Police are preparing to dig for the remains of a missing student after an alleged confession to her murder by serial killer Levi Bellfield.

The former nightclub bouncer told detectives, in a prison interview this week, that he had hidden her body in woodland 24 years ago.

Elizabeth Chau, 19, a computer studies student at Thames Valley University, vanished in west London in 1999.

Bellfield “admitted” killing her in conversation with a prison visitor last year, then wrote a confession that prompted a visit from detectives from the Metropolitan Police’s unsolved murder squad.

He described how he had killed her and, using a map brought into the prison, he showed police a rough area where he had hidden her body.

Bellfield’s solicitor Theresa Clark said: “He tells me he feels it’s important that her family have some closure. He wants to see justice done because they have had to live this for so long and that’s unfair. He gains nothing from it, there is no positive publicity for him.”

Bellfield, 54, is serving a whole life sentence for the murders of two young women and the schoolgirl Milly Dowler, whose body was found buried in woodland after she was snatched from the street in 2002.