The murder of beloved British BBC television presenter Jill Dando left the nation reeling, devastate, confused, and speculating. What happened to the UK’s golden girl of television?
Jill Dando was born on November 9th, 1961 in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, England. She was a smark, kind, outgoing girl who excelled in the performative arts. She went to Cardiff in order to study journalism, and was a member of a handful of theatre groups.
Her first job out of school was at the Weston Mercury as a trainee reporter, following in the footsteps of her father and brother. In 1985, Jill left print journalism and became a newsreader for BBC Radio Devon.
That same year, Jill began presenting for Spotlight South West for BBC South West, and moved onto BBC Spotlight in Plymouth in 1987.
Jill’s illustrious career took off, and she moved to London in 1988 in order to present on-the-hour news bulletines on both BBC1 and BBC2. Jill also went on to present Breakfast Time, Breakfast News, BBC One O’Clock News, Six O’Clock News, Holiday, Crimewatch, and occasionally Songs of Praise.
In 1994, Jill moved to the very posh neighbourhood of Fulham. She also began presenting a new programme, Antiques Inspectors, in 1999.
By all accounts, Jill’s career was taking off, and her life was exactly where she wanted it to be. She was engaged to be married, and had set a wedding date of September 25th, 1999. Spending most of her time at her fiancé’s home in Chiswick, she had plans to eventually sell her Fulham home, though those plans hadn’t been solidified yet.
On the morning of April 26th, 1999, Jill left her fiancé’s home, and ran some errands. She was captured on CCTV going about her day – stopping for petrol, buying groceries, stopping for ink and paper, just normal every day errands.
At around 11:32 AM, she returned to her Fulham home, and intended to check her mail, and her fax machine, wanting to refill the ink and paper in order to collect her messages. As she reached her front door, a gun was placed to her head, and she was shot. Her house keys were still in her hand. Jill was 37-years-old.
Her neighbour found her, 14 minutes later, and telephoned the police. Jill was taken to Charing Cross Hospital, where she was declared dead at 1:03 PM. As news of her murder began to make the rounds, it was up to her distraught colleagues to make the report during the lunchtime news.
It was found that Jill had been shot by a 9mm calibre bullet from a semi-automatic pistol. It was determined, without question, that the gun had been pressed right up against her head at the moment it was fired.
It was believed that the bullet was from a re-activated gun, which may have been modified or altered in some way. Though thorough searches were conducted multiple times, the weapon as never been found.
Police began their investigation by speaking with Jill’s neighbours. One told police that he heard a surprised outburst, as though Jill was “greeting a friend”, but had not heard a gunshot. He did, however, state that he saw a tall, white man, around the age of 40, walk calmly away from Jill’s home.
The neighbour who found her stated seeing Jill on the ground, knowing something was wrong, and had phone the police immediately.
The murder of beloved BBC television presenter Jill Dando resulted in intense media coverage. Her colleagues felt pressure to help as much as they could. They presented a Crimewatch episode a week after her murder, asking the public to come forward with information.
The Metropolitan Police were also feeling the pressure. They named their investigation Operation Oxborough. This investigation would come to be known as one of the largest running, and most costly investigations by Scotland Yard, as well as the largest criminal investigation since the Yorkshire Ripper.
With the media attention, and Jill’s status as a celebrity, the Met Police were under extreme amounts of scrutiny. They were also fielding a lot of statements, witness accounts, and leads. Many people came forward stating seeing a number of “sweaty” men, or just sighting of men in general, around Jill’s neighbourhood in the moments surrounding Jill’s murder. None of these leads panned out.
Within six months, the investigation had interviewed more than 2,500 people, and taken over 1,000 statements. Hundreds of hours of CCTV footage from the morning of Jill’s murder were viewed, hoping to see if Jill had been followed or stalked, and over 80,000 mobile phone records for the Fulham area around the time of the murder were searched. Every single person of the 486 people Jill had in her filofax were contacted.
Nothing came of these investigative avenues. Jill had not be stalked or followed while running errands, the mobile phone records amounted to very little, and the filofax proved even less useful. The investigation was running very, very cold.
A year into the struggling investigation of Jill Dando’s murder, police were beginning to grow desperate. They had no leads, and no information. And so, they decided to re-evaluate some of the early leads and statements given to them in the first few days and weeks of the investigation.
This led them to Barry George. He lived near Jill’s home, and had a known history of stalking, antisocial behaviour, and attention seeking behaviour. It was clear that George had severe behavioural and mental difficulties, but investigators discounted these facts, and honed in on him as their primary suspect.
On May 25th, 2000, investigators put him under surveillance. Three days later, on May 28th, Barry George was arrested and charged for the murder of Jill Dando.
