Jill Dando's murder: 20 years on, fresh witness accounts raise disturbing ...

The time is a little before midday on Monday, April 26, 1999. Vida Saunders is enjoying tea at a neighbour’s home when another friend comes knocking at the door. The new visitor is in a state of some agitation.

‘I could tell at once from the expression on her face that something wasn’t right,’ Mrs Saunders recalled this week. ‘I didn’t know then just how wrong it would be.’

The friend asks Mrs Saunders to accompany her to a house in the next street, Gowan Avenue. She has just seen something –— something very disturbing — as she walked past the address on her way home from the shops. Now she wants someone else to see it, too.

Nothing ever happened in their suburban enclave in Fulham, West London. At least, nothing very bad.

But that morning would be different. What had just taken place on the front step of 29 Gowan Avenue would make headlines around the world for years to come. The shock reverberates to this day.

‘I don’t think I fully grasped what I was going to see and it seems odd now, with hindsight, but I took my mug of tea with me,’ Mrs Saunders said.

In those days, much of the white-painted Victorian frontage of 29 Gowan Avenue was screened from the street by a privet hedge and a small tree. ‘But what I saw as soon as we stepped through the front gate hit me like a physical blow.’

What she saw was the dead body of BBC television presenter Jill Dando, 37, killed only minutes earlier outside her own front door by a single gunshot to the head.

‘Jill’s body was lying at such an odd angle,’ Mrs Saunders recalled. ‘She looked like she had collapsed on the spot. The back of her head was against the front door and her chest was facing towards the pavement.

‘She was in a pool of blood, and I noticed her lips were blue and there were some small drips of blood running from her nose. I think we knew immediately that she was critically injured.

‘She was still clutching a set of keys in one hand, probably her door keys or possibly her car keys. The handles of her handbag were over the other arm and her mobile phone was inside, ringing constantly.

‘Normally, I think, if you saw someone collapsed like that, your instinct would be to reach out and touch them, to try to help them and see if they are all right. But it was clear Jill wasn’t [all right].’

Mrs Saunders paused. ‘That image of Jill lying there. . . I would have visions, snapshots of it in my dreams and even when I was doing my laps when I went swimming. I couldn’t get it out of my head.

‘It has given me many sleepless nights. Of course, time moves on and memories start to fade. But talking about it again now brings it all back so vividly. It was, it is, awful.’

Mrs Saunders has not spoken before about her role in the tragedy, except to the police. One can sense in her account a disbelief that she should have been caught up in the case. Because even 20 years later, the murder of Jill Dando remains one of the most shocking crimes of our times.

That Britain’s ‘most celebrated and loved’ TV presenter, ‘the nation’s sweetheart’ and the face of BBC Crimewatch, could be the victim of an execution-style killing, in broad daylight in our capital city, was extraordinary enough.

That the murder was without any clear motive and remains unsolved, despite a huge reward for information and myriad theories, has only added to the fascination.

One man was charged with and convicted of the murder. Barry George, a local loner and fantasist who had already served a prison sentence for attempted rape, was found guilty of the killing at the Old Bailey in July 2001. But his life sentence was later quashed on appeal, and at the end of his 2008 retrial, George was found not guilty.

By then the trail seemed to have run cold. Or has it?

Today the Daily Mail begins an exclusive three-part reassessment of the Crimewatch presenter’s cold-blooded murder and the hunt for her killer.

Our investigations have taken us to the Balkans and across the British Isles. We are able to draw on previously unavailable police and prosecution documents and other official reports, new witness testimonies — such as that of Mrs Saunders — and interviews with detectives and legal sources involved in the two Scotland Yard investigations into the murder — as well as suspects.

We will be able to reveal some key findings of a secret police cold-case review of the murder, carried out only five years ago. We will expose the mistakes investigators made, the red herrings that were pursued — and examine the possibility of a third Jill Dando murder trial taking place, albeit more than two decades after the event.

Our new assessment will also probe the evidence against Barry George, a serial stalker of women, and the High Court’s refusal to grant him ‘miscarriage of justice’ compensation after he was cleared of the killing.

But first let us return to the fateful day itself.

April 26, 1999, dawned cloudy with a forecast of showers. But the life of Jill Wendy Dando seemed to bask in perpetual sunshine.

