Silent Witnesses Read Free

the M1 highway bridge, hanging from a tree. While this last detail was not true, the rest of the description was uncannily accurate, considering that the police had not yet released this information. Another witness then came forward and explained thatthe boy had told him, only hours after it happened, that Dawn’s body had been discovered, again before the police had made an official announcement. It was also alleged that he had acted inappropriately with several women in the past, and that he had told one he was the last person to see Dawn Ashworth alive. One of these witnesses had also noticed scratch marks on his hand when they spoke.
    As a result of all this information, Detective Sergeant Dawe and Detective Constable Cooke from the inquiry visited the boy at his house in Narborough and arrested him in connection with the murder of Dawn Ashworth. He was driven to Wigstone Police Station where he underwent a series of interviews conducted by various members of the inquiry team. Over many hours he was gradually worn down until at last he admitted to the murder of Dawn Ashworth. Many of his admissions were contradictory and more than a little vague, but when he was eventually presented with a statement admitting that he had carried out the murder, he signed it. He was then removed to Winson Green Prison in the nearby city of Birmingham.
    With her killer safely behind bars, four weeks after her murder, Dawn Amanda Ashworth was finally laid to rest in the churchyard of St. John’s Baptist Church in Enderby.
    Now that they were sure they had their man, the police wanted to make a definite link between Dawn’s murder and that of Lynda Mann. It was something the press had already been speculating about. However, there were flaws in the case against the boy. He had given blood and it was quickly established that he was not a Group A secretor PGM1+, something the police had placed a great deal of emphasis on when looking for the killer. But a forensic scientist reassured them by tellingthem that they were only dealing with maybes and suggesting such things were perhaps not a “precise” science. The boy’s mother had given him a strong alibi for the evening of Dawn’s murder, but this was also dismissed on the grounds that she was a far from disinterested party. In retrospect it seems likely that the police were so relieved to have someone locked up for the crime, and so swayed by the circumstantial evidence against him, that they ignored what were actually real problems with the case.
    Exactly what happened next is open to debate. In the end it depends who you believe. The boy’s father maintains he had heard of the development of genetic fingerprinting and asked his son’s lawyer to look into it. The police, on the other hand, maintain it was their idea to try to prove once and for all that they had the right man. It will never be clear who put forward the idea of using this new technology in the case, but put forward it was. Dr. Alec Jeffreys’s work came into play. This was to be the decisive development in the cases of both Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth.
    Before the murders, Jeffreys had already made legal history by proving through genetic fingerprinting that a French teenager was the father of an English divorcée’s child. He was well known and highly respected within the scientific community but not particularly recognized outside that sphere. That was about to change.
    A senior detective from the Leicestershire Constabulary asked Jeffreys to analyze samples of blood from the self-confessed murderer of Dawn Ashworth, “just to be sure.” He explained to Jeffreys that the police hoped to prove that the boy had also murdered Lynda Mann.
    Jeffreys was given a semen sample from the Lynda Mann investigation. It was somewhat degraded but nevertheless he ran it through his usual process and hoped for the best. Luckily, he was able to obtain a proper DNA profile. “And