by Tom Philbin
One of the suspects was a man with a rather unusual name, Colin Pitchfork, a 25-year-old baker who lived in Little Thorpe, the town next to Narborough. When police called at his house in January, he was very nervous because he had stolen some home-improvement materials. But the police hadn’t shown up for that. They were just conducting routine canvassing about the murder.
Pitchfork was one of the people who didn’t have an alibi, but he did not become a suspect because he said he was minding his baby between the hours of 6:15 and 9:30 p.m. on the night of the murder, and investigators accepted that. How could he leave the baby at home, commit a murder, and then return to his babysitting chores?
The area where the murder had occurred, meanwhile, was in a state of fear, with villagers wondering if whoever had killed Lynda would strike again. As time went by and stretched into spring, the number of cops assigned to Lynda Mann’s murder decreased. Initially, there had been 150, but by April only eight cops were still actively investigating the case.
At Easter, the lead detective, Ian Counts, announced with tears in his eyes that the investigation was being shut down, and by August it was over completely. Police did have one thing: around 150 blood tests that had been given during the course of the investigation. But these were serology samples, not DNA, and none came close to exposing whoever the perpetrator was.
Psychic Help
At one point the Eastwood family, desperate to know who had murdered their daughter, hired a psychic, a fortyish woman on the frail side. She went into Lynda’s bedroom and tried to communicate psychometrically, a process whereby the psychic touches objects that the person who has “crossed over” has touched in the hopes that psychic communication can occur.
Jack the Ripper
Belief in “seers” or psychics goes back a long way. Victorians produced spiritualists (many of them bogus) who invited people into séances to communicate with the dead. In 1888, psychics got involved to some degree in the case known as the Whitechapel murders, the crimes of the man known as Jack the Ripper. In ten weeks, from the end of August into November, someone killed five prostitutes (two of them on a single night), slitting their throats and removing pieces of them to carry off. The murders stopped as quickly as they had begun, and Jack’s identity was never conclusively resolved. There were a handful of suspects, but no one was ever charged or convicted of any of these brutal crimes.
To try to discover who this killer might be or when he might strike again, spiritualists all over England held sittings, the details of which were sometimes revealed to the press. From his scars to his residence to his accomplices, spiritualists provided what information they could about the killer from their impressions. One man said that the Ripper was wearing a tweed suit and took the police to the home of a doctor who was subsequently hospitalized for mental illness, but no psychic provided information that conclusively solved the crimes.
Over a century later, Pamela Ball tried to contact the victims of the killer through channeling, in which a living person becomes a means through which the dead can speak. Calling her method “evidential mediumship,” she used several different means, including astrological charts of the victims, to contact someone with “inside” knowledge. She received feelings such as nausea and resignation, and images of several different men, which indicated that there may have been more than one killer. She tried contacting various suspects and came to the conclusion that most of the victims were killed because they knew political secrets.
None of this makes any difference to people who care about scientific evidence. With the passage of time, the contamination of crime scenes, and the lack of anything physical distinctly tied to the Ripper (not even letters, for certain), it’s unlikely that any suspect can be proven to be Jack. In fact, Ball asked the otherworldly forces if Jack’s identity would ever be known and received the answer, “No.” She tended to support the idea that a member of the royal family was involved, a sexy theory but not very tenable. None of her assertions gained via psychic impressions can be verified.
While contacting victims long after a crime has occurred can be a fascinating exercise, the psychics who actually get involved in an investigation provide a better means for showing their ability—or not.
To do this, the psychic held one of Lynda’s pieces of jewelry, a necklace, in her hand. The Eastwoods did not accompany the woman into the room but could hear her choking. Eventually, the psychic came out of the door and proclaimed, as reported in Wambaugh’s The Blooding: “He was a big, strapping man. He came up from behind.” In what was undoubtedly an attempt to make the Eastwoods feel better, the psychic said, “The afterlife is in a different plane. We all live on different planes, [some] of us in the worlds [as well as] others. This world is hell.”
“And where’s Lynda?” her mother asked.
“She’s in the other plane. It’s like being in a hospital there. She’ll continue living there much as she has here.” The psychic concluded by saying that “if he’s not caught within one year, he’ll do it again.”
