Profiling is meant to be unprofessional. But if you were an overstretched police-force with the whole country baying for blood because its cherished favourite TV star had just been murdered, you'd find yourself profiling along with the worst of them.
And so we have prime suspect Barry George, who's got enough red flags on him to start a revolution. A lowlife misfit with a history of stalking and indecent assault, living alone in a nearby flat full of handguns and pictures of glamour-queens, having even been (somehow) accepted in a parachute battalion, although mentally sub-normal and epileptic to boot. And most suspicious of all, he had spent the following day trying to establish an alibi, before the police had even knocked on the door.
All of that, however, was just circumstantial. The hard evidence came down to one virtually-invisible speck of gunpowder in a coat-pocket, which was enough to get him put away for life. But it also invited claims of contamination, which eventually saw him walk free, though without the payout that goes with proof of innocence. For my money, Barry George still remains the likeliest killer. But we have heard some conflicting theories about whether the hit was carried out by a deranged amateur striking at random or a well-drilled professional assassin following orders.
As always, the uncertainty throws up some colourful scenarios, all too tempting to believe, yet also easy to demolish. One likelihood would have been a jealous ex-boyfriend or failed suitor, but extensive interviewing drew blank on this score.
Then there was the Serbian dimension. The bombing of Belgrade was underway at that moment, and Jill herself had appealed on TV for the Kosovo Relief Fund. The police had considered this angle, but rejected it, apparently because Balkan terrorists didn't usually target women (that certain Archduchess in Sarajevo being the exception, presumably). Our present investigator Julie Etchingham is intrigued by a sequence of three anonymous phone-calls to the BBC in the right sort of accent, declaring "We butcher back!" and revealing that "the next one will be Tony Hall" (the future Lord Hall, who was immediately bundled off to safety). She thinks this qualifies as the missing 'boast' that normally follows a terror-spectacular. In my book, it just sounds like a piece of pantomime, as do various other claims about underworld connections.
This leaves two issues that I find vaguely unsettling. One is the location, where nobody expected her to be on that morning, except her fiancé Alan Farthing. (This might support the case against Barry George as the random operator.) And what are we hearing now, well after this film showed? Possibly the most alarming revelation of all. For it turns out that Jill had been researching no less a figure than Jimmy Savile, whose sainthood she was starting to question...
