The Abduction
Colette Aram grew up in the small town of Keyworth, England. In many ways, 1983 Keyworth was emblematic of a bygone era in British history. The residents all knew their neighbors and although the village suffered from the tough economy of the early 1980s, crime was not much of a problem. Keyworth is located in the north central region of England, far from the crime and problems of London, Manchester, Liverpool, and the other major cities of Britain.
Colette Aram’s parents believed it was the perfect place to raise their daughter.
Colette lived at home with her parents, but was training to be a hairdresser and hoped to use that to find a job in order to save some money so that she could get a place of her own, or possibly to move in with her boyfriend. Her boyfriend lived approximately one and a half miles from the Aram residence. It was a walk Colette made countless times.
Often, Colette’s boyfriend would pick her up at her family’s home and then the two would go out on the town or spend a quiet evening at his place. On the evening of October 30, 1983, Colette’s boyfriend’s car was having problems, so she decided to make the short walk to his place.
About half-way to her boyfriend’s, at around 8:10 pm, Colette stopped to talk with a group of her neighbors who were hanging out in front of a house. The Aram’s neighborhood was usually active with children and adults socializing, so the scene was nothing out of the ordinary. Also, although Halloween is not as big a holiday in England as it is in the United States, the English do celebrate it and so the evening was a bit more festive and active than usual.
Once Colette finished talking with her neighbors, she rounded the corner and was never seen alive again.
But she was heard!
Witnesses reported hearing a scream and seeing an unknown car drive off around the same time. Was Colette abducted?
Colette’s family immediately contacted the local police, but wasted no time and began searching for her themselves. The cover of darkness hampered their search, though, and ostensibly also gave Colette’s abductor cover.
The search for Colette resumed early on the morning of October 31. It did not take long for searchers to find the naked body of Colette Aram, which was located in a wooded area less than a mile from her family’s home. An autopsy revealed that the friendly teenager had been raped and strangled to death.
The citizens of Keyworth were upset and frightened when they learned of Colette’s murder.
A monster was walking the streets of quiet Keyworth.
A Kidnaping Case Becomes a Homicide Investigation
The forensic examiners dutifully cataloged all of the physical evidence relating to the case, including the semen from inside Colette, although the technology of the time limited what they could do with it. For the time being, the police were forced to rely on old fashioned techniques to find Colette’s killer.
Since Colette was on her way to see her boyfriend, he immediately went to the top of the list of the police’s persons of interest. After interviewing Colette’s boyfriend, the police quickly ruled him out as a suspect for a number of reasons, including a solid alibi. Once Colette’s boyfriend was struck from their list of potential suspects, the local investigators learned that he was the only man on their list.
When the police did a background check of all the men in the Aram’s neighborhood and compiled a list of all of Colette’s known male acquaintances, it was determined that none were viable suspects. Most had air-tight alibis and those who did not either had a blood type that did not match the semen taken from Colette or they were too young to have committed the crime.
It seemed that the police were at an impasse.
The days after Colette’s murder turned to weeks and the weeks turned to months. Then the police and the Aram family were approached by the British Broadcasting Company about a new television show they were producing about unsolved crimes in Britain. The producers of the show, titled Crimewatch, wanted to profile Colette’s case on their inaugural episode in June 1984. The local investigators and the Aram family were more than happy to give interviews for the show with the slim hope that someone watching would know something and come forward.
After the show aired, the BBC studios received hundreds of tips. Unfortunately, though, none of those tips panned out. Since Crimewatch represented a new medium (it served as inspiration for the later America’s Most Wanted), many of the calls were actually pranks and a few were from scorned lovers who tried to use the show to get back at former partners.
After sifting through the largely bogus tips generated from the spot on Crimewatch, local authorities received a bizarre letter.
The Nottinghamshire Police—Keyworth is within the shire of Nottingham, which is close to the equivalent of an American county—thought that the letter was the break they needed to solve the case. Perhaps the killer would reveal information about himself that would ultimately lead to his arrest.
In the letter, the killer bragged that the timing of the abduction and murder, the night before Halloween, helped him blend in with the crowd.
“No-one knows what I look like. That is why you have not got me,” the killer wrote. “I know I strangled her. I drove around and ended up at Keyworth. I left the key there to fool you and walked back across the fields. You will never get me.”
Hoping that someone would recognize the killer’s writing, the police published part of the letter, but they received no responses.
The murder of Colette Aram went cold for nearly thirty years.
Advances in DNA Technology
When Colette Aram was raped and murdered in 1983, Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) was known to scientists, but they had yet to learn how to develop DNA profiles that are specific to each person. Around the time Colette was murdered, scientists in the United Kingdom, not far from her home, were developing a process whereby each person’s unique genetic profile could be mapped and profiled. Once developed, DNA profiling would revolutionize law enforcement as much as the discovery that each person has unique fingerprints did in the late nineteenth century.
