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Jill Wendy Dando (9 November 1961 – 26 April 1999) was an English journalist, television presenter and newsreader. She spent most of her career at the BBC and was the corporation's Personality of the Year in 1997. At the time of her death, her television work included co-presenting the BBC One programme Crimewatch with Nick Ross.
On the morning of 26 April 1999, Dando was shot dead outside her home in Fulham, south-west London, prompting the biggest murder inquiry conducted by the Metropolitan Police and the country's largest criminal investigation since the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. A local man, Barry George, was convicted and imprisoned for the murder, but after eight years in prison he was acquitted following an appeal and retrial. No other suspect has been charged with Dando's murder and the case remains unsolved.
Dando was educated at Worle Infant School, Greenwood Junior School, Worle Community School, and Weston College, where she was Head Boy, and completed her A-levels. She then went on to study Journalism at the South Glamorgan Institute of Higher Education.
Dando was a member of Weston-super-Mare Amateur Dramatic Society and Exeter Little Theatre Company, with whom she appeared in plays at the Barnfield Theatre. She was a volunteer at Sunshine Hospital Radio in Weston-super-Mare in 1979.
Dando presented the BBC television programmes Breakfast Time, Breakfast News, the BBC One O'Clock News, the Six O'Clock News, the travel programme Holiday, the crime appeal series Crimewatch (from 1995 until her death) and occasionally Songs of Praise. In 1994, she moved to Fulham. She was the subject of This Is Your Life on 8 November 1996. On 25 April 1999, Dando presented the first episode of Antiques Inspectors. She was scheduled to present the Six O'Clock News on the evening of the following day. She was featured on the cover of that week's Radio Times magazine (from 24 to 30 April). Dando was also booked to host the British Academy Television Awards 1999, alongside Michael Parkinson, at Grosvenor House Hotel on 9 May. On 5 September, BBC One resumed airing of Antiques Inspectors, the final series to be recorded by Dando. The series had made its debut on 25 April, with filming of the final episode completed two days before that. The programme was cancelled following her death, but it was decided later in the year that it should be aired as a tribute to Dando. The final episode aired on 24 October.
At the time of her death, Dando was among those with the highest profile of the BBC's on-screen staff, and had been the 1997 BBC Personality of the Year. Crimewatch reconstructed her murder in an attempt to aid the police in the search for her killer. After Barry George was charged with the murder but acquittal, Crimewatch made no further appeals for information concerning the case.
Richard Hughes, her next-door neighbour, heard a scream from Dando ("I thought it was someone surprising somebody") but heard no gunshot. Hughes looked out of his front window and, while not realising what had happened, made the only certain sighting of the killer — a six-foot-tall (183 cm) white man aged around 40, walking away from Dando's house.
Forensic firearm examination indicated that Dando had been shot by a bullet from a 9mm Short Caliber semi-automatic pistol, with the gun pressed against her head at the moment of the shot. The cartridge appeared to have been subject to workshop modification, possibly to reduce its propellent charge and thus allow it to function as subsonic ammunition. Police ballistics checks also determined that the bullet had been fired from a smooth bore barrel without any rifling, which indicated the murder weapon was almost certainly a Starting pistol that had been illegally modified to fire live ammunition.
Investigating authorities quickly ruled out the work of a professional assassin due to the many amateurish aspects of the crime, such as the use of a converted Starting pistol as the murder weapon and the fact Dando was shot in public on her doorstep rather than after first being forced inside her house where her body would not be discovered for a much longer time period. Forensic psychologists working on the case predicted that the perpetrator would instead be a loner with a severe personality disorder.
Within six months, the Murder Investigation Team had spoken to more than 2,500 people and taken more than 1,000 statements. With little progress after a year, the police concentrated their attention on Barry George, who lived about 500 yards from Dando's house on Crookham Road. He had a history of stalking women, and other antisocial and attention seeking behaviour. George was put under surveillance, arrested on 25 May 2000 and charged with Dando's murder on 28 May. A search of his bedsit had uncovered over 4,000 photographs of hundreds of women covertly taken in public by George, along with other photos of well known female TV personalities such as Caron Keating, Anthea Turner, Fiona Foster and Emma Freud, in addition to newspaper article cuttings regarding Dando’s life and media career. Police also discovered a photo of George wearing a military gas mask while posing with a modified Bruni blank-firing handgun. When shown this image during interrogation, George admitted it was him in the photo and that he had purchased the weapon via mail order, however George denied that it had been converted to fire live ammunition.
