by Tom Philbin
Notable Quotable
“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.
Pitchfork’s Youth
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.
Colin Pitchfork, the first murderer caught with the use of DNA.
Forensic Science Marches On
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.
The Autopsy
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.
DNA
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.
In June 1976, I was embarking on a thrilling new project, my first novel. The subject, of course, was murder. I figured that if I wanted to learn about homicide, I should talk to the investigators in the homicide squad in Suffolk County, where my story was set.
In mid-June, having applied for and gotten permission to do just that, I was ushered into the office of Lt. Tom Richmond, the homicide squad commander. A private, powder-blue, two-story home had been converted into the squad’s temporary headquarters while the regular quarters were under construction.
Richmond was a warm, garrulous man with a funeral business on the side, and he answered my questions willingly and well. Indeed, I was thrilled when he told me things like, “The body speaks to you.” I could see such utterances enlivening and adding credibility to my novel.
After around forty-five minutes, I left the office and headed for my car. Little did I know that as I did, a detective with a high-powered, long-distance camera was taking multiple pictures of me. The reason, I was to find out, was that police everywhere know that killers like playing with fire and often contact police in some way after a murder. For example, Edmund Kemper, the notorious serial killer from the West Coast, would go to a bar called the Jury Room in Santa Cruz, California, where the cops who were investigating the murders he had committed hung out.
A week before I showed up at the Suffolk County homicide squad, the body of a 13-year-old girl named Katherine Woods had been found in Huntington. I was aware of that because the story was splashed all over the newspapers, but at the time I had no active interest in it for my book. As it happened, I immediately and routinely became a “person of interest” in Katherine’s case.
A Day with Jimmy
After my visit, one of the Suffolk County homicide detectives invited me to accompany him on his rounds the next day. Jimmy Pavese was a burly, cigar-inhaling guy who was as tough as cops come. I thought he was just being nice and trying to help me get the research I needed to write my book. Jimmy also supplemented my crash course in homicide by giving me Manner of Death, a book written by medical examiner Howard Adelman that showed all kinds of people who had left this life violently, and all in living color.
The next day was old hat for him but not for me. I got to view a young, deceased guy who had already been autopsied on a stainless-steel gurney in the morgue and, therefore, saw for the first time the characteristic Y-shaped incision on a victim’s chest. This guy had been murdered by the Mafia, and I was astonished to see only a tiny hole from a .22 bullet in his head. Unfortunately, I was still there when the dead man’s wife or girlfriend came in and started screaming hysterically.
Two things got to me that day. One was Jimmy’s cynicism. At the end of the day, when we had stopped for a few beers, he commented offhandedly that “people stink, Tommy.”
And the other was what real homicide is all about. It’s a horror, a far cry from the sanitized material presented on TV or in the movies.
Another Kindness
A couple of days later, I got another pleasant surprise. Jimmy knocked unexpectedly on my door and asked if I wanted to go to the crime scene of the Kathy Woods case. I was out the door in a flash.
As we drove to the scene, I recalled what I knew about the case from the newspapers. Kathy Woods was from Italy and had been adopted by Thomas Woods and his wife, Marian, as were four other kids: Jill (Kathy’s biological sister), Steven, Thomas, and Merrie.
Kathy attended Burr Hill Elementary School. On June 2, a Wednesday, she had gone to a big playground after school with friends and then had left to go home. She never got there and was reported missing by the Woods family.
On the following Saturday morning, her body was found by a family of bikers in woods adjacent to Sweet Hollow Road in Huntington, about five or six miles from her posh home in the upscale community of Dix Hills.
Because they were looking for a thirteen-year-old girl, cops didn’t know at first that this was Kathy’s body. The person they found looked like a spectacularly curvaceous woman in her early twenties. Indeed, I found out later that a number of cops came from other precincts in the county just to view the body.
Trip down Sweet Hollow
Sweet Hollow was a very narrow road that was relatively primitive for being in the middle of the bustling town of Huntington. The road was partly paved and partly packed dirt. It was flanked by heavy woods, and later, after traveling it many times, I learned that the road was in perpetual shadow because the tops of trees from both sides of the road interlaced and blocked the sun. Much later, it became a mecca for ghost hunters because at night it was very spooky.
Before we started rolling down it, Jimmy pointed out the window and said, “Look, there are metal medallions on the light poles in the woods. We’re looking for the LILCO (Long Island Lighting Company) pole numbered 62, which is near where she was found. Why don’t I look on my side and you look on yours?”
We did that, and as we did, Jimmy started to ask me questions about the murder, things like how I would’ve handled it if it were me. I found the questions quite complimentary.
“One thing I wouldn’t do is murder her in these woods,” I said. “There are only a few houses along the road, but certainly she would scream and be heard by someone. I think
she was killed somewhere else and her body dumped here.”
LILCO Pole 62 Missing
For some reason, we couldn’t find LILCO Pole 62. After a half hour, Jimmy suggested we quit and go to one of his favorite places, the nearest bar.
As we sipped beers, Jimmy remained quiet until he suddenly said, “I hope you don’t think I was trying to refamiliarize you with the scene.”
It took me a moment to understand what he was getting at. He would have loved for me to give him a fact I shouldn’t know, such as the location of well-hidden LILCO Pole 62.
I was still a person of interest.
Once he was convinced I was not involved in Kathy’ murder, I got to be friends with Jimmy and he really let me inside the case, though, of course, not all the way inside. He told me Kathy’s throat had been cut and she had been stabbed in the back. There were bruises on her face but she died of asphyxiation. A gag the killer shoved down her throat had choked her to death.
And she had been hog-tied with cord made of yellow polypropylene. The cords were tight and interconnected to her neck, so if she moved, she would choke.
But undoubtedly the worst detail was that cops speculated—since time of death is so difficult to prove—that the killer had kept her alive for at least three days, sexually and physically assaulting her the entire time. She definitely was not murdered on Sweet Hollow. They called it a crime scene, but it was just the place where the body had been dumped. Kathy had been tortured and killed somewhere else. She had been a little girl, and I found the details of her abduction and death almost unbearable to think about.