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Father of Milly Dowler says family have paid ‘too high a price for justice’ during trial of her killer Levi Bellfield Milly Dowler’s family today spoke of the “mental torture” they endured as witnesses in the trial of her killer, Levi Bellfield, as the jury were discharged before it reached a verdict on allegations that he attempted to abduct another girl, Rachel Cowles, 11. On the steps of the Old Bailey, Milly’s father, Robert, said: “My family have had to pay too high a price for justice for Milly” and described it as a “truly mentally scarring experience on an unimaginable scale”. During the trial, Bellfield’s defence harshly scrutinised details of the Dowler family’s personal life . The family said they had been made to feel like they were the criminals. Roger Coe Salazar, chief crown prosecutor of the Crown Prosecution Service in the South East said he recognised that the family feel the “jury trial process has let them down” but hoped the pain and anguish they are presently feeling will be somewhat diluted as a result of the convictions secured”. He said the “adversarial nature of our criminal trial system in this country is designed to test the evidence given by witnesses; be they for the prosecution or defence so as to ensure safe conviction and acquittal of the innocent”. Former home secretary David Blunkett said the case gave “pause for thought” and questioned defence barristers’ actions. Earlier Mr Justice Wilkie said that publicity in the case had left him no option but to discharge the jury which had been due this morning to continue deliberations on allegations Bellfield had attempted to abduct Cowles a day before Milly was snatched three miles away in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey. Judge Wilkie said he must refer the matter to the attorney-general, Dominic Grieve, over possible contempt. The judge said that there would be no retrial over Cowles and that an attempted abduction charge would lie on file. Cowles, now 21, whom the serial killer allegedly tried to abduct her the day before he snatched Milly, said she was “extremely hurt and angry that some of the media reporting has robbed me of justice”. As Bellfield refused to come to the court from his prison cell, judge Mr Justice Wilkie described him as a “cruel and pitiless killer” who had “not had the courage to come into court to face his victims and receive his sentence”. The judge on Friday sentenced the former doorman and wheelclamper to life in jail with a whole life tariff for Milly’s abduction and murder and told him he would never be released. He is thought to be the first person to have received a second whole-life sentence. Outside the court, Milly’s family welcomed the conviction, but said the trial had been a “horrifying ordeal” in which they were treated like criminals. Milly’s sister, Gemma, described the day her parents were cross-examined, during which her mother collapsed, as worse than when she was told her sister’s remains were found. Bellfield was already in prison for murdering 19-year-old Marsha McDonnell and Amelie Delagrange, 22, and the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy, 18, in 2004. Bellfield, 43, was given three life sentences for those crimes in February 2008 and told then that he would never be released. The judge said today: “He robbed her [Milly] of a promising life, he robbed her family and friends of the joy of seeing her grow up into a self-confident, articulate and admirable young woman. “He treated her in death with total disrespect, depositing her naked body, without even a semblance of a burial, in a wood far away from her home, vulnerable to all the forces of nature.” He added: “He is marked out as a cruel and pitiless killer.” But the cruellest thing he did, added the judge, was in an attempt to divert responsibility from himself: “He instructed his lawyers in this trial to expose to the world her most private, adolescent thoughts, secrets and worries”. As Milly’s sister Gemma, sobbed, and her mother Sally and father sat quietly comforting her, the judge said Bellfield had “sought to hint she was a dark, unhappy, troubled person”, which “flew in the face ” of her family’s evidence. She was a “funny, sparky, enthusiastic teenager, fully exploring her developing emotional life,” he said. Turning to the Dowler family’s ordeal: he added Bellfield must have known that that process “could do nothing other than hugely increase the anguish of her family, particularly her mother Sally Dowler, in ways which were made dramatically clear in court”. “No one who has been on court can have been in any doubt that the Dowler family had suffered indescribable agonies during almost a decade over the loss of their beloved daughter, for which all our hearts go out to them. “In an important sense this agony may be thought to have culminated in this trial.” He added: “I appreciate that the trial process has been excruciating for them by reason of the issues the defendant instructed his lawyers to raise in his defence.” “I understand that they feel let down by the trial process in that respect. Unfortunately given the nature of the defence it was unavoidable,” he added. “All I can do is hope that they may in time come to terms with that and that the outcome of the trial in some small way contribute to their grieving process and assist them in coming to a semblance of closure.” The only sentence he could pass was one of life. The fact it was a killing of a child was an aggravating factor, as was his “macabre attempt to conceal her body”, and his “substantial record of serious violence”. He made a whole life order so Bellfield will “never be released from custody”. In addition he was sentenced to 12 years for the kidnap to run concurrently. It can now be reported that Surrey police force has apologised for missing opportunities in the hunt for Milly’s killer that could have led to Bellfield’s arrest before he went on to murder two more victims. Bellfield, who lived 50 yards from where Milly was last seen, also escaped the net when police, conducting extensive house-to-house inquiries, knocked 10 times at his rented flat without response but made no inquiries of the landlord as to who lived there. By the time they did, the flat had seen several tenants come and go, with any potential forensic evidence obliterated by redecorating and steam cleaning. Surrey’s chief constable, Mark Rowley, has privately apologised to Milly’s parents and to Cowles. He is set to meet relatives of the other victims. “Mistakes were made,” said assistant chief constable Jerry Kirkby. Outside the court, Detective Chief Inspector Maria Woodall, leading the inquiry, said she was “extremely disappointed” that the jury were discharged before they could reach a verdict on Cowles. Milly Dowler Crime Caroline Davies Karen McVeigh guardian.co.uk