The Murder of Jill Dando (April 26, 1999)

There is a documentary to be aired on Netflix early next week. Most people on this side of the Atlantic Ocean will not know who she was. But in the UK, you would be hard pressed to find anyone who didn’t recognize Jill Dando, and her murder on the front step of her house hit the nation hard.

As Dando was about to put her keys in the lock to open the front door of her home in Fulham, she was grabbed from behind. With his right arm, the assailant held her and forced her to the ground, so that her face was almost touching the tiled step of the porch. Then, with his left hand, he fired a single shot at her left temple, killing her instantly. The bullet entered her head just above her ear, parallel to the ground, and came out the right side of her head.

Bob Woffinden, The Guardian (July 2002)

As my other ‘forensic’ astrologers would note, a 4th House Mars is indicative of the killer. This person is a mystery, mainly because Mars is in the secretive sign of Scorpio. It is also an indication of it being a revenge killing. The identification and conviction of Barry George would later be overturned. So, who did it?

That Finger of God (Yod) pointing at the Moon may be a clue. This act was an emotional response. But why? Was this a spurned lover, a Crimewatch subject, or a Serbian warlord?

On the night of her death, Dando’s BBC colleague Nick Ross said on Newsnight that retaliatory attacks by criminals against police, lawyers and judges were almost unknown in the UK. Forensic examination of the cartridge case and bullet recovered from the scene of the attack suggested that the weapon used had been the result of a workshop conversion of a replica or decommissioned gun. It was argued that a professional assassin would not use such a poor quality weapon. The police therefore soon began to favour the idea that the killing had been opportunistically carried out by a crazed individual. This assumed profile of the perpetrator led to the focus on George.

Cold case reviews by the police after 2008 concluded that Dando was killed by a professional assassin in a “hard contact execution”. Pressing the gun against her head would have acted as a suppressor — muffling the sound of the shot and preventing the killer from being splattered with blood. In 2012, a cold case review named Serbian warlord Arkan as a suspect, although by this time he had died.

Wikipedia

Whomever was responsible for her killing has never been caught (if you eliminate Barry George from their enquiries). In any event, her funeral had all the hallmarks of the assassination of a British royal.

R.I.P. Miss Dando.