Recovering deleted text messages without backup

I am trying to find out if here is any way to recover text messages that have been intentionally deleted. I have looked through the backup and the deleted texts are not in the backup. Is there any way we can read the deleted texts from the flash memory on the phone? I have looked at AT&T records and I know there are about 950 texts to a specific number dating back to April 2009, and need to find a way to see if I can see the content of the texts. The phone is a 3G and has been replaced by a iphone 4 so it is simply sitting collecting dust as i try to recover the text history. Any help would be greatly appreciated.