The Devil's Dozen (13 page)

British killer Colin Pitchfork, the first man to be arrested using DNA evidence.

No one started to search for her until well into the night. Lynda’s parents had gone out to a social club for the evening, and then a pub, so they did not realize their daughter was missing until they came home about 1:30 a.m. They learned from Lynda’s sister Susan that Lynda was not home. She had promised to be there by ten and it was now three and a half hours later.

Eddie Eastwood, Lynda’s stepfather, notified the police and went out to visit teenage hangouts and then walk through the neighborhood. He even trudged along the moonlit Black Pad, unaware that he passed within a few yards of Lynda’s body. He also did not realize that once her murder was discovered, it would become part of a case that would grab the attention of the entire world. A scientist was busy at work on this day, unaware of his future involvement, as was the detective who would initiate one of the most important moves in the history of criminal investigation.

It was too late to call her friends, but when it became increasingly clear that Lynda was nowhere nearby and had left no messages to explain her absence, her family grew frantic. City folk moved to Narborough because it was considered a safe village, and no one wanted to believe the girl had come to serious harm, but it wasn’t like Lynda to be irresponsible. The fifteen-year-old was only five-foot-two and just over 112 pounds. If someone did accost her in the dark, she’d have had little defense.

The police searched as best they could, but it was not until dawn that Lynda’s whereabouts were ascertained. An employee of the psychiatric hospital on his way to work came across Lynda’s body at 7:20 a.m., lying on the side of the path close to the hospital grounds. At first, he thought it was a mannequin, but then realized it was a girl, partially naked. He flagged down a car, and the man, an ambulance driver for the hospital, returned with him to look at the body. The girl’s jeans, shoes, and tights had been rolled up and cast aside. Her legs were extended outward and she lay partially on her side on the frost-covered grass. A scarf still covered her neck, but her jacket was pulled up and her nose bloodied. Her right leg covered a piece of wood about three feet long—possibly used to bludgeon her.

Sir Alec Jeffreys, the British molecular biologist, whose work led to Pitchfork’s apprehension—and to the exoneration of a man who had falsely confessed to Pitchfork’s crimes.
Reproduced with permission from Sir Alec Jeffreys

The men called in the Leicestershire constables, who were inexperienced with murder, never having received a summons for such a crime from Narborough or any other village close by. Others had to take over. The detective chief superintendent from the Criminal Investigation Division was David Baker, forty-seven, who had been a police officer for over a quarter of a century. He arrived at the scene and quickly notified a Home Office pathologist. A team of officers arrived with bloodhounds, while others searched for clues in the area—more clothing, a dropped item, a footprint—anything that might assist in developing a lead. Lynda’s stepfather, brought to the scene, identified her.

It appeared that Lynda had been sexually violated before being killed. Her body was removed to the morgue for an autopsy, where the pathologist found that the slender girl had died from strangulation. There were bruises and scratches to her face that indicated she had been punched hard; there were also bruises on her chest, probably caused by the piece of wood. There was no indication that she had put up a fight, so it was possible she had been knocked unconscious, at least initially. However, it appeared that she had removed her shoes, probably under duress. No one would have done this in the cold. Semen stains in her pubic hair attested to an attempt at rape, which had not been completed before emission, although some penetration had occurred. Semen was recovered for antigen blood-type analysis. The rapist proved to be a secretor, with blood type A, which belonged to approximately one in ten adult males in the country. Eddie Eastwood was not among them.

Suspicion fell on hospital inmates, but the hospital assured the community that no one had left the building that night. There were no other leads, so the case went cold.

Inspector Derek Pearce, thirty-three, was known as the smartest detective in the area, and he received the assignment to head the Lynda Mann murder squad. While many officers were optimistic about a quick solution, as the months rolled by, this “squad” would grow to well over one hundred members.

In Narborough, residents stopped going out at night and demanded that the Black Pad be better protected. The county should consider spending the money to light it, they argued, because several other assaults had occurred there. Using a new and confusing computer system, the police looked up records of men convicted of criminal assaults, while other officers knocked on the doors of every residence in the village to ask questions. They wanted to know all the places Lynda had frequented, because at any of these she might have attracted the attention of a man who then followed her. On the other hand, it could have been a completely random attack, wrong time and wrong place, by a stranger. To make matters worse, some ten thousand people had been in and out of the psychiatric hospital, and many were possible suspects. In addition, the police had to distinguish good leads from bad and identify people merely seeking to associate themselves with the notorious case.

The
Leicester Mercury
kept track of all reports, which included sightings on the night of the murder of young men running, but little came of it, aside from more calls with more leads that went nowhere. By April 1984, the murder squad had been reduced to only eight investigators, and soon there were just two. Blood tests given to all suspects had turned up negative, and psychics who’d visited the family provided only vague ideas. All of them warned that this man would kill again, but the police were already aware of that possibility.

Nearly two years later, in a village just east of Narborough, a sixteen-year-old hairdresser went home one night, crossing an unlit footbridge, and a man accosted her, forcing her to give him oral sex. She told a friend the next day, who alerted the police, but they could not apprehend the perpetrator. They could only wait for the next strike, which was sure to come.