Psychic Detectives
I remember being in Washington, home base of the FBI, while doing a story on child abductions. I asked two high-ranking agents of the Crimes Against Children unit what their attitude was about using psychics on cases, and neither of the agents said they believed in it. They would surely be in the majority of cops.
Of course, there have been some spectacular failures using psychics. One of the most famous was Peter Hurkos, a Dutch-born psychic detective. Boston police called him in to try to gain insight about the Boston Strangler, who had killed women there in 1962, 1963, and 1964. Police were under tremendous pressure by the media and the terrified public to solve the case. Hurkos was given complete access to the case but was not able to come up with anything.
On the other hand, psychic successes are reported all the time. Vernon Geberth—a hard-nosed investigator who is as down to earth as anyone could imagine—does not discount them out of hand. Indeed, I got the feeling that he believes in some of them. And I know that many cops believe in psychics and will say that they work.
I also did a book with a psychic named Jeffrey Wands. When I first met him and listened to him, I wasn’t that impressed. It struck me as illogical that someone could come out of the blue and know something about a case without any previous knowledge of what had been going on.
But during the time we worked on the book, I was surprised many times and even amazed at how accurate his predictions were. The first time I was impressed involved myself. The first day I interviewed him for the book, he came up to me after the session was over and said quite seriously, “Take care when you’re driving.”
“Why?”
“You have a problem with the brakes on your car.”
I nodded, but I didn’t believe him. My brakes were fine. The next morning, as I was driving somewhere—I forget where—I got on the Northern State Parkway, a big parkway running east and west across Long Island, where I live. Suddenly and totally without warning, all the brake lights on the car went on and the brakes failed. I was able to ease the car to a stop, and I don’t remember exactly what the problem was, but I can tell you that Jeffrey Wands had gotten my attention.
Over the years, I saw him predict a variety of things that simply had to come from his psychic ability. I have seen him be wrong, too. So my overall feeling is that I could never say that he didn’t have psychic ability.
A variety of events have occurred as psychics predicted that they would. No doubt the most famous—or infamous—was when psychic Jeane Dixon, who used to be featured in a variety of tabloids, predicted that President Kennedy would be assassinated. Apparently her insight never got to Kennedy.
While the investigation had slowed to a crawl, a scientist named Alec Jeffreys of Leicester University, which was a few miles from Narborough, had been working on how human genes evolve. He had a major project and also a small side project related to the muscle, in which he was noting how genes repeated themselve
s. Jeffreys’ work would soon prove pivotal in both Lynda Mann’s case and the case of another murdered teenager.
Jeffreys was not as interested initially in the minor project, but then he noticed how genes repeated themselves and how the genes of one individual varied from another, although members of the same family had the same genetic makeup. He immediately saw the importance of genes (DNA) in identifying individuals and ultimately would patent his finding.
A Perfect Family
The Ashworth family lived in a Georgian-style home in the town of Enderby, which was close to Narborough. Robin and Barbara Ashworth had two children, Dawn, a pretty fifteen-year-old, and Andrew, her tallish thirteen-year-old brother.
From the outside, the combination of the family, the spacious house and property they had, and the laid-back and emotionally close way they approached life seemed to be, as Barbara Ashworth described it, “perfect.”
After the school term ended in summer 1986, Dawn got a summer job in a news agent’s shop. Every night she would go out to the homes of friends in Narborough, and though her parents were worried a bit about her going out at night, she agreed to return to home by a certain hour. To get from Narborough to Enderby, Dawn would walk along a path between the two towns called Ten Pound Lane, or Green Path, because it was always so lushly overgrown with grass.
On this night, she was supposed to be home by 7:00 p.m. But soon it was 9:30, and her worried parents called the police at 9:40. Then, like Eddie Eastwood had, they started searching. At one point, Robin Ashworth wasn’t aware that he had just passed the body of his daughter lying on Ten Pound Lane in an area that had, in a stunning coincidence, just been mowed by Eddie Eastwood.
Body Discovered
On Saturday, July 22, a detective sergeant found a jacket with a pack of cigarettes in a pocket and a tube of lipstick. The finds galvanized the police into action, and before noon, an area with bushes and vegetation near the path was sealed off. That area concealed the body of Dawn Ashworth.
