Record of the call to 999 (British emergency number) on Monday, April 26, 1999, at 11:44 in the morning:
-I’m walking down Gowan Avenue. It looks like someone collapsed… Confidentially, it looks like it’s Jill Dando and she collapsed. There is a lot of blood – says a woman who will later identify herself as Helen Doble with a broken voice.
-Can you come over and check for me if the lady is breathing? – asks the operator.
-It doesn’t look like he’s breathing. Blood comes out of his nose. Her arms are blue…
-I just need to know if he’s breathing. Does the lady’s chest rise and fall?
-Oh my God, no, I don’t think she’s alive! I’m sorry…
A few minutes before the 999 call, BBC news presenter Jill Dando had parked her BMW very close to her home in the exclusive Fulham neighborhood of south-west London. She had come from doing some shopping – sole, milk – after spending the night at the house of her boyfriend, the gynecologist Alan Farthing.
When she reached the door of 29 Gowan Avenue, she placed the packages on the floor to take the keys out of her purse. The precise moment she was going to open it, a stranger grabbed her from behind her with his right arm and pressed her face against the entrance step. At the same time, he held a 9-millimeter pistol with a silencer that he held in his left hand against her temple and fired. The shot entered just above the woman’s left ear and went through her head.
Jill Dando, host of the program CrimeWatch – one of the most watched on British television – and presenter of Six O’Clock Newswas officially pronounced dead at 1:03 p.m. at Charing Cross Hospital.
BBC face
Tall, blonde, expressive, intelligent, with an undeniable resemblance to the late Lady Di – who died in August 1997 -, at 37 years old Jill Dando was the best-known face of the BBC.
Born into a family of journalists – her father and brother were journalists – she began her career in a media outlet in her hometown, The Weston Mercuryand later spent reading the news for BBC Radio Devon.
In 1994 she moved to London and there she achieved success as host of journalistic programs. Breakfast Time, Breakfast News, BBC One O’Clock News, Six O’Clock Newsand the travel magazine Holiday. Since 1995 he also hosted, along with renowned journalist Nick Roos, the program CrimeWatch, one of the most watched on British television. In addition, the network announced that she would be the main host of the BBC special on December 31, 1999 to welcome the new millennium.
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The gossip programs and society magazines followed her step by step. Jill Dando’s private life was always in the news. Her engagement to doctor Alan Farthing followed like a soap opera, whose happy ending – or, at least, one of its milestones – would take place on September 25, when they finally married after the groom obtained a divorce from his previous partner. The place they would choose for the honeymoon was one of the debates of the moment.
But Jill Dando was not just a pretty face on television, she also presented investigations and took positions: on pedophile networks, the bombings in Kosovo or the underworld of the London underworld.
For this reason, the investigation into his murder opened up to a wide range of possibilities, but without any certainty.
The overcoat killer
Due to the relevance of the victim and the public commotion that his death unleashed, the investigation into Dando’s murder mobilized the London police, who assigned a team of 45 officers under the command of Inspector Hamish Campbell for “Operation Oxborough.”
About the alleged murderer, the agents only obtained a few pieces of information. Neighbor Richard Hughes saw a white man, about 6 feet tall and approximately 40 years old, calmly walking away from the journalist’s house. He was dressed in an elegant overcoat and wearing sunglasses.
Two other witnesses saw a man in an overcoat running from 29 Gowan Avenue. They described him as having thick dark hair and glasses. A neighbor spoke of a man in an overcoat who ran “sweating profusely and with a nervous expression.”
During the following months, the group led by Inspector Campbell answered some 80,000 telephone calls about the case, interviewed nearly 5,000 people, took 2,500 testimonies, analyzed 14,000 emails and reviewed 191 street surveillance cameras, whose recordings showed that no one He had followed Dando on his way to the house. The conclusion was that the murderer was waiting for her and that, because of the way she committed the crime, he was a professional.
The list of suspects reached more than two thousand, but nothing could be proven to any of them.
The hypotheses
“We are not ruling out any leads. We will analyze both the private life of Jill Dando and any possible connection with the event program that she presented, Crimewatch”, said Inspector Campbell in those days.
