Premium Episode 98: The Mysterious Murder of Jill Dando (Sample)
A top BBC news personality mysteriously gunned down in front of her own home with hand-crafted bullets. This bizarre story from 1999 has been the seed of a multitude of conspiracy theories, including some that live on in 2020 soft-QAnon groups like "Save the Children". Annie Kelly ushers us back to the 90s in the UK to figure out how we got here.
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Welcome, listener, to the 98th premium chapter of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Who Killed Jill Dando episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Annie Kelly, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
This week, Annie Kelly is putting on her X-Files t-shirt and traveling back to the 1990s to examine the unsolved murder of BBC reporter Jill Dando.
To this day, conspiracy theorists are convinced that the British deep state murdered her because she was on the verge of revealing a massive child trafficking conspiracy.
Including the now infamous pedophilic misdeeds of Jimmy Saville.
A major BBC radio and TV personality, the Queen knighted Saville in the 90s, and he died in 2011, a year before it was revealed that he had molested hundreds of children during his frequent charity visits to schools and hospitals.
So was Jill about to pull the plug on the operation?
And is the Queen of England turning a blind eye to all this top-level pedophilia?
In the opinion of our UK correspondent, no comment.
But in mine, yes, absolutely, the Queen is a nonce.
Annie Kelly will also help us understand how the Jill Dando murder continues feeding conspiracy theories today, including those spun by the organizers of soft QAnon Save the Children rallies.
Hello there listeners, it's your British Brexit babe Annie Kelly reporting for duty.
You may have already heard by now that since my last appearance on the podcast, Facebook has undertaken its most extensive crackdown on QAnon groups and pages yet.
This is good news for the world and good news for my own mental health, as since I was a member of pretty much every UK conspiracy group going, I was cracking up slightly reading that stuff every day.
But some Facebook groups remain, most notably, and weirdly, Freedom for the Children UK, one of the central locuses of British QAnon activity, and they're going as strong as ever with 13,000 followers.
Obviously, such groups have had to get a little clever with what they post if they want to avoid the ban hammer, and one image I keep seeing cropping up is an infographic which gives users a list of talking points to bring up to their normie friends without ever mentioning QAnon.
Okay, so it's a pink infographic.
There's some Twitter and social media handles on here, and under the research portion, there's text that reads, Cam Loops, Missing Children, 1964, Jimmy Saville, Ricky Dierman, Prince Andrew, Peter Morrison, Cyril Smith, Margaret Thatcher, Bishop Peter Bull, Pedophile Information Exchange, Justice for Jill Dando, Now, a lot of these points of research are simply names of famous actual or alleged child abuse scandals in the UK.
A common QAnon tactic we're all probably familiar with by now, pointing to legitimate child abuse cover-ups to try and disarm you from the more ludicrous parts of their claims.
But one in particular stood out to me, and that's Justice for Jill Dando.
Because it's one of the most famous British murder cases of my childhood, but I had no idea what it was doing in a list of QAnon talking points.
Now, John Sandoz is one of those stories where I think there's probably going to be quite a disconnect between our British listeners and our listeners from the rest of the world.
So please bear with me, fellow Brits, as I get Johnny Forerunner up to speed.
That's Jake's name.
Yes, I'm ready.
I'm listening.
Jill Dando was a well-known British TV presenter at the BBC in the 80s and 90s.
She presented many of the BBC's flagship shows, including The One and Six O'Clock News, BBC Breakfast Time and Crime Watch.
Crime Watch, as the name might suggest, is a still-running BBC show about various unsolved or ongoing crimes in the UK, which often works closely with the police to either raise awareness or run appeals.
It's something of a staple of naff British telly that your nan watches to get scared at.
Although, to be fair, they do do some genuinely useful work with making that section of the public aware to common scams.
On the morning of the 26th of April 1999, Dando was shot and killed as she was about to enter her home in Fulham, London.
The BBC announced her murder in the 9 o'clock news that night.
Good evening.
A massive police hunt is underway tonight in West London for the killer of Jill Dando, who was murdered earlier today outside her terraced home in Fulham.
Police said tonight she died from a single shot to the head.
Neighbours who found her dying on her doorstep had heard a scream and seen a well-dressed man hurrying away down the street.
