FIVE
COLIN PITCHFORK:
First DNA Sweep
When friends saw Lynda Mann at school on November 21, 1983, she seemed her usual bubbly self. The English village of Narborough, in Leicestershire County, was a place where people knew one another, thanks to a couple of churches, shops, and pubs, and residents were aware of small incidents worthy of gossip. The drama of crime, however, was generally absent. That was about to change.
Directly after school, Lynda walked over to a neighbor’s house to babysit. She often did this to make extra money to buy clothes. She hoped one day to be a world traveler, and those who knew her were confident that she would accomplish whatever she decided to do.
Around six forty-five that evening, Lynda went to do another round of babysitting, but learned she would not be needed, so she set out to see her best friend, Karen Blackwell. She intended to visit one more friend that day, Caroline, to retrieve a borrowed item, so she left Karen’s shortly after seven. It was cold that night, but Lynda liked to keep her affairs in order and she did not mind the weather. The house in Enderby was a fifteen-minute walk away. Caroline would recall that Lynda was in and out quickly, before seven-thirty. From there, she headed for a wooded path on the west side of town known as the Black Pad. It was fenced along one side because it lay near the grounds of a psychiatric hospital. This was the quickest way for her to get home. Somewhere along this path, she met a man who killed her and left her body in the dark, under the full moon.
British killer Colin Pitchfork, the first man to be arrested using DNA evidence.
No one started to search for her until well into the night. Lynda’s parents had gone out to a social club for the evening, and then a pub, so they did not realize their daughter was missing until they came home about 1:30 a.m. They learned from Lynda’s sister Susan that Lynda was not home. She had promised to be there by ten and it was now three and a half hours later.
Eddie Eastwood, Lynda’s stepfather, notified the police and went out to visit teenage hangouts and then walk through the neighborhood. He even trudged along the moonlit Black Pad, unaware that he passed within a few yards of Lynda’s body. He also did not realize that once her murder was discovered, it would become part of a case that would grab the attention of the entire world. A scientist was busy at work on this day, unaware of his future involvement, as was the detective who would initiate one of the most important moves in the history of criminal investigation.
The Village Murders
It was too late to call her friends, but when it became increasingly clear that Lynda was nowhere nearby and had left no messages to explain her absence, her family grew frantic. City folk moved to Narborough because it was considered a safe village, and no one wanted to believe the girl had come to serious harm, but it wasn’t like Lynda to be irresponsible. The fifteen-year-old was only five-foot-two and just over 112 pounds. If someone did accost her in the dark, she’d have had little defense.
The police searched as best they could, but it was not until dawn that Lynda’s whereabouts were ascertained. An employee of the psychiatric hospital on his way to work came across Lynda’s body at 7:20 a.m., lying on the side of the path close to the hospital grounds. At first, he thought it was a mannequin, but then realized it was a girl, partially naked. He flagged down a car, and the man, an ambulance driver for the hospital, returned with him to look at the body. The girl’s jeans, shoes, and tights had been rolled up and cast aside. Her legs were extended outward and she lay partially on her side on the frost-covered grass. A scarf still covered her neck, but her jacket was pulled up and her nose bloodied. Her right leg covered a piece of wood about three feet long—possibly used to bludgeon her.
Sir Alec Jeffreys, the British molecular biologist, whose work led to Pitchfork’s apprehension—and to the exoneration of a man who had falsely confessed to Pitchfork’s crimes. Reproduced with permission from Sir Alec Jeffreys
The men called in the Leicestershire constables, who were inexperienced with murder, never having received a summons for such a crime from Narborough or any other village close by. Others had to take over. The detective chief superintendent from the Criminal Investigation Division was David Baker, forty-seven, who had been a police officer for over a quarter of a century. He arrived at the scene and quickly notified a Home Office pathologist. A team of officers arrived with bloodhounds, while others searched for clues in the area—more clothing, a dropped item, a footprint—anything that might assist in developing a lead. Lynda’s stepfather, brought to the scene, identified her.
