UK UK - Jill Dando, 37, Fulham, London, 26 Apr 1999

[tes1984]

I'm well aware that miscarriages of justice happen, but I don't see how the Linda Cook case is in any way comparable to Jill's. You're comparing apples to watermelons.

Perhaps not the strongest comparison ever, but not sure about the apples and watermelons comment.

Both cases involved tunnel vision (and dodgy investigating) from the police, and suspects who were convicted on circumstantial evidence, and then spent years in prison before finally being released.

Definitely agree BG was a stronger suspect on paper for JD, than MS was for LC though.

 

[Interested_But_Confused]

As much as I do not think it was a movie-style stealth assassin, I do think it was to swift and too well planned to be BG. He would be even louder and messier than Slobo's boys. This guy turned attention wherever he went.




People can have a nasty shock from many fairly innocent reasons. Suddenly loosing their balance, seeing a spider, finding unexpectedly a hideous stain on their garments, dropping something... It was a short, not very loud (not heard by anyone else than RH) scream/exclamation, not exactly a reason in itself to run out of the house.



RH saw a killer, that's agreed upon. Other people saw a man that might be the killer but until he is caught we cannot be sure.

BG was definitely noticeable, which is why he appears to have repeatedly been noticed on Gowan Avenue that morning; yet at the time Jill arrived home, through what can *only* be described as luck, there was nobody on the street and only a couple of neighbours to see or hear anything. Nobody could realistically plan for Jill to arrive home at precisely the moment when there were no good witnesses. Regardless of who did it, IMO simple stupid luck played the largest part in them not being caught in the act.

As for Jill's scream being "short," if RH's original statement (when it was freshest in his memory) is accurate, five seconds really isn't so short. If you care to, you should take a timer and scream for five seconds. I was surprised when I timed it at how long a five-second scream actually is.

Regarding the killer being seen, all I said was: "The initial appeals were all for sightings in the Fulham Palace Rd and Bishop's Park Rd area, because that was the direction the killer was initially seen running." The man RH saw (and the neighbour across the street also saw) *was* running in the direction of Fulham Palace Rd. Other witnesses may or may not have seen the killer--personally I don't think many if any of them did--but my original comment wasn't inaccurate.

 

[rvlvr]

Re BG being seen that morning, the sighting I’ve always thought was most likely to be BG is the one made by the postman. I can well imagine him wandering the streets of Fulham, walking by JD’s house (he clearly would’ve known where she lived, imo), and upon seeing the postman approach the door lingering to see if she opened it.

It’s difficult though for me to imagine that this very conspicuous act (the man is shown in the reconstruction as facing the postman directly) was actually BG staking out her property with a view to killing her. But that’s JMO.

I think a lot of the other sightings are red herrings - trilby hat man, for instance. And I’m really not convinced by some of the supposed ‘partial sightings’ of BG, especially so after doing a bit more digging and finding out that a detective on the case had an affair with one of the witnesses, CdR!

Although she gave evidence at the trial, the judge ruled her testimony about spotting George was inadmissible after learning of the affair.

Source: Life for Jill killer: Witness in affair with Dando cop. - Free Online Library

 

[Hexe]

BG was definitely noticeable, which is why he appears to have repeatedly been noticed on Gowan Avenue that morning; yet at the time Jill arrived home, through what can *only* be described as luck, there was nobody on the street and only a couple of neighbours to see or hear anything. Nobody could realistically plan for Jill to arrive home at precisely the moment when there were no good witnesses. Regardless of who did it, IMO simple stupid luck played the largest part in them not being caught in the act.

That's true, but there were people around shortly before and after Jill was shot. Nobody noticed any weirdo around. I mean we are talking here a dude who sauntered into Kensington Palace Gardens with full burglar kit and behaved weirdly enough to turn the guards attention to himself, or barged into friend's house wearing a mask and shooting with starter pistol. There is nothing subtle in BG's behaviour, this man is an elephant in fine china shop.

