Many people are convinced to this day that Barry George kept a shrine to Jill Dando. He didn’t. People think he was obsessed with her and clipped articles about her from the press. He was not and did not. In fact the prosecution at both of his trials struggled to prove that he even knew she lived near him.

One witness was produced who testified that, long before the murder, he stood at the end of Gowan Avenue, Miss Dando’s address, one day and remarked: “A very special lady lives down there.”

That was meant to link him with Miss Dando, and that was about as good a link as could be made.

What is certain, though, is that Mr George was the best available suspect for this sensational murder. He was local and he was very odd.

He had an interest, albeit a wacky one expressed some years previously, in guns. He was strange around women, some of whom, with some reason, found him creepy or even sinister. And, above all, after Miss Dando’s death he behaved very strangely.

But being the best available suspect is not the same thing as being the culprit, as the Old Bailey jury decided yesterday. A jury needs to be satisfied that the person in the dock actually committed the crime, and in this case not only was there no motive, there was also no murder weapon, nothing at all to locate Mr George at the scene and no plausible modus operandi.

More important, as a matter of law, was the identification evidence.

The murder occurred at 11.30am. The best evidence linking Mr George to the scene was one witness who picked him out of an identity parade as a man she had seen in Gowan Avenue at 7am, 4½So if the case was so feeble, how was he convicted? I remember, early in the trial, a seasoned Old Bailey hand remarking that he thought Mr George would be found guilty, because “in these celebrity cases, the benefit of the doubt always goes to the celebrity”.

What he meant was that the odds were against Mr George because the prosecution would benefit from sympathy for Miss Dando. I am still not convinced that was the whole explanation, but it was probably a part of it. All these years later that celebrity factor has certainly waned.

I don’t see grounds for criticising the police. They would not have been doing their job if they had not arrested him, so suspicious was his behaviour after the death. It was not their decision that the evidence justified a prosecution but that of the Crown Prosecution Service, which can reasonably argue that the original conviction shows they did not act unreasonably.

If there is something here that we need to learn, it may be that, in cases when we are about to lock up the local weirdo for a crime, we ought to think twice. And if a celebrity is involved, we ought to think three times.

Brian Cathcart is Professor of Journalism at Kingston University and author of Jill Dando: Her Life and Death

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