Silent Witnesses Page 2
Before the murders, Jeffreys had already made legal history by proving through genetic fingerprinting that a French teenager was the father of an English divorcée’s child. He was well known and highly respected within the scientific community but not particularly recognized outside that sphere. That was about to change.
A senior detective from the Leicestershire Constabulary asked Jeffreys to analyze samples of blood from the self-confessed murderer of Dawn Ashworth, “just to be sure.” He explained to Jeffreys that the police hoped to prove that the boy had also murdered Lynda Mann.
Jeffreys was given a semen sample from the Lynda Mann investigation. It was somewhat degraded but nevertheless he ran it through his usual process and hoped for the best. Luckily, he was able to obtain a proper DNA profile. “And there,” Jeffreys recalled later, “we could see the signature of the rapist.” More importantly, “It was not the person whose blood sample was given to me.” Jeffreys then went on to spend a week analyzing samples collected from the Dawn Ashworth murder.
When he finally had the results, he contacted Chief Superintendent David Baker and told him that he had both good news and bad news. Baker wanted the bad news first. Jeffreys told him, “Not only is your man innocent in the Mann case, he isn’t even the man who killed Dawn Ashworth.” After the detective had finished using some particularly colorful language, he asked Jeffreys for the good news. “You only have to catch one killer. The same man murdered both girls.” Baker wanted to know if there could have been a mistake. Jeffreys was firm on this point. “Not if you’ve given me the correct samples.”
The boy appeared in Leicester Crown Court on November 21, 1986. It was a day on which both legal and forensic history was made. He became the first person ever to be set free on the evidence of a DNA test. To this day, nobody is entirely sure why he confessed to the crime in the first place, or indeed how it was that he seemed to know so many privileged details of it. It seems likely that he simply caved in to pressure under interview and that the information he had came from rumors he’d heard and repeated; it just happened to be uncomfortably close to the truth. His acquittal was a triumph for Jeffreys and for forensic science, and an enormous relief for the boy and his family. For the Leicestershire Constabulary, however, it was a disaster. They had no choice but to begin their hunt once more.
They began to search for the real culprit with renewed urgency. A reward of £20,000 was offered for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the murderer, and a fifty-man squad was assembled at Wigston Police Station.
Then, at the beginning of 1987, a remarkable and, it has to be acknowledged, brave decision was made by the inquiry’s senior investigation team. They decided to take blood from every unalibied male member of the local community between ages fourteen and thirty-one and from all males who had worked in, or had some other connection with, the villages of Narborough, Littlethorpe, or Enderby. (This was later amended to any male born between January 1, 1953, and December 31, 1970, who lived, worked, or had a recreational reason for being in the area.) This included past and present patients and employees of the Carlton Hayes Hospital.
“The blooding,” as it became known, took place in two locations, three days a week, between 7 AM and 9 PM. There was also a late session between 9:30 PM and 11:30 PM once a week. By the end of January there had been a 90 percent response and over a thousand men had given blood. However, only a quarter of them had been cleared through testing. The process was obviously going to take longer than the two months initially estimated.
January was a bad month for Colin Pitchfork. He was feeling troubled and having difficulty sleeping. His concerns had started when he received a letter from the Leicestershire Constabulary requesting that he go to one of their clinics and voluntarily give blood. It gave him a time and date to attend. When his wife asked why he was so agitated about it, he explained that he was convinced that the police were going to set him up because he had a previous conviction for indecent exposure. He didn’t go.
When the second request arrived, Pitchfork started to approach friends and colleagues at Hampshires Bakery where he worked, offering them £200 if they would take the blood test for him. He cited his conviction for flashing and his hatred of the police as reasons. To their credit, most of his colleagues refused. That was, until he approached Ian Kelly. Kelly was a twenty-four-year-old oven man at the bakery and had only worked there for six months. He and Pitchfork were not on particularly friendly terms, but they got along well enough.
Pitchfork took a different tack when trying to persuade Kelly. He told him that he had already given blood for a friend who was scared of getting into trouble because of a previous conviction for flashing and robbery. There was, he said, no chance this friend could have any connection with the murders because he wasn’t even living in the village when they were committed. Now he, Pitchfork, was in trouble because he had done an innocent friend a favor. If discovered, his act of friendship might even land him in prison. The next occasion Pitchfork was due to give blood was January 27. Time was running out for him. He continued to put pressure on Kelly until he eventually agreed to give blood on Pitchfork’s behalf.
The whole arrangement nearly fell through when Kelly got sick on the day he was supposed to attend the appointment. However, Pitchfork managed to talk him out of bed, and the two of them made their way to Danemill School on Mill Lane in Enderby, where blood was being taken. (Oddly, the school was on the street where Dawn Ashworth had lived.) While Kelly gave blood, Pitchfork waited outside, standing in the shadows so as not to be noticed. Kelly did all that had been asked of him; he signed the consent form and gave both blood and saliva. The job was done.