About two years after Colette was murdered, a British scientist named Alex Jefferys worked day and night in his Leicester lab to discover that each person has a unique DNA code that can be “fingerprinted” or profiled. The discovery was revolutionary and almost immediately applied to law enforcement. Jefferys first used DNA profiling to help capture British murderer and rapist Colin Pitchfork in 1987, which set the stage for DNA profiling to be used in crime labs across the world.
Despite the great leap forward made in the science, it still took a long time to compile an accurate DNA profile well into the 1990s and large samples were often needed. By the 2000s, though, the science had advanced enough that a DNA profile could be gleaned from a sample within hours and scientists learned how to extract a profile from mitochondrial DNA. Samples no longer needed to be large, which was bad news for the bad guys.
Police procedures had also advanced in the nearly thirty years after Colette Aram’s murder.
Although the police who originally investigated Colette’s murder were hampered by limited DNA science, they were far sighted and skilled enough to properly preserve the physical evidence from the case, namely the killer’s semen that was extracted from Colette. For the first few years after Colette’s murder, the semen sample sat in an evidence locker, but by the 2000s the case was reevaluated when the United Kingdom created a national database of DNA taken from criminals, both those convicted and charged, as well as DNA taken from cold cases.
It was only a matter of time before Colette’s murderer was caught.
The break that police were looking for came in 2008 when a man named Jean-Paul Hutchinson was arrested on a traffic violation. As required under British law, the man was forced to submit a sample of his DNA for the national database and after doing so it turned out that his DNA was a near match to Coleen’s killer. It seemed as though, after nearly thirty years, Colette’s killer would finally face justice.
&nb
sp; But there was just one problem—Jean-Paul Hutchinson was only twenty-four-years-old in 2008, which meant that he was not yet born when Colette was killed.
Could the killer’s DNA sample have been stored improperly?
Investigators reviewed all the possible scenarios until they were left with the most plausible one—since Jean-Paul Hutchinson’s profile was not an exact match, then the DNA profile belonged to someone to which he was closely related.
His siblings were ruled out because they were too young to have committed the crime, so the attention quickly turned to the Hutchinson family patriarch, fifty-one-year-old Paul Stewart Hutchinson.
At first glance, Hutchison seemed like an unlikely suspect. The former rail worker and father of four had no criminal record.
But DNA does not lie.
A sample of Paul Hutchinson’s DNA was taken and it was quickly determined that he was in fact the person who left his DNA in Colette Aram.
Hutchinson was charged with Aram’s murder in 2009 and seeing that he had no defense against the positive DNA match, pleaded guilty in January 2010 to her murder. In court, the once large and imposing rail worker looked like a shell of his former self. He was suffering from diabetes, walked with a cane, and would now have to spend the rest of his life in prison.
Although the process took nearly thirty years to complete, Colette’s family was glad that the case was finally over and they could at last have their closure.
“We got Hutchinson in the end,” said Colette’s mother, Jacqui Kirby to the press after the guilty plea. “But it took 26 years and I paid the price. Colette’s death tore my family apart.”
But life in prison was not a prospect Paul Hutchinson wanted to face. Just a few months after he pled guilty to Colette’s murder, Hutchinson was found dead in his cell of an apparent drug overdose.
He may have cheated justice in this world, but the next world will probably not be so forgiving.
Chapter 10: The Murder of Manhattan Prostitute Helen Jewett
For some of you true crime aficionados reading this, you may remember the 1994 trial of the so-called “Hollywood Madam”, Heidi Fleiss. In that case, Fleiss was sent to prison for pandering, but made headlines because of her high-profile clientele. Although Fleiss never went public with the names of any of her clients, a number of prominent actors, athletes, and even politicians were rumored to have used her services.
The Fleiss trial took place in an era where traditional values were being challenged throughout the United States. Prostitution had already been legal for decades in some parts of Nevada and tolerated in many other areas throughout the country. Fleiss’ trial garnered media attention not so much for the type of crime committed, but more so for the defendant’s glamorous looks and the possibility that a “bombshell” could be dropped in the form of Fleiss’ black book of clients.
Most Americans were indifferent to the moral nuances of the case.
In 1836, long before the Heidi Fleiss trial and the glare of twenty-four-hour news networks, an equally salacious trial took place in the United States that also involved prostitution and high-profile clients.
But the 1836 trial centered on the murder of a prostitute named Helen Jewett.
Like the Heidi Fleiss trial, the Helen Jewett murder trial became a media sensation for a number of reasons. The victim was a once innocent, attractive young woman who lost her moral compass and walked down the road of perdition before being brutally murdered!
The suspect was a young man with no viable motive to kill Jewett and the verdict that was returned can be described as questionable at best.
The Helen Jewett murder trial had all the hallmarks to make it one of the most sensational trials in nineteenth century American history. Because of those factors, it continues to intrigue legions of true crime fans and amateur sleuths.
Dorcas Doyen
Helen Jewett was born Dorcas Doyen in Augusta, Maine, in 1813. The Doyens were a working class family who tried to instill traditional values and ethics into young Dorcas, but her mother died when she was a young girl.
