The Milly Dowler case

[hackmum]

Does anyone else think there's something very fishy about the deletion of messages on Milly Dowler's phone?

Last year the Guardian reported that messages on her phone were deleted either by News of the World journalists, or private investigator Glenn Mulcaire acting on their behalf. It later came out that Mulcaire couldn't have deleted them and the Guardian came in for a lot of stick from people who suddenly bizarrely decided that NotW had the moral highground.

The police are now saying that they don't know whether the messages were automatically deleted or whether they were deleted by a person.

The Guardian says that several sources (essentially the Dowlers and the police) told them at the time that they believed the messages had been deleted by NotW journos, and their mistake was to report this as fact.

I feel like I'm missing an important bit of the story. Surely phones only delete messages automatically if they've been listened to? And so someone was listening to those messages. If it wasn't Milly Dowler, who was it? Levi Bellfield, the man who killed her? Or a NotW journalist? And if it was a journalist, they were at least indirectly (if not directly) culpable for the fact that the messages were deleted.

Can anyone else make sense of it?

[turnigitonitshead]

They are saying they do not know if/who and surley that is because there is no evidance or tecnology to say one way or the other.

[BlackOutTheSun]

They are saying that they don't know, Milly's phone was changing which tower which signal was being used. There isn't enough information left to find out how. If it was investigated back when it happened, and the police where leaking info out then we might have known 100%. As far as I know NI have admitted and have paid out composation.