Milly Dowler’s parents convinced she was still alive after voicemails deleted

Sally Dowler told the Leveson Inquiry of her initial joy but then how she did not sleep for three nights after learning that a private detective working for the News of the World had hacked her daughter’s phone. Mrs Dowler described how she rang her daughter’s phone repeatedly in the weeks after Milly vanished as she walked home in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, in March 2002. “At first we were able to leave messages, and then her voicemail became full and then you rang and then you just got the recorded, ‘You are unable to leave messages at the moment’,” she explained. Mrs Dowler continued calling 13-year-old Milly’s number and felt elation when she finally got through to her daughter’s recorded message. She told the inquiry: “I rang her phone. It clicked through on to her voicemail, so I heard her voice and it was just like, ‘She’s picked up her voicemail, she’s alive’. I told my friends, ‘She’s picked up her voicemail, she’s picked up her voicemail’.” Mrs Dowler said the credit on Milly’s mobile phone was very low so police put more money on it. But she could not remember how detectives reacted when she told them that her daughter appeared to have accessed her voicemails. Mrs Dowler described the moment, just before the trial of a man accused of Milly’s murder, when police told her and her husband Bob that private detective Glenn Mulcaire had hacked their daughter’s phone. She said: “As soon as I was told it was about phone hacking, literally I didn’t sleep for about three nights, because you replay everything in your mind and just think, ‘Oh, that makes sense now, that makes sense’.” Mulcaire denied deleting messages from Milly Dowler’s phone. The investigator is accused of illegally accessing the teenager’s voicemails after she went missing in 2002, but his solicitor said he had “no reason” to erase any of them.