Biography

On 28 May 2000, Barry George (aka Barry Bulsara) was charged with the murder of Jill Dando, and on 2 July 2001 he was found guilty at the Old Bailey. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. In November 2007, he successfully appealed his conviction for her murder and was held in custody pending retrial. Following an eight-week hearing, he was acquitted on 1 August 2008. His initial conviction was found to be unsafe as it had largely rested on a tiny particle of gunshot residue in a coat of his which matched the kind of gun used at the scene of the murder, but experts could not say for sure that it was from the same gun, and it did not prove he was at the scene, let alone pulled the trigger, as the particle could have contaminated his coat in other ways. The judge in the retrial said it was therefore inadmissible as evidence against him.

Her murder remains unsolved.

At the time of her murder there were many theories on the motive. These included a stalker upset by her forthcoming wedding, a Serbian connection (the war in Kosovo was raging and she hosted a charity appeal for the refugees) and revenge for a criminal convicted on "Crimewatch UK".

Ironically, when appearing on "Crimewatch UK" she regularly ended the show by reminding viewers that most people never experience a crime.

Within 24 hours of her murder, the police were telling the media that the circumstances made it look like "a professional hit". In 2018, former Surrey Police detective Mark Williams-Thomas suggested that the Metropolitan Police should have stuck to that theory, saying "There is no doubt that Jill was murdered, assassinated, by a professional hit-man. For an individual to get away with it for nearly 20 years... for an individual to have remained completely under the radar. The gun has never been recovered, nothing else has come into circulation. That shows you the quality of this person".