The Murder of Jill Dando, review: a powerful re-examination but still a distinct lack of answers

Twenty years on, the murder of BBC television presenter Jill Dando still seems senseless and incongruent. She was the friendly face who fronted programmes from Holiday to Crimewatch to The Antiques Inspectors. What on earth could have led to her being executed in broad daylight on the steps of her home in Fulham? The words of her brother Nigel at the end of this poignant documentary summed up the universal response to the bewildering nature of her death from a single shot to the head: “I would just like to know why someone would want to kill her?”

The Murder of Jill Dando (BBC One) wasn’t able to provide an answer to that. In fact, one of the surprising things about it, in the age of true-crime programming, was that the events of April 26, 1999, were not pulled apart over the course of two, four or even 10 hours in a painstaking search for clues. Instead everything was compressed into one hour that served as a reminder of Dando’s career, gave us a glimpse of her off-screen personality (“she sometimes found it difficult to be nice to everyone”), and raked over the police investigation with the help of the detective who led it, Hamish Campbell.

Perhaps it was simply that the trail has gone too cold to produce anything more than the theories that have long swirled around the murder, although each of these in Netflix’s hands might have been an episode in itself. In truth, the trail was already pretty cold by the time the police had their first viable suspect, a full year on from the bloody scene on Dando’s doorstep. The documentary showed Campbell’s notes when the homicide unit finally realised that two separate reports about a man behaving suspiciously on the day of the murder were about the same person. This “has come too slowly to my attention”, a frustrated Campbell noted at the time.

Barry George, who appeared only in archive footage, was that man, whom the police needed to “trace, interview and eliminate” from their enquiries. It had been a year of pressure from above, increasing scrutiny from the press, and those proliferating theories – the most prominent of which were a gangland hit connected to Dando’s work on Crimewatch and a revenge killing by a Serbian hit man linked either to Dando’s TV appeal on behalf of Kosovan refugees or the Nato bomb that had targeted Serbia’s TV station. “There was not one piece of information that points to a contract killing,” Campbell maintained.

There were images of the search of George’s flat – shocking in how squalid it was – and footage of him in a police interview. He lived 10 minutes’ walk from Dando’s house, and had rolls of undeveloped photographs of women, some taken in Dando’s road, and business cards for arms dealers. To Judith Dando, however, his arrest for her cousin’s murder seemed “contrived and convenient”.

George was found guilty by a jury in 2001, though the evidence against him was almost wholly circumstantial. In 2007, an appeal court quashed his conviction on the basis that too much weight had been placed on the one thing with which the prosecution had tried to link him to the scene: a single particle of gunpowder residue (less than 1,000th of an inch in size) that matched the residue on Dando’s hair. The documentary showed a forensic expert, who explained that one in 100 people might pick up such a particle unknowingly.

Given the lack of compelling new evidence, the strength of the film was in director Marcus Plowright’s sensitive interviews with friends, colleagues and family, as well as with the oft-criticised and clearly still rankled detectives. There was also an interview with the then director of BBC News, now director-general, Tony Hall, who described the calls the BBC received shortly afterwards explicitly mentioning a Serbian connection and naming him as next on the list. He seemed determined not to set too much store on the threat to his safety.

The BBC would not confirm whether Cliff Richard had been approached to appear. He was often described as a “close friend and confidante” and would have made an interesting addition to the film. Similarly, the Beeb said, “It was not necessary to have a present-day interview with Mr George” – the reasons for which can only be speculated on.

Given that the film had to serve as both tribute and re-examination of the crime, it was lucid and powerful. But there remained an impression that there was more to say.