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

[Novosti]

From the Guardian:



Putting aside the obvious issue with Mr Paul’s evidence, that he had two fairly lengthy interactions with Barry George and apparently came away with the belief that George was a blonde, spiky haired east European, let’s assume that his recollection of events is correct - does this honestly sound like an attempt by George to ‘coach a witness’? I think that’s a stretch and a half, to put it mildly.

Mr Paul’s belief simply that he was dealing with a ‘nutter’, is surely the correct explanation here.

Did anything that Barry George do in the weeks after Jill Dando died make sense? Of course not - the man was a simpleton, with a poor memory and a personality disorder. He went to the council’s housing office and asked them to erect a memorial to Jill. He collected condolence cards from local businesses, which he forgot all about and left in his flat, to be found later by police. He told at least one random member of the public that he was going to speak at Jill’s memorial service!

All utterly bizarre behaviour obviously, but exactly the sort of behaviour you’d expect a man like Barry George to partake in.

No disagreement on the bizarre nature of his behaviour. But absolutely it was coaching a witness: going back to the taxi office at all for these purposes; asking about his clothing on the day of the murder; pointing to the sun to elicit the colour he wanted; lying about the e-fit. It was a plan (albeit not a sound one) to change the evidence a witness/alibi might give.

 

[rvlvr]

No disagreement on the bizarre nature of his behaviour. But absolutely it was coaching a witness: going back to the taxi office at all for these purposes; asking about his clothing on the day of the murder; pointing to the sun to elicit the colour he wanted; lying about the e-fit. It was a plan (albeit not a sound one) to change the evidence a witness/alibi might give.

Do you have a source for the e-fit thing?

It’s true George told people he resembled the description of the suspect, though that description was being circulated on the day of the murder. I’ve never found evidence to support the oft-made claim George said he resembled the e-fit prior to it being released, though? I suspect it’s a misconception but happy to be corrected!

 

[Novosti]

Do you have a source for the e-fit thing?

It’s true George told people he resembled the description of the suspect, though that description was being circulated on the day of the murder. I’ve never found evidence to support the oft-made claim George said he resembled the e-fit prior to it being released, though? I suspect it’s a misconception but happy to be corrected!

We obviously don't have court transcripts. But here is a relevant piece of Guardian reporting the day after the conviction:

"George, police learnt, had returned to Hafad two days after the murder and asked staff if they remembered what time he had been there on April 26.

George told them he was worried he looked like the e-fit of the man the police were looking for. Detectives, however, had not released an image of a man seen running away from the scene.

George went to Traffic Cars again and asked if the controller, Ramesh Paul, remembered what he was wearing on his previous visit. When he could not, George became agitated and said "I was wearing yellow, like the colour of the sun! You must remember!"

Lost clues that led police to Dando's killer

Eight clues lost in a mass of information provided by 16,000 calls finally led detectives to arrest and charge Barry George. The crucial "messages" were provided by members of the public who called the murder squad between April 26 and June 14 1999. On their own, they were not regarded as overly...

www.theguardian.com

 

[rvlvr]

Yes, I’ve read that piece before. I don’t really think it answers the question though - all the articles I’ve ever read that detail evidence given by the witnesses including direct quotes from Mr Paul and the women at HAFAD don’t mention this thing about the e-fit, which would be quite an extraordinary omission I think - it’s obviously a very different thing to say ‘I look like the description of the gunman’ vs ‘I look like the e-fit (which hasn’t been released yet)’.

I suspect that Guardian piece has its wires crossed but of course without the trial transcripts we can’t be certain.

 

[Novosti]

Yes, I’ve read that piece before. I don’t really think it answers the question though - all the articles I’ve ever read that detail evidence given by the witnesses including direct quotes from Mr Paul and the women at HAFAD don’t mention this thing about the e-fit, which would be quite an extraordinary omission I think - it’s obviously a very different thing to say ‘I look like the description of the gunman’ vs ‘I look like the e-fit (which hasn’t been released yet)’.

I suspect that Guardian piece has its wires crossed but of course without the trial transcripts we can’t be certain.

The point about the efit was also made in other Guardian articles, on Wikipedia and in Orlando Pownall's statements.

I think if you want to assert that it's all mistaken, you need to provide some explanation for that.

 

[rvlvr]

As I say, I’m happy to stand corrected! But I didn’t think that was the strongest link to support you point. As it goes I dug around after posting and found this one, also from the Guardian, which perhaps you meant to link to instead?

