The Killer Book of Cold Cases (21 page)
Read The Killer Book of Cold Cases Online
Authors: Tom Philbin
The detective’s first response could not be repeated in polite company. Finally the detective said: “Give me the bleedin’ good news then!”
Jeffreys said, “You only have to catch one killer. The same man murdered both girls.”
Quickly, Baker and some detectives, cops, and forensic scientists went to Jeffreys’ lab where he explained how the lines on a screen he used, lines that resembled a bar code, identified the kitchen porter, Lynda Mann, and Dawn Ashworth—and the DNA of the teens’ killer.
The next day, Baker announced that, based on the DNA results, the kitchen porter was going to be released. On November 21, 1986, something highly significant happened: the kitchen porter went to court and became the first person in the world to be freed by genetic fingerprinting.
Now killers have something else to fear from crime fighters: a new database of dog DNA.
Indeed, in South London the value of dog DNA was well established during a clash between members of rival gangs. Twenty or so members of the O-Tray gang confronted a teenager, 16-year-old Christopher Ogunyemi, a member of an opposing gang, and he immediately started running, hoping to scale a fence to get away. But one of the opposing gang members, Chrisdian Johnson, had a dog with him, a mix of pit bull and mastiff named Tyson (presumably after Mike Tyson). Johnson sicced the dog on Ogunyemi, and the dog pulled him back to Johnson, who then stabbed him to death.
The dog was accidentally slashed during the attack, and when police investigated, they found a 600-yard trail of blood, as well as blood all over Johnson. The newly developed DNA dog technology allowed cops to prove that Johnson was at the attack site, because they found his dog’s blood at the site and on Johnson. It was the first time that dog DNA had been used to secure a conviction. Johnson had stabbed Ogunyemi six times. Two of the knife wounds sliced through his aorta and proved fatal.
Detectives said that it was the first time a dog had been used like this in a gang killing. Detective Chief Inspector Mick Norman, who led the investigation, said: “It was vitally important that we could put Johnson at the scene of the attack. We did not have excellent ID evidence.”
Authorities said that the new dog DNA database came online only two months before the murder, enabling statistical analysis to be given on samples for the first time, rather than just identification of the animal type.
Scientist Rob Ogden, PhD, and others at the University of Edinburgh set up the database, and it has resulted in a number of other cases being prosecuted. Ogden, a forensic animal DNA specialist, said: “It can involve dangerous dog offenses, but we also get cases where dogs naturally shed hairs.”
Later that day, the Leicester Constabulary held a news conference to explain how the 17-year-old porter had been freed and why. One of the newspapermen had the temerity to ask Baker when the police had first realized they had “committed a blunder.”
“You only have to catch one killer. The same man murdered both girls.”
—Alec Jeffreys
As Wambaugh described in
The Blooding
, Baker said, with a look that could have reactivated every chunk of DNA in the room, “The Leicester PD did not commit a blunder.” Baker said the kitchen porter had only been charged after he signed a confession. Of course, that still was a blunder because the police had arrested and treated the wrong person as if he was the killer.
At one point, as the police gained faith in DNA testing, they had an idea: Why not just draw blood samples from likely suspects—gathered from police background files—and see if any of them matched the genetic fingerprints of the killer as laid out by Jeffreys? The idea got the green light, and the police sent letters to likely suspects in the area, who then came to give blood samples. After a lack of success with hundreds of samples taken, the police had another idea: expand the search and give tests not only to natural suspects but also to all men in the right age range in surrounding communities.
They didn’t know it, but by going this route, the police had made someone feel like a cornered rat. He was the murderer, a man who had been questioned originally but from whom the cops had accepted an unproved alibi. They believed that he had been taking care of his baby during the three hours when Lynda Mann had been murdered. To have committed the crime, he would have had to leave the baby alone for three hours. And that is exactly what he did.
