A Typo in the Constitution

Jill Dando, John Yates & Operation Oxborough

Jill Dando was murdered at her own doorstep on 26 April 1999, aged 37. Her murder is, at present time, unsolved. Operation Oxborough, the Met’s investigation into her death, discovered significant evidence that her privacy had been invaded in the 5 months prior to her death. Who was responsible for that activity, and to what extent did the Met discover the customers for that information?

OPERATION OXBOROUGH

There is one major Met operation that I’ve not seen referenced in any of the Leveson-related coverage, a truly-massive investigation that uncovered illegal information harvesting techniques back in Spring 1999. It was the largest murder investigation the Met had ever run. The victim had been targeted by at least one information thief in the months prior to her death. The investigation was Operation Oxborough: the hunt for the killer of Jill Dando. 

The Dando murder was widely reported, and conspiracy theories about it still abound - a non-negligible proportion of those who followed the case still believe she was assassinated by a professional Serbian hitman in revenge for the bombing of a TV station in Belgrade by NATO forces during the Kosovo war. 

Eventually, local loner Barry George stood trial, was convicted, had his 2002 appeal dismissed, before a 2007 appeal ordered a retrial at which he was acquitted. He subsequently sued News International for libel damages, settling for a substantial-but-undisclosed amount. The murder remains unsolved to this day.

Operation Oxborough was meticulous. A single internet user had searched for Jill Dando’s postcode the previous year, viewing her Gowan Avenue address in Fuham on a map using website 192.com - he was interviewed and ruled out of inquiries. The police spoke to everyone in the UK with the surname Dando. All 486 people in her Filofax were spoken to, and 2100 suspects considered based on tip-offs. 

Two witnesses (Belinda Normanton and Richard Hughes) had seen the man considered the prime suspect carrying a mobile phone as he hurried away from the scene. So Police checked 80,000 mobile phone numbers that had been used in the area at around that time, apparently with the help of GCHQ in Cheltenham. 

Within weeks of the the killing, Nick Hopkins in The Guardian (17 June 1999) recognised the importance of ‘pinging’ mobile phones to determine who was in the area: 

“The killer appears to have been carrying a mobile phone, and detectives have contacted the major networks to discover if it is possible to identify the calls that were made in the crucial period between 10.30am and midday on April 26 in south-west London. Again, it could be weeks before the results are known.”

Four weeks before Barry George was arrested, Richard Stott asked in the News of the World (30 April 2000):

“POLICE hunting Jill Dando's killer are sure he was an obsessive loner. Plausible. So why did he consistently use a mobile? That indicates an accomplice”. 

It had been thought that a sweaty professional assassin had missed his rendezvous with a getaway driver (who was in a blue metallic Range Rover) and had instead fled on the Number 74 bus before boarding the London Underground at Putney Bridge station. Stott’s query responds to a shift that had occurred certainly by early 2000, when the 45-officer investigation had got nowhere in eight months. Tangents like the six-month surveillance of suspects like Steve Savva, or the investigation into 'mercenary’ Dean Shelley, had led to naught. The theories of case changed. The police were now looking more into celebrity stalkers and sex pests.

Ultimately, in February 2000 Detective Constable Jonathan Gallagher would find a 'dog-eared index card stored in a West London police station’ (The Times, 3 July 2001) that referenced Barry George’s previous convictions for sexual offences. The same officer had custody of the infamous coat which had a single particle of gunpowder in the pocket, which was so crucial to the second appeal. 

THE INFORMATION CRIMES

But the police weren’t looking for a haphazard stalker. On 10 January 2000, Stewart Tendler wrote an article for The Times headed 'Dando Police Focus on Phone Pest’:

“Three attempts were made by the same stalker to obtain personal information about Jill Dando, as well as possible access to her home, by trying to persuade utility companies to hand over her bills. Scotland Yard detectives working on the Dando murder case disclosed months ago that there had been approaches to electricity and telephone companies by a caller who on one occasion posed as the television presenter’s brother. Last week they confirmed that there had been a third attempt, and they believe that the three were linked.

The calls were made in the months before Dando, 37, was shot dead on the doorstep of her home in Fulham, southwest London, in April. They were made to call centres around the country; the caller who rang BT asked to take over payment of Dando’s account. The caller knew Dando’s ex-directory number. Information contained in the bills would have given that person access to details about her private life, including telephone numbers of friends and business contacts. He may also have been able to use the knowledge to gain access to Miss Dando’s home.”

