Fresh evidence has emerged of other voice messages allegedly hacked from the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler's by the News of the World.

A report suggested that the former Sunday tabloid newspaper had details of more voicemails left on her mobile phone than originally thought.

The Wall Street Journal said it had obtained earlier print editions of the newspaper from 2002, which made reference to more messages on the missing teenager's phone.

It states that it undertook a review of the News International-owned newspaper and found that early versions on one day contained detailed quotes from three voicemails.

In the final edition, the article only contained one passing reference to a single voicemail.

On 14 April 2002, the News of the World published a story in its final edition about a woman allegedly pretending to be Milly who had applied for a job with a recruitment agency. It suggested that the hoaxer had given the agency Milly's real mobile number, which it used to contact her when a vacancy arose, leaving a message on her voicemail six days after she went missing.

The newspaper later informed the police about the voicemail that it is alleged to have intercepted.

However, the Wall Street Journal has now said that it has obtained earlier editions of the newspaper from the same day, which include an article that makes reference to two further messages left on the phone.

The first version, which ran in the early England and Scotland editions, stated that a strange and unexplained voicemail had been left on the mobile phone by a man on 28 March at 7.48am who said "Mortlake in Putney by Tangies", before signing off with "Piggo baby".

According to the Journal, the article also cited the time and date of a third voicemail, which was left by a mystery caller and was described as being "another brief cryptic message".

The final edition of the paper changed dramatically, however, and the story and headline focused on the possibility that a hoaxer had been posing as Milly Dowler, hampering the police investigation. The later article only made a brief reference to the voicemail relating to the employment opportunity.

Milly, 13, disappeared on her way home from school in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, on 21 March 2002 and her remains were found by mushroom pickers in a wood six months later in a forest 25 miles away.

In June this year, Levi Bellfield, a former nightclub bouncer who had two previous murder convictions, was found guilty of her murder. Bellfield was sentenced to life in prison. At the time of the school girl's disappearance, he was living close to where she had last been seen but he had escaped police notice for years.

The Guardian revealed last month that the News of the World allegedly hacked into the missing schoolgirl's phone and deleted messages, which gave her family the false hope that she was still alive and accessing her voicemail [see footnote].

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Dowler family lawyer, Mark Lewis, said on Friday that they were in talks with News International, which were aimed at avoiding litigation over the phone hacking issue.

A spokeswoman for News International declined to comment on specific talks with the family, but said that the company was looking to settle with phone-hacking victims as swiftly as possible.

• The following was published on 12 December 2011 in the corrections and clarifications column: An article about the investigation into the abduction and death of Milly Dowler (News of the World hacked Milly Dowler's phone during police hunt, 5 July, page 1) stated that voicemail "messages were deleted by [NoW] journalists in the first few days after Milly's disappearance in order to free up space for more messages. As a result friends and relatives of Milly concluded wrongly that she might still be alive." Since this story was published new evidence – as reported in the Guardian of 10 December – has led the Metropolitan police to believe that this was unlikely to have been correct and that while the News of the World hacked Milly Dowler's phone the newspaper is unlikely to have been responsible for the deletion of a set of voicemails from the phone that caused her parents to have false hopes that she was alive, according to a Metropolitan police statement made to the Leveson inquiry on 12 December.