Silent Witnesses Read Free Page A

there,” Jeffreys recalled later, “we could see the signature of the rapist.” More importantly, “It was not the person whose blood sample was given to me.” Jeffreys then went on to spend a week analyzing samples collected from the Dawn Ashworth murder.
    When he finally had the results, he contacted Chief Superintendent David Baker and told him that he had both good news and bad news. Baker wanted the bad news first. Jeffreys told him, “Not only is your man innocent in the Mann case, he isn’t even the man who killed Dawn Ashworth.” After the detective had finished using some particularly colorful language, he asked Jeffreys for the good news. “You only have to catch one killer. The same man murdered both girls.” Baker wanted to know if there could have been a mistake. Jeffreys was firm on this point. “Not if you’ve given me the correct samples.”
    The boy appeared in Leicester Crown Court on November 21, 1986. It was a day on which both legal and forensic history was made. He became the first person ever to be set free on the evidence of a DNA test. To this day, nobody is entirely sure why he confessed to the crime in the first place, or indeed how it was that he seemed to know so many privileged details of it. It seems likely that he simply caved in to pressure under interview and that the information he had came from rumors he’d heard and repeated; it just happened to be uncomfortably close to the truth. His acquittal was a triumph for Jeffreys and for forensic science, and an enormous relief for the boy and hisfamily. For the Leicestershire Constabulary, however, it was a disaster. They had no choice but to begin their hunt once more.
    They began to search for the real culprit with renewed urgency. A reward of £20,000 was offered for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the murderer, and a fifty-man squad was assembled at Wigston Police Station.
    Then, at the beginning of 1987, a remarkable and, it has to be acknowledged, brave decision was made by the inquiry’s senior investigation team. They decided to take blood from every unalibied male member of the local community between ages fourteen and thirty-one and from all males who had worked in, or had some other connection with, the villages of Narborough, Littlethorpe, or Enderby. (This was later amended to any male born between January 1, 1953, and December 31, 1970, who lived, worked, or had a recreational reason for being in the area.) This included past and present patients and employees of the Carlton Hayes Hospital.
    â€œThe blooding,” as it became known, took place in two locations, three days a week, between 7 AM and 9 PM. There was also a late session between 9:30 PM and 11:30 PM once a week. By the end of January there had been a 90 percent response and over a thousand men had given blood. However, only a quarter of them had been cleared through testing. The process was obviously going to take longer than the two months initially estimated.
    January was a bad month for Colin Pitchfork. He was feeling troubled and having difficulty sleeping. His concerns had started when he received a letter from the Leicestershire Constabulary requesting that he go to one of their clinics and voluntarily give blood. It gave him a time and date to attend. When hiswife asked why he was so agitated about it, he explained that he was convinced that the police were going to set him up because he had a previous conviction for indecent exposure. He didn’t go.
    When the second request arrived, Pitchfork started to approach friends and colleagues at Hampshires Bakery where he worked, offering them £200 if they would take the blood test for him. He cited his conviction for flashing and his hatred of the police as reasons. To their credit, most of his colleagues refused. That was, until he approached Ian Kelly. Kelly was a twenty-four-year-old oven man at the bakery and had only worked