Unhappy echoes of an old murder

One of the most extraordinary decisions in British legal history has resulted from an application for compensation by a man jailed for eight years for a crime it is now agreed he did not commit.

Barry George was convicted in 2001 for the murder of television personality Jill Dando in April 1999. From the very beginning the evidence against him seemed flimsy and after repeated appeals by his lawyers he was granted a retrial in 2008 and was acquitted.

However, his attempt to gain compensation for his years behind bars ended this month when he was denied leave to appeal against a decision by the Supreme Court that he was, in effect, “not innocent enough”.

It is impossible not to believe that this amazing verdict is based on George’s background which, since the original trial, has become common knowledge. He has serious emotional and mental problems, diagnosed in childhood; he had a typical Walter Mitty complex, posing at various times as a policeman and an SAS officer; more seriously he had past convictions for sexual assault and attempted rape. Before the Dando trial he was diagnosed as suffering from Asperger syndrome and epilepsy and was judged to have an IQ of 75.

However, the main case against him rested on the evidence of a witness who had seen a man in Dando’s street four-and-a-half hours before the late morning murder “who might have been George” and a minute speck of firearm residue on George’s coat. At the retrial an expert witness testified that this could easily have resulted from someone wearing the coat at a fireworks display weeks, even months before.

Miss Dando was killed by a single shot to the head on the doorstep of her flat in Fulham, London, about a couple of kilometres away from where George lived. No-one heard a shot and it appears that the murder weapon had been pressed hard against her head when it was fired. This would have the effect of deadening the sound and lessening the chance of blood splattering onto the assassin.

In other words, the killing had the hallmarks of a cold-blooded professional hit man, not the mixed-up, low IQ Barry George.

Dando was a high-profile television journalist. She fronted the Crimewatch program, which appealed to the public for clues to unsolved crimes. There were possibly underworld figures who would like to have seen her investigations halted. Another theory was that she was targeted by a Yugoslav terrorist group in retaliation for the NATO bombing of the Belgrade television station three days before, during the Kosovo crisis, which resulted in the deaths of several local television personalities.

The police have steadfastly rejected these theories saying they have no evidence of an underworld connection and that insufficient time had elapsed since the Yugoslav bombing for a retaliatory strike to be organised.

To my mind the Yugoslav connection carries some credence, especially if a trained agent was already on the ground in London, which in those troubled times was quite likely.

In the meantime, Dando’s family have no closure and George has no justice.