Lynda Mann was one of two daughters of an English family who lived in Narborough, a village six miles southwest of the city of Leicester. Nearly everyone had a garden, and the village had more than its share of quaintness, with winding paths and woodsy areas, as well as grazing cows and sheep. Kath was Lynda’s mother, a short, dark-haired, buxom woman, and her stepfather was Eddie Eastwood, a strapping, blond-haired man. In 1983, Lynda was fifteen, and her sister, Susan, was seventeen.
Lynda had a lot going for her. She loved life, music, clothes, makeup, and hairstyles, and she was a good student at the Lutterworth School. She got plenty of A’s and was studying French, German, and Italian. Her goal was to be a multilinguist, so she also wanted to try Chinese.
As she grew up, her looks grew with her. She was pretty, with dark hair and eyes, and very fair skin. When people described her, they spoke of her outgoing, bubbly personality. For Lynda Mann, life was good.
Monday, November 21, was like most days for Lynda. She had a babysitting job scheduled after school and would be coming home after 6:00 p.m. That particular evening, Eddie and Kath Eastwood made a night of it. First they went to a ladies’ dart-throwing tournament at the Carlton Hayes Social Club, and then they went to the Dog and Gun Club where he played darts and they had a few beers.
They returned home at 1:30 a.m. and got an unpleasant surprise. Their older daughter, Susan, said that Lynda had not come home, although she was supposed to be back before 9:30 p.m. Eddie Eastwood immediately went out searching for her, including walking down the Black Pad, a tarmac path that ran adjacent to a housing complex that was being constructed and was part of the property owned by a mental institution, the Carlton Hayes Hospital. He found nothing and went back to the house and called the police.
The next morning on his way to work, a man walking along the Black Pad looked through the five-foot-high, wrought-iron fence next to him and saw what looked like “a mannequin, lying in the grass surrounded by a cluster of trees,” as Joseph Wambaugh wrote in The Blooding. Not sure whether he was seeing a human body, the man ran into the road and flagged down a hospital driver. He opened the gate and approached. Soon he determined it was a body of a young girl, her jeans, underpants, and shoes wrapped in a bundle five yards from her. There was dried blood on her nose, her face was bruised, and her scarf was wrapped around her neck. Her body was stiff, rigor mortis having set in.
Shortly thereafter, cops descended on the scene and the story exploded. Lynda Mann had been brutally murdered, strangled, and the inhabitants of the small village were not used to that kind of thing.
During the autopsy, investigators discovered that Lynda had not only been strangled but also beaten badly, taking heavy blows to her chest. Lynda’s nails were not damaged, indicating that she had not fought back. Victims who fight back frequently break nails and, important to investigators, may have trace material from the assailant, such as skin, embedded under the nails.
Lynda also had been raped; dried seminal fluid was found on her vaginal hair. She had been hit hard in the face, possibly knocking her unconscious, and she had bitten her tongue as she was being strangled. Her anus and vagina had been penetrated. Investigators were able to do quite a detailed secretor analysis. Of course, this did not lead them to a suspect, but they stored the evidence in case someone would come along that they could match the samples up with.
The police, as usual, started their investigation from the inside of the family out, and the first suspect was Lynda’s stepfather, Eddie Eastwood. The police reasoned he was a natural suspect since he was her stepfather and had, in fact, only been married to her mother, Kath, for a few years.
As part of the investigation, Eddie Eastwood was required to take a blood test. Using the semen found on Lynda, the technology of the time allowed investigators to determine the killer’s blood group. Eastwood’s blood did not match that of the 10 percent of people who had the killer’s blood type. Meanwhile, Eastwood was so traumatized by being considered a suspect that he could not speak for three weeks.
Before DNA became the ultimate way for investigators to identify someone, there was the science of identifying body fluids known as serology. Serology units refer to screening evidence for biological stains to determine if they are blood, saliva, semen, or other bodily fluids. Serology units apply enzymes, proteins, and antigens to fluids as a way of distinguishing among biological samples from different people. In most crime labs, serology screenings are now used to describe the steps taken before DNA testing is done. Technology marches on.
