You may have seen some of the recent publicity for this BBC1 documentary The Murder of Jill Dando , in which the detective in charge of the original investigation into her death, Hamish Campbell , states that he doesn’t think the mystery will ever be solved. Dando was a 37-year-old TV presenter and already an established celebrity when a man wearing a dark coat (probably) shot her dead on the front step of her home in London. There are many theories still circulating about why this famous woman with no known enemies came to her end. As one who worked with her while she was presenting BBC Breakfast news in the early 1990s, I can, for what it’s worth, support the many other testimonies to her professionalism and easy-going manner, a welcome contrast to some of the more imperious “talent” around the BBC at the time. She was very charming, and apparently even tried to be pleasant to her stalkers, themselves also of interest to the police.Her work on Crimewatch UK pointed to a vengeful criminal; her personal life yielded few clues, but that hasn’t stopped the speculation; while the death of the “Jill Dando of Serbia” during a Nato bombing of a TV station in former Yugoslavia suggested another motive for her “assassination”, as the press sometimes described it. The only person arrested and convicted of her murder, Barry George, later had his conviction quashed and was acquitted after a retrial. From extras.This sensitively produced documentary, directed by Marcus Plowright, eloquently explains the detective’s pessimism, with the help of interviews with Dando’s friends and family, as well as Campbell’s original police decision logs, which document every important judgment he made during his time handling the case. Filmed in naturalistic style, dwelling on the interviewees during their questioning, Campbell is really the central character here, and he spends a good deal of time explaining the complexity and weight of evidence they had to sift through: “We had over 2,000 people named as potential suspects or responsible. Some actions to trace and eliminate one person might take a day. One action might take two weeks. But there’s thousands of them and that’s the issue of managing stranger homicides – you’re looking at it and thinking, how do you know which one is right then?”That, at least partially, accounted for the fact that George, though later acquitted in any event, took a year to be questioned. By the way, George – or a representative of his such as his lawyer – doesn’t appear in the film beyond archive footage of his going in and out of court, plus some bizarre images of him from before his arrest.