Colin Pitchfork: The Double-Murderer Caught By DNA Fingerprinting | Our Life

linda was supposed to be babysitting for a lady down the road only only a few houses away and we came home and she hadn't come home [Music] there's a good boy excuse me though i'm looking at jackson's lane i turned off the main road and came down here but now i'm lost [Music] your way off it's down the other side of the high street what are you doing [Music] [Music] the body of a school girl found murdered this morning has been named as fifteen-year-old linda mann from nabra leicestershire linda's body was found just yards from her home by a passerby you have three villages there's enderby little thorpe and nara small communities all leading a very very normal life law-abiding good community people and then suddenly this happens this disaster in within their midst happens it was a lovely atmosphere very village very community um everyone helped each other if you needed a hand you knew who to go to this lane is known locally as a black pad it's used mainly by people walking their dogs pedestrians from enderby and from nabra it was unusual because she was always very good always on time or she would let us know if she was going to be late at that time of night he was taking a chance because usually this lane is fairly well used by people he knew that it was getting dark she was alone and the opportunity for him was there and that's why i took it well we've been up all night um i was looking out the window watching children going to school just thinking she might come back probably you know ready to go to school she stayed at a friend somewhere that we didn't know of and um police come to the door and asked us to sit down and just said she's dead we found her i think people believed that it was somebody local because of the location that linderman was founded it would have to be somebody who knew the area quite well it's 15 days after the rape and murder of linda mann and people in the village of nabora are living in fear i think young ladies should be very scared because we haven't found him so we don't really know what's happening at all it was a topic of discussion in every pub on every bus in every street not just in the village of naba or littlethorpe or any of the areas around that but across the whole of the county and police are keen to speak to anyone who saw linda on the night she was murdered the man leading the hunt detective superintendent david baker has appealed to anyone who may have seen something to come forward there was no indication that it was anybody away from the area we got no descriptions of the assailant or anything like that from witnesses so we were very much in the dark as to who was responsible david telephoned and he said paul can you help we're in a position that doesn't make very much sense to us at the moment my view was that you were almost certainly looking at someone who was very local to the offence [Music] this is a person who would be living in a stable relationship but he's a man who is certainly going to be driven by a sexual fantasy cycle pitchfork had a conviction for indecent exposure as a child but it was when he was living out of the catchment area when he was living in the city which was totally away from areas where we were looking at but of course unbeknown to us he was contemplating buying a house in littlethorpe at that time colin pitchfork was well known in the local community he worked at hampshire's bakery but he also had a sideline of making cakes for people and quite a few people in the villages would have actually used his services for birthday cakes wedding cakes and so on it was only on the house to house inquiries into the death of linda mann when he came in the system on the lindemann inquiry once we've moved on to the house to house inquiry teams and you break down into pairs and you work a set area on january of 1984 myself and colleague were sent to a new house in a state in little thorpe into haybarn close which turned out to be the home address of colin union leaders on pitchfork issue locally the brutal murder of 15 year old school girl linda mann continues to shock the community just to ship police are today focusing their enquiries on the villages hello [Music] where they always are ah hello madam sorry to bother you i'm doing some inquiries into the murder of linda mann i don't know if you're aware of it she was a 15 year old girl yes i know about it right well uh um is your husband in we need to ask a few questions just routine yes he's upstairs come in ellie thank you colleen some people to see you his wife answered the door and let us into the living room and he was some time coming down as it turned out he was up in his loft laying stolen floorboards and he was trying to compose himself before he come down and spoke to us all right there sorry to keep you waiting i've been doing the floorboards in the spare room now that's for the wicky day no problem um what i need to do is go through this questionnaire with you mr pitchfork um just ask a few questions do you understand yeah yeah okay um could you tell me your whereabouts on the evening of the 21st november 1983 between 7pm and midnight bloody hell i can't remember what i was doing last night let alone last month what sort of day of the week was it um a monday monday oh that's a stupid gym classy love so i was babysitting well i was in all night you know right love [Music] [Music] so you can verify that your husband was at home looking after your baby yeah on monday the 21st of november yeah that's right [Music] there was no gut feeling there that you were dealing with somebody who was a bit wrong there was no indication whatsoever that he was anything you know worse than you know in any other chap gradually it grinded to a halt but we continued to monitor you