CLEARED DANDO SUSPECT: HOW DARE THEY SAY I’M ‘NOT INNOCENT ENOUGH’ FOR COMPENSATION
...the indignant words of Barry George in this extraordinary encounter — in the final part of the Mail’s exhaustive new investigation into the murder that horrified Britain
Had Operation Oxborough got its man, at last? Police pursued tip-off that had been ignored
DANDO: THE SHOCKING UNTOLD STORY
HE IS a shambling, dishevelled bear of a man, barely contained by a dark suit and overcoat. As Barry George talks in a low, throaty growl, the breeze picks at his white shirt tails and red tie.
Plus ca change. George had been dressed in identical fashion on the morning Jill Dando was murdered, he had suggested in the police witness statement he gave almost a year later.
Twenty years have passed since the killing. But in the troubled world of the only man ever charged with the crime — George was convicted at the Old Bailey then acquitted at a second trial — time appears to have stood still.
Now, though, he cuts a pathetic figure rather than one of any menace, as was alleged by police and prosecutors at the time. In these circumstances, why should he not today be considered the ‘other victim’ in Britain’s most sensational modern murder case?
On April 26, 1999, Miss Dando, the much- loved BBC Crimewatch presenter, was killed on her doorstep in Gowan Avenue, West London, by a single gunshot to the head. By the time George was cleared in the summer of 2008 he had already served seven years of a life sentence for the crime.
George had always craved fame. But this was unwanted notoriety, which in 2010 he fled for a new life in the Republic of Ireland. And that is where the Mail spoke to him, now aged 58, last week.
Much of what he told us during a conversation lasting more than an hour will not be quoted at his request, because of what he described as ‘ongoing legal cases’.
What can be reported is that George — who has made numerous live TV appearances since his acquittal and was happy to speak to us — talked with passion about his continued ‘fight for justice’ and the lingering doubts on the part of officialdom which still assail him. Doubts which in 2013 saw the High Court rubber- stamp decisions by successive governments to refuse him even a penny of compensation for the years he spent behind bars.
Compensation is only paid when the court quashes a conviction because a new fact has emerged to show beyond reasonable doubt that the applicant did not commit the offence.
‘ How can you be acquitted unanimously by judge and jury, which means you (regain) innocent status, but then get told you are not innocent enough?’ he asked us last week.
‘How more innocent than innocent can a person be? I spent years in custody and then they have looked at the thing and decided I’m not innocent enough.’
Yesterday, in the second of our three-part reassessment of the Dando affair we looked at the murder investigation and the various colourful theories concerning the motive.
Indeed, in the first 12 months of the inquiry, Scotland Yard looked at and rejected almost 1,400 possible suspects. It was not until February 24, 2000, ten months after the murder, that having been tasked with examining previously unexplored leads, Detective Constable John Gallagher focused on a new name.
A directive called ‘Action No 1637’ had called for the tracing, identification and elimination from the inquiry of a man named ‘Barry Bulsara’.
In fact, Action 1637 dated from as far back as May 15, 1999, less than three weeks after the murder.
The order was in turn a result of an anonymous call received only one day after the killing. It concerned a ‘mentally unstable man’ who lived in Crookham Road, only 500 yards from Miss Dando’s home.
The detective then reviewed other messages linked to this previously ignored tip-off.
As a result, DC Gallagher visited an address at Crookham Road. It was the home of Barry George, but he was not there at the time. Neighbours told the policeman of George’s apparent links to the lead singer of the rock band Queen, Freddie Mercury. ‘Bulsara’ was Mercury’s real family surname. George claimed to be Freddie’s cousin. He was not.
It was not until April 11, 2000, that DC Gallagher finally caught up with George, in the street near his flat.
George admitted that he and Barry Bulsara were one and the same. He gave police a witness statement. Six days later, police executed a search warrant on his flat. What they found there would help see him end up in the dock on a murder charge.
After a year of frustrations, red herrings and dead ends Operation Oxborough seemed to have got its man, at last.
But the prosecution was to result in what George’s sister Michelle Diskin Bates has called ‘one of the most infamous miscarriages of justice cases in recent British legal history’.
Barry Michael George was born in West London in April 1960 to a special police constable father and an Irish cleaner mother. He was the third of three children in a family which fell apart on their parents’ acrimonious divorce in 1967. George’s father would later remarry and emigrate to Australia.
The young boy had his own particular challenges. There would be diagnoses of epilepsy and personality disorders. From the age of five he attended a local school for children with educational and behavioural problems. At 12, he was moved to a residential special school in Ascot. At age 16, he left with no qualifications.
Back living with his mother, he held a number of low-grade jobs. One was as an internal messenger at the BBC television centre in West London.
George lasted only five months there. But it was the start of an intense interest in the organisation which had given the struggling teenager a brief first-hand contact with the world of celebrity. For years afterwards, he would call at the BBC’s Wood Lane offices to collect a copy of Ariel, the staff magazine. He also began to reinvent himself as a somebody of substance, importance, of heroism and glamour. Everything he was not.