As for Jill's scream being "short," if RH's original statement (when it was freshest in his memory) is accurate, five seconds really isn't so short.

We have different definitions of short then (yes I did a trial with a watch). Also, to quote RH's own words:

"It was a female scream. I did not consider it to be significant at the time. I thought it was someone surprising somebody."

Does not sound like he is describing a scream of terror, does it? A scream you utter when you get surprised is usually not particularly long, nor loud.

Regarding the killer being seen, all I said was: "The initial appeals were all for sightings in the Fulham Palace Rd and Bishop's Park Rd area, because that was the direction the killer was initially seen running." The man RH saw (and the neighbour across the street also saw) *was* running in the direction of Fulham

The man seen by RH was not running, but calmly walking. I have a huge problem with fitting RH's and the neighbour's statements together for that reason. Considering the neighbour insists he saw the man before 11:29, I do not discard the possibility the man he saw was not the killer.

 

[rvlvr]

Perhaps RH allowed himself to get a little carried away by the drama of the moment, by the attention from the media, and so on, and perhaps… stretched the truth, a little.

His version of events as told in this Guardian article appears different again?

Moments later, before Miss Dando had opened the front door, Mr Hughes heard a scream.

At first he thought she must be sharing a joke with her fiance. But then she screamed again, and he ran to the window of the upstairs bedroom.

'It was a very distinctive scream, she sounded quite surprised,' he said. Even then, it seemed unlikely to him that anything out of the ordinary had happened.

'I heard a scream. She was covered in blood'

Jill Dando had every reason to be cheerful as she returned to her house yesterday morning.

www.theguardian.com

How many screams did he hear, and for how long? IMO the doubt and discrepancies undermine his credibility as a witness, but in his defence his recollections of the killer - what he looked like, how he left the scene, etc - have always been consistent, AFAIK. It seems to be the bit before the murder he might’ve, shall we say, misremembered?

 

[Inspector Evans]

Re BG being seen that morning, the sighting I’ve always thought was most likely to be BG is the one made by the postman. I can well imagine him wandering the streets of Fulham, walking by JD’s house (he clearly would’ve known where she lived, imo), and upon seeing the postman approach the door lingering to see if she opened it.

It’s difficult though for me to imagine that this very conspicuous act (the man is shown in the reconstruction as facing the postman directly) was actually BG staking out her property with a view to killing her. But that’s JMO.

I think a lot of the other sightings are red herrings - trilby hat man, for instance. And I’m really not convinced by some of the supposed ‘partial sightings’ of BG, especially so after doing a bit more digging and finding out that a detective on the case had an affair with one of the witnesses, CdR!



Source: Life for Jill killer: Witness in affair with Dando cop. - Free Online Library

Always like looking at FreeLibrary to see the articles and style of journalism at the time.

I'm not sure who the detective is but the Mirror a month later (May 1999) ran a special looking at all the known clues and possible scenarios:

JILL DANDO SPECIAL INVESTIGATION: DAY 1- COOL KILLERS; JILL DANDO SPECIAL INVESTIGATION: DAY 1. - Free Online Library

Free Online Library: JILL DANDO SPECIAL INVESTIGATION: DAY 1- COOL KILLERS; JILL DANDO SPECIAL INVESTIGATION: DAY 1.(News) by "The Mirror (London, England)"; General interest

www.thefreelibrary.com

The detective remarks on standing on Gowan Avenue and struggling to believe how small the space was between gate and front door. Also estimated her patio was overlooked by 50 bedroom windows so killer not being directly seen was "luck of the devil."

 

[Hexe]

Let's delve a bit into my doubts about the statements of RH and GUB. The nagging question is: did they see the same man?

GUB, who lived on Gowan Avenue 30, said:

I came out of the house and saw the man running down the road away from Jill Dando's house. I was suspicious because people don't run in this road.
He was in my sight for around four to five seconds. He started off running fast, but then heard my gate click. He looked in my direction, saw me and slowed down. He went behind a lorry parked in the road and I didn't see him again.