The body, like that of Lynda Mann, was covered with bruises, many of them made post mortem and from the damage of insects. She was naked from the waist down with underpants looped around her right ankle, but she still had her white pumps on. Her bra had been pulled down, exposing her small breasts, and a smear of blood traveled from her vagina across her left thigh.
Her body was covered with abrasions and cuts, not only from insects but from her body being dragged across sharp nettles to its final hiding place. She had been a virgin, but her vagina and anus had been forcefully penetrated. Like the Eastwoods, the Ashworths became victims of the homicide, not physically murdered but spiritually killed.
Eddie Eastwood, both a grieving father and a suspect, perhaps put it best. “I went to a pub in Enderby one day. I went into the back room and just let go. I realized how much we were all victims of the one that done it. I cried like a child, I did.”
Police, of course, having suffered the ignominy of not solving Lynda Mann’s murder, now had a new one to solve, and the pressure to clear it was, as cops say, quite intense. They interviewed hundreds of people, not only men with perverse sexual pasts, but ordinary people who might logically be suspect, such as mental patients, people who lived in the area of the murder, and people who someone had called in a tip about.
Meanwhile, parents started taking their young children to and from school, and it was announced that lights would be installed on the Black Pad for around $10,000. The police work yielded a number of viable suspects, but each time the cops failed to find the real killer.
The villages and surrounding areas where the two teenagers had been murdered were, of course, terrorized by the murders, but then something increased their fear. Word got out to newspaper reporters that the killer of the two girls was the same person. There was no proof, but that was the opinion of detectives. What that did, essentially, was to tell people that the killer was motivated by inner demons that lusted for blood, rather than these being two isolated incidents. That meant every young girl was at risk.
A Tip
Police were going wild trying to find a viable suspect, and then they got one. As usual, the lead came not from Sherlock Holmesian insight, but a tip from a civilian.
A young man who worked at Carlton Hayes Hospital had been on vacation, and when he returned, he spoke to his friend, a kitchen porter at the hospital, who had some stunning news for him: The body of a young girl named Dawn Ashworth had been found “in a hedge near a gate by the M1 bridge.”
When the young man went home, his father asked him where he had gotten the information because there was nothing about it on the “telly.” His son told him. That would have been twelve hours before the teenager’s body was discovered. The man’s account got back to the police, as well as someone saying that the porter had told another witness the same thing. This had been only a couple of hours before the press was told.
Cops descended on the young porter’s home near the Foxhunter Roundabout in Narborough to arrest him at five in the morning. What followed during his interrogation was a virtual one-man show: he denied guilt, admitted guilt, said he had met Dawn and seen a man hovering near them with a stick and assaulting her…and then denying he had done anything. He was a whirlwind of verbiage and eccentric behavior, and despite all that, he was charged with murder.
The impact on his parents was profound—neither of them could eat for days, and each started to take tranquilizers. Then, one day, the porter’s father said something to the police. “I got to thinking,” he is quoted as saying in The Blooding. “I’d read somewhere in the Reader’s Digest or saw on Tomorrow’s World about the DNA testing that the chappie in Leicester had discovered. I told my laddie’s solicitor to look into it.”
The lawyer later reported back that one of the chief detectives hadn’t heard of DNA testing but said he would check it out. Later, the police would claim that they hadn’t needed any prompting; they had checked it out on their own.
Ultimately, a semen sample from the body of Lynda Mann and blood from the kitchen porter were delivered to Alec Jeffreys at nearby Leicester University for the first DNA testing of human beings. Based on what he found, Jeffreys asked police for a sample of something from Dawn Ashworth. A week later, it was delivered, and then Jeffreys conducted his tests and called the police.
As described in The Blooding, the representative of Leicester Chief Superintendent David Baker listened to Jeffreys. “I have bad news and good news,” Jeffreys said. “Not only is your man innocent in the Mann case, but he isn’t even the man who killed Dawn Ashworth.”
Alec Jeffreys, who pioneered the use of DNA.
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.
A Detective’s Best Friend
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 Ogun
yemi, 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.”