In an extraordinary account, Jacqui Hames' "My Line of Duty" set out the story of how Jacqui and her family were targeted, intruded upon and surveilled by News UK reporters.Now, in an interview with fellow Hacked Off Board Director & journalist Emma Jones, Jacqui goes into even greater detail about what happened.Can you describe how you learned of the murder of you colleague Jill Dando and how that pivotal moment was to alter your outlook and experience as a police officer? On 26 April 1999 I was about to go into a meeting at the Serious Crime Analysis Section of the UK’s National Crime Faculty where I worked. I had recently suffered a miscarriage but was excited to announce to everyone I was 3 months pregnant again.However, as I entered the room, I was pulled to one side by my boss who, with a face white with shock, told me that Jill Dando had been murdered – shot dead on her doorstep as she walked to her front door.In that moment my professional and private lives crashed together like two cars meeting head-on at 60mph. Every murder investigation I had worked on (and there were many) flashed back to me – the post-mortem examinations, the crime scene photos, the CCTV images of unknowing victims in their final hours, the forensic seizures, the dreadful suffering of family and friends.And now this was Jill, the wonderful, kind person who had been such a good friend to me during our years together on the BBC’s Crimewatch. Our last conversation had been just a few days before as we walked out of Television Centre together: she had been so happy talking about her forthcoming wedding and looking forward to a wonderful future, and I was so happy for her.And now she had been murdered.Like many in the police service I had spent years fighting and squashing down my own emotions so that I could cope with everyday life and not let anyone down. I needed to cope with work, look after my home and 2-year-old daughter and support my Crimewatch family. But this left me reeling. Not immediately, but gradually I discovered that it was more than I could bear.After Jill’s death I began to have nightmares. Flashed visions and sounds of shots being fired at me as I walked up my garden path to my front door… I dreamt of masked men breaking into my home in the night and shooting me and my family. And when I was awake, no matter how hard I tried to suppress them, memories and images of Jill including snatches of CCTV showing her last movements, played constantly in my head.Then came the guilt. I had no right to be affected like this; her family and close friends were the ones who deserved sympathy. I should be professional and deal with this. And familiar, old worries returned as I condemned myself as weak and not up to the job.Next came panic attacks. At worst they left me so crippled I felt I was having a heart attack; at best there was an underlying anxiety that kept me in a constant terror it might at any moment escalate out of control.How did your situation and anxiety worsen when your then-husband started working on the Daniel Morgan case? After my son was born – a moment of true joy – I finally took some time off work to be with him and my daughter, and endeavour to recover some equilibrium.But then one day I returned home to find two very tall officers from the Metropolitan Police’s Witness Protection Unit waiting for me in my kitchen.My then-husband, David Cook, a police officer like me, had recently made an appeal on Crimewatch in relation to the notorious murder of a private detective, Daniel Morgan. This was 2002 and the case was already 15 years old. Morgan had been killed with an axe in a London pub car park and a series of investigations had been impeded by corruption in the police.David, who had appeared on Crimewatch before, was given the job of asking anyone with information to come forward and announcing a £50,000 reward. He went on to become the Senior Investigating Officer (SIO) on the inquiry, which lasted until March 2011.The officers in my kitchen were there to tell me that after the appeal went out the inquiry team received intelligence that a suspect in the case had been overheard discussing David’s role and saying he intended to make life difficult for him.This was clearly a threat not only to David but also to me, to our family, and to our home. Suspects in a murder inquiry where a man had been left dead in a public car park with an axe in his head are could be capable of anything. One of them had already been convicted of planting cocaine in someone’s car to subvert a court case.We were placed under the umbrella of Witness Protection and a police panic alarm was installed in our house.Even now it is difficult to describe the emotions this evoked in me. I had not recovered from Jill’s murder and those terrors surged back to the surface. The nightmares returned and once again I was enduring the humiliation of fighting off panic attacks at inappropriate moments.How did the threats materialise? Whoever was behind this soon piled on the pressure. Our mail was tampered with. An email was sent to the Crimewatch office claiming (falsely) that I was having an affair. Someone called a police finance department pretending to be from the Inland Revenue and attempting to obtain private information about us.We took our house off the market because of the risk of letting in snoopers or worse. All aspects of our daily lives had to be reconsidered.How were your kids targeted and/or affected? A particularly chilling moment for me was noticing my daughters rocking horse had been moved in the garden. This probably sounds feeble, but it was always in the same place, she loved it so much and would come home from school and immediately rush to the garden to jump on it. One day it wasn’t there – it had been