Compensation would at last acknowledge that Barry is innocent
As the man convicted then cleared of TV star Jill Dando’s murder struggles to adjust to life in Cork, his sister says...
He was portrayed as the lonely, oddball fantasist ‘I realised in Jill’s murder, someone had to be got’
FOR Ballingcollig-based housewife Michelle Diskin, the morning of May 25, 2000, started like all others. She had packed her three young children and husband Pat off to work and school, and was tuning into RTÉ’s Gerry Ryan Show before tackling the housework. Little did she know that morning’s news bulletin would upend the next decade for her and her family.
The reporter noted that a British man in custody for the murder of beloved BBC presenter Jill Dando has been named as Barry Bulsara of Fulham, London. The name sent a chill down Michelle’s spine: it was the name her younger brother Barry George had used in a recent email to her.
‘If you could ever pick a time when your life turned and became an entirely different one, that was it,’ Michelle notes. ‘I kept thinking, “it can’t be him. It must be someone with the same name”. People ask me what the worst time of this whole ordeal was, and I always say it was that time, at the very beginning. I didn’t know where to turn for information. I’d previously had depression and my mum didn’t want to worry me. I thought it would all blow over.’
Far from it: the moment would go on to not just blow apart Barry George’s life, but would greatly impact on his family. His arrest for the shooting of Jill Dando on her Fulham doorstep in 1999 kick-started years of scrutiny, campaigning and legal battles for Michelle; a time that was punctuated by no shortage of other tragedies.
On July 2, 2001, Barry was wrongfully convicted of Jill Dando’s murder. For many reasons — Dando’s celebrity being just one of them — the case was one of the most high profile that Britain had seen in years. Initially, Barry was immediately ruled out as a suspect, because police were certain the killer was a professional hitman hired by a jealous former boyfriend or gangster with a grudge against Crimewatch, the BBC show that Dando presented.
While the killer appeared to have a specialist knowledge of guns, possibly converting a starter pistol to fire live ammunition and then adapting the bullet by hand, Barry was reportedly so hopeless with gadgets that he once had to ask a local shopkeeper to load film into his camera for him.
His conviction was quashed in 2007, and after a retrial, Barry was acquitted on August 1, 2008.
Michelle is now Michelle Diskin Bates, after remarrying and moving to Northamptonshire with her husband, Peter — her first husband, Cork native Pat, died in 2007 after a short illness. She has written a blistering memoir, Stand Against Injustice, about her and Barry’s experiences within the British justice system, as well as her tireless fight to clear his name. It’s by turns a forensic, disturbing and inspirational read.
‘There were quite a few reasons for writing the book,’ she says. ‘People make huge judgements based on what they think they know. I thought it was vitally important they had the full story.
‘I also wanted to provide a roadmap for other families who might experience a miscarriage of justice.’
Until that fateful day in 2000, Michelle had had relatively little knowledge of the ins and outs of the legal system. She had even less knowledge about what a miscarriage of justice entailed.
‘Like most people, I thought it doesn’t happen very often, and that the person was probably guilty, and that they’re just trying to get off [when attempting to overturn a conviction],’ she admits. ‘I didn’t know any better.’
In the foreword of her book, Michael Naughton writes: ‘A common theme of miscarriage of justice cases is that the police and prosecution often operate within a paradigm of “tunnel vision”, which sees them identify a potential suspect, first, and then work inwards to build a case against them rather than working from the evidence out in criminal investigations.’
‘It’s something I wasn’t aware of — like everyone else I thought that police would look at every avenue,’ recalls Michelle. ‘It was only after I spoke to Barry’s legal team and realised that in the case of Jill’s murder, someone had to be got. Someone said, “you have to get someone for this, so get on to it”.
‘I can’t say that someone involved decided that Barry would do. What I can say is that the officer in charge of the case went back on Crimewatch and said, “we are changing who we are looking for”. He was describing Barry and Barry’s flat at the time. They were asking for information on “a person like this” and that closes off all other avenues.’
In the case of Barry George, it could be argued that several elements in his background already put him on the back foot in the event of an investigation. Prior to Dando’s murder, he had worked as a messenger at the BBC, and had already exhibited an interest in many celebrities.
Down the years, he had adopted a number of pseudonyms, including the aforementioned Barry Bulsara (Freddie Mercury’s birth name), Paul Gadd (Garry Glitter’s real name) and Steve Majors, a combination of actor Lee Majors and Steve Austin, the character he played in the Six Million Dollar Man.
In 1980, Barry had been charged and prosecuted for posing as a policeman. He then adopted the persona of SAS member Tom Palmer, one of the soldiers who ended the 1980 Iranian Embassy Siege. Barry was charged with two counts of indecent assault in June 1981. He was acquitted of indecent assault against one woman, and convicted of indecent assault against another, for which he received a three-month sentence, suspended for two years. In March 1983, Barry was convicted at the Old Bailey under the pseudonym of Steve Majors for the February 1982 attempted rape of a woman. He was imprisoned for 18 months.
‘Mum didn’t tell me everything because I was living in Ireland, and it was only when I went to visit her, and she needed to visit Barry in prison, that I found out,’ Michelle recalls. ‘Boy, was he in trouble with me. Oh boy, he didn’t get a word in, I was berating him so much.
‘As difficult as it is to face the issues, people with the types of disability that Barry has do certain things and don’t realise the full implication of them. Not to excuse him in any way, but they might know that it’s wrong but the full implication would evade them for a while.’
After his arrest for Dando’s murder, Barry had reportedly been found in the grounds of Kensington Palace, wearing a balaclava and carrying a length of rope and a note he had written to Prince Charles. He was constantly portrayed as the lonely, oddball fantasist with a fixation on the famous.