know everything that went on outside the community itself in leicester and the rest of the county i think people had really started to forget about it police this morning are stepping up their search for missing school girl fifteen-year-old dawn ashworth who went missing two days ago in the leicestershire village of enderby earlier police said they were extremely concerned for the safety of dawn and are appealing for any information that may lead to her safe return here was a girl of the same age as linda mann the girl on her own going from a to b and disappears so consequently we we did treat it with a great deal of priority dawn had been to see some friends in arbor she crossed the dual carriageway and she walked up 10-pound lane and she got to perhaps halfway along when she was confronted by the man who indecent exposed himself to her sadly for dawn she panicked and ran through the gate into this field and she ran into danger he followed her into the field spoke to her told her all about himself raped her decided they needed too much information with strangled her and then dumped the body in some undergrowth the body discovered this morning by police in enderby has been identified as that of missing school girl dawn ashworth fifteen-year-old dawn went missing two days ago after failing to return from a friend's house some were already linking her murder with that of lindemann four years ago i warned her and warned her about the dangers of going down there on the road but children of all ages certainly when the of dawn's age think they know best and if there's a shortcut to be made on a bright summer's day um i'm sure that we saw attempted to use it we've got to find the fiend really that did this to my daughter to our daughter and um stop it from happening again people now really did believe if they didn't before that the killer was local and that's the time when the police began to say you know we believe this is a local man police today have a fresh lead in the door nash with murder inquiry a woman motorist traveling down the leicester to coventry road last thursday saw a young man hanging around the path near to where dawn was murdered we need to identify this individual we need to talk to him a man called buckland seen on his motorcycle near to the motorway bridge which is at the entrance to 10 pound lane on several occasions [Music] buckland was seen wandering around the area what are you doing looking for a girl buckland was going around telling people that the police were looking in the wrong area he even told police officers looking for dawn that they were looking in the wrong place take your helmet off buckland was a local lad who worked in the hospital you know what stayed there there was something not right something very strange we interviewed him and he couldn't give a very good account of where he was that afternoon and in fact we were able to establish that a motorbike absolutely identical to his was parked under the motorway bridge not far from where the body was subsequently found we weren't satisfied with his explanations and a decision was taken to arrest him [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] there was a sense of thank god you know the man has been caught after all this time and this will hopefully put an end to it leicestershire police today arrested a youth in connection with the murder of 15 year old dawn ashworth killed in nabra three weeks ago seventeen-year-old richard buckland the kitchen porter also from nabra was arrested in a dawn raid on his home this morning richard buckland the 17 year old youth arrested in connection with the murder of 15 year old school girl dawn ashworth has today been charged with her murder police said buckland had been identified by a number of witnesses close to the location where dawn's body had been discovered hidden in undergrowth in the village of enderby as a result of being interviewed he made certain admissions and there came a time during those interviews where we got to act on what he said and we charged him with the murder of dawn ashworth we then interviewed him regarding uh linda mann but he totally denied any implication in it and there was nothing whatsoever which we could attribute any responsibility whatsoever both cases were virtually identical the location of the bodies the way they were killed we knew it was the same man but he refused point blank to admit to linda mann which we knew was connected and that is how the dna first came in i'd heard about alec jeffrey's work i think i'd read about it in the local paper and so we contacted dr jeffrey and asked him if he would do a dna test for us they had a prime suspect who confessed to one but not the other of the murders and they were then stuck they really wanted some independent line of evidence that would establish that this person was indeed guilty not just of the one murder but of both murders we understood that he would be able with the testing to bring it down to one individual as opposed to a percentage of the population my initial reaction was well yes we will try but don't hold out too much hope nobody's ever attempted this sort of analysis on relatively old real forensic casework we had no knowledge whatsoever of dna prior to that we didn't know what it can do and what it can prove what it can't prove dna is a long strand long molecule which contains within it a code and that's a code for how to construct a human being because all human beings aren't identical then obviously their dna cannot be identical amongst all people if it were we'd all be clones of each other dna fingerprinting looks at these spectacularly variable bits of dna which reveal maximum information in one easy test about how people vary from one person to another so we went into the analysis very skeptical we did the extracting the