The investigation swung into full bore, including the complete vetting of the staff of the Carlton Hayes Hospital, a massive Edwardian brick structure that housed mental patients near Lynda’s home. Canvasses were conducted, and reports followed up. The police also vetted the records of the patients in the hospital, some of whom had perverse sexual backgrounds, but nothing came up. The effort was massive and the police were very confident that they would make an arrest quickly; but though there were many suspects, no arrests came.
One of the suspects was a man with a rather unusual name, Colin Pitchfork, a 25-year-old baker who lived in Little Thorpe, the town next to Narborough. When police called at his house in January, he was very nervous because he had stolen some home-improvement materials. But the police hadn’t shown up for that. They were just conducting routine canvassing about the murder.
Pitchfork was one of the people who didn’t have an alibi, but he did not become a suspect because he said he was minding his baby between the hours of 6:15 and 9:30 p.m. on the night of the murder, and investigators accepted that. How could he leave the baby at home, commit a murder, and then return to his babysitting chores?
The area where the murder had occurred, meanwhile, was in a state of fear, with villagers wondering if whoever had killed Lynda would strike again. As time went by and stretched into spring, the number of cops assigned to Lynda Mann’s murder decreased. Initially, there had been 150, but by April only eight cops were still actively investigating the case.
At Easter, the lead detective, Ian Counts, announced with tears in his eyes that the investigation was being shut down, and by August it was over completely. Police did have one thing: around 150 blood tests that had been given during the course of the investigation. But these were serology samples, not DNA, and none came close to exposing whoever the perpetrator was.
At one point the Eastwood family, desperate to know who had murdered their daughter, hired a psychic, a fortyish woman on the frail side. She went into Lynda’s bedroom and tried to communicate psychometrically, a process whereby the psychic touches objects that the person who has “crossed over” has touched in the hopes that psychic communication can occur.
Belief in “seers” or psychics goes back a long way. Victorians produced spiritualists (many of them bogus) who invited people into séances to communicate with the dead. In 1888, psychics got involved to some degree in the case known as the Whitechapel murders, the crimes of the man known as Jack the Ripper. In ten weeks, from the end of August into November, someone killed five prostitutes (two of them on a single night), slitting their throats and removing pieces of them to carry off. The murders stopped as quickly as they had begun, and Jack’s identity was never conclusively resolved. There were a handful of suspects, but no one was ever charged or convicted of any of these brutal crimes.
To try to discover who this killer might be or when he might strike again, spiritualists all over England held sittings, the details of which were sometimes revealed to the press. From his scars to his residence to his accomplices, spiritualists provided what information they could about the killer from their impressions. One man said that the Ripper was wearing a tweed suit and took the police to the home of a doctor who was subsequently hospitalized for mental illness, but no psychic provided information that conclusively solved the crimes.
Over a century later, Pamela Ball tried to contact the victims of the killer through channeling, in which a living person becomes a means through which the dead can speak. Calling her method “evidential mediumship,” she used several different means, including astrological charts of the victims, to contact someone with “inside” knowledge. She received feelings such as nausea and resignation, and images of several different men, which indicated that there may have been more than one killer. She tried contacting various suspects and came to the conclusion that most of the victims were killed because they knew political secrets.
None of this makes any difference to people who care about scientific evidence. With the passage of time, the contamination of crime scenes, and the lack of anything physical distinctly tied to the Ripper (not even letters, for certain), it’s unlikely that any suspect can be proven to be Jack. In fact, Ball asked the otherworldly forces if Jack’s identity would ever be known and received the answer, “No.” She tended to support the idea that a member of the royal family was involved, a sexy theory but not very tenable. None of her assertions gained via psychic impressions can be verified.
While contacting victims long after a crime has occurred can be a fascinating exercise, the psychics who actually get involved in an investigation provide a better means for showing their ability—or not.
