Police reportedly failed to act on sinister threats sent in a letter to Jill Dando just four weeks before she was shot dead in Fulham.

Her fellow TV host Alice Beer tells for the first time how she too was targeted by the maniac who threatened to rape and kidnap her and Jill.

She also reveals that three days after Jill’s murder in Gowan Avenue on April 26 1999, fellow BBC star Anne Robinson received a death threat from a Serbian fanatic.

The rape letters were sent to Alice and Jill at the BBC who passed them on to police before Jill’s murder.

But Alice claims detectives never spoke to her about them – even AFTER the killing.

She said: “There are a lot of questions I would like answering. They’ve been at the back of my mind.

“I waited for a call from the police after Jill’s death – but it never came. Nobody spoke to me about the threat.

“Nobody questioned anything. If no stone were left unturned in that investigation then I would have been called.”

The letter to Jill should certainly have rung alarm bells with police both before and after the 37-year-old presenter was shot in the head on her doorstep on April 26, 1999.

Alice’s startling new information emerged during an investigation into the original Dando case files by the Mirror and former detective and investigative reporter Mark Williams-Thomas.

Detectives were advised by a leading forensic ­psychologist brought into the murder probe to check for any suspicious mail to Jill. It appears that link was missed.

Case files also showed that both Alice and TV’s Anne Robinson – who co-presented Watchdog with her – received a phone death threat just three days after Jill was killed.

A record of the call said: “From Serbia, going to kill Anne Robinson, Alice Beer and two others.”

Police traced the call to a phone box in Gerrards Cross, Bucks, but found no way of tracking the caller.

Alice, who was away filming in the Canary Islands at the time, said: “I received a call from the deputy editor of Watchdog saying ‘there has been a death threat against you’.

"It was quite shocking and scary and I was told, ‘you’ll definitely be picked up from the airport’– but that was literally it.

“Then I waited for follow up on the death threat and nothing happened, which I was very surprised about.”

The incident raised another possible missed connection to the Dando murder.

Jill had fronted a TV appeal for Kosovan-Albanian refugees displaced by the Nineties war there which is believed to have enraged Serb paramilitaries along with a Nato-led bombing of a Serb TV station which killed 16 people.

Alice, 49 – who worked with Jill on ­Children in Need and the Holiday programme – told of the letters when Mark approached her about our investigation.

She says she is still haunted by the fear that police may have missed a glaring opportunity to catch the killer.

Alice, who had also appeared with Jill on the BBC’s Children in Need charity telethon a year before the murder, was shocked when they both received the sinister letters in March, 1999.

She was presenting the BBC consumer show Watchdog with Anne Robinson and worked in a neighbouring office to Jill.

She said: “The letters were in the same handwriting from a person claiming that they wanted to capture and rape us.

“Mine was in amongst my mail at the BBC.

"My letter was handed over to the police via the programme editors or the management of the BBC.

"I was told Jill Dando had had a similar letter in the same handwriting and the local Shepherd’s Bush police were investigating.

“So when Jill was shot a month later that was in the back of my mind – that ­somebody had threatened both of us in handwritten letters not long before she was murdered.

"Yet I never received any contact (from the police).”

Alice, whose father was a police superintendent, says she was ­mystified that no one ever took a formal statement from her.

And she says she was not made aware of any follow-up investigation into the threats following Jill’s death.

By that time police were concentrating on Barry George.

Legal experts now say the eight years he spent in jail is one of the biggest travesties of justice in modern criminal history – simply because police did not follow up other serious leads.

He was formally cleared when the jury in his second trial in 2008 returned a unanimous not guilty verdict.

All Alice wants the police to do now is continue their search to find the killer and get justice for her slain colleague.

She said: “If Barry George didn’t kill Jill, then somebody else did. And of course that person needs to be found guilty.

“There were links that weren’t followed up which we questioned but we probably just thought that they had their man. They obviously didn’t.

“Everyone who knew Jill, loved Jill, wants to know – who really did kill Jill Dando?”

Story originally published on Mirror online.