RH, inhabiting then the number 30 on Gowan Avenue, stated:

The next thing I heard was a scream. I presumed it was a female.
Seconds after, I went and had a look out of the window where I saw a gentleman walking away from the scene.

GUB was adamant his sighting was no later than 11:29, while RH estimated the time to be a few minutes later.

Do you see where the problem is? If not look at the map I attached. We have the location of JDs house marked there in red, GUB in blue and RH in green. The blue arrow on the pavement shows the direction in which the man seen by witnesses moved.
See the problem now?

RH, who saw the man leaving Jill's property, stated he saw him walking briskly. GUB, who lived exactly vis a vis to RH saw the man first running, then slowing down to walk.

The problem is gentlemen lived exactly vis a vis. There is no room for the perpetrator to start walking, then running and then slow down to walk.

What is more, GUB stated he spotted the man running fast towards him when he exited his house and then the man slowed down to walk when he heard the cling of GUB's front gate. These front gardens on Gowan Avenue are tiny, sure, but still, between exiting home and reaching that gate multiple seconds passed. That's enough for a running man to cover a lot of metres. There is no way this man could exit Jill's gate, run for five seconds and still be facing GUB. He would be away from him and turned with his back to our witness. Anything else is a physical impossibility.

 

[rvlvr]

The problem is gentlemen lived exactly vis a vis. There is no room for the perpetrator to start walking, then running and then slow down to walk.

I actually started to write up something similar last night but couldn’t properly explain it in the way you have. Even in the - I think - 5-6 seconds GUB said he saw this man, any half fit man would cover a fair bit of ground, especially as this man was supposedly already running away from a position directly opposite GUB’s house. Was this guy running in treacle?

Though where we differ is that I actually do think GUB likely saw the same man RH did but, perhaps like RH, he was swept up in the drama of the moment. JMO - he definitely did see a man hurrying away and it very likely did strike him as suspicious, but then (entirely innocently, I’m sure) a little poetic license was used on his part to fill in some blanks.

 

[Inspector Evans]

Perhaps RH allowed himself to get a little carried away by the drama of the moment, by the attention from the media, and so on, and perhaps… stretched the truth, a little.

His version of events as told in this Guardian article appears different again?

'I heard a scream. She was covered in blood'

Jill Dando had every reason to be cheerful as she returned to her house yesterday morning.

www.theguardian.com

How many screams did he hear, and for how long? IMO the doubt and discrepancies undermine his credibility as a witness, but in his defence his recollections of the killer - what he looked like, how he left the scene, etc - have always been consistent, AFAIK. It seems to be the bit before the murder he might’ve, shall we say, misremembered?

Richard Hughes was on the UK TV evening bulletins that night, they are still up on YT. Just a few hours after her death and he said clearly in the interview on the street he heard a scream. Also when asked if he saw the potential attacker "I have a particular vision of this man." "He walked away very calmly."

The most in depth interview on the day's events before the court case started in 2001.

 

[rvlvr]

I'm not sure who the detective is but the Mirror a month later (May 1999) ran a special looking at all the known clues and possible scenarios:

Great link, thanks for sharing.

What’s always bothered me is that we know that the man seen running down Fulham Palace Road in the minutes after the murder was supposedly later identified as the undertaker, ‘JS’.

And we also know a witness observed a man, sweating profusely and standing at a bus stop on Fulham Palace Road, with a mark on the bridge of his “slightly foreign looking” nose as if he’d been wearing glasses. (Interestingly, a witness sighting shown on the Crimewatch reconstruction placed a man wearing glasses only 200 yards from JD’s home just minutes before she was shot.)