To do this, the psychic held one of Lynda’s pieces of jewelry, a necklace, in her hand. The Eastwoods did not accompany the woman into the room but could hear her choking. Eventually, the psychic came out of the door and proclaimed, as reported in Wambaugh’s The Blooding: “He was a big, strapping man. He came up from behind.” In what was undoubtedly an attempt to make the Eastwoods feel better, the psychic said, “The afterlife is in a different plane. We all live on different planes, [some] of us in the worlds [as well as] others. This world is hell.”
“And where’s Lynda?” her mother asked.
“She’s in the other plane. It’s like being in a hospital there. She’ll continue living there much as she has here.” The psychic concluded by saying that “if he’s not caught within one year, he’ll do it again.”
I remember being in Washington, home base of the FBI, while doing a story on child abductions. I asked two high-ranking agents of the Crimes Against Children unit what their attitude was about using psychics on cases, and neither of the agents said they believed in it. They would surely be in the majority of cops.
Of course, there have been some spectacular failures using psychics. One of the most famous was Peter Hurkos, a Dutch-born psychic detective. Boston police called him in to try to gain insight about the Boston Strangler, who had killed women there in 1962, 1963, and 1964. Police were under tremendous pressure by the media and the terrified public to solve the case. Hurkos was given complete access to the case but was not able to come up with anything.
On the other hand, psychic successes are reported all the time. Vernon Geberth—a hard-nosed investigator who is as down to earth as anyone could imagine—does not discount them out of hand. Indeed, I got the feeling that he believes in some of them. And I know that many cops believe in psychics and will say that they work.
I also did a book with a psychic named Jeffrey Wands. When I first met him and listened to him, I wasn’t that impressed. It struck me as illogical that someone could come out of the blue and know something about a case without any previous knowledge of what had been going on.
But during the time we worked on the book, I was surprised many times and even amazed at how accurate his predictions were. The first time I was impressed involved myself. The first day I interviewed him for the book, he came up to me after the session was over and said quite seriously, “Take care when you’re driving.”
“Why?”
“You have a problem with the brakes on your car.”
I nodded, but I didn’t believe him. My brakes were fine. The next morning, as I was driving somewhere—I forget where—I got on the Northern State Parkway, a big parkway running east and west across Long Island, where I live. Suddenly and totally without warning, all the brake lights on the car went on and the brakes failed. I was able to ease the car to a stop, and I don’t remember exactly what the problem was, but I can tell you that Jeffrey Wands had gotten my attention.
Over the years, I saw him predict a variety of things that simply had to come from his psychic ability. I have seen him be wrong, too. So my overall feeling is that I could never say that he didn’t have psychic ability.
A variety of events have occurred as psychics predicted that they would. No doubt the most famous—or infamous—was when psychic Jeane Dixon, who used to be featured in a variety of tabloids, predicted that President Kennedy would be assassinated. Apparently her insight never got to Kennedy.
While the investigation had slowed to a crawl, a scientist named Alec Jeffreys of Leicester University, which was a few miles from Narborough, had been working on how human genes evolve. He had a major project and also a small side project related to the muscle, in which he was noting how genes repeated themselves. Jeffreys’ work would soon prove pivotal in both Lynda Mann’s case and the case of another murdered teenager.
Jeffreys was not as interested initially in the minor project, but then he noticed how genes repeated themselves and how the genes of one individual varied from another, although members of the same family had the same genetic makeup. He immediately saw the importance of genes (DNA) in identifying individuals and ultimately would patent his finding.
The Ashworth family lived in a Georgian-style home in the town of Enderby, which was close to Narborough. Robin and Barbara Ashworth had two children, Dawn, a pretty fifteen-year-old, and Andrew, her tallish thirteen-year-old brother.
From the outside, the combination of the family, the spacious house and property they had, and the laid-back and emotionally close way they approached life seemed to be, as Barbara Ashworth described it, “perfect.”
After the school term ended in summer 1986, Dawn got a summer job in a news agent’s shop. Every night she would go out to the homes of friends in Narborough, and though her parents were worried a bit about her going out at night, she agreed to return to home by a certain hour. To get from Narborough to Enderby, Dawn would walk along a path between the two towns called Ten Pound Lane, or Green Path, because it was always so lushly overgrown with grass.