It appeared that Lynda had been sexually violated before being killed. Her body was removed to the morgue for an autopsy, where the pathologist found that the slender girl had died from strangulation. There were bruises and scratches to her face that indicated she had been punched hard; there were also bruises on her chest, probably caused by the piece of wood. There was no indication that she had put up a fight, so it was possible she had been knocked unconscious, at least initially. However, it appeared that she had removed her shoes, probably under duress. No one would have done this in the cold. Semen stains in her pubic hair attested to an attempt at rape, which had not been completed before emission, although some penetration had occurred. Semen was recovered for antigen blood-type analysis. The rapist proved to be a secretor, with blood type A, which belonged to approximately one in ten adult males in the country. Eddie Eastwood was not among them.
Suspicion fell on hospital inmates, but the hospital assured the community that no one had left the building that night. There were no other leads, so the case went cold.
Inspector Derek Pearce, thirty-three, was known as the smartest detective in the area, and he received the assignment to head the Lynda Mann murder squad. While many officers were optimistic about a quick solution, as the months rolled by, this “squad” would grow to well over one hundred members.
In Narborough, residents stopped going out at night and demanded that the Black Pad be better protected. The county should consider spending the money to light it, they argued, because several other assaults had occurred there. Using a new and confusing computer system, the police looked up records of men convicted of criminal assaults, while other officers knocked on the doors of every residence in the village to ask questions. They wanted to know all the places Lynda had frequented, because at any of these she might have attracted the attention of a man who then followed her. On the other hand, it could have been a completely random attack, wrong time and wrong place, by a stranger. To make matters worse, some ten thousand people had been in and out of the psychiatric hospital, and many were possible suspects. In addition, the police had to distinguish good leads from bad and identify people merely seeking to associate themselves with the notorious case.
The Leicester Mercury kept track of all reports, which included sightings on the night of the murder of young men running, but little came of it, aside from more calls with more leads that went nowhere. By April 1984, the murder squad had been reduced to only eight investigators, and soon there were just two. Blood tests given to all suspects had turned up negative, and psychics who’d visited the family provided only vague ideas. All of them warned that this man would kill again, but the police were already aware of that possibility.
Nearly two years later, in a village just east of Narborough, a sixteen-year-old hairdresser went home one night, crossing an unlit footbridge, and a man accosted her, forcing her to give him oral sex. She told a friend the next day, who alerted the police, but they could not apprehend the perpetrator. They could only wait for the next strike, which was sure to come.
Second Victim
The village of Enderby was connected to Narborough by a shortcut called Green Lane, or Ten Pound Lane. On July 31, 1986, Dawn Ashworth, fifteen, took this lane to visit friends in Narborough. Her mother had told her to be home by 7 p.m., but she did not arrive. The family went looking for her, asking her friends what they knew and walking along both the Black Pad and Ten Pound Lane. Several witnesses had seen Dawn at various times that afternoon as she went to the homes of two friends. She had gone back to Enderby at twenty minutes to five and had been spotted going through the wooden gate to the footpath.
By late evening, Dawn’s parents phoned the police. Lynda Mann was on everyone’s mind. There was little they could do in the dark, but the next morning, swarms of police searched the area with tracker dogs. After hours of searching, they found nothing. The Ashworths received several phone calls in which the caller refused to talk, but by the end of that day they still did not know the whereabouts of their daughter. They feared the worst.
On the second day of the search, August 2, more than sixty police officers joined in. They picked up a blue denim jacket, similar to the one Dawn had been wearing when last seen. It was near a footbridge not far from Ten Pound Lane. By noon, they had found a clump of weeds and bushes in a field. From this protruded the fingers of a hand. They knew they had found the body of Dawn Ashworth. The footpath killer had struck again.