The village of Enderby was connected to Narborough by a shortcut called Green Lane, or Ten Pound Lane. On July 31, 1986, Dawn Ashworth, fifteen, took this lane to visit friends in Narborough. Her mother had told her to be home by 7 p.m., but she did not arrive. The family went looking for her, asking her friends what they knew and walking along both the Black Pad and Ten Pound Lane. Several witnesses had seen Dawn at various times that afternoon as she went to the homes of two friends. She had gone back to Enderby at twenty minutes to five and had been spotted going through the wooden gate to the footpath.

By late evening, Dawn’s parents phoned the police. Lynda Mann was on everyone’s mind. There was little they could do in the dark, but the next morning, swarms of police searched the area with tracker dogs. After hours of searching, they found nothing. The Ashworths received several phone calls in which the caller refused to talk, but by the end of that day they still did not know the whereabouts of their daughter. They feared the worst.

On the second day of the search, August 2, more than sixty police officers joined in. They picked up a blue denim jacket, similar to the one Dawn had been wearing when last seen. It was near a footbridge not far from Ten Pound Lane. By noon, they had found a clump of weeds and bushes in a field. From this protruded the fingers of a hand. They knew they had found the body of Dawn Ashworth. The footpath killer had struck again.

Like Lynda, Dawn had been stripped from the waist down, although her white shoes were still on her feet. She lay on her left side, with her knees pulled up, and blood trickled from her vagina. From scratches on her body it appeared that she had been dragged to this area, through thorns and nettles. Flies had already deposited eggs in her nostrils and ears. The autopsy found that Dawn had been penetrated vaginally and anally, at or near death, and had died from manual strangulation. She had been hit, and her mouth had been roughly held, possibly to prevent her from screaming.

No one doubted that the two sex-murder cases were linked to a single perpetrator. Dawn’s body was barely half a mile from where Lynda had been attacked. Semen removed from the bodies revealed the same blood type. Since Dawn appeared to have struggled a little, newspaper reports asked the public to watch for a man with a fresh scratch. More than two hundred police officers were assigned to this task force.

A local psychiatrist stated that the offender was more likely to be a local man whom no one would suspect than a patient from the hospital. “He may be regarded by his family as a quiet, even timid man.” He probably kept tight control over his lust, so people who knew him would be unaware of it. However, once accomplished, the crime would become part of an entertaining fantasy, triggering a future episode. Even with just two murders, he could be viewed as a serial killer, because it was unlikely that, unless caught, he would stop.

An officer learned that a seventeen-year-old kitchen porter from the hospital had been seen loitering in the area of Ten Pound Lane, sitting on his motorcycle, just after the police had taped it off as a potential crime scene. He appeared to watch the activity with great interest, so he became a primary suspect.

This young man, R.B., approached an officer to say that he had seen Dawn walking toward the gate on Thursday evening. He also told a fellow employee that Dawn’s body had been found hanging from a tree—and this was before it was actually located. Although he was wrong about the body’s condition, he seemed to know long before the police did that she was dead.

R.B. was summarily arrested on August 8. Mentally slow for his age, his answers to questions concerning his whereabouts and his association with Dawn were inconsistent. He kept saying he could not remember, although the incident had occurred only a week earlier. He finally admitted that he had talked with Dawn and had even accompanied her partway along the lane before returning to his bike and going home. He did admit to sexual contact with another girl when he was fourteen, and had even gotten rough with her and forced himself on her for anal penetration. He watched pornography and viewed girls derogatorily as “slags.” Later, R.B. added another detail: he had seen a man carrying a stick, following Dawn. Yet when the officers told him they suspected he had been involved, he quickly capitulated. He had liked her from afar and “probably went mad.” He then said he’d been drunk. It was all an accident. He hadn’t meant to kill her. He thought he’d been in some kind of trance, because he couldn’t remember anything. Then just as abruptly as he’d begun to confess, he denied everything.

His interrogators tried again. They got him as far as admitting he had been with Dawn and that he had seen her lying on her side, under a hedge. He also said he had grabbed her around the throat and squeezed. He then had sex with the body. He added other details, but not everything he said matched the condition of the body.

It had taken about fifteen hours, but the police believed they had a confession to the assault and murder of Dawn Ashworth that would hold up. After R.B. had provided details that had not been published in the newspapers, investigators felt sure he was good for both murders. However, he would not confess to the killing of Lynda Mann. Since the blood type from both incidents was the same, they had a problem. What the police did not know is that their problem would soon become much more serious.

R.B.’s mother offered an alibi, but no one listened, especially after several young girls claimed he had molested them. His father had read an article about the discovery of DNA testing in nearby Leicester, so he asked his son’s attorney about it. This man brought it to the attention of Superintendent Tony Painter, who had interrogated R.B., but Chief Superintendent David Baker was already aware of the tests and had decided to contact Dr. Alec Jeffreys. The university where the discovery occurred was nearby and there was no harm in asking. If such a test could prove that R.B. had assaulted and killed both girls, then the problem with his confession to one murder but not the other would be moot. In addition, the police would solve both cases at once and clear the books.