Blooding

by Joseph Wambaugh

  “Any chance of a mistake?” was about all Baker could manage, at the end of a long and painful debate with the intractable geneticist.

  “Not if you’ve given me the correct samples,” Jeffreys answered.

  And that was that. The dazed policemen lurched out of Jeffreys’s office. Hanging from the notice board outside the laboratory was a copy of a letter that couldn’t have amused them at the time.

  Dear Sir, Madam:

  We are interested in the new genetic fingerprinting recently devised by Leicester University. As owners of self-catering accommodation we wonder whether this method could be used to verify persons responsible for leaving urinated beds.

  We enclose an SAE and look forward to your reply.

  With thanks,

  Yours

  faithfully,

  The kitchen porter was scheduled to go to court in late November, three years to the day since the murder of Lynda Mann. But something unusual happened the night before, something the boy couldn’t figure out. In the high-security cells they always left the red light on all night so they could make periodic checks to assure that no one was attempting escape or suicide. That night they turned it off for the boy. The next day he was taken to Charles Street Police Station in Leicester and treated to sandwiches. He was transported without handcuffs.

  The parents of the kitchen porter received a telephone call from their son’s solicitor who said, “The whole thing’s blown up in their faces. I’ve been told that unofficially.”

  There were only a few people present in the gallery at Crown Court, Leicester, on November 21, 1986, when legal and forensic history was made. The seventeen-year-old became the first accused murderer in the world to be set free as a result of the DNA test known as genetic fingerprinting. The boy’s solicitor drove him from the courtroom to his parents’ home after a hiatus of three months and ten days.

  The Leicestershire Constabulary called a news conference that afternoon. Asst. Chief Constable Brian Pollard, in uniform, sat at a conference table before a room full of reporters. Chief Supt. David Baker sat on his right and Supt. Tony Painter was next to Baker. All three looked like they’d just been told that Libya was moving its London embassy to Leicester.

  Pollard, facing batteries of lights and cameras, donned half-glasses and read a very carefully worded introduction from a prepared statement regarding the kitchen porter and the DNA tests. Then he quickly concluded by saying, “Those tests did not implicate him in the murder of Lynda Mann. Further tests were asked for by the investigating officers in the murder of Dawn Ashworth. The tests were carried out and results were checked by scientists at the forensics science laboratory in Aldermaston who confirmed the findings. The result of the test indicate that a person as yet unknown was responsible in the deaths of both girls. The Crown Prosecution Service have been kept informed and have decided that proceedings should be discontinued.”

  When questions were allowed, one of the first went straight to the commander of Leicestershire CID, who was asked when it was that they realized they’d “committed a blunder.”

  David Baker, with a look that could have radioactivated every chunk of DNA in the room, said, “The Leicestershire CID did not commit a blunder.”

  Then he tried to turn down the rems by explaining that the kitchen porter had been charged only after he’d confessed during a tape-recorded interview session, part of which had been conducted in the presence of his lawyer.

  Baker cryptically added, “He is not responsible for certain aspects of that murder.”

  “Has he been totally eliminated?” a journalist asked.

  “No one has been totally eliminated,” the chief superintendent answered.

  The television news that night began with a startling lead: “Police have reopened the hunt. Youth accused of murder is freed.”

  Another network newscast began, “Father says he should never have been arrested. Police go back to the drawing board.”

  Still another said, “Police are no nearer today than they were three years ago.”

  The next day the headline was huge:

  YOUTH GOES FREE

  NOW PROBE IS ON INTO DOUBLE MURDER

  Both Chief Supt. David Baker and Supt. Tony Painter spoke to the kitchen porter’s parents after he’d been discharged by the magistrate at Crown Court.

  David Baker told them, “We know what you’ve been through. You think we don’t, but we do.”

  When Tony Painter spoke to the boy’s father, the unemployed taxi driver said to Painter, “A few weeks ago I could have willingly killed you.”

  “I can understand that,” said Painter.

  Both police officials were exceedingly polite and patient as they relayed confidential information they’d learned from the boy.

