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The Murderer Accusing a Notorious Killer of His Crimes

After 22 years behind bars, Michael Stone – who has always maintained his innocence in the random killing of a family – says Levi Bellfield is the true culprit. But the courts don't want to hear it.
michael stone levi bellfield
Left: Michael Stone in 2005. Photo: Scott Barbour / Getty Images. Right: Levi Bellfield. Photo: Met Police handout.

In 2001, Kent Police believed they had finally landed the man they were under huge pressure to find: the cold-blooded killer who'd brutally murdered a mother and her daughter in a secluded part of the Kent countryside, on the 9th of July, 1996. But that man – the "Chillenden Murderer", Michael Stone – has always maintained his innocence, and has been fighting for his release ever since.

"They've shown a distinct lack of interest," says Paul Bacon, a solicitor who forms part of Stone's legal team. "They're satisfied they've got their man and we're just troublemakers, I think is basically how they see us. So there's no cooperation on their part; [you] can't get anywhere with them."

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On Wednesday, a ruling by the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) effectively ended any hopes that Stone had of obtaining his freedom. An alleged confession by another man, serial killer Levi Bellfield – who, among other crimes, was found guilty of the notorious murder of schoolgirl Milly Dowler in 2011 – had led him and his legal team to believe that they could take the case to the Court of Appeal, but the CCRC have ruled that the new evidence was not strong enough, provisionally rejecting the appeal.

Stone's lawyers have until the 2nd of December to challenge the decision, yet huge doubts about the safety of the conviction remain, and those who have followed the case are unlikely to be satisfied by this latest development. After 22 years behind bars, is Michael Stone the ongoing victim of one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British legal history?

The savage attack on the Russell family – 45-year-old Lin, six-year-old Megan Russell and nine-year-old Josie – in Chillenden, a village that lies equidistant between Canterbury and Dover, shocked the nation. As they walked their dog back from school, they were accosted, tied up, blindfolded and bludgeoned with a claw hammer, for no apparent reason.

Miraculously, when they were found, eight hours after the attack, Josie was somehow still alive; she was discovered barely breathing and was rescued, eventually making a full recovery. The others, including the family dog, tragically did not. The horrifying crime – and the apparently indiscriminate nature of it – immediately caught the attention of the UK's media, which descended en masse upon the sleepy Kent village.

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Police initially struggled to find any suspects; it took a year until a Crimewatch reconstruction prompted a psychologist to alert police to the 36-year-old heroin addict and small-time criminal, Michael Stone, as a possible suspect. It then transpired that, five days before the attack on the Russells, he had threatened to kill his former probation officer and their family. He was arrested in July of 1997 and convicted by a jury at Maidstone Crown Court in October of 1998.

However, there was no DNA evidence linking him to the murder scene – the main evidence for the prosecution came via three fellow inmates who alleged that he had confessed to them while he was on remand. However, one revealed, in the immediate aftermath of the trial, that he had lied, while the other was discredited, having been paid by a newspaper. A retrial was ordered, with the judge summing up to the jury that "the case stands or falls on the alleged confession of Damian Daley", the sole remaining witness to the alleged confession. The jury believed Daley, and Stone was duly found guilty for a second time and sentenced to three life sentences with a tariff of 25 years. Subsequent appeals were rejected, despite Stone continuing to protest his innocence.

However, in May of 2017, a BBC documentary assembled a team of experts to examine the case anew, using original files and statements. Viewers were left in no doubt as to the existence of a number of huge holes and question marks relating to the conviction, even before the alleged confession by Levi Bellfield, which came later that year.

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Lawyer Sheryl Nwosu was one of the people brought in for the programme and, speaking to VICE before the CCRC decision, was firm about her doubts over Stone's guilt.

"In every case, there's always a bit of, 'Did he do it? Did he not?' But I came away from it and I was like, 'Are you joking? Are you absolutely joking?' I'm not convinced at all. I couldn't be sure. And that's the test. If you put me on the jury… You know, Michael Stone was not a nice character – there were things that came out about him. But even factoring those things in, I came away from it and I just thought, 'I'm not convinced.' There was not one part of me that was convinced."

Chief among her concerns was the central tenet of the prosecution's case: the alleged confession from Stone to Daley, via a heating pipe in a neighbouring cell in Canterbury Prison, while both were on remand.

"The thing that then jumped out and shocked me was that, when we were asked to consider where Daley was now – he was in prison for murder [he was convicted in 2014 after stabbing a man to death over a drug deal], and then it was like, 'what'?" she says.

