7
A Case of Who Dunnit?
By the afternoon of Monday 2 July 2001 the jury had been deliberating for the best part of six days. This was not the longest wait for a verdict that I’ve had – in the Fertiliser Conspiracy trial a few years later (see Chapter 20) it was nearly seven weeks – but whatever the length of time, I find this is the most difficult part of the trial to handle. Juries have an onerous task and take their responsibilities very seriously; therefore you can rarely expect a verdict within hours, after sitting for many days and weeks listening to detailed and complex evidence and arguments. This trial had been going since Wednesday 2 May, two months earlier.
It had taken place in Court Number One at the Old Bailey, the scene of many famous trials in the past, including those of John Christie (10 Rillington Place) and Ruth Ellis. Given this history, and the somewhat sombre grandeur of the setting, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind about the gravity of the occasion. No one connected with the trial can leave the building, in case the jury suddenly returns with a question – or, of course, with the verdict – and this could happen at any moment. Even though I’ve been there many times before, I am always on tenterhooks at this juncture of a trial, and it’s very difficult to devise ways of occupying the time; it’s even worse for the family involved, in this case the defendant’s sister, let alone for the person downstairs in the cells. And this was a murder case, so just imagine what it must have been like waiting for the verdict.
The Central Criminal Court stands in what was the bailey1 of the City of London wall and occupies the site of Newgate Prison, within which executions took place up until 1902. The defendant I was representing had been in custody for more than twelve months, since his arrest the year before.
Much of my time is spent with my client discussing the trial, the body language of the jurors when they come into court, the meaning of any questions they ask and the possibilities of an appeal should it all go wrong. On this occasion there was a dedicated team of people who were all able to ease the burden: my instructing solicitor Marilyn Etienne, my junior Maryam Syed and the psychologist Dr Susan Young.
Unusually, the jury had been sent each night to a hotel. When I first started, this was standard practice in order to ensure no interference from outside sources and, in particular, no risk of prejudice from untimely or irresponsible press reporting, but in the end the cost of this exercise was thought to outweigh the possibility of prejudice.
Once we got to the weekend with this trial, it was decided that the court would sit on the Saturday, to enable the jury to continue with its deliberations, which it is not supposed to do other than when they are all together and assembled in the jury room, with the jury bailiff outside. When this happens it is always a little odd, since Saturday is not a normal court day and the building is eerily empty.
The Old Bailey has been my professional home for over forty years and I am familiar with every step and every brick, and I appreciate that it’s the people who work there who make the place tick: the police officers on the front door, the stewards on the Lord Mayor’s entrance at the back, the prison officers, canteen staff, court ushers, Matron, court clerks, shorthand writers/stenographers, journalists, telephonists, cleaners and, last but by no means least, my fellow colleagues at the Bar. With many of the staff I am on firstname terms, and I can be assured of a helping hand when I’ve lost something or I’m not feeling well (rare in my case). The grapevine of information from this network is crucial in gauging the temperature of the day – prison vans stuck in traffic, a juror late, the judge a bit on edge, a bomb scare – and out of hours you can be treated to some lovely vignettes. Late one evening after the courts had risen I went back to court to retrieve some papers, and noticed that the small court next door appeared to be sitting. It has oak panelling throughout, and a large, high-sided wooden dock beneath which is the well of the court, flanked by a witness box similar to a pulpit and the jury box; the judicial bench spans the width of the court at a level slightly above all this. Through the small glass panels of the court door I could see that there was someone sitting in the witness box and another person sitting in the high-backed leather judge’s chair. It was two women cleaners taking a breather: they had entered into the spirit of the place and were re-enacting the events of the day as they imagined them, punctuated by some mighty fine one-liners – until, that is, my clapping broke up the party. The backstage crew in the Theatre of Law is just as vital as it is at the Victoria Palace.
At the top of the Old Bailey are the barristers’ robing rooms – one for women, another for men – and a further small room for Silks. The conditions are cramped; my locker, no bigger than a tallboy, is shared with four others. Tatty wigs, soiled wing collars, discarded papers are scattered about. Everyone is friendly, but normally in a rush. Studs go missing, and in my case my spare trousers; riding in by bike, I need a complete set of court clothes as well as the gown, wig and waistcoat.
There is a canteen for barristers called the Bar Mess. Forty years ago this was an austere dining room, with deep-green leather-backed chairs and a corner for a tipple of pre-prandial sherry. There was also an unspoken pecking order, whereby the top established Silks and Treasury Counsel (specialist prosecutors), usually from half a dozen sets, all sat proprietorially at the top table. All that has changed and now the ‘mess’ is a bustling melee of barristers.
