"Michelle Diskin was in the front room at her home in Cork listening to the morning radio when she first heard that her brother Barry George had been charged with Jill Dando's murder.
She says she felt numb - completely numb.
'I thought: "No, no, it can't be." 'I wanted to phone my mother, but she is a very quiet and private person. How do you ring your mother and say: "Mum, has my brother been arrested for murder?" she says.Michelle, a deeply religious woman, finally decided to phone and ask if she should pray for her brother. It seemed a more gentle way of dealing with the appalling news. 'Mother said: "It's all rubbish. He didn't do it. It will die down". I didn't know what to do and said to myself: "Could Barry have done this?"
'
Could I see anything in the Barry I knew that might be guilty of this - and I couldn't. I thought about his behaviour. He can be aggravating. But no, not murder.'
But on July 2, last year, Barry George, 42, an educationally-subnormal fantasist with an IQ of just 76, was found guilty of the murder of BBC TV presenter Jill Dando.
She was killed with a single shot to the head. The gun was pressed so hard against her skull that the imprint of the muzzle remained on her scalp afterwards.
There was, however, not one overwhelming piece of evidence to link George to the crime. In the year since the case ended, no other criminal verdict has excited quite so much interest and there has been an endless debate over whether he was indeed guilty 'beyond reasonable doubt'.
Last month, an appeal against his conviction was rejected by three of the country's most senior judges.
Michelle continues to insist upon her brother's innocence. She is determined to take the case to the House of Lords and, should that fail, to Europe, believing his conviction to be a dreadful miscarriage of justice.
In fairness, she doesn't believe her brother to be an angel, but she insists that does not make him a murderer.Michelle is a warm, articulate woman with a strong sense of right and wrong. Being in the public eye does not sit easily with her. She is, by nature, a home-builder, a wife and mother to three teenage children.Their terraced family house near Cork is tidy, comfortable and perfumed with scented candles. It is a tactile household where hugs and kisses are easily exchanged.
Her own London childhood had been tough, often violent. In her late teens, she moved to Ireland to work with mentally disabled children. She had little need to dwell upon her past - until her brother's arrest.
Initially, Michelle believed the courts would clear her brother and she resolved not to speak out on his behalf. Indeed, she didn't want to drag her family into the unholy mess, and, in any case, no direct evidence linked her brother to the crime.
No confession. No apparent motive. No eyewitnesses. No murder weapon was ever found.
There was virtually no scientific evidence, except for minute traces of firearm discharge found in one of George's pockets and described as a 'close match' to particles found in Dando's hair. There was also a risk, acknowledged at the trial, that even this evidence was contaminated.
The prosecution case seemed to be simply that George lived locally and was an oddball with unhealthy obsessions. He was said to be 'fixated' with Princess Diana and to stalk women.
He had been convicted, many years earlier, of attempted rape and impersonating a police officer. He used different names (he was arrested as Barry Bulsara, using the real surname of one of his idols, Freddie Mercury) and lived in a world of fantasy. He was said to be 'obsessed' with guns.
George also happened to be near Dando's Fulham home on the morning of her murder. His own home, a chaotically untidy flat, happened to be just a few streets away.
Michelle says: 'Barry was in Belmarsh Prison on remand when I first saw him. I had to see him through a glass screen. It was like being in a confessional box. There was a dark, dingy glass between us and you could hardly hear a thing.'He looked terribly vulnerable and scared. Almost the first thing he said was: "Shhh, don't talk."
'Then he said: "I have not done what they are saying."
'I was asking questions and he kept telling me to talk to my solicitor. I cried. I think he did too. He said he was sorry that he had put us in this. I couldn't touch him but I wanted him to know he was being supported.
We held up our hands against the glass. I felt utterly overwhelmed that this could be happening to us. At each step along the way I thought it would be stopped. It's unbelievable it wasn't.
'There was no evidence. They just lumped everything up and made out he was one big psycho. Timeframes were forgotten, facts were distorted to make a picture - a very bad picture.
'The police needed somebody, and Barry looked, on the surface, as if he would disappear and nobody would fight for him.
'That's why I have to support him. I have always loved him very much.'
Michelle was the eldest of three children, raised in a cramped highrise flat in White City, West London. The bath was in the kitchen and she shared a bedroom with both her sister, a mentally handicapped epileptic two years her junior, and Barry, the baby of the family.
It was an uneasy household with frequent violent rows. 'Barry and Susan were always very special because I had to look after them when I was small.'
There were a lot of pressures living in such close quarters with people on both sides of you and underneath you. My parents fought all the time so I would take the kids out - sometimes for hours on end.
'
It was very difficult. Because Susan had very definite problems that were so big, Barry's were pushed to one side.
'
He was a gorgeous baby and, as a boy, was into cars and buildings. He sometimes got into trouble, but he could never seem to understand why.'He couldn't concentrate for long periods of time and was taken out of school and sent to special school. But his disability didn't become really apparent until he got older.
'Barry has a rigidity of thought. He gets a thought and isn't able to change tack. If you changed the topic of conversation, he wouldn't be able to stop focusing on the first one.'
Michelle was 12 when their parents separated. She says it was a relief, an end to the dreadful rows. Her relationship with her mother was not easy and by the age of 15 she was living with her father.
'My mother was warmer earlier in the marriage,' she says. 'And less warm towards the end of it.'
When Barry asked to move in with his father, he was refused. 'I'm sure Barry saw it as a rejection. Probably the first of many,' she says.By the age of 18, Michelle was living in Ireland with her grandmother. She kept in contact with her family and her brother visited for a holiday. 'He was 14 and so sweet I didn't want to send him back. I remember he used to hang about this place called Barry's Tea and wanted to work there in the yard but he was too young.
