The Blooding (18 page)

Barbara carried a long-stemmed rose and after they lowered the casket she kissed the flower and dropped it into the open grave.

As was the case at Lynda Mann's funeral, detectives came, but this time only to pay respects. Not to scan the crowd of people who waited for the family mourners to depart before they filed past the open grave. Not to look for a killer.

A lesser misery the Ashworths had to endure was trying to cope with condolences to parents of a murdered child--condolences no one knows how to offer, and no one knows how to receive. After the funeral, Robin refused to go near that churchyard. Barbara was able to tend Dawn's grave by constantly reminding herself that her daughter was not really down there.

Afterward, when her husband would make any sort of tentative sexual approach, Barbara reported that she'd "almost crack up." In describing it, she said, "Then I'd think: That's all he wanted from her. Why not let her walk away afterwards if that's all he wanted?"

Even when a more normal relationship gradually resumed, she'd be in tears afterward, still thinking, That's all he wanted from her! Why not have it and let her walk away? He must've done others and let them walk away! Why not Dawn and Lynda?

"It was something I could never get over," she said. "Or if that's al
l h
e wanted, why not go to a prostitute? Or if he had to rape, why not just let her walk away? Because I could have seen her over that. There would've been mental scars as well as the physical, but she'd still have been here. I could've seen her through it."

When Chief Supt. David Baker and Supt. Tony Painter invited the Ashworths to police headquarters, Baker explained that they could at least be consoled by the fact that their daughter's killer had been caught, would undoubtedly be convicted, and would be imprisoned for a long time.

Robin Ashworth said, "You're sure then? You're sure you've got the right one?"

"There's virtually no doubt," Supt. Tony Painter said. "We're convinced."

But Barbara Ashworth still lived in torment, dwelling on Dawn's last moments on earth. "Your imagination runs not as you tend to imagine what she went through. The only real consolation I got, if you can call it that, came from knowing a lot of what he did to her he did at the point of death. Which means she didn't know about it."

-..
. L
.-6?5).

As the case against the young kitchen porter was meticulously assembled, it became apparent that he, in the words of one detective, was "thruppence short of a pound." Another detective who'd investigated many reports about the boy's bizarre behavior called him "the pippin village idjit you always hear about."

Sgt. Mick Mason, who still visited the Eastwoods, said to Kath, "Yes, well, he must have murdered Lynda too." But then recalling his own statement--"Lynda would've been able to sort out a fourteen-year-old"-- he may not have been entirely convincing to Kath and Eddie Eastwood when he assured them that Lynda's killer had been caught.

There were a great many attempts during the hours of interviews to break down the kitchen porter's stubborn insistence that he did not have anything to do with the murder of Lynda Mann. As incredible as it seemed, what with the identical modus operandi, it had to at least be considered that there could have been two separate killers in the Mann-Ashworth murders.

Of course, the seventeen-year-old had been given a blood test and found not to be a PGM 1+, A secretor, but the forensic scientists who had tested the semen stains were dealing only in "probably's" and "maybe's" and seldom could exclude anyone "positively." It would have been hard t
o f
ind a detective anywhere who would stake his reputation on something as iffy as blood typing and grouping.

As far as the police and public were concerned, it was a matter of tidying up. It was reckoned that the speedy inquiry into the murder of Dawn Ashworth had cost f113,000 in overtime payments, a report of which was made to the county council. The incident room was closed and officers were returned to regular duties.

Undergrowth at Ten Pound Lane was to be drastically cleared, and the path opened wide, never again to be the secluded pastoral footpath where leaves brushed your face on a bright summer day.

What prompted the next move is open to debate. According to the kitchen porter's father, he asked the head of the inquiry if his son had had a semen test and was told it wouldn't be needed.

"Then I got to thinking," the father recalled. "I'd read somewhere, maybe in Reader's Digest or Tomorrow's World, about this DNA testing that the chappie in Leicester had discovered. I told my laddie's solicitor to look into it."

