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THE full details of the sinister world of Barry George were revealed last night as he began a life sentence for the murder of Jill Dando.

An Old Bailey jury took five days of deliberations to decide by a 10-to-1 majority that warped George, a policeman's son, gunned down the TV presenter in cold blood on the doorstep of her home.

The verdict in a packed Court Number One was witnessed by a sombre Alan Farthing, her fiance, and her brother Nigel Dando.

Unemployed George, 41, of Crookham Road, Fulham, south-west London, denied the murder.

It emerged that George fantasised about the SAS, had a history of stalking women - and once served a prison sentence for attempted rape.

He was even once arrested in combat gear crouched in bushes outside the Kensington Palace home of Diana, Princess of Wales.

George had a 15ft rope coiled around his chest and a commando knife strapped in his belt, although he was not charged over the 1983 incident.

But, on April 26, 1999, he lay in wait for BBC Crimewatch presenter Miss Dando, 37, and ambushed her as she returned to Gowan Avenue from seeing her fiance.

Terrified, she screamed for up to five seconds before George fired a single bullet into her head at point-blank range in an attack that shocked the nation.

The day after his military-style assassination, George returned to the scene to lay a bunch of flowers by the police cordon, claiming to represent the local community.

Yesterday, he sat staring straight ahead in the dock, in baggy jeans and a casual blue shirt and tie - a Bible in his hand - as the jury foreman read out the guilty verdict to gasps from the public gallery, where his sister Michelle Diskin sat stunned.

Sentencing George to life imprisonment, Mr Justice Gage branded him "unpredictable and dangerous" and said he had deprived Miss Dando's fiance, family and friends of a much-loved and popular personality.

He added: "Why you did it will never be known. It is probable you can give no rational explanation."

George was said later to be devastated. His sister, Ms Diskin emerged outside the Old Bailey to insist the wrong man had been convicted. "There will be an appeal. Justice was not seen today," she said.

But the verdict was welcomed by consultant gynaecologist Mr Farthing and Miss Dando's friends and colleagues at the BBC.

Mr Farthing said outside court that her friends and family hoped that the end of the trial would act as "some kind of milestone" in coming to terms with the loss of "this extraordinary person who we all admired and loved".

Jill's brother Nigel praised the police's "trem-endous endeavour". Of the killer, he said: "I have no feelings about Barry George."

Nick Ross, Miss Dando's co-presenter on Crimewatch, said he felt "no bitterness" towards George, adding: "Jill herself was never one to demonise offenders. In fact, in some ways I feel sorry for him."

The eight-week trial focused on a pivotal piece of forensic evidence.

The prosecution claimed that a single speck of firearms residue found in George's coat pocket lining linked him to the shooting.

But George's defence team said the particle less than a half of a thousandth of an inch in size was completely unreliable as evidence.

The jury was not told that George had a criminal record, which marked him out for police attention long before Miss Dando's murder.

When he was 22 he was convicted at the Old Bailey of attempting to rape a language student and sentenced to 33 months, and in 1988 he was questioned about a series of rapes.

A few years later he was a suspect in the hunt for the killer of Rachel Nickell. He was questioned twice by detectives after 23-year-old Ms Nickell was stabbed 49 times in front of her two-year-old son on Wimbledon Common in 1992. George was eliminated from the inquiry.

But the killer had an unhealthy obsession with women celebrities, and collected hundreds of pictures of famous people in his dingy flat.

Detectives also found more than 2,000 undeveloped photographs of 419 women he had trailed around London secretly photographing.

George mingled with mourners in the quiet street where hours earlier he had shot dead Miss Dando and even brought his own flowers.

Saying he felt "concern and remorse" at her murder, he laid a bouquet at the cordon police had set up around the crime scene.

The motive behind the senseless killing presented a problem for the police, the court and everyone else.

Even the prosecution admitted it was "impossible to determine with any degree of certainty" what exactly it was George had against the blonde TV star.

One possible motive for wanting her dead was in retaliation for some imagined slight she had inflicted on his idol, Queen singer Freddie Mercury.

He had a grudge against the BBC because he believed it had mistreated Freddie Mercury in the past.

But the only apparent connection with Miss Dando was that she had taken part in a charity film for Comic Relief in 1993 in which she mimed along to a Queen song.

The policeman who led the murder hunt believes George may have shot her because he felt confusion and anger, possibly sparked by her engagement to Mr Farthing.