A loner and fantasist but not a calculating killer

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Saturday August 9 2008

In our report on Barry George's case, we mentioned a relative of George's who we said had died after swallowing her tongue during an epileptic fit. Epilepsy Action, formerly the British Epilepsy Association, assures us that it is not physically possible to die from swallowing your tongue during an epileptic seizure. It is possible for the tongue to fall back and block the airway after the seizure has stopped. To prevent this, the person who has had the seizure should be put into the recovery position so that the tongue falls to the side. Under no circumstances should anything be put in the person's mouth.

When Jill Dando was murdered in broad daylight on the doorstep of her west London home, Scotland Yard came under immediate pressure to find the killer. She was the face of television's Crimewatch programme, associated with tracking down murderers rather than being their victim.

Her death was front page news and dominated television bulletins, but it was also the clinical nature of the attack that helped turn the hunt for her killer into a media circus.

Dando was killed by a single shot to the head, a method often used by professional hitmen. Witnesses remember hearing her scream just after she turned up at her Fulham home at 11.30am. They found her body outside the house, the keys to her BMW convertible still in her hand.

Dando was at the height of her fame, co-presenting the BBC's 6 o'clock news and a regular face on prime-time television. She was due to get married within six months.

The reasons for the killing triggered countless rumours - a jilted lover, an obsessive fan, mistaken identity, even a Serbian hitman angered because she had made a recent appeal on behalf of Kosovan refugees. But despite a £150,000 reward, it took more than a year before Barry George was arrested. Then the more police delved into his background, the more they began to suspect him.

He had an obsession with guns and celebrity, a reputation for stalking women, previous convictions for attempted rape and indecent assault and an erratic relationship with reality. He lived near the TV presenter in Fulham and was known as "the local nutter," a fantasist who had pretended to be the cousin of Freddie Mercury, the lead singer with Queen. He had posed as an SAS soldier and tried to pass himself off as a professional stuntman.

During his original trial, the jury heard that 13 women had given statements to the police saying George had stalked them; there was evidence that he had pestered others who lived close to his flat. But was he a killer?

Born in Hammersmith in 1960, Barry Michael George was the youngest of three children of Alfred, a lorry driver and special constable in the Metropolitan police, and Margaret, who divorced when George was 13.

His eldest sister, Michelle, who lives in Ireland, has been a loyal campaigner on his behalf, attending court supportively. His other sister died at the age of 28 after swallowing her tongue during an epileptic fit; George also suffered from epilepsy. At the age of 14 he was placed in a council boarding school in Sunningdale, Berkshire, for boys with "emotional and behavioural difficulties". He told other children there to call him Paul Gadd, the real name of the now disgraced pop singer Gary Glitter.

After leaving school, his first and only job, in the late 70s, was a short-lived one as a messenger with the BBC at Television Centre in Wood Lane. He remained a regular reader of the BBC's in-house magazine, Ariel, and had four copies of the memorial issue for Dando. He would visit the centre to pick up copies. When police eventually raided his lodgings, the BBC link was one of the factors that raised their suspicions.

By the early 80s, George had already come to the attention of the police. He was charged and acquitted of an indecent assault in 1980 but convicted on a similar charge shortly afterwards. He received a three-month suspended prison sentence. He was later accused of rape, which he denied, although he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge.

In 1983, he appeared at the Old Bailey under the name Steve Majors (Lee Majors played Steve Austin in the TV series the Six Million Dollar Man) and was convicted of attempted rape and sentenced to 33 months. He served 23 before being released. He had earlier been found by the royal protection squad hiding in the bushes at Kensington Palace, wearing khaki, carrying a knife and a length of rope. He never explained why he was there and he was not charged with an offence because officers swiftly linked him to the sex attack.

While living in DHSS accommodation in west London in the 80s, George told a fellow resident he had been in the SAS and showed him a replica Heckler & Koch hand-held machine gun and a blank-firing Colt 45 pistol. On one occasion he had allegedly staged a mock attack on a friend's home dressed in a combat jacket and balaclava, during which he had fired a blank round from a handgun.

