Damaged women ‘date’ jailed killers like Levi Bellfield so they don’t get hurt
ALL we know of serial killer Levi Bellfield’s new fiancée is that she’s “a blonde in her forties”.
Unless her IQ is around the same number, it begs the question: Why plan a happy-ever-after scenario with a man who bludgeoned three young women to death and will, quite rightly, never leave prison?
Yet, despite this obvious obstacle, 53-year-old Bellfield has reportedly consulted a solicitor to help him with his plan to marry under the Marriage and Human Rights Acts.
It defies belief that a man who deprived his victims Milly Dowler, Amelie Delagrange and Marsha McDonnell of the right to enjoy their own wedding days, should potentially be allowed the human right to experience the same.
Isn’t prison supposed to be a punishment? “Given the magnitude and nature of his brutal crimes, it will turn many taxpayers’ stomachs to think that their money is being used to fund such a grotesque union,” says David Spencer, director of the Centre for Crime Prevention.
Indeed it does. So, given that conjugal rights aren’t allowed, why can’t the Government also find a way to flatly outlaw marriage for a lifer like Bellfield?
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Anyone in for a short term can marry once they’ve served their time and been released, if they so wish.
But the “high security” Category A inmates whose crimes have wrecked lives shouldn’t be able to enjoy the liberties afforded to the law-abiding.
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So if Boris Johnson et al want a vote-winning move before the next election, stopping monsters like Bellfield from marrying in prison would be an excellent start.
In the meantime, what of his bride-to-be, who reckons he’s “changed”, apparently? She says: “I don’t know Levi from 2002, I know the Levi of now.”
Oh dear. What she actually knows is that Levi can’t physically or mentally hurt her because, quite rightly, he’s locked up.
So, in that respect, she’s safe to dream up whatever deluded fantasy she likes about her warped “relationship” with a man who has a long history of hating women.
Misfortunes of couples
There will always be sad and lonely people who fixate on the drama of being involved with someone so infamously unavailable.
And if you want to see it first hand, then check out the compelling fly-on-the-prison-wall TV show called Love After Lockup, which follows the misfortunes of couples who meet while one of them is in jail, and then have to function in the outside world once the sentence is over.
Quite often, the prisoner turns out to be the more balanced person in the relationship.
In her book Women Who Love Men Who Kill, author Sheila Isenberg conducted in-depth interviews with several women “in love” with men in prison and said that, without exception, they were all damaged by a form of abuse in their earlier life and liked the idea of a relationship with a man who can’t actually hurt them because he’s locked up.
You’re always in a state of control because you’re the one who’s on the outside. You’re free.
Sheila Isenberg
“So you’re always in a state of control because you’re the one who’s on the outside. You’re free,” she says, adding that the relationship always feels like the first flush of romance because, “they could not have a normal life with them.
“Nobody came home after work and took off his dirty socks and left them on the floor . . . It was always, ‘Will they let me in to see him?’ ‘What’s his lawyer going to say?’ ‘Will he get paroled?’ All these super-dramatic, melodramatic things.”
So when the drama ends and the mundanity of daily life begins, it’s never long before the ex-con has a look of “prison was better than this”.
The potential future “Mrs Bellfield” knows his two “whole life” sentences means their relationship will never be truly tested.
Easy recipe for a quiet life, Paul
BAKE Off star Paul Hollywood says he would have turned down the hit TV show if he had known how much the media scrutiny of his private life would “cut him to the core”.
Paul, 56, hit the headlines after having an affair with US co-judge Marcela Valladolid which eventually led to him splitting from wife Alex after 20 years of marriage.
He then went on to have a relationship with barmaid Summer Monteys-Fullam, 30 years his junior. He says: “Would I have done Bake Off if I’d known all this stuff was going to happen, the loss of my private life?
“No, I wouldn’t have done it . . . ultimately what matters is your private life and your anonymity.”
Alternatively, he could have chosen not to have an affair and, subsequently, not dated a far younger woman with a cracking figure and a penchant for posing in her underwear.
In other words, if he’d stayed with his wife and led a quiet life, he’d have found the media glare very easy to avoid.
A JOB NOT TO WEEP
IT’S par for the course these days that you can’t discriminate against race, age, gender etc when advertising a job. Quite right too.
But when takeaway owner Neil Maynard asked for a £25k a year manager, the Facebook ad was blocked because he specified he wanted someone with “experience”. Er, right. “I felt it was pretty daft,” says Neil from Deal in Kent.
Indeed. Thank goodness he wasn’t advertising for a surgeon, marksman or airline pilot.
Masked kids
ALARMINGLY, one in five children aged between two and three is struggling to meet speech development milestones.
Experts have put it down to the pandemic reducing the chance to play with other children, but surely a world of adults mumbling at them from behind masks must have played its part too?
BORIS’S PRIME FOCUS
WHEN asked which way he would be voting in the Eurovision Song Contest, Boris Johnson replied: “I haven’t listened to any of the songs.”
This admission comes hot on the heels of his recent claim to not know who Lorraine Kelly was, despite the fact she’s been on our TV screens for over 30 years.
Interesting. Former PM Tony Blair received a weekly briefing on “populist” topics, such was his fear at seeming out of touch with the electorate.
But clearly, our current PM either doesn’t care or hopes we’ll merely assume that he’s focusing on far weightier matters than, for example, who’s banging who in EastEnders.
- PRESUMABLY, all those footie fans who booed the National Anthem will also be lodging their disapproval of the monarchy by going in to work on the Platinum Jubilee Bank Holiday?
TATT’S A WAY TO STAY
JUST when you think the world can’t get any madder, an asylum judge in Cardiff has quashed the decision to deport an asylum seeker back to Iraq because her Beatles tattoo shows she is a “thoroughly westernised woman”.
Cue tattoo parlours all over the country being booked solid by those wishing to illustrate their Britishness in a bid to thwart potential deportation.
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The 28-year old Kurdish woman has “Take these broken wings and learn to fly” on her shoulder – a lyric from Paul McCartney’s 1968 song Blackbird.
Perhaps Should I Stay Or Should I Go by The Clash might have been more appropriate.
Brave Jake
WELL done to Blackpool striker Jake Daniels for coming out as gay.
Hopefully, we are another step closer to the day when a gay man playing professional football is no longer considered to be news.