IF fame is a double-edged sword, then for Jill Dando there was no positive side to it.
Her celebrity profile not only cost Jill her life, but also scuppered the chance of finding justice for her murder.
On the day of Jill’s death, I was in the canteen at The Sun HQ when my phone rang with news that she had been murdered on the doorstep of her home an hour earlier.
I was one of the first reporters to arrive at a confused crime scene where it remained uncertain for hours whether she had been shot or stabbed.
One thing seemed certain – it would not be long before police caught a killer who had targeted such a high-profile figure in broad daylight in a busy area of London.
Yet a quarter of a century on, there is no prospect of ever proving who murdered her.
The best chance of securing the necessary evidence was lost within an hour of her death.
Despite clearly being dead, well-meaning medics – apparently overawed by Jill’s celebrity status – tried desperately to revive her, potentially trampling over forensic evidence in the process.
They took her body to nearby Charing Cross Hospital, where a trauma team tried in vain to revive her. Nobody will ever know what forensic opportunities were potentially lost.
The lack of evidence found at the scene and no obvious motive left detectives with a mountain to climb. Speculation still continues over whether Jill was the victim of a Serbian warlord seeking revenge for a Nato bombing of a Belgrade TV station days earlier.
But no claim for responsibility was ever made. BBC Foreign Editor John Simpson was in Serbia at the time and would have been a far easier target. Nothing emerged from a trawl of Jill’s personal life and inquiries into two suspected British hitmen – possibly hired by someone upset by her Crimewatch role – drew a blank.
The only thing which did make sense was that Jill had been targeted by someone obsessed with her.
And there was no shortage of those, with 140 people identified as “having an unhealthy interest or obsession” with Jill. Before Barry George came into the frame, one elderly obsessive – who was apparently seen on Jill’s street the morning she died – was investigated and ruled out.
Jill and her loved ones deserve better, but justice can be fickle – and murder inquiries are often determined by the deck of cards given to detectives on day one.
Convicted sex offender George, however, was believed by police to fit the bill perfectly. The oddball loner had a history of stalking women and an obsession with media personalities and he was seen at a disabled centre a short distance from the murder scene shortly after Jill’s death.
I covered both his trial and retrial – ordered after gunshot residue in his pocket was ruled inadmissible – and did not believe the cases had been proved beyond reasonable doubt.
Perhaps unfairly, George was denied any compensation for the eight years he spent in prison because no new evidence had come to light to prove his innocence.
A Scotland Yard cold case report later concluded: “There is no evidence that points to any other person being responsible for the murder.”
The last cold case review was six years ago, when no new lines of inquiry through new advanced forensics were identified.
Jill and her loved ones deserve better, but justice can be fickle – and murder inquiries are often determined by the deck of cards given to detectives on day one.
