BARRY George's name was just one of 2100 possible suspects in the Jill Dando murder investigation. Detectives found that about 140 people had an unhealthy interest in or obsession with the TV presenter.
Officers involved in the year-long investigation - code-named Operation Oxborough - faced a mammoth challenge, and in the end spoke to more than 5000 people and took more than 2400 statements.
However, their biggest obstacle was the lack of an apparent motive and the fact that there were no eye-witnesses and no clues left at the scene.
Conspiracy theories abounded. One suggested Miss Dando, a presenter on the BBC's Crimewatch UK, may have been shot by a contract killer as part of some form of underworld vendetta.
Another said a Serbian warlord may have ordered her assassination by a hitman in London after she made an appeal on behalf of Kosovan refugees shortly before her death.
During the trial, George's defence team suggested that Miss Dando was shot by a Serbian assassin in reprisal for the Nato bombing of television studios in Belgrade three days earlier.
Other suggested lines of inquiry ranged from Mafia hitmen to spurned lovers, ex-boyfriends and associates. There also were a number of hoax claims of responsibility.
Officers received about 7000 separate items of information. In the first two days after the murder, 200 males were reported as responsible.
Details of almost 8000 people were recorded and the details of more than 1200 vehicles were taken. Details of almost 7000 telephone owners or subscribers were noted.
Police examined more than 3600 items of property and more than 2000 documents.
More than 80,000 mobile phone numbers were identified as having been in use within the Gowan Avenue area at about the time of the murder.
Detectives spoke to most of the 486 people who appeared in Miss Dando's organiser.
They also examined about 14,000 e-mails received by the BBC before and after her death, as well as footage from 191 CCTV cameras in the Hammersmith and Fulham areas of west London.
Detective Superintendent Hamish Campbell, who led the investigation, said: ''The amount of information coming in was reaching unimaginable proportions.''
Officers followed up the most credible suspects and eliminated them from their inquiry.
They were first given the name Bulsara - which George had used - on May 12, 1999, but did not see him until April 11 the following year.
From then on, he was put under surveillance until he was finally arrested on May 25 last year.
Scientific evidence became a pivotal feature in the murder trial. A single speck of remains from a firearm was found in George's coat pocket lining.
The coat, which was seized after his arrest, linked him to the shooting of Miss Dando on her front doorstep, according to the prosecution.
But the defence said the particle - less than a half of a thousandth of an inch in size - was utterly unreliable as evidence.
The speck, invisible to the naked eye, could have got there when police inexplicably and ''stupidly'' took the coat to a police photographic studio before it went to the forensic lab for analysis, the defence said.
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