The Blooding (9 page)

During that month, reporters interviewing the Eastwoods printed a story that "financial difficulties and health problems" had beset the family during the preceding twelve months. Eddie told of hopes being dashed that his work would permit him to take the family to some other part of England. He was now resigned to staying there in Narborough.

"Kath can never look in the direction of The Black Pad when we're driving by," he said.

Kath's mother, the sixty-four-year-old grandmother of Lynda Mann, told reporters that she visited her granddaughter's grave once every fortnight to replenish the flowers. She said, "As a Christian I do feel sorry for anyone who has done this. It may have been something that got out of hand. But I feel bitter too. It has crippled us. He must be brought to justice."

Kath said publicly that even former friends tended to avoid her and the family. She didn't blame them and understood their reasons.

"They just don't know what to say to you," Kath explained. "They feel that they must say something and they don't know what."

But she longed for her old companions to return.

Just after the first anniversary of the death of Lynda Mann, a hospital worker from Carlton Hayes Hospital found a tiny cross with a poppy attached to it, there in the ground beside The Black Pad, on the spot where Lynda had been murdered. Nobody knew what to make of it. The Eastwoods thought it might be a sick joke. Others thought it might be a gesture of remorse on the part of the killer. Poppy Day in England fell two weeks before the anniversary of the murder so the police thought it was just a simple gesture by some child, but who could say?

Chapter
10.

Breakthrough

One of the first experiments Alec Jeffreys conducted using genetic fingerprinting was on a family group to see if the pattern of inheritance was as simple as he expected it to be. From that test he saw clearly that half the bands and stripes on the X-ray film were from the mother, and the rest from the natural father. The patterns were inherited in a sensible fashion. It was thrilling.

Determining constancy from tissue to tissue within the individual followed next. His team took both blood and semen and found that the genetic map was constant irrespective of the kind of cells from which the material had come. To discover how sensitive the system was, they tested small quantities of blood and semen. It was rather sensitive: a drop of blood was enough, or a tiny amount of semen.

But there was the question of whether DNA was stable enough to survive in degraded forensic material. Jeffreys had conversations with forensic scientists at the Home Office who had access to three-year-old blood and semen stains. They tested these and it worked again.

Then they began testing the system on a wide range of animals and fish. Again it worked, and as they improved and refined their system the resolution and clarity of the X ray got even better. It only remained for the excited geneticist to write up his discovery for publication in the scientifi
c p
ress. He did the writing, but held up publication until he had his patents; there were highly profitable implications to his discovery.

Jeffreys didn't speak publicly about genetic fingerprinting until November, 1984, one year after the death of Lynda Mann. He discussed it then at two meetings in London: one with the Lister Institute of Genetic Medicine, and the other with the Mammalian Biochemical Genetics Workshop. These satisfied the scientific disclosure requirement for his patent application, an application that listed Jeffreys as the inventor and the patent rights as vested in the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine, of which he was a research fellow. Alec Jeffreys wanted any commercialization to benefit a British company, so Lister selected Imperial Chemical Industries as the sole licensee for any and all commercial exploitation.

In March 1985, when the Leicester geneticist published, he estimated the chances of two people having the same DNA fingerprint, two brothers for instance, as literally none. "You would have to look for one part in a million million million million million before you would find one pair with the same genetic fingerprint," Jeffreys said, "and with a world population of only five billion it can be categorically said that a genetic fingerprint is individually specific and that any pattern, excepting identical twins, does not belong to anyone on the face of this planet who ever has been or ever will be."

It was a dramatic claim and brought an immediate practical test. Shortly after publication, Jeffreys was called upon to enter an immigration case, a complicated one involving a boy who was living in Africa with his father, but who'd been born in Britain of Ghanaian parents. The boy wanted to return to Britain and live with a woman he claimed was his mother, but immigration officials believed the woman was his aunt and he'd been denied British residency.

Jeffreys had somehow to match the bands in the child's genetic fingerprint with those of a father not present. And he had a mother who wasn't all that sure about the boy's paternity in the first place.

The geneticist decided to take the undisputed children of the woman and match their genetic fingerprints with the mother's to "reconstruct," with some measure of certainty, an absent father. When he compared the pattern of the boy with those of his siblings, the reasonable conclusion was that the man who'd fathered him was the same man who'd fathered th
e r
est of the children.

Journalists loved that one. They wrote articles suggesting that some of the huge disputes on Dallas and Dynasty could easily be resolved by genetic fingerprinting. It was said that Dr. Alec Jeffreys had done a disservice to crime writers the world over, whose stories often center around doubtful identity and uncertain parentage.

Later in 1985 Jeffreys published again, after another system was developed in California, called the polymerase chain reaction. The California technology was even more sensitive than Jeffreys's system, which could get down only to a single hair root. But the California system, which had actually produced a genetic fingerprint from forty sperm heads, didn't have as high a level of individual discrimination. For forensic analysis, the Jeffreys system needed larger amounts of quality genetic material, but its end product was highly discriminatory. The California system could work on more degraded genetic material and so had its own place in forensic science. The bases of the two systems were very different, but they complemented each other.

Jeffreys wasn't afraid to test his system in a high-profile forensics matter, but the attention he was receiving in 1985 was basically confined to the scientific community. He got a professorship from Leicester University as a result of his discovery, was awarded a string of medals and prizes, and was admitted as a fellow of the Royal Society.

When the Home Office publicly accepted evidence provided by Jeffreys as convincing enough to use in deciding immigration cases, Alec Jeffreys was quoted as saying, "This makes me very hopeful that it will become a recognized method."