The shocking loss of one of Britain's best-known personalities drew many tributes, among them from the Queen and the Prime Minister.
Our Chief News Correspondent, Kate Adie, reports.
It's a quiet, pretty avenue in southwest London, where Jill Dando had lived for several years.
Shortly before midday, some of her neighbours were alerted that something was wrong.
Two women went towards the front door, and saw someone lying on the doorstep.
A third neighbour joined them.
I heard the scream.
You heard a scream?
I did hear a scream.
Did you hear a man's voice or anything like that?
No, no man's voice at all.
Did you hear a shot or did you...?
There was no shots.
From what I would say was a shot, I wouldn't have thought there was a shot, no.
From your assessment, what appeared to have happened to her?
She was obviously attacked, and whether she was attacked with a knife or whether she was attacked with some sort of instrument, but she certainly...
She was obviously very shocked what happened.
She was conscious?
She was talking?
She wasn't conscious when I saw her.
And what did you do?
Dial 999 straight away?
I personally didn't, but the people I was with, the two ladies who also live in the street, dialed the number and had the ambulance services there within 10 minutes.
Taken by ambulance to Charing Cross Hospital, she remained unconscious, having suffered serious head injuries.
Jill Dandler arrived here by ambulance at 12.30pm.
Despite all efforts by hospital paramedics, My apologies, ambulance paramedics and hospital medical staff.
She was certified dead at 1.03pm.
Several people saw a man near the house at the time, saying he was walking briskly, possibly running away.
A man was seen leaving from outside number 29 Gowan Avenue and he ran east down this road towards the Fulham Palace Road.
A man between late 30s and 40s, white, he was carrying a mobile phone, he was clean-shaven and he had dark hair.
The witnesses described him as being well-groomed, possibly wearing a jacket or a suit.
And anybody who knows that man or anybody else who saw that person out there, we would like to speak to.
Completely pilled, Annie.
I'm so pilled.
It sounds like a secret agent fucking murdered her!
It sounds like a hit!
Incredible!
Well-groomed.
Lovely clothes.
Single gunshot to the head, well-groomed.
She was shot with an umbrella!
A manhunt followed, with much public speculation as to the motive of Dando's killer.
Jill Dando's fiancé and ex-boyfriends were quickly ruled out with solid alibis.
Three main theories about Jill's murderer began to prevail.
The first of these centered around Jill's role as a crime watch presenter.
Quite simply that it was a revenge killing by someone from the British criminal underworld that had felt targeted by the show.
Crime watch appeals were known for projecting little-known criminals to national heights of fame, meaning that it wasn't unlikely that someone, somewhere, might have felt that the show, or Dando herself, were responsible for their arrest or conviction.
Evidence for this theory was the supposed professionalism of the killing.
How Dando had been murdered in broad daylight on a residential street with no eyewitnesses and in such a short space of time.
Remember that point because it's going to be important.
The second theory was that Dander had been targeted by a stalker or deranged fan, as most of the media I can find from back then seems to call stalkers.
This one is fairly self-explanatory and not particularly difficult to justify.
Women are at a significant risk of violence if they have a stalker, and famous women are of course much more likely to be subject to stalking simply due to their high profile.
Dando didn't actually even live full time at the house that she was killed at.
Her friends and family said she mostly stayed at her fiancé's house and that she only dropped into her registered address infrequently and often on the spur of the moment.
The killer then could quite plausibly have been waiting outside that house for any length of time until she showed up at the door.
This sounds a lot less like a professional hit and a lot more like someone psychologically obsessed.
The third theory, a popular one at the time that actually ended up being discussed in the subsequent trial, was that Dando was an unwitting victim of a Serbian state backlash against the UK for their role in a bombing by NATO.
As journalist Bob Waffington for The Guardian reported in 2001, The murder, on Monday, April 26, 1999, bore the hallmarks of a ruthless and well-thought-out operation.
And, only three days earlier, British and U.S.
planes had bombed the radio-television Serbia building in Belgrade, killing 16 employees in an attack described by Tony Blair as, quote, entirely justified.
Earlier that month, Dando had made a high-profile BBC appeal on behalf of Kosovan Albanian refugees.
Before long, there was speculation that the two events were linked, Thank you.
