Jill Dando murder case will never be solved, says detective

The pragmatic detective: most homicides are solvable but not all

“In most crime dramas and crime fiction books there are no loose ends.  All the clues are there and the criminal is identified by police detectives, usually within a six-part series or a five-hundred page book.  Why?  Because few of us would watch or read them if there was no sense of resolution (or ‘closure’ as the American’s would say) for us at the end and we don’t like that.

Unfortunately, true life, and more importantly ‘true crime’, is not always as straightforward or indeed criminal events as conveniently resolved as fictional representations might suggest – sometimes there is no resolution at the end of a case, however heart-breaking that is.

Mercifully, most serious crimes are solvable and are indeed solved.  The police clear-up (or detection) rate for homicides (murder, manslaughter and infanticide) in England and Wales, generally hovers at around 90%, which is one of (if not the) best of all police forces in the world.  Of the remaining 10%, approximately 5% will be detected within a year of the homicide, leaving 3% that are likely to get solved at some point in the future, but 2% that may never be so.

Why?  Because unfortunately some crimes, in this case homicide, are seemingly impossible to solve.  My research into ten or so cold cases originally from the 1970s to the 1990s where the offenders were eventually identified by DNA evidence analysed in the 2000s, suggests that those homicide investigations which become ‘cold cases’, do so not because of police failings or the incompetence of the criminal justice system to prosecute offenders, but because these cases do not fit with the usual predictable patterns often found in homicides.  For example, in the previously cold cases that I have looked at, the victims and their murderers appeared to be strangers, the murderers led a transient life-style and moved away soon after the murder, and forensic science and CCTV coverage were far less advanced at the time these murders happened than they are now, so investigations relied more heavily on witnesses.

So what’s my point?  It is simply that when police investigations into horrific crimes, such as the murder of television presenter Jill Dando twenty-years ago, do not produce a satisfactory outcome (i.e. the right suspect is charged) then the likely media and public reaction is to blame the police investigation in some way.  I don’t think this is fair.  As I said at the beginning, some crimes are just impossible to solve, however that annoys us viewers and readers of fictional crime."

Read the Jill Dando story