Hotline flooded with calls

Detectives hunting the killer of Milly Dowler received a flood of calls following the conviction of Levi Bellfield.

More than 20 people phoned a police hotline last night - some with information on Bellfield's whereabouts around the time of the schoolgirl's disappearance.

Some of the calls came from former friends and associates of the double killer, who today issued a statement through his lawyer in which he denied killing Milly.

Surrey Police described the new information as "potentially very hopeful".

Detective Chief Inspector Maria Woodall, who is leading the new Dowler inquiry, said: "We have had more than 20 calls from the public, a number of which have the potential to be significant. We still need to find the red Daewoo car seen leaving the area shortly after Milly disappeared."

Detectives believe that Bellfield attacked 13-year-old Milly as she walked home from school in Walton-on-Thames in 2002, a year before he murdered Marsha McDonnell.

Crown Prosecution Service lawyers believe they have 80 per cent of the proof needed to charge Bellfield with Milly's murder. Police are poised to interview him again and are confident of receiving new evidence now he is behind bars.

A series of clues link Bellfield to Milly. Detectives believe they may have known each other, so Milly would have trusted him if approached in the street. She is believed to have known the daughter of one of his ex-girlfriends. He also worked as a doorman at a youth club disco that Milly attended.

On the day of her disappearance, Bellfield was alone at his long-term girlfriend Emma Mills's home in Collingwood Place, off Station Avenue.

He had been dog-sitting with Miss Mills at a friend's house in West Drayton but returned to Walton-on-Thames after they had a row. That afternoon he uncharacteristically turned off his mobile phone.

At 11pm he returned to West Drayton wearing a change of clothes. In the middle of the night he got up saying he could not get a lie-in there and was going back to Collingwood Place.

Two days later Miss Mills took a taxi home and found all the bedding was missing. Bellfield said

her dog had messed the bed and he had burned the mattress and bedclothes.

A red Daewoo car similar to one owned by Ms Mills was caught on CCTV leaving Station Avenue 30 minutes after Milly's disappearance. It was reported stolen a few days later.

Surrey police have released the vehicle registration, N503 GLT, and chassis number, KLATF68V1SB554108, in a renewed bid to trace it.

Bellfield made one reference to the murder of Milly when he was sitting on a sofa one day talking to a girlfriend. The pair were watching a police appeal about her killing when Bellfield said: "You never know, I could be the killer. I might be famous one day."

Milly's parents Bob and Sally Dowler said: "We are pleading for anyone who knows anything to have the courage to speak up.

"Even six years on you can still help start easing our pain by letting us know, finally, what happened on our daughter's final days."

However, a series of police blunders at the time of the first investigation left Bellfield free to murder.

Officers investigating Milly's disappearance failed to spot a series of clues that could have put him in the frame, allowing him to carry on his campaign of violence.

He could be linked to 20 more attacks including murders and rapes.

In the two years before Milly's abduction, Bellfield was reported to police 93times for alleged indecent assault, obscene phone calls and physical assaults.

But the inquiry by Surrey police into Milly's disappearance failed to identify him as a possible suspect. In addition, officers from the Met made crucial errors when they investigated the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy.

Four detectives were disciplined after an Independent Police Complaints Commission inquiry into how the Met examined the hit-and-run attack on the convent school head girl.

Only when Scotland Yard murder squad investigators took on the case and established links between the hammer attacks on Amélie Delagrange and Marsha McDonnell and other London assaults did Bellfield emerge as a suspect for Milly's killing.

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