Jill helped solve so many crimes yet her killer is still free.. surely it's time to start up the investigation again

TV colleague urges Met take fresh look at Crimewatch star's murder

- JENNIE BOND

The terrible irony is that Jill helped solve so many dreadful crimes.

Crimewatch, the programme she presented for four years until the day she was so brutally murdered - was integral to police investigations into hundreds of felonies.

And yet, 25 years after she was shot dead on her own doorstep, her killer has not been found.

That's why I think we absolutely owe it to my friend and colleague to investigate every possible avenue that might unlock the mystery of who fired the shot that left the whole country shocked.

The new lead uncovered by the Mirror this week is chilling and may prove hugely significant.

Could it really be that Jill's assassin is currently locked up in a Serbian jail? Was her killing the appalling consequence of her noble decision to front a television appeal to help Kosovan refugees from the Balkan war?

Was it perhaps also intended as vengeance for the NATO bombing of a Serbian TV and radio station in Belgrade a few days earlier? The BBC received menacing phone calls after her murder suggesting as much, but the truth has never been established.

The Mirror's investigation centres on a man called Milorad Ulemek, a twice-convicted murderer who is serving 40 years in a Serbian jail.

At the time Jill was killed, he was the head of a feared squad of hitmen targeting opponents of the dictator Slobodan Milosevic.

A key witness in Jill's murder has now identified Ulemek as likely to be the man she saw "running for his life" down Fulham Palace Road in the direction of the Tube station shortly after 11.30am on the day of the killing.