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Prosecutors claim man Rachel Cowles allegedly saw during walk home from school in Shepperton was Levi Bellfield
A schoolgirl who allegedly avoided being enticed into a car by convicted double-murderer Levi Bellfield the day before Milly Dowler was abducted told a jury how the incident left her feeling scared, confused and tearful.
Rachel Cowles, 21, who was 11 at the time and bore an "uncanny resemblance" to Milly in her school uniform, said a man in a red car claiming to be a new neighbour had offered her a lift as she walked home from her school in Shepperton, three miles from where the 13-year-old schoolgirl vanished.
Cowles said the red car had pulled up with the passenger window wound down, and the driver had leaned towards her. "I remember him saying 'Hello. I've just moved in next door. Would you like a lift home?'" she told an Old Bailey jury. "I said 'no thank you. It's all right.'" The vehicle pulled away as a police car drove past in the opposite direction, she said.
Cowles felt "half-confused" and wanted to get home "to see if I could see his car and if he was telling the truth". But when she did she could not see the vehicle.
The driver was white, in his 30s or 40s, and was a skinhead or bald, with a "rather chubby, round" face and with a gold hoop earring in his left ear, she said.
Prosecutors claim the man was Bellfield, who lived yards from where Milly disappeared, and was driving a red Daewoo Nexia at the time.
When Cowles got home, her mother phoned police, but she was too distressed to give a description of the driver. When asked, she told a police operator: "I don't know," and burst into tears. "I felt scared. I suddenly realised the enormity of what had just happened," she said.
No police officer came to take a statement at the time, she said. Police did not take a statement from her until three years later, when the media reported on a possible link between a red car and the abduction of Milly in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, and a possible connection with the murder of French student Amelie Delagrange, 22, in Twickenham Green.
The court heard Cowles and her mother, Diana, a lab technician, had watched a police appeal in March 2005 on GMTV for a red car and possible links with the Dowler case. Her mother rang the police and then wrote to the chief constable, and an officer came to take a statement in April 2005. Cowles described the driver, and said the car was red, with five doors, and two child seats in the back and was smaller than her parents' Rover but bigger than a Fiesta.
Bellfield, 43, a former club doorman, formerly of West Drayton, west London, denies the kidnap and murder of Milly on 21 March 2002, and the attempted abduction of Cowles the previous day. Milly's unclothed body was found 25 miles away in Yateley Heath Woods, Hampshire, six months after she vanished.
The jury have been told Bellfield was convicted in 2008 of the murders of Amelie Delagrange, 22, and Marsha McDonnell, 19, and the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy, 18.
Jeffrey Samuels, QC, representing Bellfield, asked Cowles: "Were you aware of the detail and description of the man who had been arrested in respect of that Twickenham Green incident?"
She replied that she had not looked at any media regarding the Twickenham incident.
"Do you think your description, which emerges for the first time in the statement in April 2005, might just have been influenced by what you had seen on GMTV or other things in the paper or something that may have been said to you?", asked Samuels,
"No" she replied.
"Do you think that maybe your memory and therefore your description of the vehicle in the statement may have been influenced by footage you had seen on GMTV?" asked Samuels.
"No" she replied.
Jurors were told Cowles had failed to identify Bellfield in an ID parade in 2005.
The trial continues.