His comments were printed in the Leicester Mercury, two years after the murder of Lynda Mann. The last paragraph in the Jeffreys article said, "The new technique could mean a breakthrough in many areas, including the identification of criminals from a small sample of blood at the scene of the crime."

A month prior to that second anniversary of murder, while Alec Jeffreys was preparing a second paper for publication in a scientific journal, a sixteen-year-old trainee hairdresser said good night to her teenage boyfriend late one evening on a street corner in Wigston, a few miles east of Narborough. The boyfriend kissed her and ambled off, disappearing around a corner. The hairdresser turned toward home, walking down Blaby Road.

She looked fourteen or fifteen to me. A pretty little brunet I was having a wander. Just driving down Carlton Drive when the opportunity presented itself. I followed behind her, but Blaby is a main mad. Don't touch her on a main roadl Mustn't touch her on a main road!

The hairdresser walked into Kirkdale Road and then turned right toward the footbridge over the railway, toward Kenilworth Road. There was no lighting and she moved more quickly through the darkness on the footbridge.

It had to be right The car had to be parked in a line with the girl between me and the car. That's the way it had to be. I parked the car in an alley at the back of some shops.

Coming off the bridge the hairdresser saw something that made her break stride. She saw a shadow figure pacing up and down on the right side of the pavement. It seemed a bit peculiar. The shadow figure seemed to be waiting impatiently. When she got close to him she saw he was wearing a dark-blue nylon hooded jacket with white tassels. She was glad there were houses just ahead. The hairdresser ignored him and tried to walk past.

His arm shot out and hooked around her neck! She started to scream. She felt the blade of a screwdriver against the left side of her neck. A powerful hand seized her mouth. He whispered, "Shut up screaming or I'll kill you."

The blade gouged, the hand smothered. Like rabbit and fox, she was jerked, shaken, dragged along the pavement--dragged backward between the houses, back toward a row of garages. When they reached the opening he carried her inside, and pushed her forward in the darkness until her face pressed against the damp brick wall.

He released her mouth tentatively and said softly, "It'll be all over in a bit."

"Why me?" she pleaded. "Why me?"

"You're the only girl around, aren't you?" he said reasonably. "They'll all be coming out of the pubs soon," she sobbed. "There'll be more coming along! Why me?"

He began moving his free hand all over her. He fingered the zip on her trousers. She whimpered and pushed his hand away.

"You do it then," he whispered. "You do it."

She instinctively pulled back but stumbled in the darkness. She found herself sitting on the concrete floor, weeping.

"Take my money!" she cried. "Take anything but leave me alone! I promise I won't tell anybody!"

"Well," he said, dispassionately, "you'll have to suck it now, won'
t y
ou?"

She started to get up but he shoved her down, letting her feel the blade while he unzipped.

She didn't really believe he was going to do it. It all seemed so impossible she refused to believe it. He stood over her. He shoved it in her mouth. It was flaccid. He withdrew and masturbated.

She never shouted She never screamed. I took her to the floor very gently. I told her she was stupid to be walking home alone at that time of night. And what was her boyfriend letting her walk around at that time for? And where the bleedin hell were her parents? And why didn't they come to fetch her? They're nowt but silly twats, I told her.

He put it back in her mouth. She didn't move. She wanted to clench her teeth but was too frightened.

"Let this be a lesson," I told her. "You never walk the streets at night. You might not be enjoying this but I ain't hurting you. I could've knocked you of dead easy."

Suddenly he withdrew from her mouth. He turned away for a second. She didn't know if he ejaculated. If he did, it was when he turned away, or perhaps he didn't at all.

She knew what I said was right. She agreed with it I came, but I can't remember where I did it. She pulled away from me.

He said, "Don't say anything to anybody or I'll come back and find you."

The hairdresser sat there sobbing after he'd gone. She believed he might be there waiting to test her, waiting in the darkness. She managed to stand and move. She crept from the garage. He was gone.

Her parents were already upset that she'd been seeing the boyfriend and staying out late, so she didn't tell them what had happened. But while at work in Leicester the next day she had to tell someone. After blurting it out to another hairdresser, she felt better. She also told the manager of the salon, and the manager called the police.

There were some pathetic local headlines in 1985. The Mercury ran a story with a headline that read:

Edward Eastwood got into debt because he was unable to work after his stepdaughter, Lynda Mann, was murdered, Leicester magistrates were told.

Eastwood (43) of The Coppice, Narborough, admitted five offences of obtaining credit while an undischarged bankrupt. He was remanded on bail until August 5 for social inquiry report.

After the first bankruptcy he obtained credit from five different companies without disclosing he was bankrupt, but he had made repayment on all the loans. Solicitor Mr. Walter Berry said Eastwood got into debt because of the very traumatic situation which affected the whole family after the murder in November 1983.

A doctor's letter, which he handed to the magistrates, told a 'terrible tale of woe,' he said.

Before the murder, Eastwood was working as a quality control manager and was putting in 90 hours a week to pay off his loan debts. But afterwards, the court was told, he was unable to work and lost the job.

A month later a story headline said:

The stepfather of murdered teenager Lynda Mann was ordered to do 150 hours' community service by Leicester magistrates after he pleaded guilty to five offences of obtaining credit while being an undischarged bankrupt.

Prosecuting, Mr. John Davis said Eastwood had obtained credit to buy a greenhouse and furniture, have car repairs done, as well as obtaining a loan to pay off debts, and he was subsequently declared bankrupt again.