Dando defendant told police a 'pack of lies'

Firearms residue found in strands of Jill Dando's hair matched a particle recovered from a jacket owned by the man accused of murdering her, the Old Bailey heard yesterday. By Nick Hopkins.

www.theguardian.com

"[George] sought to explain this visit on the basis that he wanted to account for his movements because people had said he was similar in appearance to the photofit picture which had been released," said Mr Pownall.

"As you know the e-fit was not released until two days later - the 30th of April."

I’d be curious to know if Mansfield challenged this and as I say I can’t find any quotes from Mr Paul or the HAFAD women that mention the e-fit, but this is definitely interesting coming from Pownall.

 

[Novosti]

As I say, I’m happy to stand corrected! But I didn’t think that was the strongest link to support you point. As it goes I dug around after posting and found this one, also from the Guardian, which perhaps you meant to link to instead?

Dando defendant told police a 'pack of lies'

Firearms residue found in strands of Jill Dando's hair matched a particle recovered from a jacket owned by the man accused of murdering her, the Old Bailey heard yesterday. By Nick Hopkins.

www.theguardian.com

I’d be curious to know if Mansfield challenged this and as I say I can’t find any quotes from Mr Paul or the HAFAD women that mention the e-fit, but this is definitely interesting coming from Pownall.

Lack of transcripts and all that. But as far as we can see, it wasn't challenged. In general, Mansfield and the defence team didn't directly try to challenge the evidence of George giving misleading statements about his whereabouts and seeking to construct alibis etc. Rather, they prioritised challenge to the interpretative inference that any of this could be a solid enough basis to convict.

 

[rvlvr]

Lack of transcripts and all that. But as far as we can see, it wasn't challenged. In general, Mansfield and the defence team didn't directly try to challenge the evidence of George giving misleading statements about his whereabouts and seeking to construct alibis etc. Rather, they prioritised challenge to the interpretative inference that any of this could be a solid enough basis to convict.

Indeed. Though all we can say with any certainty is that Pownall said that witnesses said that George said he looked like the e-fit. And George may well have said this, but then the witnesses may well have been wrong, also. We don’t know when they were spoken to about this matter specifically, how sound their recollections were, and so on. We’ve seen that maybe Mr Paul wasn’t a super reliable witness and of course the prosecution themselves tried to undermine the reliability of at least one HAFAD witness who provided George with an alibi. So while it sounds perfectly believable there’s evidently good grounds for skepticism too, I’d say.

 

[rvlvr]

We do?

This post of yours has stuck with me since last summer. I’d long been of the opinion Jill must’ve been dead by 11.31, as it was at this time that she received a call on her mobile that she didn’t answer. But I started to question this as we know she was carrying shopping and obviously her keys as she approached her house, making it possible she didn’t answer the call as she was busy driving/parking/gathering things from her car.

Anyway I’ve been re-reading the Mirror’s recent articles on Jill’s case and there’s some interesting information in them regarding timings. In particular:

Richard Hughes, then a 32-year-old financial trader, told detectives he saw the killer a few minutes after he had made a short phone call which billing records showed was at 11.33, police files reveal. Mr Hughes told detectives he thought the murder was "nearer to 11.40".

But the only other person to definitely see the gunman, Goeffrey Upfill-Brown, then 71, estimated it could not have been after 11.29, a finding contradicted by the last known sighting.

Ken Williams saw the running man cross Fulham Palace Road at the bottom of Gowan Avenue less than two minutes after placing a bet which was timestamped at 11.37.02:

Williams … reported seeing an athletic suspect spin off the bonnet of a moving car on the same stretch of road as the two motorist witnesses. Ken was waiting at a pelican crossing on the Fulham Palace Road with his black labrador Angie when the man appeared approximately 300 meters from where Jill lay dead outside her Gowan Avenue home.

He said: "I thought that was the man that killed her because he came from Gowan Avenue. Why would he run across that road like that when the traffic was moving? I thought it was mad."

Mystery 18 minutes of TV star's murder – betting slip, sweating man and key mark

Eight Jill Dando murder witnesses described seeing a white man of a roughly similar age, height and build in dark, smart clothing acting suspiciously around the time she was killed

www.mirror.co.uk

The issue with the running man sightings is that if Jill was killed at 11.31, and knowing it’s only a 4 minute walk from her home to Fulham Palace Road, and Williams places his bet at 11.37 then has to walk for a minute or two to where he sees this man, then the timings aren’t quite right (unless of course the killer hung around Gowan Avenue for some reason after shooting Jill). But if the killing happens after 11.35, this sighting has much more relevance imo.

