A dramatic reconstruction of the day Jill Dando was killed: Investigation tells ... trends now

No one who watched it will ever forget the heartbreaking footage of 19-year-old Danielle Cable pleading for justice live on prime-time television.

Ten million people tuned in to BBC1’s Crimewatch as Danielle — little more than a child — described how her 21-year-old boyfriend, Stephen Cameron, had been stabbed to death in a road rage attack on the M25.

Eventually, career criminal Kenneth Noye would be found guilty of the murder, largely thanks to Danielle’s brave testimony in court.

The Crimewatch interview was conducted by a rising star at the BBC, Jill Dando, who at one time admitted that her role on the show left her in fear of retribution from the criminals she sought to expose.

That fear loomed large in the minds of detectives two years later, when Dando featured on Crimewatch herself, this time not as presenter but as the victim of a brutal assassination outside her West London home in April 1999.

It didn’t take police long to ask one chilling question: Was Jill Dando’s role in the interview of Danielle Cable two years earlier enough to warrant a ‘revenge’ contract killing, commissioned by Kenneth Noye himself?

At the time of Jill’s death, Noye had already taken two lives.

In his Kent garden in January 1985, he stabbed to death undercover officer John Fordham. At the time, Noye was under surveillance for his part in laundering gold bullion from the £26 million Brink’s-Mat robbery at Heathrow.

Pleading self-defence, Noye was cleared, but jailed for the bullion handling and released under licence in 1994 after serving eight years.

Then came the ‘M25 murder’ in 1996, when his second victim was Stephen Cameron.

Afterwards, Noye fled to Spain. He had been arrested by the time of the Dando murder and was still in custody awaiting extradition. But could he have masterminded the killing — commissioning it before his arrest?

As the investigation unfolded, detectives came to the conclusion it was not Noye’s doing. Both his known killings were hot-blooded. Both were committed with knives. ‘They were completely different types of killings from the Dando case,’ one retired former senior detective who had worked on the latter told the Mail this week.

But if Noye was not responsible, then who was? By the time of her death, Jill Dando’s career on Crimewatch meant there was an extensive list of suspects.

A much-loved BBC Personality of the Year and committed Christian who also presented Songs Of Praise and Holiday, she had fronted Crimewatch 42 times.

At least two senior London crime families were supposedly resentful of her crusading TV role.

In the end, Operation Oxborough — as the Dando murder inquiry was codenamed — would examine an astonishing 1,393 potential suspects and consider myriad, sometimes bizarre motives.

One theory was that she had been killed on the orders of a Russian Mafia don, whose advances she had rejected while filming the Holiday programme in Cyprus.

Another — which gained headlines around the world — was that her murder was the work of a Serb hitman, after Dando fronted a fund-raising programme in aid of Kosovo refugees. MI5 and MI6 became involved. 

More recently, it was claimed, in Paris court papers, that her killing was a case of mistaken identity, following an investigation by another blonde, female BBC colleague into alleged abuses at a French model agency. The alleged intended target also happened to be a patient of Dando’s gynaecologist fiancé.

Two decades ago, the police hunt would eventually focus on an oddball loner and fantasist, who had served prison time for attempted rape.

Barry George was found guilty of the Dando killing at the Old Bailey in July 2001. But his conviction and life sentence were later quashed on appeal for being unsafe 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?

Four years ago, the Mail published a groundbreaking investigation into the killing, with testimony from witnesses, suspects and investigators who had never spoken publicly before, as well as material from a confidential cold case review in 2014.

Now Netflix has produced a three-part series on the killing which is due to air tomorrow. Even after all these fruitless years, Dando’s family hope that the broadcast might lead to new information; an arrest, belatedly, a conviction.

So what do we know about the events of Monday, April 26, 1999? A little before midday, Vida Saunders was enjoying tea at a neighbour’s home when another friend knocked at the door. The new visitor was in a state of agitation. ‘I could tell at once from the expression on her face that something wasn’t right,’ Mrs Saunders recalled to the Mail. ‘I didn’t know then just how wrong it would be.’

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

‘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 body of 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,’ she 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 back out 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. It was such a disturbing image. I think we knew immediately 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, try to help them and see if they are all right. But it was clear Jill wasn’t.’

Dando had become a chronicler of Britain’s everyday life at its best and worst. In 1993, she was chosen to host the primetime travel programme Holiday. Two years later, she took on the same role at Crimewatch, which she would present before tragedy struck and she became the story rather than the storyteller. In 1997, viewers voted her the 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.

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

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

read more from dailymail.....