Normally at lunchtime I cannot be bothered to eat a meal, so I grab a sandwich and sit in the adjacent tiny Bar Library. There is always more preparation to be done, but most importantly it provides an opportunity, when I spy someone relevant through the little glass window, to pop out and discuss the case with codefending or prosecuting counsel. In my view, this is crucial to the effective management of a trial.
There are very different stances adopted over this exercise. Some lawyers, reflecting the adversarial nature of the process, feel that contact should be kept to a bare minimum; others, especially in cases with a political hue, are deeply suspicious and believe that nothing should be given away; but a large proportion feel that regular interchanges are perfectly acceptable. I have endeavoured to steer a middle course – not too close and not too far. The fundamental requirement is trust. All concerned must know you mean what you say: don’t bluff, and don’t pull any fast ones.
A great deal can be achieved by sensible dialogue and negotiation, whether it’s a contested trial or a guilty plea. The most obvious example is agreeing what evidence can be read without challenge, or can be reduced to admissions to save court time and money. Another is giving notice of legal submissions and attempting to distil the core issues out of court. If you don’t, it merely leads to unnecessary argument and hostility – and an adjournment in any event. Neither judges nor juries appreciate trials that are consumed with personal duels fought out in public, so I have studiously tried to avoid these.
The prosecutor in the trial was Treasury Counsel Orlando Pownall: tall and imposing, with an affable, persuasive manner, he is regarded by his many admirers as ‘the matinee idol’. Many years before, I had led him on a different murder case where our defence had involved unravelling the mental effects of insulin deprivation. There had been a plethora of points of law to be sorted before the trial got going, and our working relationship enabled this to be accomplished without fuss or bother.
But back to the long wait.
By the close of play on the Saturday there was still no verdict, and I was becoming increasingly nervous, because in this case the longer the jury was out, the more likely I felt the chances of a conviction. Normally it’s the other way round, because you believe that the doubt you must have engendered by the defence case is causing the jury to hesitate and think hard. This time I made the mistake I had guarded against over many years, of allowing myself to believe that we had achieved an acquittal. I was not alone in this: the vast majority of observers right through to the press benches believed the same, as was clear from the publicity that followed the verdict. But as the wait went on, my confidence in this result was slowly ebbing away.
That weekend I was supposed to have been with Yvette and some close friends in Sussex. It was a beautiful summer afternoon, and as I stood on the pavement outside the Old Bailey contemplating the quickest way of joining them, my worries must have been written all over my face, because a passing member of the public took a photograph of me standing there looking somewhat bemused – and kindly sent it to me later. The rest of the weekend I could not take my mind off the case, and kept trying to work out what was causing difficulties for the jury.
On the Monday, when we returned to the Old Bailey, we discovered that one juror had been discharged because a family member had died. That meant we were down to eleven, and the majority-verdict direction was given by the judge: if you have twelve jurors you can return a verdict of eleven to one or ten to two (this was brought in by the Juries Act 1974 to circumvent what was perceived to be the problem presented by perverse jurors); where the number drops to eleven or ten, you can only have one disagreement; below that you have a hung jury, with the possibility of a retrial, which most participants wish to avoid. I am an inveterate optimist, and it ran against the grain to give up hope when so much effort had been expended. It is extremely hard to maintain a positive demeanour, but this I strive to do, without being unrealistic or raising false hopes, both for myself and for those around me.
When the jury returned just after 4 p.m. on the Monday and, by a majority of ten to one, convicted Barry George of the murder of the television presenter Jill Dando, I could hardly contain my feelings of pain, distress and anger. How could this be? I barely had time to compose myself before the next stage of the trial: sentencing. Although the sentence for murder is mandatory life imprisonment, mitigating factors may be brought to the attention of the trial judge. In fact there was nothing more to add, and in any event I’ve always found it incongruous at the end of a hotly contested trial to have to switch gear and mitigate for someone who has contended throughout that he didn’t commit the crime.
