the Blooding (1989)

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  "She's in the other plane. It's like being in hospital there, the equivalent of hospital. She'll continue living there much as she was here."

  The woman was obviously trying to put them at rest, but the family was upset for days. A big strapping man coming up behind Lynda. The choking, strangling sounds. It was like Kath's recurring dream!

  "If he's not caught within one year, he'll do it again," the medium warned.

  The aftermath of murder produces many casualties. Susan Mann had, like Eddie Eastwood, been center stage during the inquiry into the death of her younger sister: Lynda the pretty one, the bright one, the popular one, the one they doted on.

  The police inspector responsible for the night patrol of Narborough began receiving reports of a shapely girl in a miniskirt flagging down patrol units as well as CID cars. When he talked to his officers he learned that the girl was Susan Mann who was offering "clues," none of them worthwhile.

  "Leave her alone" was the word he quickly passed.

  A sergeant who'd become a friend of the family spotted Susan one night and decided to have a chat with the girl, who had never openly grieved for her murdered sister.

  "Look here, Sue," he said, "we've been ordered not to talk to you anymore. It's just not on. You can't be waving down police cars."

  "Nobody talks to me anymore," she said. "I even talk to Lynda, in me own mind, but nobody talks to me. Nobody cares!"

  "Well, of course we do," the sergeant said.

  And suddenly, Susan Mann grieved. Perhaps for Lynda, perhaps for her mother or for herself. In any case, the lonely girl cried. She wanted comfort and a shoulder. She reached for him.

  "Steady on!" he said. "This won't do! I'm a married man and a bloody policeman!"

  So they all wept eventually, all the victims of The Black Pad killer. They all wanted someone to hold them and tell them it was all right, even though they knew it wasn't and would never be again.

  Chapter 9.

  Discovery

  Derek Pearce had, in the course of his police career, read books dealing with forensic medicine, like Dr. Simpson's. But like the majority of policemen, he was skeptical that science would ever do more than occasionally augment "old-fashioned bobbying," police work being more of an art than a science to its practitioners.

  "I'd always heard about startling scientific discoveries," he said, "but I'd never been startled. A fingerprint in blood was about as startling as it ever got for me on a murder enquiry. I always said I'd like to see one of those scientists startle me someday."

  He was about to get his wish. A few miles away from the village of Narborough, a thirty-four-year-old scientist at Leicester University was, in the autumn of 1984, about to stumble upon a discovery which would indeed startle Derek Pearce, as well as every other man and woman in the Leicestershire Constabulary.

  The discovery occurred on a "fringe project" taking place in the laboratory of geneticist Alec Jeffreys, whose main project involved a study to determine how genes evolve. He was working with those genes which express specifically in human muscle. He was most interested in the repetitive sequence he'd found in the human myoglobin gene.

  His little fringe project, progressing to its final stages, was of minor academic interest. Then it suddenly became a bit more intriguing.

  Several years earlier, genetic engineering techniques had been developed for looking directly at genes and deoxyribonucleic acid--their genetic material--known as DNA. Geneticists had become interested in the possibility of examining the genetic differences between people, the most fundamental aspect of all.

  The DNA molecules that govern heredity were troublesome and elusive because most genetic material varies quite a lot from one person to another. The challenge, as Jeffreys saw it, was to identify those regions of genetic material that displayed the most variation from person to person, and then to construct a means of highlighting these regions with a radioactive probe. Simply put, Jeffreys was trying to develop much better genetic markers than had yet been found, specific markers for mapping human genes.

  There was a bit of the philosopher in the geneticist. Two years before he began work on his fringe project, he'd been quoted regarding genetic engineering being done at Leicester University: "Too many people still throw up their hands in horror about the ethics or morality involved without really knowing what genetic engineering is really about. What we've really got is a new toy with endless possibilities and it's just amazing what could be done. New medical compounds could be made, crops and farm animals could be manipulated to provide better yields, and many diseases could be virtually eradicated."

  Alec Jeffreys then tried to allay the fears of people with Frankenstein fantasies. "It is the scientists themselves who first thought that experiments could be dangerous, but experience has shown that very little can go wrong. There's no way scientists could contemplate using humans as guinea pigs, even in the unlikely event that their governments would let them. I have this nightmare vision of people choosing the characters of their children in the same way that they choose a car or a washing machine. But I think society will always make sure that science does not interfere too much with nature."

  Jeffreys's twenty-seven-year-old lab assistant, Victoria Wilson, had been with him for eight years by September of 1984.

  "The years were just a blur," she later said of those earlier times. "They just sped by, but Alec seems to somehow remember everything we've done, just as it happened day by day."

  The biology scientists are "interesting types," according to Vickie Wilson. But even the most interesting among them must have been startled the first time they saw the bearded geneticist with a roll-your-own dangling from his lips. He looked anachronistic, like a pot-smoking academiciao from the sixties, but it wasn't cannabis, it was Golden Virginia tobacco. He let the cigarettes go dead in his fingers when energetically involved in conversation, and never smoked tailor-mades unless going somewhere special.

  He was seldom seen without his bulky turtleneck. That "polo neck jumper" became a Jeffreys trademark.

  The geneticist's staff consisted of a research assistant, two technicians, usually a couple of Ph. D. students, and a postdoc or two, all of whom enjoyed his style.

  "Alec's always excited," another technician said of her boss. "He's such an enthusiastic scientist. His personality inspires the rest of us."

  Whenever he got excited, Vickie Wilson figured he was on to something, and he had been very excited one day in September of 1984.