Anyway TL;DR, I think you might be right.

 

[davidt]

One thing I've been thinking about is how whoever killed Jill happened to be in the right place at the right time given the extremely small window of opportunity.

I've recently watched another documentary where again Jill's agent is quoted as saying this was mot one of Jill's routine visits. He'd contacted her to say he was faxing her some documents and because of that Jill decided to go there and pick them up.

One thing that occurred to me is that it would be very useful to have a detailed list of all the visits she made to the property in the period leading up to her death. That would include dates, days and crucially the times of those visits. Say for a period of 2-3 months prior to her death. That way there would be a clearer idea of what sort of pattern could be deduced by anyone who may have been watching her. It's possible that this particular unplanned visit may have coincided with the day and time she made her regular visits and someone might have reasonably expected her to be there even though she didn't intend to be.

 

[rvlvr]

Good points. I posted a while ago about Jill’s alarm system, which to my mind seemed quite sophisticated by the standards of the day. It captured and stored information regarding comings and goings at the house, but over what time period I’m not sure.

R

UK Post in thread 'UK - Jill Dando, 37, Fulham, London, 26 Apr 1999'

Aug 18, 2025

The more you read into it, the more you come to realise that Jill Dando never really lived at the Gowan Avenue house in a conventional sense. Even when she and Bob Wheaton were dating, they’d apparently split their time between his place and hers, but often she was abroad filming Holiday, and there were instances where after landing at Heathrow she’d head straight to the BBC to read the news. “One August,” Brian Cathcart writes in his book, “she calculated that she had slept in her own bed four times in the month.”

There’s a couple of tales I’ve come across recently that highlight just...

• rvlvr

• 

 

[Novosti]

One thing I've been thinking about is how whoever killed Jill happened to be in the right place at the right time given the extremely small window of opportunity.

I've recently watched another documentary where again Jill's agent is quoted as saying this was mot one of Jill's routine visits. He'd contacted her to say he was faxing her some documents and because of that Jill decided to go there and pick them up.

One thing that occurred to me is that it would be very useful to have a detailed list of all the visits she made to the property in the period leading up to her death. That would include dates, days and crucially the times of those visits. Say for a period of 2-3 months prior to her death. That way there would be a clearer idea of what sort of pattern could be deduced by anyone who may have been watching her. It's possible that this particular unplanned visit may have coincided with the day and time she made her regular visits and someone might have reasonably expected her to be there even though she didn't intend to be.

Yes. I think this gives rise to two hypotheses. First, a very sophisticated surveillance operation, which evaded detection by the investigators (the police gave a confident statement that she wasn't followed, having reviewed CCTV etc). Second, an attacker that was hanging around the local area anyway, potentially having done so day-after-day, week-after-week, with little else to do with his time. I find the latter much more consistent with the facts.

 

[rvlvr]

Yes. I think this gives rise to two hypotheses. First, a very sophisticated surveillance operation, which evaded detection by the investigators (the police gave a confident statement that she wasn't followed, having reviewed CCTV etc). Second, an attacker that was hanging around the local area anyway, potentially having done so day-after-day, week-after-week, with little else to do with his time. I find the latter much more consistent with the facts.

There aren’t any facts that support this second theory though. No one saw a man hanging around outside Jill’s home over a period of days or weeks prior to her murder, which is peculiar given that both the neighbours who actually saw Jill’s killer and also those witnesses who reported seeing smartly dressed men of various descriptions on the day of her murder, were evidently quite observant individuals.

 

[Yellowbelly]

There aren’t any facts that support this second theory though. No one saw a man hanging around outside Jill’s home over a period of days or weeks prior to her murder, which is peculiar given that both the neighbours who actually saw Jill’s killer and also those witnesses who reported seeing smartly dressed men of various descriptions on the day of her murder, were evidently quite observant individuals.

It does beg the question, though, that if Jill wasn't followed, and if nobody was staking out her house, how did the gunman know she was going to be there?

 

[RichardKimble]

It does beg the question, though, that if Jill wasn't followed, and if nobody was staking out her house, how did the gunman know she was going to be there?

It throws up another rather than answer one.

 

[kemo]

It leaves open the possibility that it was just a deranged individual who had gotten a hold of an improvised handgun walking the streets of London looking for a random victim. Maybe an attractive woman; maybe anyone. Even big time celebrities can have bad luck.

 

[rvlvr]

It does beg the question, though, that if Jill wasn't followed, and if nobody was staking out her house, how did the gunman know she was going to be there?