'But he would pester people, so this man sent him home with a letter saying he would take him out as his helper if I said it was OK. He said that he could see Barry needed special attention.
'The man gave Barry some pocket money and he came back with sausages, milk and bread so he could help with his keep.'
Michelle displays a certain pride when she repeats this story. It becomes clear that achievements which most people would take for granted were enormously special when accomplished by Barry.
For example, she tells how he arrived at her wedding 'all by himself' and had 'even hired his own suit so he wouldn't show me up'. She saw him handing out buttonholes to guests and was 'proud'.By this time, he had started to create fantasies about himself and, intriguingly, she recalls a relative having to steer him away from talking about the SAS.
During their phone calls, Barry would talk of his obsession about being a stuntman. He tried to join the Territorial Army under the name Steve Major.
'
It seemed perfectly innocent. He said he'd chosen it because the Six Million Dollar Man had such a name. When he later changed his name to Barry Bulsara, it wasn't something I was happy with. But he said he really loved Freddie Mercury and he was doing it as a tribute.
'
He wanted to be a special person. He wanted to have friends. I can only speculate that these inventions were ways of opening a conversation. Let's face it, it's a bit more of a conversation grabber than "I'm classified disabled and I can't do anything".'The prosecuting lawyers made much of George's fantasies. 'They tried to turn him into the Anti-Christ,' says Michelle. 'They spoke about his so-called obsession with guns after joining the Territorial Army. But the TA realised he had problems and Barry didn't handle guns. The only ones he's had are a starter pistol and a plastic gun that was stolen and broken.
'
They said he had an obsession with Diana and stalked and photographed women. It was mentioned that he was discovered by police in Kensington Gardens with a rope and a knife dressed in Army gear. He told me that he was "doing manoeuvres".
'
But he was never charged and there are no records of him being in the grounds by Diana's apartment as has been suggested.
'Even being "on manoeuvres" in the park, is not the normal behaviour of a grown person, but still pretty ordinary if you think like a child. He was going through his ex-SAS stage then - and it was almost 20 years ago.
'When police examined his flat they found a pile of 736 newspapers on the floor. Of course, there were some articles about Jill Dando, but there were more about Manchester United, although he's a Fulham supporter.
'There were also never any photos of women pinned up on the wall as has been suggested. The police found rolls of undeveloped film - 2,597 photographs showing 419 women.
'
He wasn't using the photographs to satisfy some strange obsession. He was playing a role - that's all to do with the childish part of his life. And he'd just thrown the rolls of film in the corner - as he dropped everything in his flat and forgot about things.
'
When Barry was in custody, the police had nothing to charge him with. They knew he'd been convicted of attempted rape in 1983, which he'd owned up to at the time, but he wouldn't admit to Jill Dando's murder.
'They were allowed to keep him for extra time, but still he wouldn't say he was responsible.
'If
you know my brother, he's not capable of not caving in under that sort of pressure. But he does know when he's done something wrong and when he hasn't. The next thing that happened was that a particle (of firearm discharge) turned up in a coat - it was the only reason they were able to charge him.
'But the integrity of the coat had been corrupted. It was put in an evidence bag, sealed, carted away from his flat, photographed on a dummy in a police studio with an officer's shirt underneath and put back in the crate before it was examined by forensics.
'And as far as identification is concerned, there was only one person who said she was certain she saw Barry at 7.30am. She said she saw him by a car, but Barry can't drive.
'
Barry has been described as a loner. But he's not. He was always out seeing people. He had friends, people who loved him - who accepted Barry with his differences. They didn't know about the attempted rape, but that happened almost 20 years before.He paid his price to society for what he did and he'd turned his life around. And, despite his disabilities, he had made a life for himself. He discussed his friends and would say: "There's a guy down the road and he's my friend. I wash his car for him." After he was charged, I started piecing things together.'There was a big, motherly Jamaican woman who lived across the road. When I went to see her, I could see she really loved Barry.
'She was really pleased to see me and said she hadn't known if anyone was going to help him. She was going to get some friends together to stand outside Hammersmith police station with placards saying: "Free Barry Bulsara."
'She's adamant he didn't carry out the crime.'
Michelle gathers strength from such support.
She knows her brother, not as a psychopath, but as 'quiet, softly-spoken and wellmannered'.
During medical examinations before his trial, it was discovered that George had suffered severe brain damage from a physical injury while in his 20s. Michelle says he does not know how it occurred, although she conjectures that perhaps it was something to do with his 'Steve Majors' phase.
In the early Eighties, he was registered disabled and suffered increasingly from epileptic fits. If the problem was not properly controlled he would often stumble around.
Michelle is not convinced that he would have had the ability to plan or dexterity to carry out such carefully executed crime and getaway. Indeed, the case confounded police for a year before Barry's arrest.'I knew right from the beginning, from his whole demeanour that he's innocent. I could tell when I saw him in Belmarsh - through his body language, his eye contact - before and after his conviction.
'He said to me: "They had to have someone. I didn't do this and I don't know why I'm here. But you do realise I am here for the rest of my life?"
'I said he wouldn't be - that the sentence would be reduced and he replied: "Oh no, not for me. I can't ever say I'm sorry for doing it - because I didn't do it."
'At night, things play over and over in my mind. When you realise this is a miscarriage of justice, it becomes enormous. They have grabbed Barry's life and taken it away from him.
They have also taken my life.
'It wasn't an easy thing to decide to become vocal. But I have to stand up for Barry's rights. I'm determined to at least do that.'
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-135212/My-brother-didnt-kill-Jill.html#ixzz5DQUKMFv4 
