A “crazy man” who ran from Jill Dando‘s road into traffic at around the time she was murdered was definitely her killer, a witness has said.
Ken Williams had just placed a bet when he saw the athletic suspect spin off the bonnet of a moving car in Fulham, South West London. Ken was waiting at a pelican crossing with his black labrador Angie when the man appeared approximately 300 meters from where Jill lay dead outside her Gowan Avenue home. He said: “I thought that was the man that killed her because he came from Gowan Avenue. Why would he run across that road like that when the traffic was moving? I thought it was mad.”
Asked if he was sure the man was the killer, Ken, now 83, said: “Yes, definitely.” It comes as the Met Police are being urged to launch a review after we found new evidence linking a Serbian assassin to the unsolved 26-year-old case. A van driver told us he was “80% sure” that Milorad Ulemek was the man he nearly hit close to where Ken was.
And a woman motorist told us last year that she was certain she had seen Ulemek in the same stretch of the Fulham Palace Road on the morning of April 26, 1999.
Jill, 37, was ambushed from behind as she was about to open her front door, forced to the ground and killed with one bullet to the left temple fired at close range. Ulemek, now 57 and serving 40 years in a Serbian jail, led a unit of hitmen and plotted assassinations for late Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic.
Last year we named him for the first time in connection with Jill’s murder after a facial comparison expert said he was identical to a CCTV image of a man filmed near the scene. In the light of our investigation, MPs have called for the case to be reopened and the top barrister who prosecuted Milosevic for war crimes says Ulemek should be investigated.
At the time Jill was shot, UK planes were bombing Serbia and she was one of the most famous faces on TV, presenting BBC shows such as Crimewatch and Holiday.
Within hours of her murder, the BBC took a call claiming it was in response to a Nato attack on a Belgrade TV station. It was feared Jill may have been targeted for fronting a BBC charity appeal for Kosovan refugees. The three witnesses we spoke to are among eight who described seeing a suspicious man near the murder scene at the time. Each one spoke of a white man with dark hair of a roughly similar age, height and build in dark, smart clothing.
Five said he stood out because he was running in a suit, while two said he was sweating heavily. These sightings were the main focus of the police investigation in the weeks after the murder and they released an e-fit of a “sweating man” they were hunting.
Despite raising actions to “trace, interview and eliminate” the man or men from their enquiries, he or they, are still wanted 26 years on. Detectives homed in on Barry George, a local man with severe learning difficulties, nearly a year after the murder.
Crucially, none of the eight witnesses said George was the man they had seen. Ulemek, who speaks good English, is of a similar build, height and hair colour to the descriptions given by the eight.
Ken said it “could have been” him that he saw but he did not get a good view of his face as the man was running away from him. Speaking publicly for the first time since he gave evidence for the defence at George’s Old Bailey trial, Ken, a retired labourer and lifelong Mirror reader, said the suspect was very athletic.
He added: “He was agile, fit, you know. No ordinary person could have done what he did. The car wasn’t stopping, he crouched and bounced off it. The car was still moving and he pushed his hands off the bonnet and spun off it and grabbed a pole. He knew what he was doing.”
Asked if it could have been George he said: “No, definitely not. I’d seen him around before this happened. I didn’t know his name or anything but I had seen him around. He couldn’t do what that man did, run across the road like that. I knew they got the wrong man straight away [when George was charged].”
In a statement Ken gave police five days after the murder, he said: “I was thinking, ‘What’s he running for?’ I could see no bus coming.” While waiting to cross with a woman, one of them said “he must be crazy”, the statement revealed.
Ken told police the man was wearing a dark suit and “some form of jacket” that looked like a bodywarmer. He estimated that he was in his late 30s, 5ft10 or 11, of medium build with black, collar length hair. Ken said recently that the suspect appeared to be wearing a coat that had been turned inside out.
Finger and palm marks later found on the pole he grabbed, four-and-a-half feet from the ground and facing the road, remain unidentified, police files show. Asked if officers should compare them to Ulemek, Ken said: “Yes, definitely.”
Hamish Campbell, the retired detective who led the investigation into Jill’s murder, said last year that by November 1999 he had established that the “sweating man” in the e-fit was not the killer. He added that he was sure the “running man”, if he was another person, was also not the killer.
Mr Campbell said this was achieved by drawing up detailed analysis charts of sightings showing timings and the differences in clothing and descriptions given by the witnesses.
The Met said: “No unsolved murder is ever closed and detectives would consider any new information.”
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