"I don't want to cast aspersions on people, but I work in the criminal justice system – I have done for nearly 20 years. There are people you come across and lifestyles you come across. And those, I'm sorry, certain people that are involved in acquisitive offending, drug taking – those are not the people you start banking big double murders on. Somebody who's got a history of dishonesty, and a history of offending, who has a particular background, and that's the person you're willing to take their word? To say, 'Oh yeah, Michael Stone said to me through a pipe in the wall that he did it'?"

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The programme also featured an anonymous witness – a fellow criminal – claiming that Daley was released early from being on remand, seemingly as a reward for him testifying against Stone, though this has not been verified and Kent Police have never commented on it. The programme also made clear that Daley's version of the confession contained no elements that weren't already in the public domain at the time. That is, there was nothing in it to irrefutably prove its accuracy.

Daley's alleged preferential treatment was not the only turn of events which appeared to cast doubt on the actions of Kent Police.

There was no DNA evidence linking Stone to the scene of the crime – forensics expert Dr Georgina Meakin stated bluntly in the documentary that "we end up with DNA that doesn't point to Michael Stone and points elsewhere" – and two elements caught the eye of the investigating experts.

Firstly, a bloody fingerprint mark was found on the inside of a lunchbox belonging to the Russells at the scene. "It was a particular kind of fingerprint," remembers Nwosu. "It was a loopy fingerprint. Michael Stone doesn't have those sorts of fingerprints. And nor does any of the family. So whose bloody fingerprint was that?"

Secondly, a metre-long bootlace used in the attack – which contained none of Stone's DNA, but did have mixed DNA from other unidentified sources – had gone missing from police storage (the prosecution argued in the trial that the "foreign" DNA had come from the lace being used as a tourniquet by a drug-using acquaintance of Stone, while the defence argued, understandably, that the unidentified DNA could well have been that of the "real" killer). A regular occurrence maybe? Not so, says Bacon.

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"It's very unusual. At the end of [the first] CCRC review [in 2010], when the decision came through that they were not forwarding it to the court of appeal, the other thing they said was, 'You asked for the shoelace to be forensically examined again, using up-to-date techniques. Unfortunately it's been lost.' I almost fell off my chair. Some people might argue that, in itself, is enough grounds for an appeal, because it prevented us from carrying out these other tests.

"What happened was they sent the bag back to the Forensic Service because the CCRC had asked them to do these tests, and when the Forensic Service opened the bag it was empty. That was first time we knew – maybe the police service knew – but the first time it was known to us that the lace was gone. Is it unusual? It's extremely unusual, in that it's known that this particular lace, in addition to battering the child on the head to kill her, was also used to strangle her. So it's not only a forensic exhibit, it's a murder weapon that's gone missing. So it's quite a remarkable, extraordinary turn of events.

"I went public about the loss of the lace, and then they were backtracking – it had been 'tested to destruction' was one of their comments, which was complete garbage, because the Forensic Service sent it back as a great big piece of lace. It hadn't been tested to destruction… One assumes it was there for both trials and disappeared after the second trial. It's pretty illogical."

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Nwosu was similarly scathing about the loss of such a critical piece of evidence, telling VICE, "I've never heard that happen in any other case, except where – I'm sorry – but dodgy things are going on. In any other case that I've had, where suddenly police can't find exhibits or an exhibit bag turns up empty, we've always suspected that there's been something going on, and then the lack of exhibits kind of add, you know, grease to our argument.

"Mainly it's in drug cases – so it's where corners have been cut, drugs haven't been tested, and the police will say, 'Oh, no, no, we determined that it was X, Y and Z,' and we'll say, 'Well, can you serve us with at least the preliminary tests?' 'Oh, we don't have that. No, no,' 'But you've told us that it's, you know, cocaine, or it was amphetamine – OK, so can we test the exhibits ourselves?' 'Oh no, we've destroyed them, we've got rid of them.' What were you basing your case on [then]?"

In a statement released in May of 2016, Kent Police said, in response to the claims, that "the shoelace seized as part of the original investigation has not been 'lost'. However, after repeated and exhaustive testing, where sections are removed, the disintegration has been such that only fibrous strands of the lace are left. All evidence from those examinations has been recorded and disclosed. Full disclosure of all evidence and exhibits was given throughout the legal processes."

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At the time, another of Stone's lawyers, Mark McDonald, responded, telling the Medway Messenger: "Well, if they have got the lace, I'd like to see it."

levi bellfield mugshot

Levi Bellfield. Photo: police mugshot.