I felt that I might explode and, after seeing Barry George in the cells, I decided to get home as quickly as possible. I rang Yvette on her mobile, but it was switched off, and it was only then that I remembered that for the first time in thirty-five years I had managed to procure some tickets for Wimbledon, and she was there with her close friend Ishia. This was even more frustrating, because at times like this I need to be able to share the emotional turmoil with Yvette, and if I couldn’t get to talk it all over with her, then the only way to release the pent-up angst was to walk it off. The distance from the Old Bailey to home at that time was roughly seven miles, so off I went, pounding the pavements, going over and over what might have gone wrong and what I had misjudged, effectively rerunning every minute of every day of the trial. I could not achieve reconciliation, and it seems that this was the same for one juror, who a few days later made contact with my instructing solicitor and the court, expressing concerns about the verdict.
This is a rare occurrence and, although not unknown, usually reflects substantial disquiet. A juror is not allowed to reveal the content of any jury deliberations, which means that where a juror has felt compelled to report a concern, it has to be handled confidentially by the court administrator and then the judge. There have been revelations in which the court has permitted the juror’s reservations to be aired on appeal, if the jury has acted improperly in some way: for example, if it has visited the crime scene without permission or had recourse to a Ouija board. In the Jill Dando case, the Court of Appeal refused my application to have the matter investigated, and therefore it is not clear what was troubling this juror.
My own state of unease remained until Barry George was finally acquitted by a second jury seven years later, in the summer of 2008. He had spent eight years in prison for a crime he did not commit.
There are some striking reasons why the assertion that he did not commit the crime has rung true from the moment this terrible killing occurred. In any investigation it’s important to keep one’s eye on the ball and not wander too far from the original crime scene, which usually yields the most relevant pointers and indicators.
As a defence barrister, I am often brought in quite late in the day, after a large number of other people have trawled over the scene and the evidence, formed their views and left their mark on the case, which makes it quite difficult to be independent and uninfluenced by what has gone before.
There used to be a quaint habit whereby the defence brief would arrive in chambers tied up in a pretty pink ribbon, and over the years I’ve seen all sorts of improvised uses for that ribbon – substitute trouser belt, shoelace, makeshift fan belt and gift wrap among them. From the days of a single ‘back sheet’ enclosing a couple of statements, the brief now comprises a truckload of ring-backed files, and even more recently computer-generated disks, as we head towards the prospect of a paperless, fully electronic court hearing. No matter how the material is produced, the task of distilling its essence remains the same. To achieve this and overcome the risk of being predisposed to the previous analyses, I have tried to develop a system that puts them to one side for as long as possible, while I look at the crime scene as it is described in the statements and at the exhibits which have been sent to me. As I go through them line by line, I mark them up in glorious Technicolor: blue for police, yellow for experts, green for eyewitnesses and red for the defendant. I find all this helps to impress the detail on my memory, but more importantly I have a checklist of questions I ask myself, as if I were in the shoes of the statement-maker. I have no doubt that many of these questions will have been asked already by others, but there are always a few that have been missed. The chronology of events is vital, so I construct timelines and flowcharts that I stick up on the wall, because although one thing coming before another does not necessarily mean that the former caused the latter, I can nevertheless discern patterns, which may disclose an underlying connection which is not coincidence. Alan Bennett in The History Boys has a wonderful line for defining history: ‘One fucking thing after another.’
A few years ago, the Legal Action Group (LAG) organised an exercise for lawyers to encourage lateral thinking and careful dissection of the scene of a crime, which may have been committed in a matter of seconds. An actual crime was reconstructed and each lawyer chose to put himself or herself in the shoes of a police officer, a witness and an alleged culprit, and no one was told in advance how the whole thing had panned out in reality. Part of the most telling evidence against the perpetrator derived from what an office worker claimed to have observed from his third-floor window, looking down onto a street scene below, where it was said the culprit was tampering with the handles of car doors. We all stood at the window trying to assess angles of sight; the presence or absence of trees, foliage and buildings; the height of the witness; whether he wore glasses – but no one thought of the knockout blow. The crime itself had been committed several months before, during the winter months, whereas this exercise was being conducted in the summer. The weather in the winter had been quite different. It was raining, the central heating was on full blast in the office and the windows were closed. The result was substantial condensation and misting of the glass, with seriously impaired visibility.
In the case of Barry George, the murder had occurred outside Jill Dando’s house in Fulham, west London, on Monday 26 April 1999, but he was not arrested until more than a year later, on Thursday 25 May 2000, and during the time between the crime and the arrest there had naturally been a huge amount of publicity and a mass of speculation in the media. All kinds of theories were floated, because there had been a plethora of different sightings of the possible perpetrator: a man running in Fulham Palace Road, another man sweating at a bus stop, yet another behaving oddly in Bishop’s Park, and a Range Rover that could not be traced. The murder, went one theory, had been carried out by someone embittered by Jill Dando’s work as a presenter of BBC’s Crimewatch; or was it a copycat murder after another doorstep killing in Surrey; or the work of a known stalker; or a revenge attack by a Serbian hit-squad; or did it have something to do with her personal life? With so much out there before I became involved in the early summer of 2000, there was quite a bit of ground clearance to do in order to get back to the doorway of 29 Gowan Avenue, where the murder had taken place.