moved.We had to warn my daughter’s school and my son’s nursery about the risk of strangers hanging around outside – which were particularly difficult conversations. We had to consider whether inviting our children’s friends to the house was sensible.When did you realise you were being watched? One morning I spotted a white van in the lane. Two occupants were clearly observing our home and as I watched from my kitchen the passenger window opened and I saw something being raised and pointed towards me. In that moment my nightmares became real. I was overwhelmed with fear and fled to a friend’s home.The next day there were two vans and when David left to take our children to nursery and school, both vehicles followed him.When did you come to understand it was News International conducting the surveillance operation? David was able to have one of the vans following him stopped. He later told me that they were leased to News International, the newspaper company owned by Rupert Murdoch that published the News of the World, the Sun and the Times.I was stunned. Why on earth were they following us, keeping us under surveillance and terrifying me? Surely, if there were any grounds for them to do this sort of thing at all, they should be looking at possible suspects for the Morgan murder and not harassing the officer leading the investigation and his wife and children? So why were they following you? I soon learned the very close connection between the Murdoch press and this murder case, that was so tangled in police corruption.At the heart of it was Southern Investigations, where Daniel Morgan had been in partnership with a man called Jonathan Rees, who specialised in cultivating relations with police officers of all ranks. After the murder, remarkably, Daniel Morgan’s place in the firm was taken by Sid Fillery, who had been a lead detective in the first investigation but who subsequently, like Rees, became a suspect.Both were very close to a senior figure at the News of the World, Alex Marunchak, who employed them to carry out investigative work for the paper, much of it illegal. For example, Southern would use corrupt officers to gain access to secret information about ongoing investigations that would then be reported in the paper.If the News of the World was watching me and my family and trying to intimidate us, were they doing this in an effort to help these partners in crime, even though they were suspected of the murder? Were they helping the suspects to ‘make life difficult’ for David? That would be extraordinary and outrageous behaviour from a national newspaper. What did the Met do to help after you reported the van incident? Southern Investigations was not the only organisation to have good connections inside the Murdoch press. So did the Metropolitan Police.Dick Fedorcio, the Met’s head of public affairs, approached the then editor of the News of the World, Rebekah Brooks (then Wade), for an explanation.When the answer came back, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The explanation offered for placing David and me under surveillance was that they were investigating suspicions we were having an affair – with each other. We had by then been together for 11 years and married for four, and had two children together. We had even appeared together in Hello! magazine as a result of my Crimewatch profile.David, Dick Fedorcio and Commander Andre Baker met and challenged Rebekah Brooks. With the then Commissioner of the Met, Sir John Stevens, in the room, she repeated the ludicrous claim, but agreed to investigate Marunchak’s association with Rees and Fillery.To my knowledge nothing further was ever said on the subject and Marunchak was actually promoted.It could hardly be clearer: Brooks and her paper were giving the finger to me and to the Met. They were brazenly confident they could do what they liked, even to the point of intimidating witnesses and protecting murder suspects. It is known as perverting the course of justice. (legal?)I assumed they would be called to account, and for the sake of my family and my own well-being I let the Met get on with it.Why and when did you decide to leave the police force?While David continued to investigate the murder, I was soon struggling again. I found myself constantly frightened and questioning everything, every movement, every noise, every unexpected event.I changed jobs, went part-time, tried to lead a normal family life. Eventually, our marriage – already on uneven ground - began to crumble. In 2008, despite a second career break, I left the Met to begin a new life.It was liberating, I wrote a book with Fiona Bruce, started to carve a television career, delivered training and business consultancy. But although my general health improved, the panic attacks continued, making every step of the way a challenge. When did you come to understand the true extent of News International’s intrusion into your life? In May 2011, by which time David and I had separated, police officers once again walked into my life. My details, they informed me, had been found in the notebooks of Glenn Mulcaire, by then notorious as a private investigator who hacked voicemails for the News of the World.These notes revealed much more about the scale of the paper’s intrusion into my life.What of your and your ex-husband’s personal information was collected? Mulcaire had learned my police payroll and warrant numbers, the name of the police house I lived in when I joined up in 1977, the name, location and telephone number of my place of work in 2002, my and David’s full home address and mobile phone numbers and some notes about my previous husband and his work details.As revelations about how industrial scale phone hacking by the tabloid press hit the headlines, I went