George married a Japanese student in May 1989 but four months later his wife went to the police claiming he had assaulted her. He was arrested and charged but the case was dropped before it reached court. The marriage ended.

In December 1981, he joined the Territorial Army, 10th battalion Parachute regiment, based at White City, using the name Steve Majors, but he was discharged the following November. He also applied to join the Royal Green Jackets

 and the Field Ambulance Volunteers and would later claim to have fought in the Falklands.

In August 1982, he joined the Kensington and Chelsea gun club and attended eight sessions but then his application for full membership was rejected.

In his flat, after his arrest on the Dando murder, police found a photograph of him in a balaclava and gas mask and holding a gun, probably a firing pistol. He was also a keen collector of brochures and magazines for military kit suppliers and gun dealers. When Princess Diana died in 1997, George was one of the first mourners outside Westminster Abbey. He left his tribute message outside Buckingham Palace, signing it "Barry Bulsara, Freddie Mercury's cousin".

The police investigation was led by Detective Chief Superintendent Hamish Campbell, one of Scotland Yard's most respected detectives. When his team started interviewing George, they found his answers inconsistent. When scientists reported a tiny trace of firearms residue in the pocket of his jacket, that seemed to be the final piece of the jigsaw that would make the case against him.

At the original Old Bailey trial in 2001, the prosecution relied on four categories of evidence. One had been identification evidence, provided by neighbours of Dando, which placed George near the scene on two occasions on the day of the murder; the second was the "repeated lies" told by George in police interviews; the third category was a supposed attempt to create a false alibi; and the fourth was that tiny particle of firearms discharge residue (FDR) found in his overcoat about a year after the murder. The jury, swayed by the firearms residue evidence, convicted him and he was jailed for life.

George's appeal against the conviction was turned down in 2002 but he took his case to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) which referred it again to the court of appeal. Last year, the appeal court heard from expert witnesses from the forensic science service that "it was, in fact, no more likely that the particle had come from a gun fired by George than that it had come from some other source".

The lord chief justice, Lord Phillips, observed that "if this evidence had been given to the jury at the trial, there is no certainty that they would have found Barry George guilty. For this reason his conviction had to be quashed."

The CPS decided to proceed with a retrial. "We looked for any 'show-stoppers'," said a senior prosecutor, "and there weren't any."

In the latest trial, the firearms evidence was excluded by the judge. The only piece of forensic evidence that could link him to Dando's murder was a single fibre of grey-blue polyester discovered on the raincoat worn by the BBC television presenter, which allegedly came from a pair of C&A trousers found at his home.

Having chosen not to expose George to cross-examination, his defence lawyers targeted the blue polyester fibre. They challenged the significance of the discovery, claiming the thread could have come from another source.

George's lawyers also brought in evidence from a neuropsychiatrist to dispute prosecution suggestions that he showed signs of "histrionics, paranoia and narcissism" and had a personality disorder.

Professor Michael Kopelman implied George could not have been as calculating as alleged. "[He] described to me that he can be aware of what's going on around him but he just can't respond," the professor said. There was a family history of epilepsy as well as "severe cognitive impairment" and he had an IQ of 75, in the lowest 5% of the population, Kopelman added. "I am sure Mr George has inherited a gene or genes which pre-dispose him to epilepsy or cognitive impairment," he said.

He scored even lower, in the bottom 1%, in memory and "executive" tests the professor said. These were "measures of his ability to plan and organise himself and to carry out or execute various things".

One senior Scotland Yard source said the not guilty verdicts posed two dilemmas for the force: how do they limit the damage to its reputation, and how they could tear up all their work so far and effectively admit they had pursued the wrong man for eight years.

"It's not good for us. The fact the jury took 13 hours to acquit means they were utterly convinced he was not guilty," the source said. "The fact he has previous bad character will help protect the organistaion and weather the storm."

The source added: "Are they really going to say to Hamish Campbell, 'we're going to disembowel your investigation and see where it went wrong'? ... It probably needs an external force to reinvestigate."