Murder of Amélie Delagrange

Amélie Delagrange, a 22-year-old French student visiting England, was found on Twickenham Green on the evening of 19 August 2004 with serious head injuries. She died in hospital the same night. According to accounts of CCTV evidence, Delagrange had been walking towards Twickenham Green after missing her stop on the bus home, and may have stopped and spoken with her eventual attacker between the last two recorded sightings of her before the attack occurred shortly afterwards.

Within 24 hours of her death, police established that Delagrange might have been killed by the same person responsible for the murder of Marsha McDonnell, a 19-year-old woman beaten over the head near her home in Hampton 18 months earlier, in February 2003. The two cases were subsequently linked in the investigation led by Detective Chief Inspector Colin Sutton of the Metropolitan Police.

Levi Bellfield, who ran a wheel-clamping business in and around West Drayton, was arrested on the morning of 22 November 2004 on suspicion of Delagrange's murder. He was initially charged with other offences, including rape charges in Surrey and West London on 25 November 2004, and an assault charge in Twickenham on 9 December 2004. He was rearrested and formally charged with Delagrange's murder, along with the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy and the attempted murder and causing grievous bodily harm to Irma Dragoshi, on 2 March 2006. He was separately charged with the murder of Marsha McDonnell on 25 May 2006. According to reporting, Bellfield reportedly confessed to Delagrange's murder while on remand.

Bellfield's trial addressed the murders of McDonnell and Delagrange together with the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy, an 18-year-old who was deliberately run over in Isleworth on 28 May 2004 and survived. On 25 February 2008, more than three years after the last of the three attacks, a jury found Bellfield guilty on all three counts. The jury failed to reach verdicts on two further charges he faced — the abduction and false imprisonment of a 17-year-old in Whitton in 2001, and the attempted murder of a 39-year-old woman in Longford in 2003. On 26 February 2008, Bellfield was sentenced to life imprisonment with a whole life order, meaning he would serve his sentence without possibility of parole. He did not attend court to hear his sentence, citing what he described as unfair press coverage following his conviction.

Bellfield was later convicted, in June 2011, of the separate 2002 murder of 13-year-old Milly Dowler, for which he received a second whole life order — making him the first prisoner to receive two such orders. Police subsequently reviewed Bellfield's possible involvement in a number of other unsolved attacks on women in London between 1990 and 2004, though a Metropolitan Police-led investigation involving ten police forces closed in November 2016 having found no evidence linking him to any case beyond his existing convictions.