Colin Pitchfork was a baker who lived with his wife, Carole, and two children. He was always “chatting up” female coworkers and, in fact, had had an affair with one—a not particularly attractive woman nicknamed “Brown Eyes.” He had impregnated her, but the baby was stillborn.
When Pitchfork was growing up, his family was dominated by his mother. While his brother and sister were both achievers, Pitchfork was the black sheep of the family, a lowly baker. His wife also was domineering so Pitchfork may have had deep hostility toward women. That could easily have been transferred to anyone female, particularly defenseless females that Pitchfork could slaughter with little resistance.
Like other males in the area between the ages of seventeen and thirty-four, Pitchfork received a letter in January 1987 telling him to report to the Leicester PD for a blood test. Of course, the thought terrified him. He knew he could not give cops a sample of his blood. He decided that he had to send someone in his place to pose as him, so he approached a coworker and offered him 200 pounds. Pitchfork simply told the man that he did not want to have the police probing his past, which included “flashing” when he was young.
The worker told him no, so he tried someone else at the plant, who also said no. Meanwhile, his wife began hammering at him to go after he disregarded a second letter from police. Pitchfork told her he was afraid of them unearthing his past. She kept nagging him.
Then he asked someone else at the bakery, a shy young man named Ian Kelly. Kelly didn’t know Pitchfork that well, only that he was second in command. Kelly ultimately agreed. They inserted Kelly’s picture in Pitchfork’s passport, and one night Kelly went and had blood drawn. Pitchfork passed.
But in the summer of 1987, something happened at the Clarendon, a pub near Hampshires Bakery, that would change everything. Ian Kelly, the bakery manager, and a couple of other employees of the bakery were having a couple of pints, and the conversation got around to Colin Pitchfork. Eventually, in what Wambaugh calls an “unguarded moment,” Kelly let something drop. He said, “Colin had me take that blood test for him.”
The question followed: “What test?” One thing led to another, and the bakery manager, burdened with a guilty conscience, called the police. Kelly confessed that he had signed for Pitchfork, and detectives visited Pitchfork’s house on September 19, 1987. They arrested him. When Pitchfork wouldn’t deny the killings, his wife physically attacked him.
Pitchfork was given a DNA test that proved conclusively that he was the killer of the two teen girls. He was tried and convicted of their murders and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of thirty years, but he appealed and his sentence was reduced to twenty-eight years. He will be eligible for parole in 2016. The likelihood of that is slim, even though Pitchfork educated himself in prison and is now an expert at “the transcription of printed music into Braille.”
He hasn’t said he is sorry for what he did for a simple reason: he isn’t.
No question that the investigation of murder and other serious crimes have been aided incalculably by advances in forensic science, which could collectively be described as a variety of sciences that help criminal investigators discover and evaluate evidence.
In his book,
Coroner at Large
, Thomas Noguchi, MD, former chief medical examiner for the County of Los Angeles, says that the founding father of forensics was Alphonse Bertillon, an obscure clerk in the Paris Prefecture of Police.
Born in 1853 and the son of a distinguished physician, Louis-Adolphe Bertillon, MD, young Bertillon was bad-tempered, snobbish, and pedantic. Expelled from several schools and fired from various jobs, he was, in all, an unlikely hero for the forensic profession. But, toiling in a remote and shabby corner of the prefecture, Bertillon could not help but notice the chaos in the police procedures.
The central problem was identifying criminals. Because the lawbreakers used aliases and disguises, the descriptions and primitive photographs in police card files were worthless. An escaped prisoner could be caught in a new felony, and the police would not even know he was the same man.
Bertillon devised two techniques to solve the problem. First, he standardized the photographic process, making certain that all pictures of criminals would be taken from exactly the same position and with the same lighting. Thus pictures could be compared with confidence later. He also insisted on one full-face and one profile photo, so that facial features could be better studied, a process still used in today’s mug shots.