Once I had covered that ground, there were two outstanding features of the case that rose above everything else and excluded Barry George. The first concerned the window of opportunity within which this crime must have been committed, and the second the scientifically examined crime scene.
By April 1999, Jill Dando was not living at number 29. She had put the house on the market in February, and it was in the process of being bought by a relative of her next-door neighbour at number 31, Richard Hughes. Jill was spending most of her time with her fiancé Alan Farthing in Chiswick, though she returned occasionally to Gowan Avenue as quite a few of her belongings remained there, including business papers and clothes. There was no pattern to her movements: they were sporadic because she was heavily involved with recording two television series, one a holiday programme that took her abroad, the other an antiques programme that took her outside London. Thus it would have been extremely difficult for someone to predict when she would visit number 29: which day of the week, what part of the day and for how long. In fact she had been there on Saturday 24 April, just two days before her murder.
On that fateful Monday, Jill left Alan Farthing’s address at about 10.10 in the morning, but she did not go straight to number 29. First she stopped at a petrol station, where she did some shopping which was captured on CCTV, and then shortly before 11.30 (at 11.23 a.m., to be precise) she went to Copes fish shop near Gowan Avenue. Time was running a bit tight because she was due to attend a charity lunch with a friend in central London.
Gowan Avenue was not far from where I lived at the time, so before the trial I went there on a number of occasions to size up how Jill Dando’s last moments could have occurred. The road is a narrow Victorian street of terraced houses with parking on both sides, and as I normally went on a bicycle there was no parking problem. But for a car it was usually difficult to find a space in which to park, and quite remarkably, after Jill had left the fish shop in her BMW, she arrived in Gowan Avenue to find a parking space immediately outside her house: the distance between her parked car and her front door was only a matter of feet. Each house has a tiny strip of front garden barely big enough to contain a dustbin. Richard Hughes next door heard the click of her car alarm, and very shortly after that a scream. Such a time lapse is incredibly difficult to quantify, but all the estimates placed it somewhere between ten and forty seconds. In that short time someone had appeared out of nowhere, walked up behind her, forced her down towards the front doorstep and, with the gun pressed against her head in ‘hard contact’ to muffle the sound, had shot her once, clinically and mercilessly, through the left side of her head.
You have to pause at this point to consider a number of significant questions. Whoever did this had to have been right there, out of sight, on the spot with a loaded gun, to have been able to reach Jill in the seconds it took her to lock her car and walk to her front door. Barry George did not drive and did not have a car, and there has never been any suggestion that he was driven to the scene by someone else. As everybody knows, he is very much a loner and suffers from severe epileptic seizures. He could not have known that Jill was going to arrive that Monday morning at about 11.30 a.m., so had he been intent on shooting her that day he would have had to wait right outside number 29 for hours, and there was no evidence of anyone hanging about in a position to effect a precision killing within seconds. There had been controversial and hotly contested sightings of a man said to be George in a different part of Gowan Avenue much earlier in the morning (between an hour and a half and two hours before the killing). It’s amazing who is at home on a weekday morning in a suburban street, alert to activity outside, and no one standing that close to number 29 for more than thirty minutes would have escaped the beady eyes of others.
There were two important witnesses to the crime scene itself: the next-door neighbour Richard Hughes and Geoffrey Upfill-Brown, who lived opposite. Both of them saw a man leaving the scene in a hurry, wearing what appeared to one of them to be a dark waxed jacket like a Barbour. Upfill-Brown was spotted by Hughes as he emerged from his house over the road. Both of these witnesses attended identification parades, but did not identify Barry George as the man they had seen.
The murderer managed to evade detection before and after the shooting. If you factor in the random nature of Jill Dando’s arrival and the precise way in which the shooting was done, it begins to look like an operation far beyond that of an eccentric loner. What follows is speculation, but it is based on the parameters of circumstance I have already described.
