The murder of Lynda Mann
Lynda Mann was murdered on 21 November 1983 beside a footpath known locally as the Black Pad, in Narborough, a village a few miles south-west of Leicester. She had spent the evening babysitting and took the footpath as a shortcut home instead of her usual route.
When she did not return home, her parents and neighbours searched through the night. The next morning her body was found on the footpath. She had been raped and strangled.
The 1983 investigation
The 1983 investigation identified the attacker's blood group and nothing more. A semen sample recovered from the scene showed type A blood with an enzyme profile matched by roughly ten per cent of adult men, enough to exclude suspects but not to identify one. Despite a substantial inquiry, the case went cold.
For nearly three years, Lynda's murder remained unsolved. Then, in the summer of 1986, the body of another fifteen-year-old, Dawn Ashworth, was found less than three miles away, and the two investigations became one.
How DNA solved Lynda Mann's murder
DNA fingerprinting proved that the same man had killed both girls, when Alec Jeffreys applied his technique to samples from the two murder scenes in 1986. That finding cleared the man who had falsely confessed to the second murder, and set in motion the mass screening of more than 5,000 local men that ultimately identified Colin Pitchfork.
Pitchfork admitted that he had murdered Lynda after exposing himself to her, the escalation of a long string of sexual offences. He pleaded guilty to her rape and murder and was sentenced to life imprisonment on 22 January 1988. The full sequence of events is set out in the Colin Pitchfork case timeline.