There was one viewer of the BBC documentary for whom this was more than just a True Crime television curio, but something altogether more serious: Levi Bellfield.

An anonymous inmate at HMP Frankland, in Durham, who, after becoming "best of pals" with Bellfield inside, relayed a series of alleged confessions by him to his solicitor, who then alerted Stone's team, told BBC Wales: "He said in the minutes leading up to the programme he was physically, uncontrollably shaking, and he put it down to being anxious about watching the programme." It is claimed that Bellfield told the prisoner, "My life in jail would be over if they could prove it was me," and that it would "tear his mother in two".

Bacon told VICE: "[The confession] came out of the blue, it really did. We were contacted by the other prisoner's solicitor, to say that he'd got the first glimmerings of a reference to this family, and what did we want to do, and we said, 'Well, stick with it, don't discourage the guy,' but to tell him to make as many contemporaneous notes as he could, so he would have a fairly good record of what was being said. Of course, he had to be extremely careful, because had Bellfield twigged that this stuff was being passed on elsewhere he'd have been in serious difficulties."

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Bellfield, now aged 51, earned the nickname "The Bus Stop Killer" after the 2008 convictions for the murders of Marsha McDonnell and Amelie Delagrange and the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy, with McDonnell and Delagrange suffering head injuries after "blitz attacks" from behind, being hit with blunt instruments.

Three years later, he was also convicted of the 2002 murder of 13-year-old Milly Dowler, who was kidnapped and killed as she left the railway station in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey on her way home from school. Her body was found six months later, dumped in Yateley Heath Woods, and was only identified via her dental records.

It is widely suspected that Bellfield was guilty of many more crimes, with his ex-girlfriend and the mother of two of his children, Jo Collings, telling BBC Wales in 2017, "Yes, I do [believe he was responsible for other murders]. I fully believe he definitely killed more."

A 2011 book about Bellfield by Geoffrey Wansell profiles a man who hated and indulged in perpetual violence against women over a number of years. It is suspected that his first victim was his childhood girlfriend, 14-year-old Patsy Morris, who went missing in 1980. It also detailed his obsession with schoolgirls, with one passage reading:

"After Bellfield's arrest on suspicion of murder in November 2004, Collings told the police how horrified she had been when she had first encountered his appetite for schoolgirls. She explained that he took a particular interest in the girls from Gumley House Convent School in Worton Road in Twickenham.

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"'He would look at them as we were driving along when the schools would turn out and he'd be really dirty,' Collings would explain. 'He used to call them dirty little whores and slags and they all needed fucking because they had little skirts on.' Then he would demand that she dress up as one herself. When she said no, 'I'd get a really good hiding because I refused point blank to do it,' she added. 'I said, "You're sick," and he went mad, the usual stuff: screaming, shouting, kicking and punching.'"

Bellfield's alleged confession in the autumn of 2017 suggested that there was at least one more crime he had committed: the murders of the Russell family.

"He said, 'I've never told anyone this before, I killed another child and got away with it,'" the prisoner allegedly told his solicitor. "The police were never even close. Levi Bellfield was vocal and excited. He told me how free it made him feel by being able to tell me a secret he'd kept for 20 years."

Stone's lawyer, Mark McDonald, told BBC Wales, "We have, in detail, at length, exactly what Bellfield did at the time that he was doing the murders, in relation to the Russells. This is not, 'Let me sit down and tell you a story' – this is a number of discussions that took place over a number of days, with drawings. He supports the narrative, the confession, with, 'And let me tell you where I was, and x marks the spot, and this is what I did.'"

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The murders would fit Bellfield's modus operandi of violence against women, attacking strangers and the use of blunt objects like hammers. The retired police officer, former DCI Colin Sutton, who headed up the investigation that led to the original convictions against Bellfield, told the BBC: "The similarities you've got are a woman in a quiet location, a blitz attack with something heavy and blunt like a hammer, for no apparent reason. No previous interaction between them, as far as we know, and that in itself, just those features, make it an extremely rare crime, and because of that there is the natural tendency to look at, 'Well, who else do we know who has committed crimes that have these very rare features and this very rare Modus Operandi,' and you end up looking at Bellfield. In the absence of other facts, he would be a good suspect."

Stone's lawyer Paul Bacon is in no doubt. "Here's a confession from a convicted killer, who used a hammer to kill women, the same MO as the one used on this family, and when people once said, 'Oh my goodness me, he only kills women at bus stops, and these were children coming home at 4 o'clock,' and I said, 'But Milly Dowler changed all that.' Because she's a child coming home from school in her school uniform at 4 o'clock, and she's killed."