It would have been possible for anyone planning this crime (as opposed to anyone happening along by chance) to have discovered that Jill Dando was in London, but not living at number 29. Her car could have been identified and followed on previous occasions without her realising it. Once this had been done, surveillance could have been mounted, with the anticipation that she would go to one of two base addresses. On the day in question it appears from all the enquiries and the CCTV footage that she was not followed, but this cannot be excluded altogether. Nevertheless the important information was the time at which she left Alan Farthing’s address, and this could have been communicated by mobile phone to others and/or the gunman. This scenario entails more than one person being involved in the murder.
A strong possibility has to be that the perpetrator with the loaded weapon arrived earlier in the street in a vehicle, and remained in the vehicle unnoticed. Someone in a car merely sitting and waiting, even if noticed, could be mistaken for a minicab driver and pass from the memory. Afterwards he could either leave the scene in the same car or in another one that picked him up round the corner, since there was no further trace of the man seen leaving the scene by the two eyewitnesses.
The second feature which tends to support this thesis, and exclude Barry George, is what was found on the doorstep of number 29.
The first trial in 2001 was very high-profile. Jill Dando was a popular presenter and my client was a complicated loner; their worlds were oceans apart. Security was high. Occasionally at such murder trials the jury accompanies the judge and lawyers to the scene of the crime, so that they have it firmly in their mind’s eye during the ensuing proceedings – this is called a ‘view’ – and when the jury in the Barry George trial was taken to Fulham to see the crime scene, I decided to cycle there while the rest travelled in an escorted coach. I arrived shortly after the others, to be met by a police cordon at one end of the road. Sporting my tracksuit and trainers, I suppose I didn’t look much like a QC, and the police refused to let me through. There was no budging them, so knowing the stubborn mindset of some cops, I decided to cycle round to the other end of the road and join the view that way. Same problem: the police didn’t recognise me (why should they?) or believe me, and again refused access. I was stuck – and then luckily I spotted the judge outside number 29 and waved frantically at him, with the result that the police reluctantly let me through.
A few days later, my opening speech to the jury was unusual in that I had written it down and I read it out. Normally I would not dream of doing this because you lose spontaneity and impact, and I had never done so before or since. But this case was finely and delicately balanced, and I wanted to be clear and concise. I began by pointing out that the case against Barry George hung by the slenderest of threads: a particle of firearms discharge residue (FDR) found in the inside pocket of an overcoat recovered a year later at his home address. This particle was measured in micron units, approximately one-hundredth of a millimetre in diameter, but had been at the heart of the Crown’s case and provided the only direct link between Barry George and the crime scene. When a round is discharged or fired, the chemical ingredients in the primer fuse into metallic particles, and in this case some were recovered from Jill Dando’s hair and analysed in order to determine the ingredients used for this particular bullet. There are three standard components – lead, barium and antimony – and these may be combined with other chemicals such as silicon and aluminium. Needless to say, you may only recover enough to determine one or two of these, but in this instance the prosecution scientist determined that the primer must have had the three basics plus aluminium.
During the trial we called as a defence witness Dr John Lloyd, who had helped me with the Birmingham Six and other cases, and I asked him this question: ‘From a forensic-science point of view, what significance do you attach to the finding of one particle in this case?’
Lloyd answered:
There could scarcely be less residue at all. The presence of a single particle does raise serious doubts as to where it may have come from. It might have been something which is just a casual contamination. Some laboratories have in fact not reported findings as significant when so little residue is found. It should be said that in this case, this is the first occasion when it has been suggested that the single particle could be a relic of an event which has occurred a year ago, it is quite a unique suggestion . . . The claims that it is so related are based on scientifically unsupported assumptions. The evidence is dependent on flawed police procedures. It is my view that this evidence is not reliable as evidence of the defendant’s involvement in the shooting.2
Much of the trial had been taken up with the issue of contamination. This need not be explored any more, because after the second appeal (conducted by Bill Clegg, QC) this slender thread was broken and formed no part of the second trial. Barry George was free again.
This may close the chapter on Barry George being the gunman, but it does not close the book on the crime. Other material was found on the doorstep of number 29 besides FDR: there was a cartridge case and the bullet itself. The bullet would normally have rifling marks from its passage down the barrel of the gun – the interior of the barrel is scored spirally in order to increase accuracy – and if these marks are absent, it means that the gun the murderer used had a smooth bore. Yet so far as is known, no commercial manufacturer in the world makes a 9mm semi-automatic pistol with a smooth bore. A number of possibilities ensue, all of which entail specialist equipment, knowledge and expertise, none of which could be attributed to Barry George. The murder weapon could have been a blank-firing pistol that had been altered to fire real bullets; or a gun with a smooth barrel over twenty-four inches in length which had been shortened; or a handgun that had been deactivated to remove it from use after the ban on handguns, but then reactivated for illegal use. Modifications of the first and third kind require the barrel to be drilled and replaced with a piece of smooth metal tubing.
