As Manhunt begins tonight on ITV at 9pm - we can be sure it won't feature the other villain in the Levi Bellfield case - Surrey Police.
Television is very good at Not Biting the hand that feeds it.

But, as Gemma Dowler implies in her superb book My Sister Milly, the Dowler family regard Surrey Police as a major player in the disgraceful debacle.

Gemma thinks that, had Surrey Police been any good at all, they would have turned up at the door of all Sex Offenders living within a few hundred yards of the spot Milly disappeared, near Walton-on-Thames railway station, and might well have found Milly live and well before she was killed.

I don't go that far. I think it is pushing it; kids go missing every day and the vast majority return within hours. But I do consider Surrey Police to be institutionally incompetent and corrupt - perhaps the worst force in the country - and only good at concealing themselves from examination.

The officer in charge of the flawed investigation into my behaviour, 19 years ago, was given the Milly Dowler case as a reward for getting my conviction. I know that was a wrongful conviction and hope, in 2019, to see it overturned. Detective Chief Inspector Marjoram, promoted after my first debacle, was put in charge of the Dowler case (by equally dodgy Craig Denholm). Their use of the media was reprehensible and very nearly criminal.

Was ex-Surrey Cop MWT involved? Who knows?

But because Surrey Police was so useless, they failed to find Levi Bellfield who went on to try to kill several other innocent girls - and succeeded with Amelie DeLagrange and Marsha McDonnell.

Fortunately those murders were just across the line from Surrey and fell into the hands of excellent, honest, hard working cop Colin Sutton (played tonight by Martin Clunes) who found and locked up Bellfield within weeks.

Surrey Police has never properly examined the appalling behaviour of Marjoram, Denholm and their team. Neither has the media. I fear tonight's Manhunt will also evade the issue.

But it was very clear to me there were two villains in this case. Levi Bellfield and Surrey Police.

Repeated again and again with cases like Breck Bednar.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1398848/Police-...f-missing-Milly.html

Mr Dowler was always Surrey Police's main suspect. Milly's uncle came over from Essex on the night of her disappearance to retrace her last known steps, a job police should have been doing. When he told them that he had come face to face with an aggressive man (who was almost definitely Bellfield) they didn't ask him to elaborate on it. Gemma thanked Colin Sutton and his team in her book for their "good, old-fashioned detective work".

So far - very good; Colin Sutton is a bit of a hero to me; he seems as much what British Police should be; just as Brian Marjoram was exactly what they should not be; Sutton arrested and locked up Bellfield within weeks; Marjoram and the entire resources of Surrey Police got nowhere near him in years. I was also shocked by how disinterested the media were in Amelie and Marsha and how fascinated they were by 13 year old Milly; something sick there. Why do you suppose Bellfield refuses to admit to Milly's murder? Because paedophiles are not respected in prison - or so the media states.

When ITV did a dramatisation of the Stefan Kiszko case it went no holds barred on the disgraceful CRIMINAL behaviour of West Yorkshire Police.

Watching Part Two and really liking it because it's showing what plodding, devoted, proper police work is all about. Marjoram and his team 19 years ago at Surrey Police was OK at manufacturing false evidence, assisting witnesses and guiding them to say certain things they knew they could get away with (interesting - in the fresh evidence - in one case very different to the story a few years earlier to a News of the World journalist which was deliberately withheld from my defence team) - everything, in fact, to get a wrongful conviction of an innocent man; a million miles from Colin Sutton's view of policing.

And yes, as you'll see from the Telegraph link above (and several others at the time in 2002) Marjoram was given the Dowler case a few weeks into it as a reward for his success in wrongly convicting me so yes, I'm biased. But the entire case stank; only then I hadn't learned what I quickly discovered; I should have immersed myself in every detail of the corrupt investigation. But then, naive like most, I thought police would find the truth and I'd be cleared. Big mistake. But that policy at Surrey Police - still continuing - meant certain disgraceful behaviour was condoned and true training abandoned.

The big question - who leaked the Bellfield story to the News of the World; bloody nearly wrecking Sutton's strategy? Don't ask me - I only know about contacts between Surrey Police and the News of the World.

Well quite apart from this being an excellent and classy TV show it showed up Surrey Police as at best totally incompetent and at worst criminally corrupt. It astonishes me those overseeing the behaviour of the force has allowed it to continue. Bruce Bednar's murder was inevitable. So were the deaths of Laurence Pollinger, Rob Randall and Deniz Corday. When will the Inquiry into Surrey Police be mounted?

I started this thread by saying it was certain ITV would not expose the other villain in the case - Surrey Police. I was wrong. They did - and all credit to them. Admittedly they didn't concentrate on Surrey totally failing to find and stop Bellfield who lived (and we suspect murdered Milly) one minute away from her abduction point in Walton-on-Thames. The apology to the Delagrange family - beautifully handled - should have concentrated more on that (as it should have to Marsha's family and the oddly name changed Kate Sheedy). But I suspect millions of viewers will now know how corrupt and incompetent Surrey Police are. Time for an Inquiry (and possibly removing the generous pension Brian Marjoram left with, after his disastrous time on the Milly Dowler case).

I believe there needs to be a Judicial Inquiry into police actions in so many cases.
The general public have lost faith in their police forces.

Frigging Brexit is consuming MP's attention.

But who knows what will be revealed when 'Nick' goes to court.

Over 13,000 views of this thread so far, over the three days/nights of the show. Including many from Guildford and Woking URL's.

hedda wrote:
I believe there needs to be a Judicial Inquiry into police actions in so many cases.
The general public have lost faith in their police forces.

Frigging Brexit is consuming MP's attention.

But who knows what will be revealed when 'Nick' goes to court.
Judicial inquiries are usually manipulated, whitewash affairs while public lectures and media reports of court trials often tend to be biased and sensationalised. Drama that keeps close to the facts like this outstanding series has done, helps to open the mind and shift public perceptions towards the truth. It's great reading the feedback comments Colin Sutton has been receiving on his Twitter account. There is also an interesting interview with him in the Radio Times.

twitter.com/colinsutton/status/1082922360674631680
www.radiotimes.com/news/2019-01-08/detec...bout-levi-bellfield/

I had occasion to view the documentary "Taken" which was produced after Bellfield's trial for Milly Dowler's murder. Maria Woodall of Surrey Police at least comes in for some recognition of ability from Gemma Dowler (in her excellent book) but it was very hard to watch Ms Woodall assert that from the very beginning it was apparent that Milly came from a good family and that something was clearly wrong in her disappearance. In fact the opposite was true- Surrey Police assumed it was either Mr. Dowler to blame or that she came from a family from which was likely to have run away. The police wasted months on these lines of enquiry