Detective Constable John Gallagher described how he interviewed George in April 2000 so as to eliminate him from inquires, and George had stated how he remained at home on the morning of the murder before attending a disability group in Fulham around lunchtime. Six days later the police broke into George's flat to search it for evidence, taking several items away for further examination. They returned in early May 2000 to carry out further searches, before a final search was carried out after George's arrest at the end of that month. Items seized included clothing, military related books and hand written documents. Among these were lists compiled by George of the home addresses, physical descriptions and car registration numbers of almost 100 women, including Princess Diana. Detectives also processed hundreds of undeveloped Roll film seized from his flat, which showed George had taken thousands of covert photographs of over 400 different women around Hammersmith and Fulham without their knowledge. A Cecil Gee branded overcoat was also seized as evidence, and was later found to have traces of firearms discharge residue inside one of its pockets.
After George's acquittal, some newspapers published articles which appeared to suggest that he was guilty of the Dando murder and other offences against women. In December 2009, George accepted substantial damages from News Group Newspapers over articles in The Sun and the News of the World, following a libel action in the High Court.
The original police investigation had explored the possibility of a contract killing, but since Dando was living with her fiancé and was only rarely visiting her Fulham residence, it was considered unlikely that a professional assassin would have been sufficiently well informed about Dando's movements to have known at what time she was going to be there. CCTV evidence of Dando's last journey (mainly security video recordings from a shopping centre in Hammersmith, which she visited on her way to Fulham) did not show any sign of her being followed.
Initial investigations focused on Dando's personal circle since only a few people knew of her intention to visit her Gowan Avenue house on the day. Her agent Jon Roseman was an initial suspect since he knew Dando was going there to collect faxes he had sent her. But Roseman convinced detectives of his innocence. Bob Wheaton also attracted attention since he was a jilted lover and Dando had transferred £35,000 to him towards the end of their relationship. Wheaton stated that this transfer was a gift and not a loan. He also convinced detectives of his innocence.
On the night of her death, Dando's BBC colleague Nick Ross said on Newsnight that retaliatory attacks by criminals against police, lawyers and judges were almost unknown in the UK. Forensic examination of the cartridge case and bullet recovered from the scene of the attack suggested that the weapon used had been the result of a workshop conversion of a replica or decommissioned gun. It was argued that a professional assassin would not use such a poor quality weapon. The police therefore soon began to favour the idea that the killing had been opportunistically carried out by a crazed individual. This assumed profile of the perpetrator led to the focus on George.
Cold case reviews by the police after 2008 concluded that Dando was killed by a professional assassin in a Contact shot. Pressing the gun against her head would have acted as a suppressor — muffling the sound of the shot and preventing the killer from being splattered with blood.
In 2019, it was reported that the British National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) had given an intelligence report to the Dando murder enquiry claiming that the murder was in retaliation for the RTS bombing and Arkan had ordered the killing. The report highlighted a possible connection between the bullet used to kill Dando and bullets used in assassinations in Germany, namely handmade markings found on them. An opposition journalist, Slavko Ćuruvija, was assassinated outside his home in Belgrade just a few days before Dando's murder and the method used in both cases was identical. In 2019, four men of the Serbian Secret Service were convicted of this murder. However, the verdicts were reversed on appeal in 2024, which led to a widely criticized acquittal of the four.Associated Press release 4 February 2024 In 2002, journalist Bob Woffinden had advanced the view that a Yugoslav group was behind the Dando killing and, in various newspaper articles, contested all the grounds on which the police had dismissed this possibility.
Dando's co-presenter Nick Ross proposed the formation of an academic institute in her name and, together with her fiancé Alan Farthing, raised almost £1.5 million. The Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science was founded at University College London on 26 April 2001, the second anniversary of her murder.
A memorial garden designed and realised by the BBC Television Ground Force team in Dando's memory, using plants and colours that were special to her, is located within Grove Park, Weston-super-Mare, and was opened on 2 August 2001. The BBC set up a bursary award in Dando's memory, which enables one student each year to study broadcast journalism at University College Falmouth. Sophie Long, who was then a postgraduate who had grown up in Weston-super-Mare and is now a presenter on BBC News, gained the first bursary award in 2000.
In 2007, Weston College opened a new university campus on the site of the former Broadoak Sixth Form Centre where Dando studied. The sixth-form building has been dedicated to her and named the Jill Dando Centre.
The life, death and subsequent police investigation of Jill Dando was the subject of a true crime Netflix miniseries titled Who Killed Jill Dando?, released in 2023 and running for a total of three 44-minute-long episodes. The miniseries received mixed reviews from critics, citing pacing issues, although the documentary's usage of vintage archive footage from Dando's career and early childhood were also noted as a point of interest. Critic Lucy Mangan drew attention to the details shared by Dando's brother, Nigel, of the two siblings "eating sand-blown lettuce sandwiches" on the beach together and how this added to the thoroughness of the story presented. The miniseries also interviewed Barry George, who was 63 and living with his sister in Ireland at the time of filming. George stated, "I live in Ireland now. It's quiet here. You're treated like a Strikebreaker in London, but you're not here."
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