The cartridge case had the maker’s mark stamped upon it: R-P .380 auto. R-P denotes an American manufacturer, Remington Peters. The experts could also infer that the use of a .380 round meant that the weapon used was a ‘short’ as opposed to a ‘parabellum’,3 and that it was a 9mm-calibre handgun.
Usually it would be possible to derive further clues about the gun from markings that it would leave when the firing pin hit the end of the cartridge and when it was extracted from the gun by the ejector mechanism, but there were no sufficient markings left from which to make any sensible extrapolations. What there were, at the other end of the cartridge which held the bullet before it was discharged, were some very unusual markings, regarded by some as unique. It is not unusual for a cartridge case to be reused, housing another bullet: this is accomplished by employing a machine that leaves three identical pinch marks or indentations around the rim of the cartridge where it holds the bullet, and the term used to describe this process is ‘crimping’. Here there were six crimp indentations, but not identical ones, as though they had been tapped in by hand. Because there were only faint markings of ejection on the casing, it was possible that this round had not been fired before – in which case it was difficult to understand why anybody would want to open it up and alter its composition in the first place. Alternatively, perhaps it had not been fired by an automatic at all, but by a custom-built device manufactured with specialist machines or tools.
Among the unused materials disclosed by the prosecution before the trial was a letter from a member of the public with military experience who was living in the south of England. He pointed out that manually crimped rounds were commonplace in his experience amongst the armies of the former Soviet bloc, which included the Balkans, Yugoslavia and Serbia in particular. We adduced this evidence through a defence witness, Major Mead.
The significance of all these points was that first, although Barry George had an interest in firearms, no murder weapon was found in his possession; no FDR was found on any surface or tools at his premises; there were no tools with markings that could be matched with the indentations; it was not shown that he had any knowledge of or expertise for carrying out this adaptation; and there were no documents among the many thousands of bits of paper found at his address that would have shown him how to do it.
Second, there was other material which gave support to the Serbian link. Three days before Jill Dando’s murder, on 23 April, during the war with Serbia, NATO forces had attacked the headquarters of Serbian television, owned by Slobodan Milosevic, with a cruise missile that killed seventeen people. The day after Jill’s murder the Chief Executive of BBC News, Tony Hall, received a telephoned death threat which declared: ‘Because your government, and in particular your Prime Minister Blair, murdered, butchered seventeen innocent young people – he butchered, we butchered back. The first you had yesterday, the next one will be Tony Hall.’4 Quite rightly, this was taken very seriously by the BBC, and personal security was stepped up for a number of senior executives.
With her image on the front cover of the Radio Times and the BBC’s intention of making her one of the main presenters for their coverage of the millennium celebrations, Jill Dando had become a key part of the public face of the BBC. In addition she had already made a successful appeal on television for Kosovan refugees who had become part of the genocide or ‘ethnic cleansing’ carried out by the Milosevic regime (see Chapter 22). Hit-squads operated in Serbia – a couple of weeks before 26 April the owner of a newspaper that had criticised Milosevic was shot dead outside his home in Belgrade – and the police had intelligence from an anonymous source that a Serbian hit-squad had been dispatched to the United Kingdom. Originally this line of enquiry was dismissed by the police as farfetched, partly because the intelligence they had from within the exiled Serbian community in London did not support it.
At the moment this material does not prove that it was a Serbian hit, but it does suggest a potential line of reinvestigation, especially in the light of the work being carried out by the court in The Hague, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). It was this tribunal that tried Milosevic and other alleged war criminals, and which arrested Radovan Karadzic in the summer of 2008. A good starting place for tracking down the killer of Jill Dando might be to seek assistance from the seventy-five-year-old Serbian company manufacturing ammunition, Prvi Partizan.
Some months after I had completed the draft for this chapter, the London Evening Standard revealed that Scotland Yard is to interview three witnesses about a confession by a West Midlands petty criminal of Serbian descent. It is claimed that he told people in the Portobello Bar in Belgrade in September 2001 that he had killed Jill Dando in retaliation for the death of a Serbian TV personality during NATO bombing raids on Belgrade.5