The detective who caught Levi Bellfield—the serial killer serving a whole life sentence for murdering 13-year-old Milly Dowler and two young women—has called for the law to be changed after the authorities admitted they were powerless to stop Bellfield from getting married.
Bellfield, 55, reportedly proposed to his fiancee—who has not been named— during one of her visits and then threatened legal action if he was prevented from having a wedding in jail.
But retired detective chief inspector Colin Sutton wrote on Twitter on Friday, “It’s a travesty of common sense and of justice that he is now to be allowed to marry and begin to exert this sort of control over another woman.”
He added: “When he was on remand I listened to Levi Bellfield order his teenage girlfriend to hold her phone over her flushing toilet—so he could recognise the noise and thus believe her that she was at home, rather than out with another man. She complied.”
Sutton—who was played by Martin Clunes in the ITV series Manhunt—said: “The law must be changed to prevent this kind of abuse of women being dished out from a prison cell. Immediately.”
Bellfield was convicted of the murders of Milly Dowler, Marsha McDonnell, 19, and Amelie Delagrange, 23, and the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy, 18, who survived an attack in 2004.
MP: ‘Disgusting Insult to the Victims’
Conservative MP Alec Shelbrooke said: “This is a disgusting insult to the victims and their families. This is a man who took away the human rights of young girls and women, including the right to live their lives and marry. Yet he is demanding the right to do so using human rights law.”Shelbrooke said the justice secretary, Alex Chalk, needed to push through legislation to ban marriages for serial killers and, “make sure that no other people this evil can exploit this situation again.”
A Ministry of Justice spokesman told PA, “Under current laws, there are no legal routes to block this marriage and we recognise the pain and anger this outcome will bring to his victims’ families.”
The bill would, among other things, prevent anyone who has been given a whole life tariff from marrying behind bars or having a civil partnership ceremony.
The then Justice Secretary Dominic Raab said: “There is a history of vulnerable women who have become pen pals with serial killers or particularly nasty offenders who get into relationships and then there is an issue around marriage.”
“We’re doing this as a safeguarding issue but also as a public confidence in the justice system issue,” Raab said.
Bus Stop Killer
Bellfield, a former bouncer and wheel clamper, used a hammer to attack his victims, who were often targeted at bus stops or shortly after they got off buses.After being locked up for the murders of McDonnell and Delagrange he was convicted of killing Dowler, who was abducted as she walked home from school in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, in March 2002.
Bellfield is not the first serial killer to have conducted romances from behind bars.
Richard Ramirez, the Los Angeles serial killer known as The Night Stalker, swapped dozens of love letters with Doreen Lioy while he was on Death Row in California.
The couple married in San Quentin prison in 1996 but she later broke off ties with him. At the time of his death from cancer, in 2013, Ramirez, 53, was engaged to a 23-year-old woman.