As well as the alleged confession, Stone's team have a new eyewitness, who came forward and identified Bellfield near to the murder scene. She spotted a car failing to slow down at a junction, screeching its tyres and crunching its gears and, a month later, back in 1996, gave a statement to police. However, she thought nothing more of it until seeing a 2016 documentary about the murder of Milly Dowler. "The picture came up on the screen and it shocked me, stunned me," she told BBC Wales. "It was exactly the same collar, the high collared coat I had described to the police on the day of my statement. It was a photograph of Levi Bellfield."

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However, questions still remain. Chillenden was 100 miles away from the area where Bellfield committed most of his known crimes, with Wansell writing in his book on the killer, "Bellfield was not a man to stray far from his familiar stomping grounds in west London. He took pride in 'knowing all the back doubles'… he was a creature of habit, and of limited horizons: his world was remarkably small."

Collings, however, did tell the BBC: "Yeah, he's got connections [to Kent]. I think it's something to do with a mobile home, or a holiday home, and he was backwards and forwards to Kent quite a bit."

Josie Russell told police that the attacker had asked for money – something that was not seemingly ever a motivation for Bellfield. Wansell told the BBC, "He's not killing for money, he's not killing for revenge, he's not killing for sex, none of the classic motives – he's killing because he can get away with it, and he has got away with it, and he likes getting away with it, and it makes his ego even larger. That's what makes the killing machine that is Levi Bellfield."

Bellfield, for his part, has denied making the confession, and claims he was offered payment from Stone to confess, saying he has had to complain to prison authorities about the contact from his fellow inmate.

In a statement made in December of 2017, Bellfield's lawyer Julie Cooper said: "Mr Bellfield denies the murders of the Russell family and denies ever making such a confession. Mr Stone has offered payment to our client, which he anticipates receiving as compensation for time served in custody… Mr Bellfield instructs that he has invited Mr Stone to undertake a polygraph test, which has been declined. For the record, Mr Bellfield is willing to undertake such a test in respect of the murders for which he is serving a life sentence and the murders of the Russell family."

Bellfield also has an apparent alibi for the day in question, with his former girlfriend Collings telling BBC Wales: "My daughter was born in 1996 and that was the day of my birthday. He never left my side all day and all night, so there's absolutely no way he could have got from Twickenham, where I lived, or Windsor, where I kept my horses, to Kent, done what they say he did and got back without me not knowing he was there. I hate to say it, but I can say hand on my heart he didn't do it."

However, she had also previously told the BBC documentary makers that she and Bellfield had gone for dinner that night, before going to Rocky's nightclub, where he used to work, "on a Friday or a Saturday", before going to bed. Investigators on the programme discovered that the 9th of July, 1996 was a Tuesday, leading another of the experts, Stephen Kamlich QC, to say, "The alibi is not quite as strong as it first appears."

Stone's lawyer Mark McDonald told the BBC: "In my view, there are question marks about her alibi. As to whether or not she is mistaken, that is for others to decide, not for me. I don't know. But it's not black and white."

Kent Police's response has been uncompromising, with a spokesperson telling the BBC in 2017: "Michael Stone's protests of innocence have been thoroughly tested by the judicial system."

Still, Stone continues to protest his innocence. In 2017 he told BBC Wales: "It doesn't matter what people think of me – it's not about whether I'm good or bad. Anything else they say about me is irrelevant to the basic question of who was there on the day, murdering those people."

The question remains: why did Kent Police not at least investigate the possibility that Bellfield might have been the real killer, once the world became aware of him after his two convictions in 2008 and 2011?

"It might be because, you know, they had their person. 'It's Michael Stone,'" says Sheryl Nwosu. "He's been convicted twice. You know, why would they, in a sense? For them, if they were to pursue the Bellfield lead, part of that would mean there would have to be something in them that would be saying, 'We might have got it wrong.' I don't know the police force to be that sort of a police force – any sort of police force to be that sort of a police force. I don't think error is something that crosses our justice system's mind unless it's forced in their face.

"I think that our justice system doesn't necessarily like accepting errors. The state is not keen on accepting errors and faults, and reopening things and reconsidering things, and I think historically, there are cases that you can look at… that will show you that, where there is fault, they're not stand-up guys. 'Oh, guess what, Joe Public, we got it wrong.' Sometimes they have to be compelled to, and if there's not that will, or that driving force, to force them into a position, then it can all get swept away."

@DaveFawbert