The prosecution were resting their entire case on one piece of evidence – a single particle of gunpowder that was found in the pocket of George’s coat.
On July 2nd, 2001, George was tried at the Old Bailey. He was subsequently convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Barry George was very vocal about his innocence – and the public found the circumstances surrounding his conviction rather suspect. Two appeals were launched in his defense, and were unsuccessful.
However, in 2007, the validity of the gunpowder particle evidence was heavily called into question. A third appeal was launched, wherein the gunpowder evidence – the only real evidence the prosecution had been counting on – was not admitted. Barry George’s original conviction was struck down, and a second trial was launched.
The second trial ended after eight weeks, and resulted in the acquittal of Barry George on August 1st, 2008.
Seeing as the murder of Jill Dando was so heavily publicized, it left ample room for theorizing and speculation. There are a number of theories that surround Jill’s murder. Here are a handful of them.
One of the first theories that police investigated was that a jealous ex-lover, or otherwise unknown lover, murdered Jill. These leads were thoroughly investigated. Jill’s fiancé fell under intense scrutiny. In the end, all romantic leads were unsubstantiated, and all the men – past and present – in Jill’s life were cleared.
Another popular theory was that someone had hired a contract killer, or an assassin, to murder Jill. She’d been host of Crimewatch, and some speculated that she may have angered someone through the program, who them proceeded to have her murdered.
Investigators went through the cases that Jill had presented on the programme in detail, and conferred with her friends and colleagues associated with the programme, but nothing came of it. The Crimewatch link was a dead end.
Another running theory was – and, to some, still is – the possibility that a fan, or stalker, murdered Jill. She was well known, intelligent, and beautiful. It was entire possible that someone – known or unknown to her – had become absolutely fixated on her.
In the weeks after her death, investigators discovered that that two bank employees had been illegally checking her bank records, and running records checks on her. Following this revelation, it was discovered that a man had tried to take over her telephone account in order to check up on the phone numbers she’d been calling. A further revelation found that someone had also tried to take over her utility account.
Overall, 150 people were shown to have had an unhealthy interest in Jill, though there simply wasn’t enough evidence to raise real suspicion that any of them had murdered her. Furthermore, all of the CCTV footage found of Jill the morning her of murder showed that she’d not been followed or stalked by anyone. The stalker theory ran dry.
A less popular theory came to light a few days after Barry George’s original conviction. A convicted killer sent out a letter from prison claiming that he had been part of a 4-man IRA hit squad who had been sent to murder Jill as part of a revenge killing. The man claimed responsibility on the part of the IRA because he simply couldn’t stand to see an innocent man take credit for a crime his counterparts had committed.
The man went on to claim that Jill had been targeted due to her links with senior police officers. He also claimed that British officials knew about all of this, but that the IRA was getting away with the murder so as not to jeopardize peace talks. British officials vehemently deny this to be true.
Another theory posits that Jill was murdered to keep her silent. Jill, a known investigative journalist, had been part of the investigation into the Jimmy Savile sexual abuse scandal. It was rumoured that she had a dossier of names, facts, and findings that she had intended to give to her colleagues and superiors at the BBC. It’s claimed that management at the BBC simply didn’t want to know. They, of course, dispute this claim. As a result, it is speculated that Jill was murdered to ensure her silence, and to ensure that the rumoured dossier remained just that – rumoured.
More recently, Mark Williams-Thomas, a former police officer and now investigative journalist, has stated that he’s been told that Jill was murdered by an “anonymous hitman” associated with London’s organized crime underground.
One of the most persistent theories claims that Jill Dando was murdered as a result of her reporting on the Yugoslav Wars.
On April 23rd, 1999, NATO bombed Radio Television of Serbia’s headquarters. As a result, 16 staff members died. Just prior to this, Jill had made an appeal for aid for Kosovar Albanian refugees. This appeal, and then the NATO bombing, could have potentially made Jill a likely target for revenge.
Investigators have concluded, undoubtedly, that the most likely scenario is that Jill Dando was murdered by a professional assassin in a “hard contact assassination”. They even found that the ammunition used, the close-contact, and the muffling of the gunshot had the trademarks of a Serbian assassination.
To this day, the murder of Jill Dando remains unsolved, though many continue to theorize and speculate as to what came to pass the morning of April 26th, 1999.
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Sources:
Who Killed Jill Dando? – Crime and Investigation
Who killed Jill Dando? The main theories behind murder of British TV’s golden girl – Adam Lusher – The Independent
Seeing Red A True Crime Podcast – Episode 4: Jill Dando
Jill Dando Wikipedia page