As in any crime, part of the police team focused on the victim’s inner circle. The boyfriend, Jill’s brother, her agent, and her co-workers were investigated. Their alibis were checked and rechecked until it was clear that neither of them had been on Gowan Avenue at the time of the crime. All of his relationships, his financial situation, and those of his family and contacts were also reviewed. The result was null.
Another line of investigation pointed to the possibility of revenge. In CrimeWatch, Jill and her partner Nick Ross, analyzed unsolved crimes and asked for the public’s collaboration to find the culprits. They thought about a resentful criminal and also about a trafficking network that they had denounced, but they were all dead ends. Furthermore, Jill only presented the cases and the one who really investigated and pointed out possible culprits was Ross. If it was revenge, the target should have been him and not her.
The hypothesis of “the Serbian connection” was also considered. Investigators could not rule it out because a few days before his death, Dando had hosted a BBC special on Kosovo refugees. The NATO intervention in the former Yugoslavia and a bombing of a Serbian television channel had killed 16 workers. The murder of the most famous face of the BBC could be retaliation.
The possibility that the crime was the work of a stalker was thoroughly investigated, although the killer’s modus operandi pointed more to a professional than an unbalanced person. Three years earlier, Dando had received – first at the BBC offices and then at her own home – a series of letters from an admirer who wanted to go on a date with her. Police identified the harasser, a 60-year-old man who apologized and did not bother her again. After the crime, investigators found about 140 people who had shown an unusual interest in Dando and she also questioned known celebrity stalkers. They didn’t find the culprit there either.
The months passed and the case, despite the intense investigation, remained bogged down.
Blaming a “parsley”
The broken dishes of police impotence ended up being paid by Barry George, a man with mental problems who lived near Dando. And he paid dearly for them.
Police arrested him on May 25, 2000. George had three characteristics that made him a promising suspect: he physically resembled the alleged murderer described by Jill Dando’s neighbors, he had a criminal record for harassment and indecent assault, and he was obsessed for weapons, which he knew how to handle very well.
The man did not have a firm alibi for the day of the crime, which made him the ideal scapegoat for a case that called into question the efficiency of the police.
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Investigators presented alleged scientific evidence that appeared to link George to the crime: a microscopic particle of what was said to be gunshot residue, along with evidence about the character of a fiber found on his clothing. The defense argued that the presence of armed officers at his arrest could have been responsible for the gunshot residue.
On May 29 – just four days after his arrest – he was indicted and on July 2, 2001, he was sentenced to life in prison by a jury that found him guilty in a split vote.
After losing an appeal against his conviction in 2002, Barry George had his case reviewed in 2007, leading to a new trial.
George’s attorneys focused their defense on new evidence that cast doubt on gunpowder residue attributed to a firearm found in his coat at the time of his arrest.
In August 2008, the court declared him innocent and ordered his immediate release.
“This is not the time to celebrate. Barry George, an innocent man, has spent eight years in prison for a crime he did not commit. “Those eight years could have been better spent searching for the real killer,” his lawyer, Jeremy Moore, said in an impromptu press conference at the end of the trial.
Standing next to him, Barry George could only say: “I’m overwhelmed. “I want to thank my family and my legal team.”
A “cold case” seems CrimeWatch
The ruling that freed Barry George did not satisfy the Prosecutor’s Office, much less the police: the investigation into the murder of Jill Dando had ended in failure, with the aggravating factor of imprisoning an innocent man for eight years.
The passage of time, on the other hand, made it more difficult to identify the true culprit.
Alan Farthing, the man who was to marry Jill, and his partner in CrimeWatch, Nick Ross, created an academic institute that bears his name. The BBC inaugurated a garden in her honor and established the “Jill Dando” scholarship, intended to finance journalism studies for one student per year at Falmouth University.
Almost 25 years after the murder, the case remains open without even a promising lead. It has become a “cold case” worthy of CrimeWatchthe unsolved crime show hosted by Jill Dando herself.
2023-09-29 09:35:01
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