The death of her mother was just the first in a series of early events that helped to set the trajectory of Dorcas’ life. Without her mother to show her how to be a proper nineteenth century lady, Dorcas learned that knowledge on her own.
Not long after her mother died, Dorcas’ father sent her to work for a local judge named Nathan Weston. Dorcas worked as a servant in the Weston home, but by all accounts was treated as a member of the family. Weston provided for a formal education for Dorcas and in her free time, she was allowed to use the extensive personal library in the Weston home. It was while she lived with the Westons that Dorcas acquired the sophistication and education that allowed her to become one of the most sought after prostitutes in New York years later.
Clearly, Judge Weston took a keen interest in Dorcas’ future, but some think that it was more than a father-daughter relationship.
To this day, it remains unknown if Dorcas and the judge had an affair, but it is known that when Dorcas was sixteen or seventeen she became sexually involved with another much older man. The paramour in question was a banker who was married with children. The affair immediately became a scandal in conservative nineteenth century Augusta and put the judge in a precarious position.
Since the affair was made public and Dorcas was under the age of eighteen, the judge would be expected to level statutory rape charges against the girl’s lover. If he did that the details of his relationship with Dorcas could be made public.
To wiggle out of this untenable situation, the Weston family stated that Dorcas was actually eighteen and since the sex between her and the banker was consensual, then no charges would be leveled. This allowed Dorcas to leave the employ of the Westons, although she decided to stay in Augusta.
Dorcas quickly found out that it was difficult for a woman to find work in nineteenth century Augusta, especially when she was known around the city for being involved in a sex scandal. Because her reputation was essentially ruined, and with few job prospects in the area, she turned to the world’s oldest profession to pay the bills.
A few months after Dorcas left the Weston home, she met Augusta madam Maria Stanley who gave her a job in a local brothel. Dorcas worked in the Augusta brothel for a few weeks, but then changed her named to Helen Mar and moved to Boston.
Doyen/Mar worked as a prostitute for a few months in Boston, which is possibly where she met well-known Manhattan madam Rosina Townsend. By the late 1820s, or early 1830s, Dorcas changed her named once more, this time to Helen Jewett, and joined Townsend in Manhattan to work in one of her high-end brothels.
Helen Jewett became an immediate hit with the customers.
The brothel where Jewett worked was not far from Manhattan’s city hall and the clientele included prominent politicians, Wall Street businessmen, bankers, lawyers, journalists, and actors. Truly, it was a client list that could easily compare with that of Heidi Fleiss 160 years later, which is what made Helen’s murder such a scandal.
Did a member of New York’s elite kill Helen Jewett?
A Brutal Murder
On April 10, 1836, after responding to smoke emanating from Jewett’s room, Townsend found the burned body of Helen Jewett around four a.m. Since 1836 was long before electrical power, people used candles to keep rooms and hallways lit, which is what Townsend and the other prostitutes thought killed Jewett.
At first, the police concurred.
An autopsy revealed that Helen was already dead when the fire was set. The cause of death was determined to be three blows to the head by what was believed to be a hatchet. It was a most brutal way for Helen Jewett’s troubled life to end and if there was any consolation, it was that she was killed in her sleep.
Once the police determined that the young woman was murdered, they turned their attention to arresting a suspect.
A Suspect Emerges
Almost from the beginning of the investigation, Townsend and the other pros
titutes from the brothel told the police to focus on one of Helen’s regular customers, Richard P. Robinson.
In some ways Robinson was like Jewett. Born in 1818 to a middle class family in Connecticut, Robinson left home as a teenager to “make it big” in New York City. Instead, he found work as a clerk in a dry goods store and often found himself associating with members of the criminal underworld and often went by the alias “Frank Rivers.”
According to one story, Jewett first met Robinson when she was accosted by a man on the streets of New York. As she tried to escape the clutches of the vagrant, Robinson stepped in and gave the guy a thrashing. The two then began a relationship that was more than just that of a client and prostitute.
When the two were not spending time with each other at the brothel, they exchanged letters that betrayed their often volatile relationship. They appeared to be in love, but Robinson hated Jewett’s profession and wanted her to quit.
Just three days before she was murdered, Jewett sent a particularly emotional letter to Robinson.
"You have known how I have loved, do not, oh do not provoke the experiment of seeing how I can hate," she wrote.
Richard Robinson responded, "You are never so foolish as when you threaten me. Keep quiet until I come on Saturday night and then we will see if we cannot be better friends hereafter."
That Saturday, April 9, 1836, was the last night Jewett and Robinson spent together.
Townsend told the police that she saw Robinson in the brothel wearing a long black cloak on the evening of Saturday, April 9. To her knowledge, Robinson was Jewett’s only client that evening.
Other prostitutes who worked at the brothel saw Robinson exit through a back door just before the fire. The police found a black cloak and a bloody hatchet near the door.
Finding Robinson was not difficult. He lived in a boarding house about half a mile away. Although Robinson denied involvement in Jewett’s murder, the circumstantial evidence was enough for an arrest.
True Crime Stories Volume 4: 12 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Anthology) Page 7