On this night, she was supposed to be home by 7:00 p.m. But soon it was 9:30, and her worried parents called the police at 9:40. Then, like Eddie Eastwood had, they started searching. At one point, Robin Ashworth wasn’t aware that he had just passed the body of his daughter lying on Ten Pound Lane in an area that had, in a stunning coincidence, just been mowed by Eddie Eastwood.
On Saturday, July 22, a detective sergeant found a jacket with a pack of cigarettes in a pocket and a tube of lipstick. The finds galvanized the police into action, and before noon, an area with bushes and vegetation near the path was sealed off. That area concealed the body of Dawn Ashworth.
The body, like that of Lynda Mann, was covered with bruises, many of them made post mortem and from the damage of insects. She was naked from the waist down with underpants looped around her right ankle, but she still had her white pumps on. Her bra had been pulled down, exposing her small breasts, and a smear of blood traveled from her vagina across her left thigh.
Her body was covered with abrasions and cuts, not only from insects but from her body being dragged across sharp nettles to its final hiding place. She had been a virgin, but her vagina and anus had been forcefully penetrated. Like the Eastwoods, the Ashworths became victims of the homicide, not physically murdered but spiritually killed.
Eddie Eastwood, both a grieving father and a suspect, perhaps put it best. “I went to a pub in Enderby one day. I went into the back room and just let go. I realized how much we were all victims of the one that done it. I cried like a child, I did.”
Police, of course, having suffered the ignominy of not solving Lynda Mann’s murder, now had a new one to solve, and the pressure to clear it was, as cops say, quite intense. They interviewed hundreds of people, not only men with perverse sexual pasts, but ordinary people who might logically be suspect, such as mental patients, people who lived in the area of the murder, and people who someone had called in a tip about.
Meanwhile, parents started taking their young children to and from school, and it was announced that lights would be installed on the Black Pad for around $10,000. The police work yielded a number of viable suspects, but each time the cops failed to find the real killer.
The villages and surrounding areas where the two teenagers had been murdered were, of course, terrorized by the murders, but then something increased their fear. Word got out to newspaper reporters that the killer of the two girls was the same person. There was no proof, but that was the opinion of detectives. What that did, essentially, was to tell people that the killer was motivated by inner demons that lusted for blood, rather than these being two isolated incidents. That meant every young girl was at risk.
Police were going wild trying to find a viable suspect, and then they got one. As usual, the lead came not from Sherlock Holmesian insight, but a tip from a civilian.
A young man who worked at Carlton Hayes Hospital had been on vacation, and when he returned, he spoke to his friend, a kitchen porter at the hospital, who had some stunning news for him: The body of a young girl named Dawn Ashworth had been found “in a hedge near a gate by the M1 bridge.”
When the young man went home, his father asked him where he had gotten the information because there was nothing about it on the “telly.” His son told him. That would have been twelve hours before the teenager’s body was discovered. The man’s account got back to the police, as well as someone saying that the porter had told another witness the same thing. This had been only a couple of hours before the press was told.
Cops descended on the young porter’s home near the Foxhunter Roundabout in Narborough to arrest him at five in the morning. What followed during his interrogation was a virtual one-man show: he denied guilt, admitted guilt, said he had met Dawn and seen a man hovering near them with a stick and assaulting her…and then denying he had done anything. He was a whirlwind of verbiage and eccentric behavior, and despite all that, he was charged with murder.
The impact on his parents was profound—neither of them could eat for days, and each started to take tranquilizers. Then, one day, the porter’s father said something to the police. “I got to thinking,” he is quoted as saying in The Blooding. “I’d read somewhere in the Reader’s Digest or saw on Tomorrow’s World about the DNA testing that the chappie in Leicester had discovered. I told my laddie’s solicitor to look into it.”
The lawyer later reported back that one of the chief detectives hadn’t heard of DNA testing but said he would check it out. Later, the police would claim that they hadn’t needed any prompting; they had checked it out on their own.
