BBC journalist Jill Dando was the star of '90s unsolved murder series "Crimewatch."
She could never have known that she would one day become its subject.
"This program was her passion. And now,
as Jill helped others, we hope we can do the same for her."
Jill Dando was born in Somerset in 1961 and began her journalism career
at a local newspaper. By the 1990s, she was a household name in the U.K.
At around 11:30 a.m. on April 26, 1999, Dando was killed with a single pistol shot
to her head. The killer came up behind her as she was about to enter her London home,
grabbed her by the arm, and shoved her to the ground before firing. More than 20 years on,
Dando's murder remains unsolved, even after police conducted thousands of interviews and
culled through thousands of potential suspects. An unnamed former police detective told Vice in 2019:
"Other than terror-related inquiries,
I know of no other investigation with anything like the volume."
In May 2000, the police arrested Barry George, a local man with developmental disabilities, based
on scant evidence. George had earlier convictions for attempted rape and indecent assault. Police,
after finding multiple copies of a magazine featuring Jill Dando in George's apartment,
believed he was obsessed with her. A key piece of evidence
was a microscopic particle found in George's coat pocket believed to be gunshot residue.
A jury convicted George the next year and the court sentenced him to life in prison.
After several attempts, George's conviction was overturned in 2007 — the particle evidence was
thrown out — and he went free the next year after a retrial led to his acquittal. With George's
release from prison, the police were back to square one with who was behind the murder of "the
golden girl of British TV." Many theories continue to circulate as to who was behind the killing.
Two theories involve European hitmen. At the time of Dando's killing, NATO was in the midst
of a bombing campaign against Serbian forces responsible for ethnic cleansing in the Balkans.
Just days before her death, the U.S. and the U.K. had bombed the Radio Television Serbia building
in Belgrade, killing 16 employees. The family of then-Serbian president Slobodan Milošević owned
the station. Dando had recently made an on-air appeal for aid for Kosovo-Albanian refugees,
which raised a massive amount of money. Some believe Milošević sought revenge
by sending a hitman to kill her, since she was the face of the BBC.
A more recent theory involved the former head of Elite Model Management, Gérald Marie. Lisa
Brinkworth, another BBC journalist, had gone undercover in 1998 to expose Marie's alleged sex
crimes. In 2022, Brinkworth filed court documents alleging Marie hired a Russian hitman to kill her,
who mistakenly murdered Dando instead. Marie's legal team strenuously denied the allegations.
There was still another theory involving a hitman, this one from inside England. In 2015,
Mark Williams-Thomas, a television journalist and retired police detective, floated the idea that
Dando's murder could have been a hit put out by someone in the London underworld in retribution
for her work on "Crimewatch." Four years later, Williams-Thomas interviewed an unnamed hitman who
told the journalist he believed he knew who the killer was but refused to say for fear
of retribution. During a 2019 appearance on "This Morning," Williams-Thomas said:
"There are some very nasty horrible people out there — criminals — and the crucial element,
from their point of view, is that they may perceive that 'Crimewatch' puts criminals away,
therefore putting their friends and colleagues away, and I think that was the reason."
"The motivation, the reason behind it, I think has something to do with her work on 'Crimewatch.'"
The police looked into this angle, but after investigating 30 potential
suspects and interviewing known underworld hitmen in prison,
they found no conclusive evidence to support the theory.
Perhaps the most disputed theory is that someone killed Dando to keep her from
revealing what she'd uncovered about an alleged pedophile ring involving the BBC. But according
to journalist Nick Ross, who had worked with Dando, it's just another conspiracy theory.
"We've had the whole of the London underworld turned over, the Liverpool underworld,
we've had theories it was a pedophile. I mean this is just saloon bar gossip."
Jill Dando's brother, Nigel Dando,
believes his sister's murder was a "random act of brutality." He told The Times:
"My personal feeling is it was somebody looking
for a kick and for notoriety. Jill was in the wrong place at the wrong time."
To this day, Dando's murder is officially listed as unsolved. In 2019, Detective Chief Inspector
Hamish Campbell sat down with the BBC to discuss the investigation and reiterated
that police had thoroughly examined "all the cases that [Dando] was involved in."
"We, the metropolitan police writ large, investigated that case
so thoroughly, you know, to the ends of our ability."