The truth is that Barry was well liked in the Fulham neighbourhood where he lived. ‘His neighbours said in court, “I love to stop and chat with Barry”. These are the people he was living among,’ says Michelle.
In the book, Michelle says that she had dealt with Barry’s challenging behaviour since their childhood in West London, but it was only later that her brother was diagnosed with autism, epilepsy and a form of ADHD. They also had a sister, Susan, who died at 28 after complications from epilepsy.
‘In those days, conditions like autism and ADHD were not recognised,’ says Michelle. ‘I recall that Barry would do things the rest of us wouldn’t do. He couldn’t relax or calm down. It wasn’t his fault — kids with these diagnoses simply get labelled as bad kids.’
Prior to his arrest for the Dando murder, Michelle had lost touch with Barry, but not for any particular reason. ‘Back in those days, in the 1980s and 1990s, air-fares were expensive, as was the phone. If ever I was in touch with home, it was with Mum.’
Did it cross Michelle’s mind, even momentarily, that Barry might have been involved in Dando’s murder?
‘I had to be reasonable and look at the facts,’ she says. ‘The legal team talked me through the evidence, and it meant that nothing linked him to the crime.
‘One doctor said, “no way could he have done it. If he had, he’d have fallen to the floor in a seizure as the stress would have been too much.” In any case, Barry wouldn’t have been able to keep quiet. That’s how he is.’
Fighting to clear her brother’s name took a huge personal toll on the family. Their mother, Margaret Bourke, was hospitalised after a nervous breakdown while Barry was in Belmarsh Prison. Michelle’s husband Pat died of a brain tumour in 2007 before Barry was called for retrial.
‘I remember telling my children that I was ready to give up and let Michael [Bourke, her Limerick-based uncle] take over the fight, and they said, “You can’t do that. Barry only has you”.’’ During the family’s years
long fight for justice, Michelle worried, too, that she wasn’t sufficiently around for her children, not least her youngest daughter Emma-Jane, who was fast approaching womanhood.
‘I wasn’t sure how I should deal with that, although I knew I had close female friends who would look after my daughter while I was away,’ Michelle recalls. ‘It was a huge anxiety for me.’
Visiting Barry in prison was also ‘extremely difficult’.
‘He would find it difficult to communicate the things he needed to communicate to us,’ recalls Michelle.
‘He didn’t understand things that were going on outside in the media, but then who could? For a person with the disabilities that he had and used to living alone, all he wanted was to be in control. He recently read the book, and he’s quite stunned at reading all of these things he didn’t know about, and what happened to his family on the outside.
‘He knows full well the nightmare he was living, but he didn’t know the nightmare we were living.
‘It’s important to point out that if Barry had done this, I’d have been there for him, but I’d never, ever have looked for him to be released from prison.
‘That’s what a family does. If someone does something wrong, you don’t throw them away like a piece of rubbish.’
Michelle’s local community in Ballingcollig, meanwhile, were supportive all the way through.
‘I didn’t ever have anyone in Cork say anything nasty, not once,’ she says. ‘People asked questions, but no one ever condemned me, my children, or Barry. I think Ireland knows about miscarriages of justice intimately,’ she says, alluding to cases such as the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six. ‘Perhaps there was a sense of, even if he might have been guilty, we were not.’
Barry’s retrial in December 2007, Michelle admits, was ‘just as bad as the first’. By then, he had spent eight years in prison for the crime. Owing to a change in law, his previous convictions were also cited in court.
The single most important piece of evidence presented at his original trial — a speck of gunpowder found in his coat pocket — was ruled inadmissable after the Forensic Science Service performed an about-turn and decided it was worthless in evidential terms. In 2008, he was eventually cleared of the crime. His lawyer, Jeremy Moore, said his client’s first words after the verdict were: ‘I cannot believe it.’ Michelle punched the air and said: ‘Yes.’
‘I thought, “right, this is finally over”, but it wasn’t,’ admits Michelle. With media interest in Barry riding at an all-time high, Michelle recalls that it was, from a media perspective, ‘open season’ on her brother. The British media followed the family to Cork, and when Barry went to visit his niece in hospital after she had emergency surgery, they photographed him, intimating that he was seeking a form of psychological help. The family took legal action against certain newspapers, and the attention eventually dissipated.
‘It was another one of the moments that went from dark to light,’ admits Michelle.
Barry sought £500,000 compensation for lost earnings and wrongful imprisonment, but was told in 2013, that while he had been acquitted, he was ‘not innocent enough’ to receive compensation.
‘You look for compensation for being wrongfully convicted and then you’re told, “oh, but you didn’t prove your innocence beyond reasonable doubt”,’ says Michelle. ‘Barry was the first person to be told this, but he is far from the last.’ During the investigation into Dando’s murder, police took ‘everything he ever owned’ from his Fulham flat. On his release from prison, there was the notinconsiderable task of rebuilding life from the ground up at 46.
‘He needed absolutely everything — saucepans, socks, you name it,’ says Michelle. ‘He needed everything to start his life, and he didn’t even get the £46 that every prisoner gets when they leave prison.’
Northampton-based Michelle is a regular visitor back to Cork. She will officially launch the book there, and is awaiting the birth of her second grandchild there. These days, Barry lives in Cork near Michelle’s family.
‘It can be difficult for him,’ Michelle admits. ‘He does feel that people are so good to him, and he does have neighbours that look out for him, but he misses the hustle and bustle of London. The truth is, he can’t live there.
‘I’d love to see him get the compensation, not because I’d like to see him get the money, but receiving the compensation is a clear message: “we know you didn’t do it”. Maybe he might be able to have a better life, but really, it isn’t so much about the money as it is the acknowledgement.’
MICHELLE Diskin-Bates’s book, Stand Against Injustice is out now via Malcolm Down