Ultimately, a semen sample from the body of Lynda Mann and blood from the kitchen porter were delivered to Alec Jeffreys at nearby Leicester University for the first DNA testing of human beings. Based on what he found, Jeffreys asked police for a sample of something from Dawn Ashworth. A week later, it was delivered, and then Jeffreys conducted his tests and called the police.
As described in The Blooding, the representative of Leicester Chief Superintendent David Baker listened to Jeffreys. “I have bad news and good news,” Jeffreys said. “Not only is your man innocent in the Mann case, but he isn’t even the man who killed Dawn Ashworth.”
The detective’s first response could not be repeated in polite company. Finally the detective said: “Give me the bleedin’ good news then!”
Jeffreys said, “You only have to catch one killer. The same man murdered both girls.”
Quickly, Baker and some detectives, cops, and forensic scientists went to Jeffreys’ lab where he explained how the lines on a screen he used, lines that resembled a bar code, identified the kitchen porter, Lynda Mann, and Dawn Ashworth—and the DNA of the teens’ killer.
The next day, Baker announced that, based on the DNA results, the kitchen porter was going to be released. On November 21, 1986, something highly significant happened: the kitchen porter went to court and became the first person in the world to be freed by genetic fingerprinting.
Now killers have something else to fear from crime fighters: a new database of dog DNA.
Indeed, in South London the value of dog DNA was well established during a clash between members of rival gangs. Twenty or so members of the O-Tray gang confronted a teenager, 16-year-old Christopher Ogunyemi, a member of an opposing gang, and he immediately started running, hoping to scale a fence to get away. But one of the opposing gang members, Chrisdian Johnson, had a dog with him, a mix of pit bull and mastiff named Tyson (presumably after Mike Tyson). Johnson sicced the dog on Ogunyemi, and the dog pulled him back to Johnson, who then stabbed him to death.
The dog was accidentally slashed during the attack, and when police investigated, they found a 600-yard trail of blood, as well as blood all over Johnson. The newly developed DNA dog technology allowed cops to prove that Johnson was at the attack site, because they found his dog’s blood at the site and on Johnson. It was the first time that dog DNA had been used to secure a conviction. Johnson had stabbed Ogunyemi six times. Two of the knife wounds sliced through his aorta and proved fatal.
Detectives said that it was the first time a dog had been used like this in a gang killing. Detective Chief Inspector Mick Norman, who led the investigation, said: “It was vitally important that we could put Johnson at the scene of the attack. We did not have excellent ID evidence.”
Authorities said that the new dog DNA database came online only two months before the murder, enabling statistical analysis to be given on samples for the first time, rather than just identification of the animal type.
Scientist Rob Ogden, PhD, and others at the University of Edinburgh set up the database, and it has resulted in a number of other cases being prosecuted. Ogden, a forensic animal DNA specialist, said: “It can involve dangerous dog offenses, but we also get cases where dogs naturally shed hairs.”
Later that day, the Leicester Constabulary held a news conference to explain how the 17-year-old porter had been freed and why. One of the newspapermen had the temerity to ask Baker when the police had first realized they had “committed a blunder.”
As Wambaugh described in The Blooding, Baker said, with a look that could have reactivated every chunk of DNA in the room, “The Leicester PD did not commit a blunder.” Baker said the kitchen porter had only been charged after he signed a confession. Of course, that still was a blunder because the police had arrested and treated the wrong person as if he was the killer.
At one point, as the police gained faith in DNA testing, they had an idea: Why not just draw blood samples from likely suspects—gathered from police background files—and see if any of them matched the genetic fingerprints of the killer as laid out by Jeffreys? The idea got the green light, and the police sent letters to likely suspects in the area, who then came to give blood samples. After a lack of success with hundreds of samples taken, the police had another idea: expand the search and give tests not only to natural suspects but also to all men in the right age range in surrounding communities.