dna from all these samples we went through the dna profiling procedure and the result that came through was extraordinary when the results came back it was quite surprising really because i mean he eliminated brooklyn from the murder of door nashworth and we were forced to release him and but he also uh confirmed for us that uh one man was responsible for the two murders this is uh dna taken postmortem from the first victim two bands that's her dna profile the next track is the the key forensic evidence that was the siemens sample recovered together with some cedar material from the victim and what you can see is in there as expected there's the victim's dna profile and in addition there are two bands up here which are the dna profile from the sema so we've now got dna profile of the assailant if you look at the second victim this is her blood her two bands the pattern is completely different from patterns over here and then here we have two very very faint dna profiles from trey seaman recover from her clothing but even though they're very faint because there's very little dna we can see a pattern which looks very very similar to this pattern over here and that was strong evidence that both girls have been raped and therefore presumably murdered by the same man and then this is the prime suspect in buckland here's his blood dna profile they're completely and utterly different from the semen profile from the victims the prime suspect in fact was innocent and this was a false confession tonight's top story 17 year old richard buckland accused of the murders of dorne ashworth and linda mann has been released after four months in custody police tonight said the hunt continues for a murderer they say is a local man yeah oi feet just having no ending to it but if he wasn't the one then now what i don't know i don't think they'll catch any wanting atoms again i just haven't got a clue of that and linda's mother has this message for him i really can't answer the you know the question as to why buckland admitted to the murder um but he certainly did he certainly made uh admissions and of course the tape recordings substantiated those admissions buckland has become the first man in criminal history to be cleared by genetic fingerprinting but as he enjoys his first tastes of freedom the question remains why did he confess to the murder they say so much stuff do you like you ain't gonna get out of here and you might as well just don't up i thought no chance no way then the pressure started getting really hard i just didn't stand a chance so in the end i just didn't bother the charge was dropped the man was released from custody and we were back to square one [Music] we knew quite categorically that we were looking for one person for two murders there was every indication that a local person was going to be the perpetrator in the light of what alec jeffries could supply us i decided that we would incorporate a blood test for all the males who lived in the narrow end of eight littlethorpe areas david baker was in charge of the investigation then made what i thought was an incredibly brave step and that's to say let's not disbelieve in this technology but let's believe in it we have the dna profile of the assailant we're pretty sure as a local man so let's launch the world's first dna based manhunt and see if we can get as many blood samples voluntarily from people in the local community and see if we can flush this chap out it looked as though that if we if we pursued conventional means that we'd um pursue to that time there was no guarantee that we were going to get a result so you know what we needed was this new technology to work for us and see if we could get one individual with the same blood type and dna match which is what we set out to do detectives hunting a double sex killer want to use a revolutionary blood test on over six thousand men police believe the killer of school girls linda man and dawn ashworth can be trapped using a genetic fingerprinting test developed at leicester university it is voluntary and we are you know appealing to the people to come forward it is purely for elimination purposes that we are taking these tests the plan is to test all men aged between 18 and 34 who live locally their blood and dna will then be tested to see if it matches the profile of the murderer police say they are sure the killer is a local man so by a process of elimination the killer will be caught i think most people felt uneasy perhaps what was going to happen but at the back of some people's minds i i can imagine they must have thought well this has never been done before how do we know they're not going to make a mistake it was all fairly new and it hadn't been sort of like it is now the television everybody knows how it works but it's it was so new that it hadn't really been explained but they said it as you say it's like a fingerprinting we believed in it even though we didn't know much about it we believe that this is going to work the world's first dna manhunt is underway thousands of men from the villages of nabora little thor von enderby have this week been attending voluntary blood tests in an attempt to catch the killer of two leicestership school girls did you have any doubts about coming tonight and at all no i think the uh person responsible might have all men aged between the ages of 18 and 34 have received a letter asking them to attend the screening in setting out your parameters or what have you there is a degree of apprehension that have you cast your net in the right area you know is he within the area or have you just missed him but why not some flashing don't you know are you totally bloody stupid the police are gonna take one look at my couldn't give me all sorts of trouble but that was years ago it won't be a problem and anyway you don't know