One manifestation of this makebelieve world was his conviction in 1980 for impersonating a police officer. But his fantasies became more ambitious. Around this time he changed his name by deed poll to Paul Gadd — the real name of the since disgraced pop star, Gary Glitter. In this persona, George told his local newspaper he had won the British Karate Championship by breaking 47 tiles with his bare feet.
Next, he changed his name to Steve Majors. This was an amalgamation of the name of the American actor Lee Majors and that of his most famous role as Steve Austin in the TV series The Six Million Dollar Man.
Under this identity, George managed to pull off an indisputably dangerous stunt of which, he told the Mail last week, he is still proud.
On a windswept night near Nottingham in 1981, before 5,000 spectators, George roller- skated down a ramp and leapt across four double-decker buses, landing in a heap on the far side.
He got up and punched the air as the crowd applauded far below. For once, Barry George was a genuine risk-taking hero. One can well imagine this to have been the best moment of his life. He has asked the Mail for a copy of the film of the event.
There would be other personas and more baseless yarns to impress those he met, particularly young women.
He liked to say he had been a member of the SAS. Indeed, he assumed the identity of Thomas Palmer, one of the SAS soldiers who had taken part in the 1980 Iranian embassy siege, and the Falklands War two years later.
This fantasy reflected his interest in the military and guns.
In December 1981, he enlisted in the Territorial Army. By the time he was rejected the following November he had attended a number of training days in which he was taught to maintain and shoot assault rifles and machine guns.
During this period, George also joined the Kensington and Chelsea Pistol Club as a probationary member. He attended on eight occasions before his application was not accepted.
His Walter Mitty stories and attempts at derring-do masked a darker side to George’s personality. In 1981, he was charged with
‘Barry always stands out like a sore thumb’
indecent assault after grabbing a woman’s breasts in a car park. ‘Paul Gadd, unemployed entertainer,’ was given a three-month prison sentence, suspended for two years. He was acquitted of assaulting another woman, an actress, on the same day.
The following year he sexually assaulted a modern languages undergraduate having followed her to the door of her mother’s home.
At the Old Bailey under the name ‘Steven Majors’, the 22-year- old George pleaded guilty to attempted rape. He was jailed for 33 months, of which he served 18.
Soon after his release he was found by police hiding in bushes in the grounds of Kensington Palace, then the home of Princess Diana. George was wearing a combat jacket and carrying a 12- inch hunting knife and 50 feet of rope. Somewhat surprisingly, he was released uncharged.
In Stand Against Injustice, the book Barry George’s sister Michelle Diskin Bates has written about her brother’s case, she described these paramilitary escapades: ‘Barry’s interest in guns and all things military was born of our family’s long association with the Armed Forces. He’d have loved to be able to follow his dad’s footsteps into the Army or the Royal Marines, he wanted to excel, but even the Territorial Army had to let him go because of his disabilities.’
These eccentricities would be seized upon by the police when they set about building a murder case against him. Now let us move on to the spring of 2000. In his witness statement, given on April 11, George said that on the day of the murder he had been at home all morning before going to a disability charity’s office at 12.30pm-12.45pm. Jill was shot at around 11.30am that day.
It was an alibi, but not a strong one.
Of his attire he said ‘I wore either my dark suit with a white shirt and a red tie and a black overcoat or… jeans.’
When police subsequently searched George’s flat in Crookham Road they found what they thought was an evidential goldmine.
Among the piles of clutter and rubbish were scores of rolls of undeveloped film. These contained 2,248 photographs of 419 young women, largely taken on the streets of West London. George had stalked them, taking pictures surreptitiously and trying to discover where they lived.
Often he would approach his target and try to engage in conversation, or ask her out for a drink. When rebuffed he could become verbally aggressive or simply ignore requests to leave them alone. Some were told ‘I know where you live’.
The Mail can reveal that some 98 women would later come forward to allege they were harassed by George. Some were left with deep psychological scars.
His sister would write: ‘There is no doubt that Barry’s behaviour has been bizarre and unacceptable, but it was normal for him.
‘ Forming relationships is a challenge for most people on the autism spectrum, although this can’t absolve him of responsibility for his actions. ‘Barry always looks suspicious; he stands out like a sore thumb, and he can’t see this himself.’ Among the cache of photographs were those of female celebrities, taken from television s screens. There were none of Jill Dando, however, although police found four copies of the BBC’s Ariel A magazine published the day after the murder, with a portrait of Jill on the cover. There was also a photo of a man — which police say was George — wearing a military respirator and holding a modified blank firing p pistol. ( George admitted in a p police interview that it may have been b him.) The gun was of a kind similar si to that which was used, police p believed, to kill Jill. While police found no firearms among George’s possessions there was a holster for a pistol along with h handwritten lists of blank firing weapons and various military or gun-devoted magazines.