They didn’t know it, but by going this route, the police had made someone feel like a cornered rat. He was the murderer, a man who had been questioned originally but from whom the cops had accepted an unproved alibi. They believed that he had been taking care of his baby during the three hours when Lynda Mann had been murdered. To have committed the crime, he would have had to leave the baby alone for three hours. And that is exactly what he did.
Colin Pitchfork was a baker who lived with his wife, Carole, and two children. He was always “chatting up” female coworkers and, in fact, had had an affair with one—a not particularly attractive woman nicknamed “Brown Eyes.” He had impregnated her, but the baby was stillborn.
When Pitchfork was growing up, his family was dominated by his mother. While his brother and sister were both achievers, Pitchfork was the black sheep of the family, a lowly baker. His wife also was domineering so Pitchfork may have had deep hostility toward women. That could easily have been transferred to anyone female, particularly defenseless females that Pitchfork could slaughter with little resistance.
Like other males in the area between the ages of seventeen and thirty-four, Pitchfork received a letter in January 1987 telling him to report to the Leicester PD for a blood test. Of course, the thought terrified him. He knew he could not give cops a sample of his blood. He decided that he had to send someone in his place to pose as him, so he approached a coworker and offered him 200 pounds. Pitchfork simply told the man that he did not want to have the police probing his past, which included “flashing” when he was young.
The worker told him no, so he tried someone else at the plant, who also said no. Meanwhile, his wife began hammering at him to go after he disregarded a second letter from police. Pitchfork told her he was afraid of them unearthing his past. She kept nagging him.
Then he asked someone else at the bakery, a shy young man named Ian Kelly. Kelly didn’t know Pitchfork that well, only that he was second in command. Kelly ultimately agreed. They inserted Kelly’s picture in Pitchfork’s passport, and one night Kelly went and had blood drawn. Pitchfork passed.
But in the summer of 1987, something happened at the Clarendon, a pub near Hampshires Bakery, that would change everything. Ian Kelly, the bakery manager, and a couple of other employees of the bakery were having a couple of pints, and the conversation got around to Colin Pitchfork. Eventually, in what Wambaugh calls an “unguarded moment,” Kelly let something drop. He said, “Colin had me take that blood test for him.”
The question followed: “What test?” One thing led to another, and the bakery manager, burdened with a guilty conscience, called the police. Kelly confessed that he had signed for Pitchfork, and detectives visited Pitchfork’s house on September 19, 1987. They arrested him. When Pitchfork wouldn’t deny the killings, his wife physically attacked him.
Pitchfork was given a DNA test that proved conclusively that he was the killer of the two teen girls. He was tried and convicted of their murders and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of thirty years, but he appealed and his sentence was reduced to twenty-eight years. He will be eligible for parole in 2016. The likelihood of that is slim, even though Pitchfork educated himself in prison and is now an expert at “the transcription of printed music into Braille.”
He hasn’t said he is sorry for what he did for a simple reason: he isn’t.
No question that the investigation of murder and other serious crimes have been aided incalculably by advances in forensic science, which could collectively be described as a variety of sciences that help criminal investigators discover and evaluate evidence.
In his book, Coroner at Large, Thomas Noguchi, MD, former chief medical examiner for the County of Los Angeles, says that the founding father of forensics was Alphonse Bertillon, an obscure clerk in the Paris Prefecture of Police.
Born in 1853 and the son of a distinguished physician, Louis-Adolphe Bertillon, MD, young Bertillon was bad-tempered, snobbish, and pedantic. Expelled from several schools and fired from various jobs, he was, in all, an unlikely hero for the forensic profession. But, toiling in a remote and shabby corner of the prefecture, Bertillon could not help but notice the chaos in the police procedures.
The central problem was identifying criminals. Because the lawbreakers used aliases and disguises, the descriptions and primitive photographs in police card files were worthless. An escaped prisoner could be caught in a new felony, and the police would not even know he was the same man.
Bertillon devised two techniques to solve the problem. First, he standardized the photographic process, making certain that all pictures of criminals would be taken from exactly the same position and with the same lighting. Thus pictures could be compared with confidence later. He also insisted on one full-face and one profile photo, so that facial features could be better studied, a process still used in today’s mug shots.
