The murder of Dawn Ashworth
Dawn Ashworth was murdered on 31 July 1986 after leaving her home in Enderby to walk to a friend's house in Narborough. When she had not returned by half past nine that evening, her parents reported her missing. Two days later her body was found in a wooded area beside a footpath known as Ten Pound Lane. She had been beaten, raped and strangled.
The parallels with the murder of Lynda Mann, less than three miles away and three years earlier, were unmistakable. Both girls were fifteen. Both had attended the same school. Both were attacked beside footpaths, and biological evidence from both scenes pointed to a man with the same blood profile. Leicestershire police were now hunting a serial killer.
Richard Buckland's false confession
Within weeks, the investigation appeared to be over. Richard Buckland, a local seventeen-year-old with learning difficulties, revealed knowledge of Dawn's body during questioning and confessed to her murder, though he steadfastly denied killing Lynda Mann. He was charged, and the case seemed closed.
Detectives wanted to tie him to both murders, so they turned to Alec Jeffreys at the University of Leicester, whose new DNA fingerprinting technique had never been used in a criminal case. The result stunned everyone: the same man had indeed committed both murders, and it was not Buckland. He became the first person in history exonerated by DNA evidence.
DNA's first act in a criminal courtroom was not to convict a guilty man, but to free an innocent one.
From exoneration to Colin Pitchfork's conviction
With the confession discredited, police launched the world's first mass DNA screening in early 1987, testing more than 5,000 local men. Colin Pitchfork dodged it by sending a colleague to give blood in his name, a deception exposed in a pub conversation that August. His DNA matched both scenes, and he pleaded guilty to Dawn's rape and murder alongside Lynda's, receiving a life sentence on 22 January 1988. The full story is laid out in the Colin Pitchfork case timeline.