‘Running man’ and ‘bus stop man’ are often said to be one and the same: JS. But an article in the Mirror from earlier this year stated that JS had “falsely claimed” to be bus stop man. Bus stop man is described as being around 5 feet 11 inches tall, while JS’s height was reported by the Mirror as being 6 feet 3 inches. Based on footage of an interview he gave to the media in 1999, JS isn’t a man that you’d mistake for a person shorter than 6 feet, imo. Indeed, the aforementioned Mirror article claims police “discounted the lanky liar” as being bus stop man. (Despite this, the judge when summing up at BG’s first trial wrongly discounted this man as potentially being JD’s killer, and the trial judge at BG’s 2002 appeal repeated the mistake.)

Police have never identified bus stop man. He wasn’t BG, and he wasn’t JS. So who was he? IMO this is a pretty big hole in this case.

 

[rvlvr]

Also when asked if he saw the potential attacker "I have a particular vision of this man." "He walked away very calmly."

Yeah, as I said, I think he’s always been clear about what he saw - it’s just the ‘what he heard’ bit that strikes me as a little strange. ‘A scream’, that perhaps lasted 5-6 seconds, maybe even two screams? Perhaps I sounded uncharitable last night, it can’t be easy having microphones and dictaphones shoved in your face by a hungry pack of journalists and reporters eager for news. It does seem that after the initial scramble for information settled down he tells a very consistent story.

 

[Interested_But_Confused]

Regarding the two witnesses on Gowan Avenue, if you watch the original Crimewatch reconstruction, RH actually says he saw GUB walking out of his front door at the same time he looked out of his window and saw the man leaving Jill's property. With that being the case, it must have been the same man they both saw at the same time, despite them differing somewhat in their description of his movements and their estimate of the time.

IMO both RH and GUB would have had a somewhat obscured view due to window blinds, hedges, garden walls, parked cars, etc. Discrepancies like this are always a problem where witness statements are concerned.

 

[Inspector Evans]

ID there of someone stood on corner of Gowan Avenue/Munster Road at 11.29am (6:00). If that wasn't the killer it was someone who had an incredible view of all that unfolded a minute or two later.

At the very least from where they were stood they'd have seen JD turn and drive into Gowan Avenue. Frustrating the eye witness was walking the other side of Munster Road and didn't themselves walk into Gowan otherwise they'd have seen everything I reckon.

Interesting she says he's wearing glasses.

Another big what if from this case as we know for certain the killing happened at half 11.

 

[rvlvr]

If that wasn't the killer it was someone who had an incredible view of all that unfolded a minute or two later.

Indeed. As I said earlier, the witness at the bus stop believed the man that he sighted had possibly been wearing glasses. Might’ve just been a coincidence, of course, and I don’t know if this individual on the corner of GA was ever identified? But there’s an interesting bit of information from Hamish Campbell in this Guardian piece from 2000:

"There were 23 sightings, yet none of these men have come forward!" Ch Insp Campbell told the Guardian in exasperation. "Why not? As I sit here in the middle of this storm, I think that is pretty extraordinary."

Source: Dando murder suspect held after raid on flat close to TV presenter's home

Extraordinary indeed. Perhaps some came forward or were found later on, but even then that still leaves a big chunk of potential witnesses, or suspects - never traced, never ruled out.

As you say, let’s picture the scene: JD is killed around 11.30am. The smartly stressed killer flees down GA towards Fulham Palace Road. If it’s BG, he’s ‘briskly’ taking the long way home. At the same time, the suited JS is supposedly running hard down Fulham Palace Road, apparently entirely innocently.

But at least one witness who said they saw ‘running man’ identified ‘running man’ as the man on CCTV at Putney Bridge station - and that man is very definitely not JS. Confusion abounds! Meanwhile, *another* man in a suit arrives at the bus stop on Fulham Palace Road, acting strangely and sweating profusely as if he too has been running. All this is happening while JD is lying dead a couple of hundred yards up the road. There’s a bit too much happening here and for me it’s never quite added up.

 

[Inspector Evans]

From that article;

A man calling himself James Dando and claiming to be the presenter's brother, rang the gas, electricity and water companies in February last year to try to have her bills transferred into his name. Another man, who was found and ruled out of the inquiry, used the internet service 192.com to pinpoint exactly where Ms Dando lived; another caller to British Telecom seemed to have her ex-directory telephone number.