them they're looking for somebody anybody well then give them the blood it's not you they're looking for is it no but in the meantime they'll give me all sorts of bloody hell people talked about the process of being you know fairly simple it wasn't it wasn't a big thing it wasn't a big issue i think most people perhaps felt a relief once they'd been and and had it done um and then people were returning home and and awaiting the results who was the killer it was you know perhaps almost like an announcement was was going to be made any time once everybody being tested there would be no doubt who the murderer was but all the time we were doing the blood test we were worried he would strike again and we didn't want to have a third victim on our hands what i knew is there's a cyclical element in it that his urge has built and risen so that the man is killed it then becomes quiescent it becomes quiet for a while and then gradually the appetite builds again and again and you then know that it's going on to the third victim after a suitable period of rest i'd been out with friends in wigston for a drink i got separated from my group of friends and made the decision to leave and walk on my own home can you give us a lift hope sure where are you going my doc are you going to obie i'm going up the o6 danielle great hey you're not a rapist are you get in [Music] that was my not sense of humor but my sort of me at the time and he um i don't honestly remember what he replied but he gave a reply such that i decided yeah i'll be all right i'll get in got in and did the seat belt up and at that second i knew i was in danger what's your name liz where'd you live well he said opia's on the way to where you're going i looked up at him and saw his dead stare and just realized i've made a big mistake getting in the car that's the turning there it was only as he passed the road of my house that i realized that my worst fears were coming true that he wasn't going to let me out the car go back i want to get out there came a point when i decided i'd had enough and that i just was going to get out in a muscle what and that's when i steered the car off the road there turn in nobody are you doing my crush i thought this is what you wanted to go home the psychologist said that because um he was a control list and he was trying to try and he was taking control of me in the situation because i broke his control it spoiled it for him i've not heard you just let me out give us a kiss just help me out i totally believe that what i did probably saved my life i never did contact the police i felt not stupid just that i'd made a mistake something that i wanted wanted to forget about really i didn't tell anyone i bet you never accept a lift again [Music] thousands of men in the leicestershire area after seven months of blood testing police have so far failed to catch the killer of two leicestershire school girls so far over 5 000 men aged between the ages of 17 and 35 have been tested but as yet the killer remains undetected it was a slow process i mean we'd started in the january and of course we're now into july august and i mean we're still taking samples and we're still having uh samples processed so i mean you know we didn't know whether there was one in the system from the samples that we'd already taken the operation was absolutely massive over a period of four or five years people had moved all over the country so the fingerprinting had to be carried out literally all over the uk [Applause] people were returning having had their own tests done telling their own families about the process and so on and obviously the topic of discussion when they went out their test was always the murders don't i don't fancy yourself that's fine it's got to be done no rubbish i got a letter about one of those tests so when you're going in there i'm not not me the copper stitch you up as soon as look at you you're not scared of a little prick are you colin it's only a few coppers and a needle i'll tell you what i'll come with it shall i hold your hand the only little prick around here is you and if you don't watch your mouth you'll be getting more than a gem anymore he knows that he really has only got a few choices either he comes forward and his sample is taken and he's immediately identified as being the offender or he says no thank you i won't come forward in which case he makes himself stand out as one of the very small number of people who haven't offered their sample and so he he picks himself up for investigation and that leaves just two alternatives one is that he flees and that again attracts attention and the other one the one that i thought is the most likely is that this is a man who will have someone substitute for himself in giving a sample he's just a work colleague and he worked at the same place as me that was it didn't know him particularly just knew him it worked we realized from the outset that there was a great chance that someone would try and beat the system [Music] no i'm doing it hey would you do us a favor well i can't take this test why not i've already done it see this is he's bloke he's a mata mine and uh well he got into a spot of bother and he was young from flashing and robberies and that and he's scared that uh the police are going to pick him up because of his record well he he talked me into doing the test i don't know why aren't just explaining that you can't do it don't be daft they wouldn't swallow that besides i don't think they're going to bother much of me because i didn't even live in the village when the first girl was killed but now i've got this letter well i'm in trouble because of him you wouldn't do it for me oh no no no okay then i'll call i just i couldn't do that i mean uh i can understand the trouble you know on that but you know i just can't it's um it's