Hosting Crimewatch after Jill Dando’s murder was the hardest thing – but her legacy is nailing crooks, says Nick Ross
PRESENTER Nick Ross was at home writing a script for a TV show when the phone rang with news that his colleague Jill Dando was dead.
Nick and Jill — who was shot in the head aged 37 on the doorstep of her London home in 1999 — were literally partners in crime.
For almost four years, the pair had presented BBC’s Crimewatch UK, the appeals programme that helped police solve some of the nation’s biggest mysteries.
Today, exactly 25 years after Jill’s death, no one is behind bars for her callous murder.
In 2001, Barry George, now 64, was sentenced to life for the shooting.
But his conviction was considered unsafe and it was quashed in 2007.
He was retried and acquitted the following year.
A quarter of a century on, crazy conspiracies continue to swirl about who killed Jill Dando.
But in an exclusive interview with The Sun, Nick reveals how her legacy is still all about fighting crime.
A fund in her memory, which Sun readers helped raise cash for, paid for a unique institute to study crime science — and its findings are being used by countries across the world.
Based at University College London and founded in 2001 on the second anniversary of her death, the Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science has the world’s only professor of future crime and a top-secret data lab.
It has also pioneered work in making cars thief-proof and in changing architecture to foil crime.
‘Girl next door’
Nick, 76, says: “It’s incredible to think it’s 25 years ago. It was such a shock because everyone who saw her on the TV felt they knew Jill.
“I still think about her. She was someone I knew and liked very well. She was a brilliant colleague.
“Newsrooms in those days were very macho places and when Jill was working in the news, a lot of the blokes said, ‘She’s only here because she’s good looking, she’s not really a journalist’.
“Actually, she’d been a journalist since the day she left school. I’ve only known one other broadcaster as good as her and that was David Dimbleby.
“Jill was completely natural in front of the camera, totally unfazed by live broadcasting, and that’s what endeared her to people.
“She just chatted to you as an individual, not as though you were one of millions of people out there.
“The interesting thing about Jill is she was just the same when the camera went off as she was when it was on.
“I think that’s why she was often dubbed ‘the girl next door’ because she was just herself.
“While a lot of people in broadcasting tried to seize the limelight, she was completely generous.
“At the end of our first Crimewatch we came together to do a joint ad-lib to camera.
“She was wearing particularly high heels but I noticed that she surreptitiously kicked off her shoes so that I was taller than she would have been if she’d been wearing them. Extraordinary.”
Three weeks after the killing, Nick presented Crime- watch on his own, telling the full story of how his colleague was murdered on the morning of April 26, 1999, as she was about to open the door to her house.
Nick, who hosted Crime-watch for 23 years until 2007, says: “It was the hardest thing I’d ever done.”
Detectives were desperate for information.
None of Jill’s friends or her fiancé, surgeon Alan Farthing, had a motive for wanting her dead and all had cast-iron alibis.
The murder scene, in the tiny front garden of her home in Gowan Avenue, Fulham, West London, had been totally compromised.
Three doctors and five paramedics trampled over the blood-stained path as they battled to save Jill, who had been shot in the back of the head at just after 11.30am.
There was little forensic evidence, only a casing from the bullet, the 9mm bullet itself and trace residue on Jill’s clothing and in her hair.
Calls flooded in to Crimewatch.
The murder team became swamped with more than 7,000 lines of inquiry that had to be checked, as the Dando case became one of the biggest investigations in the history of the Met.
Witnesses reported seeing a man waiting on his own near the house. One neighbour heard a scream and another saw a lone man walking hurriedly away.
‘Good enough for MI5’
Senior Investigating Officer Detective Chief Inspector Hamish Campbell and his team were under intense pressure from top brass and the media to prioritise any potential links to her work investigating the world of crime.
Every one of the investigations that had been highlighted in the 42 episodes of Crimewatch that Dando worked on were checked out for someone with a grudge.
In the week she was murdered, Jill appeared on the cover of Radio Times dressed in motorbike leathers.
Could that have been a trigger for her killer?
Nick says: “When Jill died, those of us on Crimewatch and her producer on Holiday, the travel show she presented, were very keen to do something in her honour.
“I came up with this idea — why don’t we start a university department of crime science and get a public appeal?
“So, we founded the Jill Dando Fund.”
For a year, Nick wore a forget-me-not flower badge in Jill’s memory as £1.5million poured in from her devoted fans.
The money was enough to set up the Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science at University College London.
The department has been copied in Australia, New Zealand, the US and Netherlands.
Nick says: “It is fantastic. It has the world’s first and only professor of future crime, whose role is to scan new products and services so we can forestall the next crime wave rather than just fall into it.
“It has a centre for city policing, which works directly with the police, crime analysts and intelligence officers on coming up with new and effective crime-reduction strategies.
“There’s also a top-security lab where secret data can be examined in complete confidence. It is good enough for MI5 or MI6 to use.
“It now has about 60 under-graduates each year from all around the world, many of whom will go into policing, intelligence and security.
“Jill went straight into journalism after school.
“When she went into the BBC, many of her colleagues had university degrees.
“I think she was a little bit diffident that she didn’t.
“Not that it mattered, she was so much better than almost everybody else.
“But she’d be thrilled that there’s a university department named after her.”
Jill’s fiancé Alan, 60, went on to marry in 2008 and have two sons.
The consultant gynaecologist was a member of the medical team that delivered Prince William and Kate’s children, George, Charlotte and Louis.
To mark the 25th anniversary of Jill’s death, Scotland Yard put out a statement confirming her case is “inactive” — no longer being investigated or reviewed.
The Met added: “No unsolved murder is ever closed and detectives would consider any new information provided to assess whether it represented a new and realistic line of inquiry.”
VANISHING CHANCE TO NAIL KILLER
By Mike Sullivan
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.
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.