The solicitor later reported to the family that Tony Painter hadn't read anything about DNA testing, but promised to check it out.

The police version is that, unprompted by a solicitor or anyone else, Chief Supt. David Baker had decided to try the new technology in order to make a case against the kitchen porter for the murder of Lynda Mann.

However it came about, the semen sample from Lynda Mann and some blood from the kitchen porter were delivered to a young geneticist at nearby Leicester University who claimed to have come up with a wondrous new discovery called genetic fingerprinting.

Chapter
17.

The Window

Derek Pearce wasn't an easy man to pity. He often berated subordinates in the presence of their peers. It wasn't uncommon to hear him barking something like "Don't be a lazy twat! Pull your finger out!" Eighty years ago he'd have carried a sword cane.

But there was another Derek Pearce behind it all--the torchbearer. If one of them ever mentioned the ex-wife, he'd clam up. Once he was heard to say, "It's a yacht-club kind of life she lives in Hong Kong. But she's all right." There was more than a note of regret in his voice when he added, "No woman could mean more to me than my job."

When the kitchen porter got arrested, Derek Pearce was "on division," engaged in ordinary police work, but he tried to keep in touch with what the Dawn Ashworth murder squad was doing. He listened to the recorded confessions of the kitchen porter when the lad was, in Pearce's words, "eerily toing and froing" as to whether he had or had not been in Ten Pound Lane when Dawn Ashworth was murdered, and had or had not committed the murder.

Pearce envied Insp. Mick Thomas and the others for being able to detect and arrest the killer of Lynda Mann, the failure he'd never gotten over.

During most of 1986, Dr. Alec Jeffreys had received great honor within the scientific community and he'd helped to make a bit of legal history by proving, in a highly publicized lawsuit, that a French teenager was the true father of an English divorcee's child. His continuing work in deciding paternity for immigration disputes had brought him a degree of attention that was disrupting his research.

Still, he hadn't had the kind of high-profile forensics case that excites the imagination of the public at large. He was quoted that summer as saying, "It is a perpetual struggle trying to get funds."

Whether or not he was anxious for a famous forensics case, he was about to get one that would put his face and name into news stories throughout much of the world.

Jeffreys was asked by a detective inspector from the Leicestershire Constabulary to analyze samples of blood and semen to assist in the prosecution of the confessed killer of Dawn Ashworth. The police hoped to prove that their killer was also the slayer of Lynda Mann.

Having read a great deal about the horrific murders, Jeffreys eagerly accepted, and in September he analyzed the rather degraded semen sample from the Lynda Mann inquiry. During the final stage of the process, he studied the radioactive membrane with the DNA on it. "And there," Jeffreys later recalled, "we could see the signature of the rapist. And it was not the person whose blood sample was given to me."

The next move was obvious: A sample from Dawn Ashworth had to be obtained and tested. Jeffreys was forced to wait a full week before he was able to pick up enough radioactive material from the Ashworth sample. Jeffreys called it "a nail-biting week" because he'd been virtually assured from the beginning that the same rapist must have killed both girls.

When the plastic film came up, he studied it and rang Chief Supt. David Baker's representative "at some dreadful hour."

"I have bad news and good news," Jeffreys told him. "Not only is your man innocent in the Mann case, he isn't even the man who killed Dawn Ashworth!"

Jeffreys said that the detective's first response to that was not repeatable.

Finally, the detective said, "Give me the bleedin good news then!" Jeffreys told him, "You only have to catch one killer. The same man murdered both girls."

As quickly as he could assemble reinforcements, David Baker rushed to Jeffreys's laboratory at Leicester University. His entourage included a forensics scientist from the Home Office.

Jeffreys pointed to an X-ray photo and said to those assembled, "This is the genetic fingerprint of Lynda Mann, which we found in the stains composed of a mixture of semen and vaginal fluid. We can compare this to the DNA from her own blood sample and see her genetic characters, as expected."

