“Two witnesses saw the killer leave the scene of the crime but neither identified him as Mr George.
Their descriptions of the killer loosely fitted Mr George, so they did not completely exclude him.
The only witnesses who did identify Mr George were those who saw him hanging around near Jill Dando’s home some hours before she was murdered.
Thus, the Crown’s task was to conflate the identifications of the pre-kill witnesses with the descriptions of the two scene-of-the-crime witnesses.
The Crown did not rely on a Tommy Cooper “just like that” wave of the hand to do this but established a backdrop to the killing.
First, it claimed Miss Dando was not murdered by a Serbian hitman, an ex-boyfriend, a vengeful criminal convicted by her Crimewatch work, an obsessive and jealous fan, a thief, a crazed junkie. She was murdered by a man with an irrational motive that would appear senseless to anyone normal. A fantasist — they said Mr George was a “fantasist”, a believer in crackpot theories.
Second, they suggested the killer was a loner, not a professional killer or criminal but with knowledge of pistols, and had access to amateurish kinds of weapons (converted blank-firers, or reactivated deactivated guns). This, they said, fitted Mr George.
Third, the Crown’s case was that the killer would have had to have some experience in following and observing women without their being aware.
They said Mr George’s hobby was to track, stalk and sometimes attack women in the Fulham area and there was a mass of evidence.
Fourth, as Miss Dando was not followed when driving to her home that morning (conclusively shown by the CCTV from numerous vantage points) and as her visits to her home were unpredictable (she was living at her fiancé’s house) the killer would have had to hang around her home in Gowan Avenue.
The jury appeared to accept from their questions after retirement that Mr George was in Gowan Avenue the Monday morning that she was killed.
There were four witnesses who identified Mr George as being in Gowan Avenue that morning.
The first, Susan Mayes, was rock solid on identifying him at being opposite Miss Dando’s house at 7am.
The jury was directed by the judge to look at her evidence first and only if they believed it to move on to the other witnesses.
The jury came out on their second day of retirement and asked to see the video of her identification of Mr George and to listen to the evidence she gave in the witness box.
They went back to their deliberations and came out, three hours later, and asked the judge to go through the evidence of the descriptions given by the two scene-of-the-crime witnesses.
As their directions were that they must acquit if they were not sure about Miss Mayes identifying Mr George, this must have meant they had agreed he was in Gowan Avenue that morning.
They then came out at noon on Friday with a question about the other three witnesses who made “partial identifications” of Mr George.
The judge directed that they could use video evidence of the partial identifications as support for Susan Mayes’s identification but they could “not convert two or more partial identifications into a positive identification”. An hour later they reached their verdict.
Crown counsel Jonathon Laidlaw’s last comment in his closing speech was “We suggest that this is no coincidence.” If they did think about the coincidences, the jury clearly did not think they defied common sense.
On the other hand, they may not have seen the subtlety of the Crown’s case. Who knows, except them?
But it doesn’t matter, the die is cast and cannot be un-cast.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2491147/Analysis-Twists-and-turns-that-enabled-Barry-George-to-walk-free.html