My Sister Milly by Gemma Dowler

Author:Gemma Dowler
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781405927567
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-06-28T22:00:00+00:00

Sun, 26 February 2008, pages 4–5; story, Mike Sullivan

The Sun, like many papers, is not slow to pick up on the sad contrast between Milly’s lovely delicate features and Bellfield’s bloated, ugly ones, between Milly’s dancing eyes and his reptile-cold ones.

We shall always feel pain every time we see Bellfield’s face close to a picture of Milly. In the case of the image above, the faces are cut and pasted as if the two of them are actually standing together. We’ve wished so many times that the newspapers would think about the messages this sends. The overlapping or juxtaposition of those two faces seems to imply that Milly actually knew her killer, had something to do with him. That’s a cruel, dishonest implication.

But, most of all, couldn’t the press have thought about how we, her family and friends, have felt every time we saw that brutal face next to hers? Could they not have spared a thought for Kate Sheedy and for the families and friends of Amélie and Marsha every time they put Bellfield’s mug-shot next to the faces of those pretty girls, whose only connection with Bellfield was of being stalked and violently assaulted by him?

Because of the risks to a future trial, we have mixed feelings when many of the papers echo the Sun’s detailed conclusions that Surrey Police failed to spot so many clues linking Bellfield to Milly, leaving him free to keep murdering girls for years.

They print aerial photographs showing the proximity of 24 Collingwood Place to Milly’s route home. They mention the attempted abduction of another girl just one day before Milly’s disappearance – by a fat-faced man in a red car. That report was ‘lost in the system’. They write of the ‘fat white man’ who exposed himself and tried to grab a girl in Station Avenue a month before Milly’s abduction, another case the police failed to link to Milly; that Bellfield knew Minley Woods well; that he suddenly moved out of Collingwood Place immediately after Milly was taken.

The police have never prepared us for Bellfield’s appalling back-story. And it was not admissible in court. So it is via the press that all the families of his victims get to know a thousand details about their girls’ killer, details that hurt like knives.

Out they come, all the stories about Bellfield drugging girls with ketamine or buying them with cocaine. About his liking for girls way below the age of consent. About his aggressive pestering of women and girls in the street, of luring them into vans where he kept a mattress and a baseball bat. According to the Evening Standard, ‘In the two years before Milly’s abduction, Bellfield was reported to the police a total of 93 times for alleged indecent assault, obscene phone calls and physical assaults.’

Ninety-three reports. That means Bellfield was hurting and terrorizing people, mostly women from the sound of it, almost every week, and hurting them so badly that they sought the help of the police. Not just a punch or a kick, but a beating or a rape.

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