Like Lynda, Dawn had been stripped from the waist down, although her white shoes were still on her feet. She lay on her left side, with her knees pulled up, and blood trickled from her vagina. From scratches on her body it appeared that she had been dragged to this area, through thorns and nettles. Flies had already deposited eggs in her nostrils and ears. The autopsy found that Dawn had been penetrated vaginally and anally, at or near death, and had died from manual strangulation. She had been hit, and her mouth had been roughly held, possibly to prevent her from screaming.
No one doubted that the two sex-murder cases were linked to a single perpetrator. Dawn’s body was barely half a mile from where Lynda had been attacked. Semen removed from the bodies revealed the same blood type. Since Dawn appeared to have struggled a little, newspaper reports asked the public to watch for a man with a fresh scratch. More than two hundred police officers were assigned to this task force.
A local psychiatrist stated that the offender was more likely to be a local man whom no one would suspect than a patient from the hospital. “He may be regarded by his family as a quiet, even timid man.” He probably kept tight control over his lust, so people who knew him would be unaware of it. However, once accomplished, the crime would become part of an entertaining fantasy, triggering a future episode. Even with just two murders, he could be viewed as a serial killer, because it was unlikely that, unless caught, he would stop.
An officer learned that a seventeen-year-old kitchen porter from the hospital had been seen loitering in the area of Ten Pound Lane, sitting on his motorcycle, just after the police had taped it off as a potential crime scene. He appeared to watch the activity with great interest, so he became a primary suspect.
Confession
This young man, R.B., approached an officer to say that he had seen Dawn walking toward the gate on Thursday evening. He also told a fellow employee that Dawn’s body had been found hanging from a tree—and this was before it was actually located. Although he was wrong about the body’s condition, he seemed to know long before the police did that she was dead.
R.B. was summarily arrested on August 8. Mentally slow for his age, his answers to questions concerning his whereabouts and his association with Dawn were inconsistent. He kept saying he could not remember, although the incident had occurred only a week earlier. He finally admitted that he had talked with Dawn and had even accompanied her partway along the lane before returning to his bike and going home. He did admit to sexual contact with another girl when he was fourteen, and had even gotten rough with her and forced himself on her for anal penetration. He watched pornography and viewed girls derogatorily as “slags.” Later, R.B. added another detail: he had seen a man carrying a stick, following Dawn. Yet when the officers told him they suspected he had been involved, he quickly capitulated. He had liked her from afar and “probably went mad.” He then said he’d been drunk. It was all an accident. He hadn’t meant to kill her. He thought he’d been in some kind of trance, because he couldn’t remember anything. Then just as abruptly as he’d begun to confess, he denied everything.
His interrogators tried again. They got him as far as admitting he had been with Dawn and that he had seen her lying on her side, under a hedge. He also said he had grabbed her around the throat and squeezed. He then had sex with the body. He added other details, but not everything he said matched the condition of the body.
It had taken about fifteen hours, but the police believed they had a confession to the assault and murder of Dawn Ashworth that would hold up. After R.B. had provided details that had not been published in the newspapers, investigators felt sure he was good for both murders. However, he would not confess to the killing of Lynda Mann. Since the blood type from both incidents was the same, they had a problem. What the police did not know is that their problem would soon become much more serious.
R.B.’s mother offered an alibi, but no one listened, especially after several young girls claimed he had molested them. His father had read an article about the discovery of DNA testing in nearby Leicester, so he asked his son’s attorney about it. This man brought it to the attention of Superintendent Tony Painter, who had interrogated R.B., but Chief Superintendent David Baker was already aware of the tests and had decided to contact Dr. Alec Jeffreys. The university where the discovery occurred was nearby and there was no harm in asking. If such a test could prove that R.B. had assaulted and killed both girls, then the problem with his confession to one murder but not the other would be moot. In addition, the police would solve both cases at once and clear the books.