got nothing to do with me you know i'd like to help y'all know but i can't do that why don't you ask someone else who is he not going to choose well he's not going to choose someone who's going to be unduly critical he's not going to choose someone who's going to be unduly questioning he's going to choose someone who thinks that they're going to be helping a friend getting one over on something who is sufficiently bright and intelligent to carry it off but not so questioning as to say there's something not quite right here it went on for about six weeks like he kept pestering pestering but i didn't know he'd asked anybody else so and the reason he gave me was it he'd done it for somebody else and he got two kids and his wife and that was the general reason i kept saying no no no [Music] i don't think he picked on me for any reason i think he just picked on anybody who could get older at the time to do it for him [Music] i need your help i'll tell you i can't do it alright 27th i've got to give blood on the 27th now why would you do it that's not right break the law in that i thought we was mates ah i did it for this other bloke and i didn't know him near as well as you know me i might get nicked if they find out that i've give blood twice i can't do it all right i've got kids you ain't got kids have you ever now you can help me out what do you say you're okay if you get off your back good lad good lad right now meet me after work i will go to the photo booth at the station why don't ask questions i've got to get this right [Music] i was worried that what i was doing was wrong but i thought i was doing it i felt sorry for him and that's the only reason i did it i felt sorry for his kids that was why i was doing it but i didn't got any clue that he had anything involved in it or anything every suspect who came in to be blooded had to have the passport with them if they didn't have their passport with them a photograph was taken with the name address put on the back and it was verified later with one of the neighbors but it wasn't anticipated that he could do he could get away with that we felt that we'd covered it [Music] we went to a photo because we had to get a photo for the passport i've been ill i went very well i've been to the doctors i was on antibiotics i've got a bad chest infection i was so felt so rough i weren't interested while i was having the photos colin stood outside [Music] he wanted the photo that could change his mind so nobody then identify [Music] home to take two or three minutes [Music] bearing in mind that he was a master baker very adept at icing speciality cakes so therefore he got this nimbleness within his fingers and the way he did it was he steam ironed the plastic coating off very carefully manipulated off his photograph put the other photograph on and reverse the system and iron it back on and it's only if you look very very carefully that you can see the alteration [Music] he said just remember what what my name is and how old he was i said fair enough so we got in the car he dropped me about what i'd say about 20 yards from the door miss school i walked in more or less straight away [Music] i just sat there i said there was people beside me but i wasn't taking any interest because just all i felt like doing this it's good today don't come out mr pitchfork colin pitchfork colin pitchford oh yeah that's me [Music] can i see your id respectfully please thank you alan have you got any more of those address forms i have i'll bring them through [Music] okay follow me [Music] this is please williams i went over to the end cubicle in the fall corner i sat on a chair there was a doctor and there's a police officer 16 headlines [Music] are you left or right-handed left-handed okay just pop your right hand on the table [Applause] [Music] that's great sharp scratch [Music] i took some blood said that was it and i just walked out [Music] he was just a fool he was manipulated by him and allowed himself to be manipulated by him and with the number of blood tests taken by the police reaching the 6 000 mark some are questioning whether this complex process will ever lead to the apprehension of the killer local mp34 believe that the police are doing everything how'd it go i thought they just pricked your thumb nah they used a needle and they stick it in your arm and they didn't like the attitude of them coppers treated me like a criminal they did still all over now thank you now what about the tea fish fingers or hamburgers sweet corn baked beans i didn't go into work for about half a week after well they've been into work and he told everybody he'd done it now if i'd have gone into work and he'd gone around telling everybody that he took a blood test allowed him gone up to him and said well hold on a minute why are you going around telling everybody you took it when i took it for you and then probably everything would have come out it was very sad when having gone through this huge exercise and done all this blood root typing and all this dna typing at the end of the day they had nobody it was frustrating because we knew he was in the system we knew he was there somewhere he was there this was the first criminal investigation that dna had ever been used in and i had a concern that you know the public's perception of dna was here's a flash technology is useless and what we were conscious of was that if somebody else took a sample for someone then somebody else was in the know and that information may come to us now the risk is it's the time scale we know this man is a serial killer and the great tension is which comes first is it the person who can no longer retain the confidence or is it the urge that would lead to the third victim [Music] the hump for the sex killer of two leicestershire school girls continues in the past seven months more