Levi Bellfield was condemned as a coward yesterday for refusing to face his victims in court and to be told that he will spend the rest of his life in jail.

Bellfield was given three life sentences for the murders of Amélie Delagrange, 22, and Marsha McDonnell, 19, and for leaving Kate Sheedy, then 18, for dead after running over her twice.

The 39-year-old wheelclamper, who had taunted the relatives of his victims during the trial, stayed in the cells at the Old Bailey claiming that an “explosion of bad publicity” had upset him.

There were cries of “yes” from relatives in the public gallery as the judge ruled that Bellfield would never be considered for parole and would die in jail.

Mrs Justice Rafferty said that he had “reduced three families to unimagined grief”. Ms Sheedy, now 21, had endured “indignity after indignity” after he forced her to take the witness box, she said.

“Three young women, upon whom you preyed in the dark as they stood or walked to or from buses. What dreadful feelings went through your head as you attacked and in two cases snuffed out a young life is beyond understanding,” she said.

Bellfield will join 36 other “whole-life” prisoners, including Steve Wright, who was jailed last week for the murders of five prostitutes in Ipswich. Bellfield, who suffered bouts of depression after each murder, will be put on suicide watch.

The former bouncer, who stalked bus stops looking for blonde young women, will be questioned in connection with a series of attacks in southwest London and Surrey, including the abduction and murder of Milly Dowler. The 13-year-old girl disappeared while walking home in Walton-on-Thames in 2002. Her body was found six months later in woods near Fleet, Hampshire.

It can now be reported that Bellfield was also facing rape charges involving three women. The charges will be left to lie on file. It has emerged that the father of eleven children by five different women terrorised many of his partners. One of them, Emma Mills, attended to watch the sentencing.

Relatives of the victims welcomed the length of the prison sentence but condemned Bellfield for refusing to face them in court.

Jean-François and Dominique Delagrange, whose daughter was battered to death with a hammer on Twickenham Green as she walked home in August 2004, said: “He was a coward in his attacks and a coward on the day he was due to pay for what he had done.”

Shane McDonnell, the uncle of Ms McDonnell, who was beaten to death yards from her home in Hampton a year earlier, said that her family were not surprised that Bellfield did not attend, but he was delighted that he would never be released.

Ms Sheedy, who suffered multiple injuries when Bellfield ran over her in Isleworth, said: “I think it shows the type of person he was – a complete coward. The sentence is what I wanted. To know he is never going to see the light of day again is brilliant and a relief.”

The judge said that she was moved by accounts from relatives and victims about the effect that the attacks had on their lives. “The statements I have read and the words the court heard this morning were hard for many an experienced professional to bear,” she told the court.

The parents of Ms Delagrange gave a harrowing account in their impact statement of how their world fell apart on the day they were told that their daughter had been murdered. The document, translated from French and read in court, told how they stifled their natural concerns that their daughter was moving from her family home in France to London to improve her English.

The couple, from Hanvoile, a village north of Paris, said that their loss was an open wound that would never heal. They had not put a headstone on her grave because of their “secret hope that Amélie will remain in our hearts” by not doing so. “It will always hurt us not to know what would have become of Amélie had her life not been severed in such a way,” they said.

Mr McDonnell said: “Marsha’s murder was an act of pure evil, an innocent girl attacked from behind with no motive, no reason and no justification. Losing a child in any circumstances is always an extremely hard loss to bear. To lose a child to such a barbaric act of violence that has no reason or explanation just compounds that grief further.”

Ms Sheedy, a former convent school headgirl, said that her physical and mental suffering continued after she suffered severe internal injuries from Bellfield’s attack. “To this day I still suffer from nightmares. This is both reliving the incident itself and also the nightmares I had whilst I was in hospital,” she said. “For a period of several months I suffered really bad panic attacks, flashbacks and nightmares. I couldn’t be alone at all, even during the day.”

The judge praised Ms Sheedy, a politics and law student at the University of York, for her “courage and resource” in having coped with such a terrible attack.

Detective Chief Inspector Colin Sutton, who led the investigation, and his team were commended by the judge for securing the convictions despite the lack of DNA or fibre evidence. There was a ripple of applause for the detective before Mrs Justice Rafferty raised a hand for silence and said: “Not in a court of law.”

Outside Mr Sutton said: “The fact that Bellfield did not come to court shows his cowardliness – the same cowardliness that he has shown throughout. He could not face the families, his victims and the judge and hear himself being sentenced.”

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