He also devised something called anthropometry, which other scientists soon called “bertillonage.” He measured certain components of criminal bodies, such as the length and breadth of their heads, the lengths of their middle fingers, the lengths of their left feet, and so on. All of these measurements remained constant throughout the criminals’ adult lives. Bertillon calculated that the chance of two persons having the exact measurements of these several components was more than four million to one.
The system was adopted around the world but then replaced by the science of fingerprinting. William I. Herschel, a British colonial administrator in India began using thumbprints in the 1860s to verify signatures and to serve as signatures for people who were illiterate. Henry Faulds, MD, a Scottish physician in Tokyo, published a paper in a journal in 1880 saying that fingerprints could be used to identify criminals. He later was one of the first to use the technique, eliminating an innocent burglary suspect.
Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, conceived a technique of discerning four patterns, based on a triangular figure called the delta, which appeared on almost every fingertip. Galton classified fingerprints as to whether they contained no triangle, a triangle on the right or left, or several triangles. He published the first comprehensive book about solving crimes with fingerprints in 1892. With modification, his technique is still in use today.
Bertillon made another addition to forensics by building the world’s first criminalities laboratory as a part of the French Sûreté Nationale.
Another great tool in criminal investigation was the autopsy, which was first performed in the sixteenth century in Italy. As the decades and centuries went by, the autopsy became more and more sophisticated in determining the cause of death.
In 1901, a German professor named Paul Uhlenhuth made a remarkable contribution to forensic science: the identification of blood from analysis of bloodstains. Uhlenhuth found that the blood serum (the watery component of the blood) could be used to distinguish between human and animal blood by the way it reacted to a sample of each type of blood in laboratory tests.
In 1897, Paul Brouardel, MD, a French pathologist, published the first major study that distinguished deaths by hanging from those by choking or manual strangulation. In 1925, New Zealander Sydney Smith, MD, published the
Textbook of Forensic Medicine
, which covered every aspect of forensic medicine. In 1889, Professor Alexandre Lacassagne, a Frenchman, developed a method of analysis using markings on a bullet to identify the gun it came from.
Scientists had always wanted to be able to identify poison in the body. A Scottish chemist named James Marsh mixed sulfuric acid with arsenic, producing a hydrogen gas containing arsenic elements. This gas was ignited as it left the mouth of a test tube while Marsh held a dish above it. The black deposit created on the dish was pure arsenic. When Marsh placed tissues in his tube in which arsenic was invisible, the arsenic became visible. Toxicology could thereafter detect the presence of the poison in the body of a victim.
There were other breakthroughs in forensics, but DNA was as huge as any, on a par with the greatest breakthroughs ever, and it has undoubtedly given investigators a powerful tool.
DNA is short for deoxyribonucleic acid, a nucleic acid found in every cell in the body that carries the genetic codes that control the function and structure of every component of the body. DNA technology is to crime investigation what the airplane was to travel: It has revolutionized it. When analyzed, DNA varies absolutely from one individual to the next. In a sense, it’s like a genetic fingerprint. These genetic fingerprints are in every cell of the body and are therefore contained in blood, semen, and other material found at crime scenes. All that the “genetic engineer” needs to do is compare the DNA of the substance found with that of a suspect.
The accuracy of DNA testing is mind-boggling—almost 100 percent. It is widely accepted by law-enforcement agencies, as noted earlier in this chapter. DNA has figured in innumerable sensational convictions and acquittals. Even if a DNA sample such as blood or semen is old, its genetic makeup can be discovered. Many convictions have been overturned because of DNA analysis. Gates have opened for people who had been in prison for more than ten years when a DNA analysis of evidence buried in a property room proved them innocent. Although the science is unimpeachable, attacks are often made on the experts who interpret the DNA analysis.
This book is mostly about cases that baffled police, and cold cases are almost always baffling. If these cases are solved, DNA often plays a role. Still, as these stories show, plenty of good detective work usually plays an important role.