Science and Murder
In 1984, Dr. Alec Jeffreys, a British molecular biologist, had used Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism (RFLP) as the DNA-typing protocol to dissolve an immigration dispute over a boy from Ghana who claimed he had a British mother and wanted to live with her. Dr. Jeffreys also resolved another paternity case, proving that a French adolescent was the father of a British-born child. He was able to assist in these cases because of his groundbreaking work in the lab at the University of Leicester. There he had looked for the small percentage of human DNA that shows individual variation, because that would provide a marker for definitive identification. Blood testing, even with all the protein profiles that could be identified, was still fairly fuzzy in this regard.
“I’d been working in Amsterdam with Dick Flavell,” Jeffreys said in an interview with The Human Genome. “We’d got to the point where we could detect single copies of human genes. But when I came to Leicester in 1977, I wanted to move away from the study of split genes, and to marry new techniques of molecular biology with human genetics.” He looked at the structure of genes to understand inherited variations among individuals, isolating a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) of DNA in 1978, then started to look for areas of DNA that would be more variable. This drew him to tandem repeat DNA, where a short sequence of DNA was repeated many times in a row. It seemed that these sequences would be open to duplication and recombination.
His task proved difficult at first, but Jeffreys’s work on the myoglobin gene, which produces the oxygen-carrying protein in muscle, yielded results. First he examined seal genes and then human, and there he identified a “minisatellite”—tandem repeat DNA. Jeffreys’s team used this to identify more minisatellites, through which they discovered a core sequence—part of DNA that remained constant throughout. They made a radioactive probe that contained the core sequences, which latched onto the diverse minisatellites simultaneously. Then they placed the results from different people on a blot. This was in September 1984, and when the blot was ready, Jeffreys and his colleague Vicky Wilson developed an X-ray of it. To their surprise, they discovered patterns, similar in appearance to grocery-store bar codes, that distinguished each subject from the others.
“There was a level of individual specificity,” said Dr. Jeffreys, “that was light years beyond anything that had been seen before.” He called this a “Eureka!” moment, and so it was. “Standing in front of these pictures in the darkroom, my life took a complete turn.” He set to work to refine the process and make it more manageable for identifying idiotypes, or patterns specific to all individuals except identical twins. He knew it could soon be used as a human identification system, what he called a genetic fingerprint.
For this work, Jeffreys and his colleagues received many public honors and in a paper published in Nature in 1985 (written with Drs. Peter Gill and David Werrett), they stated that an individual’s identifiable DNA pattern was unique and would not be found in any past, present, or future person. This put the doctor in demand for more paternity cases, a natural for this type of analysis. Yet he had a greater vision. Two years after the Lynda Mann murder, Dr. Jeffreys had stated to a Leicester newspaper reporter that “the new technique could mean a breakthrough in many areas, including the identification of criminals from a small sample of blood at the scene of the crime.” It was likely that officers on the task force had read the resulting article at the time of its publication, but it was the second incident that mobilized them to act on the information it contained.
Jeffreys had read newspaper stories about both victims, so he eagerly agreed to test the semen samples the police had obtained. They were packaged and sent to his lab, along with a blood sample from the suspect. Jeffreys had never tried genetic fingerprinting in a criminal case, but everyone on the police force felt certain that R.B.’s semen would prove their case, as well as confirm the technique’s viability. Since the sample from the Mann murder was fairly degraded, Jeffreys was uncertain about what to expect, but he put it through the lengthy RFLP process anyway and awaited the results.
In RFLP testing at this time, the extracted DNA was cut into fragments, then the fragments were covered in a gel to separate them into single strands. An electrical current was applied to push the negatively charged fragments through the gel at speeds relative to their length toward the positive pole, with the shorter pieces migrating faster. There they lined up according to size. The pieces were removed from the gel with a nylon membrane, called a Southern Blot, and the DNA fragments were fixed to the membrane. This process exposed the A, T, C, and G protein bases, which could then be treated with a radioactive genetic probe. The single-strand probe would bind to its complementary base, revealing the DNA pattern, and a multilocus probe would bind to multiple points on multiple chromosomes. The probe identified specific areas of the DNA with dark bands, as revealed by an X-ray (autoradiograph or autorad) of the membrane. Then a print of the polymorphic sequences could be compared to prints from other specimens. The interpretation of a sample was based on statistical probability.