By the end of May there had been an amazing 98 percent response to the call for samples. However, of the 3,653 men and boys that had been blooded, only 2,000 had been eliminated due to the laboratory’s unusually heavy workload. By now the murder squad had been scaled down to twenty-four officers, and they had over a thousand people still to contact. Shortly after this, the squad was cut again, to sixteen officers. It was left to Inspectors Derek Pearce and Mick Thomas to fight on the inquiry’s behalf against those who wanted to shut it down completely.
The breakthrough came, as is often the case, from an unguarded moment on the part of someone involved. One lunch break, Ian Kelly went to the Clarendon pub and met some of his colleagues from Hampshires Bakery. One way or another, the conversation turned to Colin Pitchfork and his inappropriate behavior toward women. During this conversation, Ian Kelly mentioned that he had given blood for Colin Pitchfork once. When he was asked why, he told them about the murder inquiry. Another of the bakers then mentioned that Pitchfork had offered him £200 to take the blood test but that he had refused.
One of the women there was profoundly disturbed by what she had heard. She asked one of the bakers what they should do about Pitchfork. The reply was simple: “Nothing.” Everyone seemed sure he wasn’t guilty of anything. Besides, it would get Ian Kelly into serious trouble, and nobody wanted that. In spite of this, the woman wouldn’t let the matter drop. She discovered that the landlord of the Clarendon pub had a policeman for a son, and she decided that she had to pass the information on, though it was several weeks before she finally contacted the young constable.
When they received this information, the first thing the team did was compare Pitchfork’s signature on the house-to-house pro forma from the Lynda Mann inquiry with that from his blooding in January of that year. The two didn’t match. On the morning of September 19, Ian Kelly was arrested by Detective Inspector Derek Pearce for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. He was taken to Wigstone Police Station to be interviewed. He didn’t hold back, telling the police everything they needed to know and naming Pitchfork as the man he had given blood for. For the first time in many months, the team started to become excited.
At 5:45 PM the same day, detectives visited Colin Pitchfork’s house. They identified themselves and were allowed inside. They took
Pitchfork into the kitchen alone and informed him, “From inquiries we’ve made, we believe you’re responsible for the murder of Dawn Ashworth on July 31, 1986.” They also told him that they were aware that someone had given blood for him. All Pitchfork said was, “First give me a few minutes to speak to my wife.” As he was leaving the room, one of the detectives asked, “Why Dawn Ashworth?” Pitchfork turned and replied, “She was there, I was there.” Although the police now felt certain that they had their man, they were also aware that they had made a mistake before. It was down to Jeffreys once again to provide the final proof. This time the DNA test came back positive: Pitchfork really was the murderer of both Dawn Ashworth and Lynda Mann.
Pitchfork made a full and detailed confession. He was tried at Leicester Crown Court on January 22, 1988. He was given a double life sentence for the murders, a ten-year sentence for each of the rapes, and three years each for sexual assaults committed in 1979 and 1985, plus a further three years for the conspiracy involving Ian Kelly. When he gave his sentence, the judge, Mr. Justice Otton, commented, “The rapes and murders were of a particularly sadistic kind. And if it wasn’t for DNA, you might still be at large today and other women would be in danger.”
DNA testing, the greatest advance in forensic science for over a hundred years, had come of age. It would go on to affect the outcome of criminal cases around the world; its importance in establishing guilt or innocence cannot be overstated. Today, despite concerns and challenges, it is clear that Dr. Jeffreys’s remarkable discovery is here to stay.
The case of Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth serves to show just what a powerful tool genetic fingerprinting is for a forensic scientist—it offers perhaps the most incontrovertible proof of a person’s connection to a scene. But there are, of course, many other techniques at an investigator’s disposal. Innovations and advances are continually being made in this field. It is this incredible variety of approaches that makes the history of forensic science such a fascinating subject. For each forensic technique, from ballistic analysis to old-fashioned fingerprinting, there are cases that highlight the real practical value of new developments. In this book I look at some of the most important of these cases, and through them demonstrate that a person still has a story to tell long after he or she is dead.
1
Identity
Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.
Margaret Mead, anthropologist (1901–78)
Forensic investigation is concerned primarily with piecing together the disparate clues left at a scene in order to form a coherent picture of events and, crucially, to establish the identities of those involved or—equally importantly —those who were not. However, it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the need for a reliable, systematized method of identifying the people involved in a crime was recognized. Prior to then, the most common ways of doing so were eyewitness accounts and information extracted by torture. Needless to say, both could easily provide a faulty account; as this was recognized, various experts rose to the challenge of improving matters. The pioneering French forensics expert Edmond Locard (1877–1966) once said that “to write a history of identification is to write the history of criminality,” and of course most forensic science is concerned either with establishing identity or with linking an individual to a crime scene. This chapter looks at the first, most basic steps in this direction—the early attempts to define and catalog a person’s physical characteristics. There was a pressing need to formalize methods of identification, as the case of Lesurques and Dubosq in France showed.