This was followed up on 19 January 2000 by Ian Hepburn in The Sun:

“Detectives now suspect the mystery surfer could be linked to bizarre calls made to public utility companies from someone claiming to be Jill’s brother. They fear the killer was living in a fantasy world and imagined himself to be part of her life. The man, calling himself James, contacted electricity, gas and water suppliers in the space of 20 minutes, trying to take over payment of the star’s bills. He knew details of her bills including a 14-digit number for her electricity account. The calls last February 1 came the day after a dinner at which she announced her engagement to gynaecologist Alan Farthing.”

By 20 April 2000, the Sun’s Adam Lee-Potter had the following details:

“Detective Chief Inspector Hamish Campbell, who is leading the inquiry, had called for information on loners, gun fanatics or infatuated fans. He said: "People are ringing in with that sort of information - very precise." Earlier, police revealed a bizarre phone call to a woman with the same name as Jill Dando may have been made by the TV girl’s killer.

Jill’s namesake was kept on the line for ten minutes by a "charming” man asking for intimate details about the murdered Crimewatch presenter.  He rang the woman - listed in the phone book as J. Dando - five months before Jill was gunned down outside her home in Fulham, West London, in April last year.“

For the avoidance of doubt, Barry George was never described as 'charming’. He was described by teachers as not being shy, but used conversation to tell you what he thought rather than to exchange ideas. He was diagnosed with Asperger’s shortly before his trial. He was all broadcast, no reception. He was the antithesis of a specialist blagger, or some other such talented inducer of secrets - for example, John Gunning, who worked for Steve Whittamore and was convicted in 2006 in relation to private data blagged from BT. George did not own a mobile phone.

DID THE POLICE UNCOVER NEWSPAPER TARGETING?

There was no shortage of news stories about Dando in the 5 months before her murder (November 1998), especially in the aftermath of her 1 February 1999 announcement of her engagement to Dr Farthing. In the autumn-through-year’s-end of 1998, she had been mooted as a BBC Newsreader, although BBC chiefs were split over whether or not she should be preferred to Huw Edwards. In March 1999, the tabloids ran a variety of stories about her future plans, including that she would be hosting the BAFTA awards, singing Madonna in Celebrity Stars in Their Eyes, and quitting the Holiday programme.

In light of what we now know from the Leveson Inquiry, those phone calls of blaggers and hackers (the day after a major celebrity announcement) sound far more like the daily work of tabloid journalists and private investigators than the actions of an obsessed weirdo with an atypical sensitivity to the news cycle. 

It is, I would submit, simply inconceivable that Operation Oxborough did not look into this pattern of interest into Dando’s life. It is inconceivable that the Met’s biggest ever murder investigation, initially thinking it was investigating a professional hit-job, did not look into this sort of intelligence gathering on a high-profile target. I struggle to believe that they did not trace the identity of those who had commissioned the blagging.

Unlike the Dowler investigation, given that media types were at the top of the list of people with personal and professional jealousies of the victim, it seems unlikely that a murder investigation would have taken at face value claims that this was just being done for scoops. Finding a media colleague with that degree of interest in her life would have heightened, not dampened, suspicions.

At very least, information crimes (which I strongly suspect were sponsored by newspapers) seriously impeded and misled investigators. It muddied the waters of the investigation so that it took almost 10 months to focus on Barry George as a prime suspect, and yet the Operations that followed pointedly avoided prosecuting journalists who had commissioned the blagging. 

POST-OXBOROUGH OPERATIONS

Graeme McLagan (author of "Bent Cops”) wrote in the Guardian (21 Sept 2002) that:

“Documents from Operation N________ reveal that senior officers were keen to bring charges against reporters if any evidence was found that they had committed crimes. However, no such evidence surfaced of criminal offences by any of the reporters or that they knew the origin of the material.”

Operation N_______ ran from May-September 1999, concurrently with the Met's Operation Barbatus (1999-2004) which led to 27 arrests and 15+ convictions, including those of ex-cops Jeremy Young and Scott Gelsthorpe who ran Active Investigations Services (AIS). However, Operation Barbatus was catching information-trading and police corruption on behalf of predominantly non-media clients.