At the culmination of the analysis, the genetic profile of Lynda Mann’s rapist was revealed, but when it was compared to R.B.’s sample there was no match. However, the work continued for the next “nail-biting” week on the semen removed from Dawn Ashworth, which was then compared to that from Lynda Mann. This time there was a match, but not the one expected. The samples matched each other, so while the same person had committed both crimes, neither sample implicated the suspect, R. B. Despite his confession, he was not their man.
The test was done again, with similar results, making R.B. the first person in criminal history to be exonerated by a DNA test. If not for science, Jeffreys would later say, an innocent person might have been found guilty and imprisoned.
The police who had worked long hours on the case wanted to challenge this finding, because it made no sense to them, but they were not able to do so. Jeffreys knew what he was talking about. The officers could only admit that they had made a mistake. Yet there was still the matter of the confession. When asked why he had admitted to rape and murder, R.B. said that he’d felt pressured. Yet he’d known unpublished facts about the crime scene, so the detectives surmised that he’d discovered the body before the police. (Others have suggested that during the interrogation, they inadvertently fed him the details, a common error.)
While the investigation continued, Jeffreys traveled to the FBI’s academy at Quantico to show them what the process involved, and at the age of thirty-six he became a renowned scientist. He would soon become famous all over the world.
Square One
Back in England, R.B. was released and investigators were determined to find the right perpetrator, so the men of Narborough and villages nearby within a certain age range, fourteen to thirty-one in 1983, were asked to voluntarily provide a blood sample. More than 4,500 men agreed to do it and most were eliminated via conventional blood tests (since DNA analysis was expensive and time-consuming). The goal was to ferret out any man who would not willingly submit to a test, because that man might have something to hide.
Each man came for his “blooding,” showed an identity card if he had one, and was interviewed. However, since the ID cards contained no photos, it was impossible to know if a man was really who he said he was. Some had passports and others had employment cards, but the process was less than airtight. If the subject was not a PGM 1+, type A secretor, he was free and clear. If he did have this blood type, his sample would be analyzed for a DNA profile. Yet, after all this processing, no new suspects turned up. Then, in September 1987, just the sort of suspicious incident the police had been expecting was reported.
A woman told them she had overheard a baker named Ian Kelly claim that he’d provided his own blood sample as a substitute for a fellow baker, Colin Pitchfork. The twenty-eight-year-old Pitchfork had a wife and child, but he was also a known thief and convicted flasher. When Pitchfork was questioned after the Lynda Mann murder, he claimed he had been babysitting his child while his wife was at school. This had checked out. When he heard about the community-wide blood test, he’d persuaded Kelly to go to the test site in his place. (He had approached three others, but they had refused.) He’d already received two notifications to show up, but said he was afraid that his past record would mark him as a likely suspect. He then fabricated a story that he’d already substituted himself to cover for another man, so he’d get into trouble if he showed up again. Kelly finally agreed and Pitchfork had given him a fake passport.
But Kelly had a big mouth. When he bragged about what he did to coworkers at a Leicester pub, one of them informed the police. That placed the spotlight dead on Pitchfork.
Before arresting him, detectives compared the signature from the blooding form, ostensibly signed by Pitchfork, with his signature on another form. There was no match. Despite its expense, the dragnet had worked: Pitchfork was a prime suspect. The police questioned other employees who had heard Kelly’s admission at the pub, and confirmed the story, so on September 18, they arrested Kelly for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. He ratted out Pitchfork, acknowledging that his cover for a friend had delayed the investigation by eight months. He wasn’t going to get off lightly.
