A photograph of the blood covered doorway shows exactly where Jill Dando was murdered 24 years ago. The TV star was shot in broad daylight outside her house in Fulham on April 26, 1999 in a crime that shocked the entire country.
A photo was released showing the harrowing pool of blood left on Jill's front doorstep in a BBC documentary, The Murder of Jill Dando, in 2019. A trail of blood can also be seen on the path leading up to the house, with spots all over the tiles, with a handbag sitting eerily by the foot of the door and the doormat moved out of place.
From the photo, the path and the garden appear disturbed, with unidentified items strewn around, the Mirror has reported. The brutal murder of the Crimewatch presenter remains one of the most infamous unsolved crimes of the last 20 years.
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A new three-part documentary has now been released on Netflix, which re-examines the case, 24 years later. The series takes viewers through Dando’s life and the true crime mystery which continues to mystify experts and the public.
The series features her friends, journalists, investigators and lawyers questioning what really happened on that fateful day. One of those interviewed is Noel “Razor” Smith, an armed robber-turned-writer who was in HMP Belmarsh, when Barry George, wrongly convicted of 37-year-old Dando’s murder in 2001, arrived after being charged. George was unanimously acquitted at a 2008 retrial.
Asked if he had any clues as to who killed Dando, Smith says: “I don’t really want to talk about that for my own safety. But there are rumours in the criminal world, let’s put it that way. It’s not who you would think and it’s not Barry George. It was a professional hit.”
Asked if he could give any insight into why she was shot dead, he shook his head immediately and said: “No. If I tell you why - you’d know who did it.”
Barry George was the only man ever put on trial for Dando's murder. He had a history of stalking women and of sexual offences. A particle of gunshot residue in his inside jacket pocket led to a guilty conviction and he spent eight years in prison, but after an appeal spearheaded by his sister, Michelle Diskin-Bates, the gunshot evidence was dismissed and the conviction quashed.
Other theories as to who killed Jill Dando include the criminal underworld - someone operating in the drugs trade or a paid hitman. A third theory suggests a Serbian hitman, as Dando had presented a Kosovo Crisis Appeal that had raised more than £1 million in 24 hours in support of those refugees fleeing the Balkans.
Days before the murder, NATO bombed a TV station in Serbia, killing 16 employees. The BBC had started to receive phone threats, including one from a Serbian saying he had killed Jill. Police tried to investigate but the call could not be traced.
As a last resort, the police turned to the people closest to Jill - her fiance Alan Farthing, ex-partner and BBC editor Bob Wheaton and agent Jon Roseman. Bob was removed from the suspect list and CCTV analysis revealed no one was following Jill. Jon, also later removed from the suspect list, had written a book about an agent whose client was shot and killed.
Detective Chief Inspector Hamish Campbell was on call on the day of the chilling murder. He remembers witnesses had seen a man leaving the scene, described as white, thick-set with dark hair, wearing a dark coat. DCI Campbell says: “All the resources came, the ballistics expert, the blood expert, the scene photographers.
“Everything had been picked up – scrapings, gravel, fingerprint marks, fibres. We had a bullet and a cartridge casing on the doorstep, possibly from a 9mm calibre weapon. The whole of her street, Gowan Avenue, was searched. Bins, gardens, flowerbeds, shrubs... Witnesses saw a man running and sweating. A traffic warden saw a man driving a blue Range Rover.”
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