One more piece of evidence would prove in the minds of detectives and prosecutors that George was the killer.
In the pocket of a dark blue Cecil Gee overcoat they allegedly found a tiny grain of firearms discharge residue ( FDR). Forensic tests would allegedly show it to be of the same type that would be fired by the type of gun suspected to have killed Jill. FDR of the same kind was found on the victim’s hair and the cartridge found at the scene.
At 6.30am on May 25, 2000, George was arrested on suspicion of murder.
In interviews he protested his innocence. He said he had no idea who Jill Dando was, nor where she
lived until after the murder. He had never seen her in the flesh. The police did not believe him.
He denied having ever owned imitation firearms — until the police showed him the gun photograph found in the flat. Eventually he admitted to having possessed a number of these weapons, which was confirmed by the testimony of former acquaintances.
On May 29, 2000, he was charged with Jill Dando’s murder.
But what of substance did the Crown have against him?
In the first trial, for legal reasons the jury would not hear of his convictions for sexual assault, his stalking, nor the Kensington Palace incident.
But no one had seen the killing. The witness testimony from Gowan Avenue that day was inconsistent. Only one witness was ‘100 per cent’ sure they had seen George in the street, albeit hours before the murder. The prosecution was an accumulation of sometimes flimsy circumstantial evidence. It had no smoking gun. Indeed, the gun used in the murder has never been found.
Nevertheless, on July 2, 2001, George was found guilty by a 10-1 majority and sentenced to life imprisonment.
His sister, passionate in his defence, had a different take on his apparently damning movements in the aftermath of the murder.
‘Barry has an unhappy knack of always looking furtive and guilty, and an ability to attract attention to himself,’ she wrote.
Doubt was almost immediately cast on the importance of the firearms discharge residue. Was it really the incontrovertible proof as presented? What if there had been another source of contamination? A first appeal against conviction was dismissed in 2002. But in 2007, the Criminal Case Review Commission referred it back to the Court of Appeal. The conviction was quashed and a second trial began in June 2008.
This time the FDR evidence, which had been central to the first conviction, was not admitted as evidence, because subsequent analysis had led to doubts about its importance. The retrial judge, Mr Justice Griffith Willams, was told the speck of residue could have come from other sources.
Again, the jury did not hear about the attempted rape conviction. But some of the evidence of George’s harassment of women was allowed.
William Clegg QC for the defence told the jury that George was intellectually incapable of committing such a ‘meticulously planned, carefully prepared and successfully executed [murder] by a coldblooded killer’.
He described his client as ‘the local loner, the local nutter, the man with serious psychological problems’. In other words, a convenient fall guy for a flawed police investigation desperate to get a conviction.
On August 1, 2008, after two days of deliberation, George was unanimously acquitted. Now a new battle began.
In early 2010, the then justice secretary Jack Straw rejected George’s application for compensation for his wrongful conviction and imprisonment.
In a letter to the claimant’s legal team he explained: ‘It is clear that there was evidence on which a jury, properly directed, could have convicted the proposed defendant.
‘Nothing emerged during the course of the retrial to demonstrate that the proposed claimant was clearly innocent of the offence.’
This decision was rubber- stamped by the new Tory justice secretary Kenneth Clarke. A judicial review in 2013 backed the government’s refusals of compensation.
Mr George’s sister Michelle Diskin Bates said afterwards: ‘In the British justice system you are innocent until proven guilty. To say Barry should prove his innocence after his conviction was quashed in ridiculous. There is no court in the land where you can prove your innocence.’
It is evident from our conversation with Barry George last week that he still harbours hopes of winning his compensation battle. For him, it is a matter of principle.
One person who will not be supporting his continued ‘fight for justice’ is the woman he attempted to rape in 1982.
She was 20 when attacked in the stairwell of a block of flats.
Now a senior Whitehall civil servant in her mid-50s, she told the Mail this week: ‘After he [Barry George] was let out, I saw his sister doing an interview, talking about “poor Barry” and that was a little bit annoying to me. It annoys my husband and friends far more. People in my circle will say they’ve seen this or that about him and they’re incensed. They’re lucky because it isn’t them [it happened to]. I just say “don’t tell me”. ‘I feel that I am getting a life sentence.’ Rape is a very different crime from murder. When we caught up with George last week, he was keen to stress he had not been in trouble for a very long time.
‘ Have the police got an allegation against me recently?’ he asked. ‘Or in the past ten years? What I done in the past many, many moons ago, I can’t erase from the records.
‘But what I can do is to show I have reformed my character.’
As for the Dando case, a 2014 police coldcase review envisaged a time when technological advances could still lead to a forensic breakthrough. Jill’s family, meanwhile, feel the discovery of the murder weapon is still the best hope of progress. Until then, the hunt for Jill’s killer goes on.
The gun used in the murder has never been found ‘I can show that I am a reformed character’