Debunks the idea that you needed MI6 intelligence to work out her own residence in London. These were relatively harmless stalkers/obsessives finding out this information so the more sinister individuals would also find this.

I think someone was watching her house for many months. To identify which car was parked outside on the days so would know what vehicle to look out for even if just walking past to work out when she was in/out and so build up her routine that way.

Perhaps this shooting would've occurred weeks before but April 1999 was a very busy month filming so the opportunity wasn't really there until the final week of that April.

If you identify the house then you have an opportunity if patience.

Perhaps with the postman noticing there was individual across the road peering at the house on that morning the actual plan was to approach and shoot when she came out of the house and turned her back to lock the door but not in so had to do it the other way when she returned that morning.

 

[Hexe]

Another big what if from this case as we know for certain the killing happened at half 11.

We do?

 

[Inspector Evans]

We do?

The Crimewatch reconstruction lists it as 11.30am. Perhaps not exactly but I presume they have CCTV of her final drive from round the corner and that lists the time as something like 11:27 or so.

 

[kemo]

There is a fundamental problem with witnesses in a criminal investigation when the object of the sighting is not known to the witnesses and the witnesses is not aware that he is witnessing anything related to a crime or anything else out of the ordinary. Memories are formed by something “significant” happening surrounded by a background of insignificant events. Those insignificant events do not form reliable memories. If someone is walking down a street and numerous perfectly ordinary people pass, none of them are likely to form a reliable memory. If, on the other hand, someone he recognizes, someone running or doing something unusual or just someone particularly attractive passes, that event is likely to form a memory. When police question witnesses in that situation, the difference between witnesses who provide specific, usable information and those that do not, often comes down to how willing the witnesses are to being helpful and cooperative and has very little to do with the reliability of their memories. A lot of these sightings are simply unreliable and shouldn’t be given that much credence.

 

[rvlvr]

The Crimewatch reconstruction lists it as 11.30am. Perhaps not exactly but I presume they have CCTV of her final drive from round the corner and that lists the time as something like 11:27 or so.

The last call she took was at 11.23am, and it’s believed she was in a fishmonger’s on Fulham Road at the time due to the background noise. According to a staff member, “she seemed jolly but was in a hurry, remarking that her car was parked just around the corner (in Dancer Road).”

It’s about a 3 minute drive to Gowan Avenue down Munster Road from Dancer Road, plus obviously you’d need to allow for her walking back to her car with the fish that she’d purchased, then parking and walking up to her front door at the other end. She receives a call at 11.31am that she doesn’t answer. I think the estimated time of the shooting is pretty much spot on.

Jill Dando's murder: 20 years on, fresh witness accounts

New dramatic eye witness accounts detail the moments after BBC presenter Jill Dando was killed on her doorstep in Fulham, London.

www.dailymail.co.uk

The last time she was captured on CCTV was 11.10am.

PressReader.com - Digital Newspaper & Magazine Subscriptions

Digital newsstand featuring 7000+ of the world’s most popular newspapers & magazines. Enjoy unlimited reading on up to 5 devices with 7-day free trial.

www.pressreader.com

 

[rvlvr]

Debunks the idea that you needed MI6 intelligence to work out her own residence in London. These were relatively harmless stalkers/obsessives finding out this information so the more sinister individuals would also find this.

Yeah, agree with this. I’d forgotten until the other day that she did actually have a pretty serious stalker at one point, a chap who “admitted sending her Valentine cards, waiting for her outside the BBC studios, phoning her at work and even calling at her Fulham home. His behaviour concerned the BBC so much that it contacted him, saying his actions constituted harassment.”

Source: Inside the strange world of the stalker

Same article notes that a year before her death, JD “was again subjected to frightening phone calls and letters. This new stalker put a note through her front door after she was pictured with fiance Alan Farthing.”