In 2003, Operations Operations Glade (the Met) and Motorman (the Information Commissioner’s Office) in 2003, which found widespread hacking. It was these operations that uncovered the detailed documented invoices of Steve Whittamore submitted to various newspapers. Those books are still not all in the public domain. However, there was never the means to show that journalists had known about the illegal methods used by Whittamore, according to evidence of DCI Gilmour to the Leveson Inquiry.

Outside of the Met, in March 2002, Surrey Police were engaged on Operation Ruby - the investigation into the disappearance of Milly Dowler. Operation Ruby was run by Commander Craig Denholm, now Deputy Chief Constable of that force. On 28 June 2012, it was reported in the Guardian that the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) is now investigating whether or not he failed to act when when he discovered that the News of the World had hacked Milly Dowler’s voicemails. According to Assistant Chief Constable Jerry Kirkby, who gave evidence to the Leveson Inquiry, this follows an internal investigation (Operation Baronet) which found that at least one of Denholm’s meetings with journalists where hacking was raised had been minuted.

YATES OF THE YARD

Denholm had previously worked at the Metropolitan Police, Hampshire Constabulary and the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS). His move back to Surrey in 2009 was from a position working under John Yates, as a Commander in Counter-Terrorism Command. That move preceded by a mere month Yates’ 2009 decision not to look into phonehacking. This has raised more than a few eyebrows. 

John Yates had been asked to look at whether there was a wider, more endemic problem with newspapers hacking into people’s private lives. He decided there was insufficient evidence of that. Yates has since admitted his decision not to investigate the broader claims of hacking was a 'pretty crap one’, saying:

“In fairness in 2005/2006 and even in 2009 did we think hacking was standard practice? I don’t think anybody knew. Now it’s different. There were levels of assurances [that it was restricted to one 'rogue reporter’] from the News of the World, who were not the most cooperative. News International cooperated just enough. They were pretty clever about that. They were just taking it to the limit.“ (emphasis added)

It is possible that the 2005/06 Goodman investigation didn’t immediately suggest more perpetrators. It is possible that operations into corrupt police officers were not common knowledge at Scotland Yard. It is possible that Glade/Motorman were fairly specialist areas of criminality limited to specific investigators, not known to all and sundry. So should perhaps John Yates be forgiven for not knowing what the newspapers could do?

In 1999, John Yates moved to a new job as Staff Officer for Sir Paul Condon, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. I imagine the murder of the presenter of Crimewatch would have received no small share of the attention of the Commissioner’s office. Then in 2000, Yates was assigned to head up the Special Inquiry Squad, or 'Celebrity Squad’ as it was better known - he dealt with the perjury case against Lord Archer, and the rape allegations against John Leslie. Again, it seems inconceivable that he would have remained unfamiliar with Operation Oxborough.

But what is most startling is that on 4 August 2008, 3 days after Barry George’s acquittal at retrial, John Yates was appointed (with two others) to review all of the evidence in the Jill Dando case and decide next steps. Less than a year later - 9 July 2009 - he announced his decision that there would be no further investigation into phone hacking.

Jill Dando was targeted by the tabloids before her death in 1999. Members of the Royal Family had been targeted in 2005. And yet when Yates was asked to review the Dando files in 2008, he didn’t recognise the behaviours of professional blaggers? When he was asked to make a decision about phone hacking in 2009, he didn’t think there was cause to think this extended beyond the Mulcaire & Goodman?

John Yates might never have been privy to Operations N______ and Barbatus, might have overlooked specialist information crimes Operations Glade and Motorman, and might have believed the NotW about the limited scope of Goodman/Mulcaire. What I really struggle to believe is that having been in charge of an evidence review of the highest-profile unsolved murder in the Met, he did not remember the clear evidence that Jill Dando had been a target and wonder about the scope of the problem accordingly. And in light of that, his perverse decision of July 2009 makes even less sense.

Jill Dando’s murder is still unsolved. It seems highly likely that she was targetted by newspapers before her death. The Met either failed to uncover this, or did not act to stop it happening to others. Whilst the investigations into police corruption that followed are to be welcomed, when Surrey police are facing an IPCC investigation for failing to act on phone hacking in 2002, it seems reasonable to ask what the Metropolitan Police Service knew, and when.

Thoughts welcome - I’m @Greg_Callus on Twitter.

• 28 October 2012
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