Indeed. Of course it’s possible someone was observing Jill’s house, but not on foot - a man in a vehicle would be far less conspicuous, for instance. And of course we know she wasn’t being followed only up until 11.10am. There’s a 20-25 minute window prior to her murder when Jill isn’t captured on CCTV, so we’ve really no idea if anyone began tailing her when she was much closer to home.

 

[rvlvr]

Sorry it’s taken so long, this is the stuff re HAFAD from Brian Cathcart’s book Jill Dando: Her Life and Death.

Pages 222-225:

The name Bulsara first entered the Operation Oxborough database in the first weeks of the investigation as a result of a series of calls to the incident room by staff at Hammersmith And Fulham Action for Disability, or Hafad, an advice centre in Greswell Street, half a mile from the murder scene on the other side of Fulham Palace Road. They wanted to report the following strange sequence of events. On the day of the murder a local man known to them visited the centre and spoke to various people about his health problems. He had a carrier bag full of papers and it was clear he had a long story to tell, but since Hafad dealt with people only by appointment he was asked to return at noon the next day. In due course he left, but he did not return to keep his appointment, turning up instead on the Wednesday, two days later, and this time in an agitated state. His concerns were now different: he was no longer asking about health matters but wanted the Hafad people to tell him the time of his Monday visit and to describe for him the clothes he had been wearing. The reason, he explained, was that he was afraid the police would suspect him of the Dando murder - he had had trouble with the police before - and he wanted the information so that he could pass it on to his solicitor. Again he spoke to several staff members, making a considerable fuss, before leaving.

The people at Hafad understandably thought this suspicious and the centre's director, Lesley Symes, rang the police that afternoon (28 April) to tell the story. Although she declined to give his name over the phone, she explained that the man had mental health problems and she said that his visit on the Monday took place at 11 a.m. The time was obviously important: 11 a.m. was half an hour before the murder and the Hafad building is just six or seven minutes' walk from Dando's house. Although Symes's information was logged in the Oxborough computer system, however, no officer was despatched to Hafad to follow it up, and after two weeks the staff there grew impatient. So on 12 May a second call was made to the incident room and it was in the course of this call - sixteen days after the murder - that the name Barry Bulsara was first mentioned. The caller was Elaine Hutton, the finance officer of Hafad, and she wanted to give the police more information about the suspicious man, presumably in the hope of galvanizing them into action. She gave the name by which he was known at Hafad and his correct address and she said that several of her colleagues believed Bulsara resembled the man in the E-fit picture that had recently been released. Finally, she gave a different time for that Monday visit: Bulsara had called in at Hafad at 11.50 a.m., she said, or about twenty minutes after the murder.

These two calls were made, of course, at the busiest and most difficult time of the investigation, when the running and sweating men dominated inquiries and when the flood of information coming in was, to use Campbell's later phrase, 'approaching unmanageable proportions'. But the two Hafad calls did not go completely unnoticed, for three days after Hutton phoned an instruction was entered into the police computer system to "T.I.E.' - trace, interview and eliminate - the Barry Bulsara who was said to live in Crookham Road. This requires a little explanation, for such instructions are part of a police process that is almost mechanical. Certain officers in every inquiry have the responsibility to review all the information that is coming in and look out for specific items, no matter how minor, that need to be followed up. Each of these is or should be marked and numbered, with a note attached in the computer system spelling out exactly what step must be taken. These notes are called 'actions', and the action relating to Barry Bulsara was number 1637 in the Oxborough file. But just because an action has been 'raised', as the police put it, does not mean that it will be dealt with immediately, for there are usually so many they have to be ranked according to priority. A low-priority action, therefore, goes into a queue where it may wait some time before being 'allocated' to a named officer to be dealt with. Action 1637 was just such a low-priority action and it remained in the queue, unallocated, for nine months.