He also devised something called anthropometry, which other scientists soon called “bertillonage.” He measured certain components of criminal bodies, such as the length and breadth of their heads, the lengths of their middle fingers, the lengths of their left feet, and so on. All of these measurements remained constant throughout the criminals’ adult lives. Bertillon calculated that the chance of two persons having the exact measurements of these several components was more than four million to one.
The system was adopted around the world but then replaced by the science of fingerprinting. William I. Herschel, a British colonial administrator in India began using thumbprints in the 1860s to verify signatures and to serve as signatures for people who were illiterate. Henry Faulds, MD, a Scottish physician in Tokyo, published a paper in a journal in 1880 saying that fingerprints could be used to identify criminals. He later was one of the first to use the technique, eliminating an innocent burglary suspect.
Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, conceived a technique of discerning four patterns, based on a triangular figure called the delta, which appeared on almost every fingertip. Galton classified fingerprints as to whether they contained no triangle, a triangle on the right or left, or several triangles. He published the first comprehensive book about solving crimes with fingerprints in 1892. With modification, his technique is still in use today.
Bertillon made another addition to forensics by building the world’s first criminalities laboratory as a part of the French Sûreté Nationale.
Another great tool in criminal investigation was the autopsy, which was first performed in the sixteenth century in Italy. As the decades and centuries went by, the autopsy became more and more sophisticated in determining the cause of death.
In 1901, a German professor named Paul Uhlenhuth made a remarkable contribution to forensic science: the identification of blood from analysis of bloodstains. Uhlenhuth found that the blood serum (the watery component of the blood) could be used to distinguish between human and animal blood by the way it reacted to a sample of each type of blood in laboratory tests.
In 1897, Paul Brouardel, MD, a French pathologist, published the first major study that distinguished deaths by hanging from those by choking or manual strangulation. In 1925, New Zealander Sydney Smith, MD, published the Textbook of Forensic Medicine, which covered every aspect of forensic medicine. In 1889, Professor Alexandre Lacassagne, a Frenchman, developed a method of analysis using markings on a bullet to identify the gun it came from.
Scientists had always wanted to be able to identify poison in the body. A Scottish chemist named James Marsh mixed sulfuric acid with arsenic, producing a hydrogen gas containing arsenic elements. This gas was ignited as it left the mouth of a test tube while Marsh held a dish above it. The black deposit created on the dish was pure arsenic. When Marsh placed tissues in his tube in which arsenic was invisible, the arsenic became visible. Toxicology could thereafter detect the presence of the poison in the body of a victim.
There were other breakthroughs in forensics, but DNA was as huge as any, on a par with the greatest breakthroughs ever, and it has undoubtedly given investigators a powerful tool.
DNA is short for deoxyribonucleic acid, a nucleic acid found in every cell in the body that carries the genetic codes that control the function and structure of every component of the body. DNA technology is to crime investigation what the airplane was to travel: It has revolutionized it. When analyzed, DNA varies absolutely from one individual to the next. In a sense, it’s like a genetic fingerprint. These genetic fingerprints are in every cell of the body and are therefore contained in blood, semen, and other material found at crime scenes. All that the “genetic engineer” needs to do is compare the DNA of the substance found with that of a suspect.
The accuracy of DNA testing is mind-boggling—almost 100 percent. It is widely accepted by law-enforcement agencies, as noted earlier in this chapter. DNA has figured in innumerable sensational convictions and acquittals. Even if a DNA sample such as blood or semen is old, its genetic makeup can be discovered. Many convictions have been overturned because of DNA analysis. Gates have opened for people who had been in prison for more than ten years when a DNA analysis of evidence buried in a property room proved them innocent. Although the science is unimpeachable, attacks are often made on the experts who interpret the DNA analysis.
This book is mostly about cases that baffled police, and cold cases are almost always baffling. If these cases are solved, DNA often plays a role. Still, as these stories show, plenty of good detective work usually plays an important role.