Who Killed Jill Dando?

More of that in a moment, but here's Jill with something else.

Struggling away, hello.

Uh...

Television in some way had always fascinated me from the year dot.

I was about eight years old and I'd have my four library tickets

and go to the library and get books about television.

Good morning.

You're watching the BBC's Breakfast News at 6:30.

It took me I suppose, um, until I was about 25 to get inside.

Jill Dando.

Jill was the most famous TV presenter on British television.

The golden girl of British television,

murdered on her doorstep in broad daylight.

That just does not happen.

I think anyone who has got a little bit of fame

knows that there are two sides to it.

You get a lot of unwanted attention.

Strange people. Obsessive.

You kind of look over your shoulder a bit.

People all over are joining again

to solve some of Britain's most difficult and serious crimes.

Crimewatch had a fantastic reputation

for putting information out there

and getting people to ring in with critical pieces of evidence.

If you harbor any suspicions, do call. So many clues and so much anguish.

Do you ever get worried about the things you see on Crimewatch?

Oh. Yes, you do. But the crimes that we show are so rare.

It's not something that you walk into the street

and think, "The same thing's going to happen to me."

There was reason to be scared.

It takes a certain sort of person,

a brutal sadistic psychopath, to shoot a gun into a head.

This was one of the largest murder investigations

the Metropolitan Police ever had to face.

It's been 22 years and it's unsolved.

Whoever did it is still out there.

One of Britain's most popular television presenters has been murdered

in what could be a professional hit.

The tributes here on the flowers echo the overriding reaction of shock...

Even the Queen has been moved to comment, saying she is shocked...

Police say there are many possible motives for the murder.

...responsible for solving so many crimes

may have created enemies in the process.

The Crimewatch presenter may have been assassinated in retaliation

for the NATO bombing of the Belgrade.

Detectives confirm that Jill Dando

had claimed of being followed by a stalker.

A man who has gone on trial in London

had an obsession with celebrities and was fascinated with firearms.

Detectives say they're not ruling out any line of inquiry.

Some believe the killer may have got away with murder.

Ambulance service, hello?

Hello, ambulance? I'm walking along Gowan Avenue.

It looks like, um, there's somebody collapsed.

And, confidentially, it looks like it's Jill Dando.

And she's collapsed on her doorstep. There's a lot of blood.

Can you approach and check that she's breathing?

- Doesn't look like she is. - Right.

Blood's coming from her nose, her arms are blue.

I need to find out if she needs... if she's breathing.

Is the lady's chest going up and down?

Oh, my God. No. I don't think she's alive.

- Okay. -I'm sorry.

Don't worry. I'll get help for you.

Please.

I was on call for the central London murder group.

We had been busy, we were under-resourced.

And I was told by my detective sergeant

that there had been a stabbing down in Fulham.

Fulham was a well-to-do, wealthy area.

So it was unusual for that reason.

Very unusual.

I was driving down there

and I got a phone call from my chief superintendent.

And he said to me, "That case, that's going to be Jill Dando."

In most homicide cases,

the detectives would not have known their victim at all,

but in this case, almost everybody knew of Jill Dando.

There was an ambulance coming up the Fulham Road as we were going down,

and I realized that was her being taken away from the scene.

It was a lovely spring day...

and I was reading the bulletins, the news summaries.

The next scheduled bulletin is at 2:40.

I had put on a rather nice blue suit.

Well, one actually that came from the designers

that Jill and I used to go to together.

And everything was fine in the newsroom, which is a buzzy, noisy, vibrant place.

...page 45. Tell me what promos you're running?

And then the news came in that a woman had been killed.

And these rumors started going around the newsroom that it was Jill.

And it went terribly quiet.

- -

When I arrived, I was briefed by the uniformed officers.

And they told me that no one had seen what had actually happened to Jill.

But they had already identified two witnesses

who had seen a man leaving the scene.

