My theory, by the lawyer for Barry George
William Clegg QC, who fought to overturn the loner’s murder conviction, is convinced a professional hitman killed the presenter. He talks to Luke Mintz
When William Clegg QC was escorted into a cell in 2006 to meet his next client, he didn’t think much of the “rather pathetic character” he was introduced to.
As one of Britain’s foremost criminal defence barristers, Clegg had been asked to represent Barry George in his second appeal against his 2001 conviction for the murder of television presenter Jill Dando.
Shot once in the head as she approached her front door in Fulham, west London, on the morning of April 26 1999, the 37-year-old’s murder had horrified the country then, and remains unsolved on its 20th anniversary, today.
Yet the crime itself took less than 20 seconds: Dando had been quickly forced to the ground on her doorstep in broad daylight, where a pistol was pressed so tightly against her head that it muffled the sound of the fatal shot. The killer walked calmly away, leaving no trace other than the single bullet.
George – a loner and failed Territorial Army recruit, who adopted the names of famous rock stars and had an unhealthy obsession with guns and celebrities – had been pinpointed early on as the man responsible by police, portrayed as a cold-hearted killer by the press, and had his first appeal dismissed in 2002.
But Clegg was convinced from the get-go that his client, an epileptic with learning difficulties, whom he remembers as a “very needy man” requiring exhaustive support from his legal team, simply didn’t have the physical or mental wherewithal to have executed a crime with such clinical precision.
After winning his appeal in 2007, Clegg successfully defended George in a retrial the following year, where he persuaded that the central piece of evidence against him – a minuscule particle of gunpowder residue found in his coat pocket – was as likely to have come from an extraneous source as the murder weapon.
Still, the killer has never been found, and George’s claim for compensation for wrongful arrest was dismissed – in an ITV documentary on Dando’s murder, aired last night, the 59-yearold said he believed there were still “a select few people” who think he had “got off on a technicality.”
Of the many theories swirling around Dando’s death, the most popular is still that of the “local nutter”, which suggests that the 37-year-old was murdered by somebody who lived nearby, and became obsessed with Dando after seeing her on Crimewatch.
It’s one supported by her brother, Nigel, who told The Daily Telegraph earlier this month that he believes his younger sister was killed by somebody “on the street at that time, who knew where Jill lived and struck lucky on the morning in question”.
It is this theory, of course, that led to George’s arrest in the first place. When under unbearable pressure to solve such an unsettling and high-profile crime, Clegg explains, police tend to point to the local oddball and “convince themselves” they must be the killer, regardless of a lack of evidence.
He remains confident that Dando was killed by a professional contract killer, not a local who got lucky. “There’s no doubt at all, the person who killed her was a professional hitman,” he says. “From the way the murder was committed, the weapon used, the method of execution – all point to it being a professional. It would have been beyond the capabilities of anyone [else].”
The theory of a Serbian revenge hit for Nato bombings which killed 16 people at the state broadcaster, RTS, three days before
Dando’s death, was explored in last night’s documentary. “The trouble is, that there’s actually no evidence of it,” says Clegg. “I thought it was unlikely because it struck me, if they were trying to make a political point, they would have told somebody about it afterwards – otherwise there’s no political point to be made.”
Defending George was just one of many momentous cases in Clegg’s 47-year career, chronicled in his memoir Under the Wig, which is released in paperback next week. But if he was convinced of his client’s innocence in this instance, he has represented child murderers, professional killers, sex attackers and Nazi war criminals, against whom the evidence was rather more overwhelming.
It is in those cases that he has “restful nights”, he writes. “I can rely on the jury to come to a sensible conclusion on the evidence. It’s much more difficult to defend someone whom I suspect is not guilty. I try not to think ‘They have definitely got the wrong person and this man is innocent’ because that creates a very real pressure. The thought that an innocent man may be incarcerated for the rest of their life because I have failed to expose the weaknesses in the case against him means I don’t sleep at all well… It is a worry that gnaws.”
We are speaking inside Clegg’s chambers at 2 Bedford Row, just off London’s Chancery Lane, where sketches from some of the most high-profile trials in British legal history – including the murders of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common in 1992, Lin and Megan Russell in Chillenden in 1996 and Joanna Yeates in Bristol in 2010 – decorate the walls.
Clegg spent his childhood in Westcliff-on-sea, Essex, where his parents ran a flower shop. Despite failing the 11-plus and attending his local secondary modern, he went on to study law at Bristol University, and was promoted to the Queen’s Counsel at the age of 41. He now lives in the village of Lavenham, Suffolk, with his artist wife, Gay, but clearly still loves the cut-andthrust of court drama, and bursts with pride as he reels off his favourite cross-examinations.
The case of Colin Stagg looms large; not least as he believes he fell victim to the same “local nutter” approach by police as George. Stagg was charged with the killing of Rachel Nickell in 1992, on the basis of a controversial “honeytrap” known as Operation Ezdell, in which a female police officer contacted him through a Lonely Hearts column and tried (unsuccessfully) to persuade him to confess.
Clegg remembers his client as “a most improbable murderer” who struck him immediately as a rather passive individual. “I thought it said a lot about him that many of his neighbours signed a card wishing him luck,” he writes, “which I do not remember happening in any other murder trial.”
He counts successfully arguing against the admission of the undercover officer’s evidence in court – after which, the case against Stagg collapsed – as his single biggest victory of his career at that point.
It was only two years later, when Clegg was reading through legal papers for another client – Robert Napper, accused of killing Samantha Bissett and her daughter Jazmine in their home in south-east London – that he put the pieces together. He remembers a “chill crept up my spine” as he noted the
similarities: the murder of a mother in the presence of a young child, on or next to common land, stabbed many more times than was necessary to kill.
His intuition proved correct: Napper confessed to killing Nickell, pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility and is being held indefinitely in Broadmoor Hospital.
In the age of Netflix, of course, grisly “true crime” documentaries such as Making a Murderer and The
Jinx have made armchair detectives out of us all. Many of us conceive of murderers as uniquely wicked individuals, destined for evil by their sociopathic tendencies.
Having worked on more than 100 trials, Clegg believes the opposite. “Murder is frequently committed by people who have no previous criminal record, and represents a breakdown in a domestic setting,” he says, “whether it is the single mother who cannot stop shaking a screaming child, or a partner who hits out.”
Perhaps most unsettlingly of all, Clegg is of the opinion that there are circumstances in which any of us could be driven to kill. “Death is often caused by the most unlikely person. It is something that we are all capable of,” he says. “No one can really know how we would react in such circumstances until they arise.”