Born in Weston-Super-Mare in November 1961, she had followed her father and brother into local newspaper journalism. Her on-screen potential was obvious. After stints in regional news broadcasting in the South-West, her big break came in 1988 when she began a job in London presenting the BBC’s hourly national bulletins.

Viewers loved her from the start. She was a friendly celebrity, the ‘girl next door’ who bore more than a passing resemblance to Princess Diana. But unlike the Princess, Jill had a down-to-earth private life that included amateur dramatics, voluntary work in hospitals and churchgoing.

A devout Baptist from childhood — she was head girl at her school — Jill would become a presenter on Songs Of Praise.

Until moving to Gowan Avenue, she had shared a house in a quiet South-West London neighbourhood with her cousin, Judith.

What you saw on screen was what you met in the flesh. There was no ‘front’ to Jill Dando. And for the British public, she would become a chronicler of their everyday life at its best and worst.

In 1993 she was chosen to host the prime-time travel programme Holiday. Two years later, she took on the same role at Crimewatch, which she would present 42 times before tragedy struck and she became the story rather than the storyteller. In 1997, viewers voted her BBC Personality of the Year.

Her private life was equally serene. In November 1997 she had been introduced by a mutual friend to a consultant gynaecologist called Alan Farthing.

Mr Farthing — who would later oversee the births of Prince William’s children — was separated from his first wife. He and Jill fell ‘very deeply’ in love almost at once.

Within a month they were holidaying together in Australia. That New Year they watched the fireworks over Sydney Harbour Bridge and vowed to be there again for the Millennium.

In January 1999, two months after Mr Farthing’s divorce was finalised, they announced their engagement. Their wedding was set for September 25, 1999.

The couple spent almost all their time at Mr Farthing’s home in Bedford Close, Chiswick. The Gowan Avenue house was used largely as Jill’s administrative headquarters. She had only stayed there overnight twice in the weeks before the killing.

On Saturday, April 24, she went there to collect post. She noticed her fax machine had run out of ink and decided to return on the Monday to change the cartridge.

That evening, she and Mr Farthing attended a British Legion Poppy Appeal event at the Natural History Museum, which Jill was co-presenting. On Sunday Mr Farthing played golf in Stoke Poges, west of London, with a friend and Jill later joined them for lunch.

That night the couple were at home together in Chiswick. They watched the first episode of Jill’s new show, Antiques Inspectors, for which she had spent several days of the previous week filming in Dublin. The show’s launch was promoted by Jill posing in a black leather jumpsuit next to a vintage Aston Martin on the cover of the Radio Times. It was a little more risqué than her usual image, but fun.

The couple also wrote several letters. One was to Claridge’s hotel in Mayfair, where their wedding reception was due to be held. They discussed the guest list which was written in Jill’s Filofax. The same list would be used by Mr Farthing to organise her funeral.

The next day was to be the start of a two-week period at home for Jill, after months away filming Holiday and Antiques Inspectors.

She had an appointment for the first fitting of her wedding dress and planned to visit a stationer about the invitations.

Mr Farthing had an 8am meeting. He told Jill to sleep in but, typically, his fiancée insisted on getting up and making him breakfast in bed. He then left the house at 7.25, and rain was already falling.

Before they parted, Jill told him: ‘Today I’m going to be a lady who lunches.’ She had a charity luncheon engagement at the Lanesborough Hotel on Hyde Park Corner, but she didn’t make it. He would not see her alive again.

The last four hours of Jill’s life can be pieced together through eyewitness accounts, CCTV footage, till receipts and phone records. Only the last moments remain a mystery.

Records for her mobile phone and the landline at her fiance’s home show she made and received a number of calls that morning. All the people she spoke to were traced by police. No one she was in contact with in her last few hours sensed that she was worried. At worst she sounded ‘preoccupied’, but then she had so much to do.

She left Mr Farthing’s home just after 10am in her dark blue BMW convertible. The top was up because of the weather. She stopped to get petrol and milk at a garage on the A4, before parking in Hammersmith, West London, to visit the Kings Mall shopping centre.

While in Hammersmith she visited Ryman the stationers and bought fax paper. She bought other fax material from Dixons and The Link stores. Finally, at 11.01am she walked through the shopping mall towards the exit.

At 11.04am she was driving her car west along King

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