That night, the police arrested Colin Pitchfork at home. He confessed before he even got out the door, saying he had killed out of mere opportunity. About Lynda Mann, he said he’d initially decided to just flash her, but the excitement of the act had aroused him so much he decided to rape her. She’d run onto the dark path and he followed her, but then realized he would have to kill her or she’d identify him. He forced her into intercourse and then strangled her. Throughout all of his, his baby slept in his car. He returned and drove home, washed up, and then picked up his wife.
His tone grew contentious when he was discussing the second murder. The police insisted that he had anally penetrated Dawn Ashworth, but he claimed he had not. Nor did he hide her as thoroughly as he had hidden Lynda Mann, raising the possibility that someone else might have found her after the murder and sexually penetrated her. Or Pitchfork found the act too shameful to admit.
He confessed to attempting to take a third girl off into the fields to rape, but changing his mind. That girl had not told anyone. He also said he’d considered different ways of killing Ian Kelly to keep him from talking, but had feared this murder would be traced to him. The only time during his interview when he showed emotion was when he spoke enthusiastically about flashing. Otherwise, he was stone cold.
During his confession, he revealed a lot about himself. As a child, he’d felt inadequate and had been teased at school. At age eleven, he started showing his genitals to girls because he enjoyed the feeling of power it gave him. Eventually he was caught and had to go to court. He dropped out of school and found a job taking care of the handicapped, but eventually he needed the high he derived from exposing himself and went out to do it again. By this time he was married, and his wife was humiliated by his arrests. Still, she believed he’d eventually outgrow it. Colin found work as a baker and seemed to thrive in his job. He had an affair that nearly ended his marriage, but then he and his wife had a baby. After they changed their residence, he had another affair and conceived a child with the woman. He continued to look for opportunities to flash, and had nearly raped another girl. In essence, Pitchfork was a psychopath who looked for personal thrills and thought nothing of the harm he did to others.
To ensure that he would not try to recant what he had said, the police sent Pitchfork’s blood for DNA testing, and the results proved that his genetic profile was indistinguishable from that of both semen samples. He became the first person in the world to be convicted of murder based on Jeffreys’s method of genetic fingerprinting. On January 22, 1988, Pitchfork drew double life sentences, while Kelly received a suspended sentence for obstructing the investigation.
The Pitchfork case sparked headlines around the world, inspiring a great deal of attention from the law enforcement community. It seemed that a potentially foolproof method had been found for solving crimes in which biological evidence was crucial. The rush was on in many places to apply DNA technology to more crimes. Lifecodes, located near Westchester, New York, became the first private lab in the United States to offer RFLP testing for criminal incidents that involved biological evidence. Dr. Jeffreys forever altered the investigation of such crimes and he was knighted for his work. In 2004, he received a “Pride of Britain” award. Thankfully, the investigators on these cases were open to breakthroughs in science and the scientists were eager to apply their tools in the forensic arena. Although Pitchfork received a sentence that allowed for parole, he remains in prison at this writing.
Even as DNA revolutionized crime fighting in many countries, some law enforcement agencies continued to rely on older, less precise methods, and as a result many serial killers slipped through the cracks. Yet, concurrent with Jeffreys’s work in biology, a psychological approach was also gaining in popularity, and where low crime-lab resources precluded the use of DNA testing, there were often specialists in behavioral analysis. Because of this, one investigator in the Soviet Union made a bold move.
Sources
“An Interview with Sir Alec Jeffreys on DNA Profiling and Minisatellites,”
ScienceWatch.com, retrieved December 4, 2007.
Jeffreys, A. J., V. Wilson, and S. L. Thein. “Individual-Specific ‘Fingerprints’ of Human DNA.” Nature 37, 1985.
Levy, Harlan. And the Blood Cried Out: A Prosecutor’s Spellbinding Account of the Power of DNA. New York: Basic Books, 1996.
Lee, Henry, and Frank Tirnady. Blood Evidence: How DNA Is Revolutionizing the Way We Solve Crimes. Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2003.
Wambaugh, Joseph. The Blooding: The True Story of the Narborough Village Murders. New York: William Morrow, 1989.