cold. Had my personal messages been listened to, I had worked for 2 years on a confidential enquiry before leaving the Met, the security implications alone were worrying.The notes also contained equally confidential information about David. The date at the top was 3 July 2002, a week or so before the News International vans began to appear outside our home. All else aside, this categorically proved that the paper knew full well at that time that I was married to David. Brooks’s excuse was revealed to be nonsense. How did you know that the police were also implicated in the leak? The most shocking thing to me was that such information could only have come from my police personnel file. Someone in the Met had read this out or shown it to Mulcaire, presumably for money. And as if that was not bad enough, the Met had known about this since 2006 but had chosen neither to inform me nor to investigate this clear proof of corruption in the ranks.Did this destroy your trust in the system for good? A veil fell from my eyes. I had always assumed – as all officers are encouraged to assume – that the Met had my back. But now I knew that fellow officers had betrayed me, and the Met leadership had allowed that to go unchallenged. The truth was that, far from having my back, the Met had chosen to let me, and my family suffer at the hands of a bunch of murder suspects acting in collusion with corrupt officers and a corrupt national newspaper.How were public perceptions about the press and police changing at this point? All around me, things had been changing in dramatic ways. The exposure of widespread phone hacking shamed the Met into launching not only Operation Weeting (investigating information from the Mulcaire notebooks) but also offshoots exploring corrupt practices involving journalists and police.The Murdoch organisation, under pressure as never before, handed over evidence to these inquiries, and some journalists, police officers and other public servants were arrested and charged with bribery-related offences (though so far none of this had related to my own experiences).Then the exposure of the hacking of Millie Dowler’s phone and the public outrage that followed forced politicians to set up a public inquiry into press misconduct, with a brief also to look into police and political collusion. This was the Leveson Inquiry.What did you and David decide to do? I contacted David, who told me he had begun civil proceedings against the News of the World and was keen to talk about our experiences at a forthcoming public inquiry.I could see that David and I had vital evidence for this inquiry, evidence suggesting that the Murdoch press had assisted murder suspects in destabilising an investigation, and that the Met had stood back and let it happen. We decided to apply to be ‘core participants’ in the inquiry, a status that meant we were more than just witnesses, but would have privileged access to documents and shared legal representation with other victims of press abuses.David then changed his mind, now working at the National Crime Agency, he became concerned that this was not compatible with his position and status as a serving senior civil servant, and withdrew his application. I understood this: he had his financial future to think about and his mental health, which had also suffered. This left me alone to represent the family experience at the inquiry.What was it like revisiting such a traumatic period of your life for the purpose of the statement? I spent weeks writing my statement. It was not something I could get help with and I found it harrowing. It meant revisiting some of the darkest times in my life, delving back into experiences I had spent years trying to block out.However, the more I wrote the more I was convinced I needed to stand up and get my voice heard. I knew there would be few other police officers able or indeed inclined to get involved, and if I could get through without anxiety overwhelming me it would be worth it. My story needed to be told.And I knew that it needed to be told, not just for my family’s benefit, but also in support of the family of Daniel Morgan, who by then had gone 24 years without seeing justice done, and who understood better than anyone the tangle of corruption that was responsible.Do you believe you were again put under surveillance while preparing for the Inquiry?Almost unbelievably, as I was writing my statement to the Leveson Inquiry, two things happened that caused me to believe I had once again been put under surveillance.First, I surprised a man loitering in the alleyway beside my house, who appeared to be waiting for me to come home. And second, my new home was broken into and the only room disturbed was my study, in particular the desk where I kept my laptop – and a hard-copy working version of my statement.The local police investigated and improved my security, but knowing what I did by then about the power and reach of the Murdoch press, the Met police and the Morgan murder suspects, this was simply terrifying.Old demons resurfaced and the nightmares and panic attacks returned. The stress was at times unbearable, some days I could barely remember my name.In addition, late one evening in January I received a call from David. He had that morning been arrested for ‘malfeasance in public office’, accused of disclosing confidential information to a journalist. With remarkable timing, the Murdoch organisation had discovered emails between him and a crime reporter. He was utterly devastated, and I feared for what he might do now he had been bailed.The next few weeks followed in a blur, I found myself in rooms full of people barely knowing who they were or why I was there.How did Hacked Off help you at this time? I was helped in this period by an