TOM PETTIFOR: 'I saw the pain Levi Bellfield inflicted on families — I fear he's manipulating them again from behind bars'

Detailed summary

OPINION: It is understandable that Elizabeth Chau's family believe police should dig at the site where Bellfield claims to have buried the 19-year-old but he has history of lying to grieving families

Levi Bellfield undoubtedly committed more crimes than the three murders and one attempted murder for which he was convicted.

Detectives who investigated him 22 years ago linked him to scores of unsolved offences, including a number of hammer attacks on girls and young women. It later emerged that Bellfield was part of a grooming gang who drugged, raped and filmed girls at a council flat dubbed the "raping room" by fellow paedophiles.

So it is understandable that Elizabeth Chau's family believe police should dig at the site where he claims to have buried the 19-year-old computer studies student.

When I first reported on Bellfield's crimes in August 2004 he was still prowling the streets of west London hunting victims while working as a wheel clamper.

I had been dispatched by my news editor to the scene of Amelie Delagrange's hammer murder in leafy Twickenham, southwest London. The 22-year-old French student was bludgeoned to death the night before as she walked home across a cricket pitch. Amelie was attacked from behind on what looked like a village green, complete with an old fashioned pavilion.

Detectives were quick to link her murder to the hammer killing of 19-year-old student Marsha McDonnell. Marsha bore a striking resemblance to Amelie and was beaten to death with a hammer in nearby Hampton, in February the year before.

Bellfield was arrested three months later and was jailed for life in 2008 for both murders and the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy, 18, in 2004.

But it was not until May 2011 that I saw him in the flesh for the first time and witnessed the pain he continued to inflict on the families of his victims.

As the Daily Mirror's crime correspondent, I covered Bellfield's Old Bailey trial for Milly Dowler's murder. Schoolgirl Milly was abducted and killed hours after she vanished while walking home from the train station in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, in March 2002.

Opening of the article, excerpted from Daily Mirror. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.