On April 27, 1796, the Lyon mail coach failed to arrive in Melun, a small hamlet south of Paris. Concerned, the people of Melun assembled a search party. It did not take them long to discover the coach, and the sight that greeted them was a gruesome one. Both the driver and the postboy had been hacked to death and their bodies badly mutilated. The apparent motive for the crime became clear when it was found that more than five million francs had been stolen from the coach. One of the horses had also been taken.
Since the coach’s only passenger was not among the dead and had, in fact, completely vanished, it seemed pretty clear to the authorities that he had been part of the gang that had committed the murderous robbery. He had claimed to be a wine merchant, but in fact must have been acting as the gang’s inside man all along. It also came to light that he had been seen prior to boarding the coach carrying a large cavalry sword; given the condition of the bodies, it seemed that this might very well have been used as one of the murder weapons. After a short investigation, it was established that the gang likely comprised four other members, who had also been heavily armed—a gang of four such men had eaten in the nearby village of Montgeron a few hours before the coach was due to arrive there and had been acting suspiciously.
The police quickly picked up the gang’s scent. The missing horse, which had been taken from the coach, was discovered in Paris the following day, and not long afterward a stable keeper reported that four sweating horses had been returned to his stable during the early hours of the morning by a man who gave his name as Couriol. Couriol was eventually traced to a village just north of Paris and arrested. Both he and his premises were searched, and over a million francs were recovered. The police were convinced that they had their man, and he was taken to Paris to answer further questions and be put before the Palais de Justice. The case then took an unusual turn.
A man by the name of Charles Guenot had been found in the same house as Couriol. Although after questioning him they had decided he was not a suspect, the police had taken some papers from him. As a result, Guenot was forced to go to Paris the following day in order to retrieve them. On his way he bumped into an old friend by the name of Joseph Lesurques, a rich businessman from Douai in northern France. Guenot explained what had happened, and Lesurques, sympathizing with his situation, agreed to go with him. By a strange coincidence, the two barmaids from Montgeron who had served the gang their meal on the fateful day were also there, helping with the inquiry. When they saw Guenot and Lesurques together, they pointed at them and denounced them, convinced that they recognized them both as members of the group.
Guenot and Lesurques were immediately arrested on the basis of this evidence. Despite fervently protesting their innocence, they were tried along with Couriol and three other men who were accused of being accomplices. Guenot was acquitted, but all the other men, including the hapless Lesurques, were found guilty and sentenced to death. The conviction of Lesurques seemed especially bizarre considering that no fewer than fifteen witnesses provided him with an alibi, while a further eighty-three spoke highly of his character and respectability. For some reason all this evidence was ignored by the court and the evidence of the two women, who never wavered in their account and their identification of Lesurques as one of the men who had attacked the coach, carried the day.
On hearing himself condemned, Lesurques, who had remained confident and assured throughout the trial, finally lost his self-control. Raising his hands to the heavens he declared: “The crime which is imputed to me is indeed atrocious and deserves death; but if it is horrible to murder on the high road it is no less so to abuse the law and convict an innocent man. A day will come when my innocence will be recognized, and then may my blood fall upon the jurors who have so lightly convicted me, and on the judges who have influenced their decision.”
Immediately after the trial in an act of contrition, Couriol, who was indeed guilty, made it clear that Lesurques really was completely innocent and had taken no part whatsoever in the crime. The judge who had ordered Lesurques’s arrest, a man by the name of Daubanton, was so disturbed by this revelation that he went to see Couriol in prison to speak to him personally. Couriol stuck to his story, explaining that the waitresses were wrong and had mistaken Lesurques for the real culprit, a man by the name of Dubosq who looked similar. The major difference between the two men was that Dubosq, unlike Lesurques, had dark hair. However, at the time of the
robbery (and for some time beforehand), Dubosq had worn a blond wig in order to disguise himself.
To his credit, Daubanton had the case reopened and a commission was established to reexamine the evidence against Lesurques. It was pointed out to them that Lesurques had no possible motive to get involved in highway robbery, as he was already rich. He was also, as we have already noted, very respectable—not the kind of man likely to carry a heavy sword around with him, or to have any idea how to use it if he did. However, in an extraordinary piece of deduction, the commission decided that perhaps Lesurques’s relatives had bribed Couriol’s relatives in order to persuade him to declare Lesurques innocent. Despite there being no evidence whatsoever to support this ridiculous theory, the Minister of Justice agreed and the sentence of death was upheld. Given the insanity of this decision, I for one have often wondered whether there wasn’t more to this case than has ever been revealed—but then perhaps it was just stupidity on a grand scale.
On October 30, 1796, the members of the gang, along with the unfortunate Lesurques, were taken from their prison cells and prepared for execution. The twenty-minute journey from the Conciergerie to the Place de Grève where the guillotining was to take place was the most moving anyone present could remember. As the wagon rolled through the streets, Couriol, standing at the front, repeated over and over to the crowd, “I am guilty, Lesurques is innocent!” People were horrified. Even on the scaffold, moments before the blade silenced him forever, Couriol screamed, “Lesurques is innocent!”