extraordinarily disparate group of people gathered together with the common aim of not letting the tabloid press get away with it - again. This was Hacked Off.Attending Hacked Off events and talking to others caught up in press intrusion and bad behaviour, I discovered the extent to which a culture of lawlessness and indiscriminate targeting had affected so many people from so many walks of life. I found I was part of something much bigger and was keen to take up and champion their causes as well.Finally, I didn’t have to dwell purely on my situation: it was so much emotionally safer for me to fight their causes alongside my own.Surprisingly when it came to the 28 February, I had a clearer head than I had experienced in a while. I just had to concentrate on one thing – getting through my evidence without a panic attack.What was it like giving evidence? Rarely is your whole life experience captured in a moment. The 28 February 2012 was such a moment arrived for me, as I walked up the imposing steps of the Royal Courts of Justice to give evidence to the Leveson Inquiry.As a police officer I had given evidence in many courtrooms so the prospect of another session in the witness box shouldn’t really have worried me. But this was different: I was about to challenge the combined might of the country’s biggest police force, and the national tabloid press.I was anxious, but I think I managed, though it was difficult and distressing. You can watch or read my evidence to the Leveson Inquiry here (link to DiscoverLeveson).What was the aftermath? Was your statement picked up by the press? It should be no surprise that my testimony, implicating the Murdoch press in the darkest wrongdoing, did not make newspaper headlines.Even as I entered the witness stand, someone, somewhere was revealing that Rebekah Brooks had been leant a police horse by the Commissioner of the Met, and that was the story that would dominate the news reports.It is hard for me, after all I have experienced, not to connect the dots between the break-in at my home and this conveniently placed news story. Knowing what I would say, they had an interest in distracting the public’s attention.Did you have more to say than you were able to during the Inquiry?When I spoke that day in 2012 I knew, or at least I believed, that it would be only the first part of my engagement with the inquiry. As with a lot of other witnesses, there were things I could not say or could not explain fully at that time because of ongoing criminal investigations.Moreover the inquiry chair, Sir Brian Leveson, was prevented from drawing conclusions about criminal activities for the same reason – because some relevant matters were sub judice.But the plan was that once those investigations had run their course and people had been cleared or convicted, the inquiry would return to pick up all of these important loose ends. Leveson Part Two, as it was called, would tackle criminal activities involving the press and the police head-on.Like a lot of other people, I underestimated the power of corruption. Not only did the Cameron government break its promises and refuse properly to implement the recommendations of the Leveson Report on press regulation, but it also delayed and delayed launching Leveson 2.Then in 2018, after Cameron had been replaced by Theresa May, the government cancelled Leveson 2 altogether.Do you still have unanswered questions? There has been no moment of truth for the press in relation to industrial-scale criminality and in particular, for me, no tough questioning of Murdoch executives about the campaign of intimidation against me and my family.Why were we put under surveillance? Who at Murdoch headquarters ordered it and who paid for it? How far were they prepared to go? Who followed my children to school? Who in the Met sold my confidential police service records to Glenn Mulcaire? Who broke into my home and why, and who ordered that? I may never know the answers.In the bigger picture, what was the relationship between the Murdoch press and Southern Investigations? How far did their collusion in corrupting police officers go? Who was responsible, and who knew? Who were those officers, and who in the Met knew? And darkest of all, did the Murdoch organisation help frustrate the investigation of the Daniel Morgan murder?What is the current status of the Daniel Morgan case? A panel of enquiry into the murder of Daniel Morgan is currently set to report soon, whilst no-one has been compelled to give evidence, they have been scrutinising and taking evidence for 7 years now. I hope at least they are able to offer Daniel’s family some answers. As a former police officer, what are your main takeaways having been through this experience? Reflecting on my Leveson appearance, I have no regrets. The fight goes on. People are still falling victim to a culture of self-interest and collusion among the press and politicians, their free speech denied.The overriding thought I’m left with is that when you have a government (of whatever colour) colluding so closely with a powerful press, and with a police service cowed by political pressure, it is almost impossible for an ordinary member of the public to get justice or have any transparency to understand the decision-making processes that affect them.Where do people like me go when the police have let them down? There is nowhere, because it is not in the interests of the press to tell the truth and politicians are either too close to the press, or too scared of them to stand up and make them accountable.This is surely not the kind of country I, and I’m sure many like me, want to live in. In the words of Detective Superintendent Ted Hastings in the BBC’s Line of Duty: ‘When did we stop caring about honesty and integrity?’