Colin Pitchfork: the first murderer caught by DNA

The Colin Pitchfork murders

On the evening of 21 November 1983, fifteen-year-old Lynda Mann took a shortcut home through a footpath known locally as the Black Pad, in the Leicestershire village of Narborough. She was found the next morning, raped and strangled. Forensic techniques of the day could narrow the killer down only to a blood type shared by around ten per cent of men. The case went cold.

Nearly three years later, on 31 July 1986, fifteen-year-old Dawn Ashworth disappeared walking between the neighbouring villages of Enderby and Narborough. Her body was found two days later near a footpath called Ten Pound Lane. The method and the biological evidence matched the earlier killing of Lynda Mann. Police knew they were hunting one man.

Suspicion first fell on Richard Buckland, a local seventeen-year-old with learning difficulties who confessed to the second murder under questioning but denied the first. What happened next changed criminal investigation forever.

The world's first DNA manhunt

In 1984, at the University of Leicester, a few miles from the murder scenes, geneticist Alec Jeffreys had discovered DNA fingerprinting. When police asked him to examine the samples from both crime scenes, the results were doubly historic: the same man had committed both murders, and that man was not Richard Buckland. DNA's first act in a criminal case was to free an innocent suspect.

In early 1987 police launched something never before attempted: a voluntary mass screening in which more than 5,000 local men gave blood. Pitchfork evaded it by paying a colleague, Ian Kelly, £200 to take the test in his place using a doctored passport. The deception unravelled in August 1987 when Kelly was overheard discussing it in a Leicester pub. A colleague reported the conversation to police, Pitchfork was arrested at his home in Littlethorpe on 19 September 1987, and his DNA matched both crime scenes.

“From the point of view of the safety of the public I doubt if he should ever be released.” The Lord Chief Justice, at sentencing, January 1988

Pitchfork pleaded guilty to both murders and rapes, two further sexual assaults, and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. On 22 January 1988 he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a 30-year minimum term, later reduced to 28 years on appeal in 2009.

How the case changed forensic science

The Pitchfork case proved DNA profiling could both convict the guilty and clear the innocent, and it did both in its very first outing. Within a decade the UK had established the world's first national DNA database (1995), and DNA evidence had become the gold standard of forensic identification worldwide, reopening cold cases and overturning wrongful convictions.

It also opened debates that continue today: about mass screening, genetic privacy, and how long the state should retain the DNA of people never convicted of any crime. Every one of those arguments traces back to two Leicestershire villages in the 1980s.