  "During the course of that research Alec was poorly," she remembered. "He had glandular fever, and I had to ring him up quite often as things were proceeding. To tell him it was getting quite interesting."

  Jeffreys's process for mapping those human genes entailed taking DNA molecules extracted from a sample of blood cells, and cutting or "chopping" them into unequal bits by adding enzymes to them. The fragments were dropped into an agarose gel where an electric field caused the larger fragments to separate from the smaller ones. The DNA fragment pattern was then transferred to a nylon membrane by a technique called southern blotting, literally drawn up by capillary force when the blotting paper was placed on the membrane.

  Jeffreys's team then added radioactively labeled pieces of the DNA to act as "probes" that would stick to the hypervariable regions they fitted. The membrane was X-rayed to disclose the radioactive pattern, the darker bands appearing where the probes had adhered.

  The distribution of these bands would be unique, person to person, and so they would be looking at a DNA image that would be individually specific.

  That was the theory of how it was supposed to work.

  On a Monday morning in September the X-ray film was developed and, in Jeffreys's words, "We were just stunned!"

  Within minutes of getting the film out of the developing tank they could read it! Furthermore, they had expected to see one or two major bands on the film, but instead they had a whole series of gray and black bands, resembling the bar codes used to mark gro
cery items. And Dr. Alec Jeffreys knew that he was looking at huge numbers of genetic markers that showed both an astonishing level of variability and an amazing degree of individual specificity.

  Jeffreys's wife, Susan, was a senior computer officer at Leicester University, and it was she who realized the possibilities of his discovery. She immediately predicted the practicality of what he'd called his "lucky string of circumstances." By that evening she was making long lists of the applications of his technology, the first being to suggest that immigration disputes could now be easily settled, and in Britain there were many. It would now be a simple matter to determine whether or not a person seeking entry into the country was entitled to do so, based upon an alleged blood relationship to a British subject.

  It wasn't long before Jeffreys and his team theorized that the system might be used on animals, with very substantial implications in determining pedigree, in artificial insemination, in ascertaining that endangered species didn't inbreed accidentally.

  It could be used in bone marrow transplants of leukemia victims to determine whether grafts had taken or not. It would be easy to determine if newborn twins were fraternal or identical, since the only people on the face of the planet with identical DNA maps would be identical twins.

  And it didn't take them very long to see that the technology could have important uses in forensic analysis. A name for the technology had to be chosen. The bold and logical choice was "genetic fingerprinting."

  On November 19th the Mercury printed a column headlined: STORIES TO JOG YOUR MEMORY.

  The newspaper article offered a news summary from Monday, November 21, 1983, the day of Lynda Mann's death. There was a story about multimillionaire Soraya Khashoggi, nee Sandra Daley of Leicester, who'd made a bid in court to have her ex-husband jailed. That was one locals would remember. Another old story dealt with the Leicester rugby hero who'd skippered his team, the Tigers, to a victory over Twickenham.

  And for several days the paper ran a series of articles summarizing the massive work done on the inquiry, ending once again with an appeal for help. The police admitted to "relying very heavily" on the local press.

  The Leicestershire Constabulary had initiated a new poster campaign and set up a mobile inquiry unit to receive any fresh leads. The police asked people to "search their consciences to remember what members of their families and friends were doing on Monday night, November 21, 1983."

  Another Lynda Mann poster was displayed throughout the villages. The poster heading said, "Let's not forget Lynda Mann, murdered a year ago in Narborough." The poster showed a photo of Lynda's face superimposed over a model posed in a donkey jacket. The poster asked the public to help with the inquiries and ended with the promise that all information would be treated "in the strictest of confidence."

  Derek Pearce reported to journalists that the renewed campaign had resulted in thirty telephone calls, but he belatedly added: "Some lines of enquiry are not new."

  On a dreary autumn day, one year after the murder of Lynda Mann, Kath and Eddie Eastwood visited a second seer. This one was a woman they'd heard about from friends in Leicester. The Eastwoods were not trying primarily to find comfort in otherworld contact, but rather looking for murder clues, to alleviate rage and despair.

  The woman was very vague and offered little solace. She reported a vision involving the initial "T." and the name "Gerard." She could see a pretty dark-haired girl, as though in a mist. But the Eastwoods realized that she could well have read about the murder and could have seen photographs of Lynda. The medium also warned that if the killer was not caught very soon he'd kill again, but the police told them that anyone with a rudimentary understanding of such crimes might have made a similar prediction.

  The "T." meant nothing to Kath and Eddie. The "Gerard" they thought could refer to the notice for Gerard Motors over the railway bridge on Narborough Road. They wondered if perhaps the murderer lived near that bridge. The police, however, were not enthusiastic about seers and mediums.

  Sgt. Mick Mason still kept in touch, and they received some calls from Inspector Mick Thomas, the other young DI who had worked with Pearce on the Lynda Mann inquiry. Thomas would ring them from time to time offering reassurance that the police would never give up, that they were working on every new lead and reworking old ones.

  He'd even call when one of the new leads didn't pan out. The calls that admitted failure went a long way in convincing them they still might hope for retribution. If he'd just called with optimistic information, they'd have chalked it up to public relations, and felt more hopeless than ever.

  They got a bit of comfort when they learned that a published report claiming Lynda had been seen in a disco on the night of her death had been investigated thoroughly and discounted. She'd been to a disco in Croft with her friend Karen on November 18th, but that was the extent of it. They thought it had to have been a villager who'd murdered her, not some stranger from a disco.

  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 scientific press. He did the writing, but held up publication until he had his patents; there were highly profitable implications to his discovery.

&nb
sp; 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 the rest of the children.