Campbell would later acknowledge that this amounted to a failure in his investigation but looking back we can see at least some reasons for it and among them, probably, are two further calls that came in from Hafad after the action had been raised. The first was made by Susan Bicknell, the organization's welfare officer, who had the longest conversation with Bulsara during his visit on the day of the murder. She rang in a week after Hutton to say that Bulsara had appeared to be 'very flustered' when she saw him and that she thought he might have witnessed something to do with Dando's death. In her opinion, she added, he did not look like the E-fit at all. And so far as the time of his visit was concerned she endorsed Hutton's version, saying that her meeting with Bulsara took place at about midday. (In fact Bicknell had a note of the encounter written a week afterwards which put the time at 11.50 a.m.) The last of the four calls from Hafad came from Elaine Hutton, who rang once again on 14 June to express concern that more than six weeks after the murder nobody from the police had yet visited Greswell Street to follow up their information. Again she identified Bulsara by name and this time she added his date of birth. She also said that when he called on the day of the murder he was wearing a casual jacket and a yellow shirt and was carrying a plastic bag. It may well be that these two later calls had the opposite effect to what was intended, for taken together they were likely to make Hafad rather less interesting to the police. The Hafad man now appeared to be dressed in the wrong way - nothing like the eyewitness descriptions of the gunman - and by Bicknell's account he did not resemble the E-fit and was merely a potential witness rather than a suspect. In the early stages of the investigation the job of tracing such a man could well have been regarded as of marginal importance, although the delay that followed was surely excessive.

Pages 263-266:

From Gowan Avenue attention turned to Greswell Street and the offices of Hafad. Here the question to be addressed was whether Barry George arrived at a time which left open the possibility that he was the killer. By a rough measure he would have needed thirty minutes to return home from the murder scene, change his clothes and make his way through the park to the disability centre, so did he arrive there later than noon? The members of the Hafad staff who saw George that morning each gave different accounts. Rosario Torres, the receptionist, said that when she answered the door to him he behaved in an odd, excited manner. 'I need help! I need help!' he said. 'I'm disabled and you have to help me.' She spent some time in loud conversation with him before Elaine Hutton, the finance officer of the centre, came out of her office nearby to take over, upon which Torres left the two together and returned to her desk in another room. The next thing she remembered hearing that day was the voice of Susan Bicknell, Hafad's welfare officer, calling out: 'Sorry, I'm having my lunch.' This, and her own feeling about the time, led her to conclude that the whole incident occurred at about 12.30 p.m.

Hutton's account of events was different in a number of respects. She said that although she saw and heard George in the building that morning she had no dealings with him, and that Torres not only let him in but also fetched Bicknell to talk to him. As for the time, Hutton accepted that at first, back in April 1999, she had thought George arrived at about 11 a.m., but later she realized this was a mistake. She based her calculation, she told the court, on a belief that George turned up about one and a half hours after she started work, and since she normally started between 9.30 and 9.45 a.m. her first assessment had been that he arrived at around 11.a.m. When she subsequently checked her diary, however, she found that she arrived late that day, at 10.25 a.m., so after doing the sum again she revised her estimate to 'approximately 12'. This was now her position. In cross-examination the defence swiftly established that the word "approximately" embraced the possibility that George had arrived at 11.50 a.m. and then, with reference to the detail of her statements to the police, pushed the arithmetic a little further.

MANSFIELD: When you came up with 11 o'clock originally, it was because you thought it was either about an hour and a quarter or possibly an hour and a half [after you began work] - if you had started at 9.30?
HUTTON: I think in my head it was about an hour and a half.
MANSFIELD: The statement this year is pretty clear. It says: 'I normally begin at 9.45. I said 11 was about the time he came in, as this time-gap would seem about right - an hour and a quarter.' That is how it is in the statement, do you follow?
HUTTON: Yes.
MANSFIELD: If in fact you started at 10.25 and you add an hour and a quarter to that, it is about 11.40 that he comes in, is it not?
HUTTON: Yes, but these were always guesstimates.
MANSFIELD: Looking back on it, it could well have been 11.40 that he came into your centre, could it not?
HUTTON: I cannot be sure of the exact time. I have always been quite clear I have never been sure of the exact time.

After Hutton it was the turn of Susan Bicknell to testify. As it happened 26 April 1999 had been her very first day at work in Hafad and since she did not know anybody at the time she could not recollect whether it was Torres or Hutton who came to fetch her from her office to talk to Barry George. On the matter of the time at which she went to speak to him, however, she was in no doubt at all. 'Before I walked out of the open-plan office I worked in I looked at the clock, and it said 11.50. I cannot speak for the accuracy of the clock but it said 11.50 and in the time that I worked at Hafad it was never more than five minutes out. So I am assuming it was right on the day in question.' Though she proved in many ways a troublesome and over-talkative witness she was never to vary her view on this point, and it was a view that had remained consistent since the time of the events themselves. Furthermore she denied indignantly that she had called out 'Sorry, I'm having my lunch', the remark which Torres had identified as one of her reasons for giving a time of 12.30. The last Hafad witness was Lesley Symes, the director, but she had seen George only briefly on the day and not spoken to him and perhaps in consequence seemed to have no clear idea of when he was at the centre.