LONDON, Feb 7 — A convicted serial killer has confessed to bludgeoning a mother and daughter to death in one of the UK’s most notorious murder cases, a lawyer for the man convicted of the killings claimed.

Lin Russell, 45, and her daughters Megan, six, and Josie, nine, died in 1996 when they were attacked by a hammer-wielding assailant as they took a footpath home through woodland in Kent, southeast England.

Only Josie survived, although she suffered serious injuries.

Michael Stone, a drug addict with a history of violence, was convicted in 1998 and has been ordered to spend at least 25 years in jail, while he has protested his innocence.

Paul Bacon, a lawyer representing Stone, has told the BBC and Sky News that he has acquired a four-page statement allegedly confessing to the attack from Levi Bellfield, who has been convicted of three murders including that of Millie Dowler, a 13-year-old schoolgirl in 2002.

"It is a full and frank confession. I believe what he is saying and I think if the police were to interview him he would finally admit the murders,” Bacon told Sky News. 

Bellfield will in any case never be eligible for parole.

Sky News published extracts from the statement, which Bacon said he would be forwarding to the Criminal Cases Review Commission and the police, which apparently detail how the attack was carried out.

Stone’s conviction for the murders was partly based on another prisoner’s account of him confessing.

Stone won an appeal against the initial conviction but was then found guilty again in a retrial.

The families of Lin Russell and Millie Dowler were among those who sued Rupert Murdoch’s News International in 2011 over phone hacking by journalists at the mass-selling News of the World newspaper, resulting in its closure. — AFP