She was walking home alone on a bright spring day – a 13-year-old girl in her blue school uniform and her hair in a ponytail.Milly Dowler had just said goodbye to her friends and had less than a mile to go to her home.
Then she vanished: ‘Gone in the blink of an eye,’ a jury was told yesterday.
The innocent young schoolgirl – ‘slim, pretty and intelligent’ – vanished from a suburban street in broad daylight.
For six months, her mother and father lived through the agony of uncertainty, not knowing their little girl’s fate.
But ‘every parent’s nightmare’ came to a tragic end when her naked, decomposed body was found dumped in undergrowth 25 miles away.
She had been kidnapped and murdered, the prosecution said, by serial attacker Levi Bellfield, a former bouncer and wheel-clamper who went on to kill two other young women – Amelie Delagrange and Marsha McDonnell – and attempted to murder a third, Kate Sheedy.
The previous day he had tried to abduct another homebound schoolgirl from the same area of Surrey where Milly and her family lived, Brian Altman, QC, said.
Rachel Cowles, just short of her 12th birthday, escaped with her life probably because Bellfield was ‘spooked’ by a passing police car as he tried to trick her into the red Daewoo he was driving, the barrister said.
But next afternoon the balding father of two, who was staying in a flat only yards away, snatched Milly from the street, he claimed. Read More