Jeffreys again pointed to the picture, which looked to the cops like nothing more than the bar codes on a box of washing powder. "And then we see two more. The last profile is of the assailant." Jeffreys stopped pointing and said, "There are two bands so it means there was one man. If there were two men involved in the attack, there would be four. Three men, six bands or stripes. Terribly simple, if you understand it."

Well, sure. To men who'd done "old-fashioned bobbying" for nearly as long as Jeffreys had been on earth, with little enough help from people like him with his bloody Oxford accent and his hand-rolled fags, to these coppers who'd put more hours and sweat into the Mann and Ashford inquiries than had gone into any others in the history of Leicestershire, it was "simple," all right. It was simply bloody outrageous!

Jeffreys went on. He put up another X-ray photo and said, "This is the genetic profile of Dawn Ashworth. There are two semen stains taken from the vaginal swab and from the clothing stain. It shows two bands not attributable to her blood sample, but it's the same as found in the semen stain from Lynda Mann. First conclusion, both girls were raped and murdered by the same man. Second conclusion, your man isn't the killer. We have here the signature of the real murderer!"

"We couldn't challenge it," David Baker said later. "How do you challenge brand-new science? Nobody else in the bleedin world knew anything about it!"

The Home Office forensics scientists were to be trained in Jeffreys's method from the technology he'd passed on to them. In a few weeks they'd be able to verify or challenge Jeffreys's conclusions, Chief Supt. David Baker was promised.

"Any chance of a mistake?" was about all Baker could manage, at the end of a long and painful debate with the intractable geneticist.

"Not if you've given me the correct samples," Jeffreys answered.

And that was that. The dazed policemen lurched out of Jeffreys's office. Hanging from the notice board outside the laboratory was a copy of a letter that couldn't have amused them at the time.

Dear Sir, Madam:

We are interested in the new genetic fingerprinting recently devised by Leicester University. As owners of self-catering accommodation we wonder whether this method could be used to verify persons responsible for leaving urinated beds.

We enclose an SAE and look forward to your reply.

With thanks
,
Yours faithfully
,
The kitchen porter was scheduled to go to court in late November, three years to the day since the murder of Lynda Mann. But something unusual happened the night before, something the boy couldn't figure out. In the high-security cells they always left the red light on all night so they could make periodic checks to assure that no one was attempting escape or suicide. That night they turned it off for the boy. The next day he was taken to Charles Street Police Station in Leicester and treated to sandwiches. He was transported without handcuffs.

The parents of the kitchen porter received a telephone call from their son's solicitor who said, "The whole thing's blown up in their faces. I've been told that unofficially."

There were only a few people present in the gallery at Crown Court, Leicester, on November 21, 1986, when legal and forensic history was made. The seventeen-year-old became the first accused murderer in the world to be set free as a result of the DNA test known as genetic fingerprinting. The boy's solicitor drove him from the courtroom to his parents' home after a hiatus of three months and ten days.

The Leicestershire Constabulary called a news conference that afternoon. Asst. Chief Constable Brian Pollard, in uniform, sat at a conference table before a room full of reporters. Chief Supt. David Baker sat on his right and Supt. Tony Painter was next to Baker. All three looked like they'd just been told that Libya was moving its London embassy to Leicester.

Pollard, facing batteries of lights and cameras, donned half-glasses and read a very carefully worded introduction from a prepared statement regarding the kitchen porter and the DNA tests. Then he quickly concluded by saying, "Those tests did not implicate him in the murder of Lynda Mann. Further tests were asked for by the investigating officers i
n t
he murder of Dawn Ashworth. The tests were carried out and results were checked by scientists at the forensics science laboratory in Aldermaston who confirmed the findings. The result of the test indicate that a person as yet unknown was responsible in the deaths of both girls. The Crown Prosecution Service have been kept informed and have decided that proceedings should be discontinued."