And they described this white man, dark hair, thick-set,

wearing a coat, a dark coat, wasn't masked, wasn't wearing gloves.

So the real focus right there was how the person

who had been seen running away was to be caught.

Uniformed officers were told to spread out and search the area.

We were waiting for information from the hospital

because there was no confirmation that Jill had died.

That changed very quickly when I stood on the pavement

and just looked from the gate,

up to the front door of Jill's house.

And I could see the bullet and casing on the doorstep.

Jill Dando had been shot in the head.

It was immediately sort of unfathomable.

The concept of any woman being shot in the head in London,

yet alone a celebrity, was rare in the extreme.

The media are already up at the top cordon.

I knew then that the media interest was going to be extraordinary.

Jill Dando arrived here by ambulance at 12:30 p.m.

Despite all efforts by ambulance paramedics and hospital medical staff,

she was certified dead at 1:03 p.m.

The newsroom was cold with... with shock.

Real shock.

We're people who are used to reporting

on all sorts of deaths, disasters, wars.

But to have one of your own...

I'm sorry. It's just I was...

One of your very, very own,

killed in that manner on her own doorstep was just too awful to believe.

And I... I had to read it.

Jill was 37.

I remember a boss saying to me, "Are you going to be okay doing this?"

And I said, yeah, I'll be okay.

Jill was 37.

Pete, I'm telling you she was 37.

All right.

I told her, she was 37.

She was exactly two years younger than me. She was 37.

What shall I say?

I'm telling you, she was definitely 37. Definitely.

Here we go.

Within the past few minutes, police have confirmed

that the BBC television presenter Jill Dando has been stabbed to death

outside her west London home.

She died in the ambulance on her way to hospital.

There are no more details at the moment.

The next scheduled bulletin is at 2:40.

I was working in the, uh, Bristol office

of the Bristol Evening Post.

And our newsroom had a bank of TV screens.

Our BBC colleague Jill Dando has died

after being attacked outside her London home.

Reports were coming out that she had died.

I clicked into sort of automatic mode.

I thought I need to protect my dad from this.

I rushed down to Weston-super-Mare.

He was obviously devastated.

I was wondering how we were going to cope with all this.

About half an hour after I had got down to Weston,

the TV reporter from BBC Points West knocked on the door. I knew him.

And I sort of slipped back into journalistic mode.

I gave him an interview.

When did you last see her? Was it...

I saw her on, um... Easter Sunday.

It would've been about two, three weeks ago.

Yeah, she was on good form. Um, looking forward to her wedding.

It was a sense of emptiness and a sense of despair.

And I had to explain to my dad what had happened,

what was going to happen.

That we were kind of going to be in the eye of a storm.

The police search is well underway now, Alan.

There are a minimum of 30 detectives.

You can see behind me the operation in front of Jill's home.

All the resources came.

The ballistics experts, the blood experts, the scene photographers.

The scene itself had been heavily contaminated.

Because there had been attempts to resuscitate.

But everything was picked up, relevant or not, scrapings, gravel.

Fingerprint marks from the gate.

Fibers.

We had a bullet and a cartridge casing on the doorstep.

The ballistics expert told me it was a single shot

to the left side of her head.

Some thought like a professional execution.

And that bullet and casing on the doorstep were from a 9mm caliber weapon.

The search teams arrived.

The whole of Gowan Avenue was searched.

Bins, gardens, flowerbeds, shrubs.

Looking to see if the gun had been discarded or anything had been discarded.

We identified some of the key witnesses.

The postman, a sort of Mediterranean-looking man,

just after ten o'clock on the opposite side of the road to Jill's house,

and a witness claimed he saw a man running across the road

and he stopped at the bus stop.

And he was sweating.

There was a traffic warden,

and she was about to give a ticket to the driver of a blue Range Rover,

and as she was starting to write the ticket out,

he brushed her off and he drove away.

So, I didn't know at the time

whether there was one person involved or two or three.

Everybody in that street on that day had to be eliminated out

as much as possible.