than six thousand blood tests have been carried out on men in the leicestershire area police are now casting their net nationwide in the search for men who have moved away from the area in the last four years it wasn't a question that we'd missed him i mean we were still feverishly gathering samples hoping that we were going to start looking we'd gone so far we hadn't got a positive result but there was an underlying belief and a strong belief that he was in the system somewhere it was much of having a bit of luck if you like and the luck did come i'm sitting in this pool with other work colleagues the conversation come right to colleen pitchfork for some unknown reason i was sure he didn't like him or something poor wife if it was me i'm killing dirty bugger he can't keep his hands off women that's what a problem is it always has been i tell you that pitchfork is a wrong my friend said something and he said well he asked me to take a blood test and i turned around and said yeah i took that test for him what test the merger inquiry that one yeah for about two or three seconds conversation went quiet does anyone want another drink yeah same again i just said it and that was the end of it i mean if somebody turned around and said real would you realize what you've said then i probably would have well what do you mean well then i probably would have realized a lot eventually this person is going to need to tell somebody he's going to want his share of hey look at what i've done you know i'm all right aren't i he's going to need the reinforcement a little bit of buzz and someone's going to hear that and send it back to the police the young woman who was in the party listened to what was said was aware of the implications in it and of course she is a catalyst of telling us all i know she just kept worrying about her worrying about it to the point where she got that worried that she had to go and say something to somebody hello is that the police it's about their murders i don't want to bother you it's probably just nothing i was in the murder incident room when the call came through it was a breakthrough if you like that we in fact were waiting for it was good information nobody could make that kind of information we knew when that information came that if that was the case there was something not not quite right we knew that we were on a certainty it was definitely pitchfork we waited for about three or four hours for him that was the most agonizing long way to my life [Music] [Music] just to look at him think this man has killed two people and here he is arriving at his home with his wife unaffected by what's been going on [Music] [Music] you're not obliged i didn't do it did you do it come on did you kill those girls did you do it yes get out of it get them out get in there police have revealed the identity of the man arrested yesterday for the double murders of two leicestershire school girls colin pitchfork from littlethorpe has undergone dna testing and matches the samples left by the killer police also said that another man from leicester has been arrested in connection with the murders i felt sick gutted well there's no words i can describe how i felt because if i know and i wanted it let's put that away we were very pleased because it was the culmination of some um four years work the feeling that yeah we were right it was in the system but we flushed him out there in a way that we didn't expect the test flushed him out otherwise he would have still been sitting there if we hadn't been uh taking blood samples he would have uh you know been bluffing it out that he was at home and we couldn't shift him on that the actual genetic fingerprinting didn't catch colin pitchfork it was me saying something in a pub and that's what caught him at leicester crown court today colin pitchfork was sentenced to two life sentences for the rape and murder of linda rosemary man in 1983 and dawn amanda ashworth in 1986. pitchfork's work colleague who took a police blood test on his behalf was also found guilty of perverting the course of justice and given an 18-month suspended sentence when he went down and i was the only one on the street that could get out that was it i mean you can't even you couldn't even walk on a bus without somebody saying a slider remark or anything i mean once nearly got stabbed because a lot of people think i was there when he actually killed him well i wasn't hot [Music] didn't even know him and what can i say to him i mean he's ruined my life so i said to that had we not been able to identify him and arrest him he would have continued with this course of conduct and was well on the way to becoming a serial killer he she had no feelings whatsoever he seemed to be able to justify everything that he'd done without any feeling for a man to be able to do what he did and when he was asked why she said because she was there [Music] i mean what kind of man is that genetic scientist professor alec jeffries was today knighted for his work in the development of dna genetic fingerprinting following its use to catch murder at colin pitchfork in leicester in 1987 it's become a major weapon for the police in their fight against crime even when we came out our first dna fingerprint never in my wildest dream and we think that this sort of general area of technology is going to have the impact that it's subsequently proved to have i mean i've been told many times by police that they regard the development of dna typing as providing them with the most powerful scientific tools in the fight against crime that they have ever had it's nice to know that you were part and parcel of the beginning of the you know dna testing because it's proved invaluable in all sorts of inquiries [Music] you

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Published: Mon Apr 12 2021