  The father made a statement to journalists who came to his home on the day of his son’s release. He said, “The lad is staying with his grandmother for the next few days but we’ll have a family get-together on Tuesday.”

  When asked about his feelings toward the police he said, “They questioned him for fifteen hours, and although I believe they followed procedure, he was bound to be confused after all that time and just said the things they wanted to hear.”

  As to other legal implications, he said he didn’t want to comment until he’d met with his son’s solicitor.

  When the father was interviewed by a national television news team, he said, “We have no idea what legal course of action we may take.” He would not let anyone interview his son personally, but described the boy’s reaction by saying, “The furrows down his cheeks show tears of relief.”

  Villagers, reporters and the public at large were astonished at how magnanimously the family was behaving. There had been no threat of a lawsuit for wrongful arrest, no demand for compensation.

  Three days after the boy’s release his solicitor, Walter Berry, told the Leicester Mercury, “They are taking no action whatsoever. They think the police acted absolutely superbly throughout. They have no complaints about the police.”

  It was indeed unusual to hear a criminal lawyer in the role of police cheerleader, so Berry was asked what advice he’d personally given to the family. The solicitor declined to state, saying it would be “improper.” However he added that the family was “completely satisfied with the way police had handled the case.”

  Actually, the kitchen porter’s parents had been given a transcribed copy of portions of their son’s lengthy confession. After they’d recovered from the shock and dismay of learning about numerous sexual incidents—especially about a prosecutable indecent assault on the nine-year-old girl—and after understanding that their son was not being charged with any of these offenses, everyone perhaps decided that a quid pro quo was in order.

  The seventeen-year-old did not return to his job at the hospital, but stayed at home every day with his parents. His mother voiced concern about his lying around the house as though still in prison.

  “He’s going to get a bit funny,” she told her husband, perhaps unable to admit that her son had always been a bit funny.

  “He were frightened to go out the house,” his father said. “So we thought a pet would be a bit o’ company.”

  They bought him a nectar parrot, raven black with a tangerine mask. The boy obviously loved his little carnival bird and called him Dusty.

  When their son did go out, one of them would accompany him everywhere he went. They were afraid there were people out there who still believed their son was the footpath murderer, people who would “get him.”

  “I’ll always have me mum or dad with me,” he said to a television newsman when his father allowed one brief interview.

  The boy spent several months listening to records, tinkering with engines, talking to Dusty. At a later time, when he was asked by an interviewer about his time in jail he looked at his father for approval before responding.

  “Not too bad,” he said.

  When his father quickly interrupted to say what
his son really meant, the boy fell silent until his father was finished. Then he compromised.

  “Well, the food was ’orrible, yeah, but … you leave them alone, they leave you alone.”

  He talked about his future in very vague terms. “I can’t find a job,” he said. “I didn’t do the killings. I didn’t do nowt. But people don’t want you around. They don’t want to know you.”

  He loved to sit and bury his lips and nose in Dusty’s feathers and purr like a cat.

  Looking toward his dad for approbation, he added, “In the nick, you ain’t got nowt to do but read papers and listen to the radio all day but … people do leave you alone, don’t they. It weren’t too bad, really!”

  Then he showed his sly little smile and purred, pressing his face into Dusty’s ebony wings.

  Dr. Alec Jeffreys was deluged with media requests. After he went to the FBI’s training center in Quantico, Virginia, his face appeared in national newsmagazines in many parts of the world.

  His genetic fingerprinting was to be made available commercially in 1987, when the chemical giant ICI started a blood-testing center in Cheshire, England. When reporters asked if he was going to become wealthy as well as famous, the thirty-six-year-old geneticist shrugged off the question, as any good scientist should, but he did not completely avoid publicity. After all, he still wore the “costume,” the turtleneck pullover, and he still had the “prop,” the hand-rolled Golden Virginia.

  If Alec Jeffreys were to become rich as well as famous, few would begrudge him. After all, his discovery was revolutionizing forensic science, as well as providing practical applications in many other areas of science and medicine.

  But he knew his life would never be the same after people started recognizing him in shops and pubs, pointing him out as “that genetic-fingerprinting bloke.”

  Eddie and Kath Eastwood had decided to move away from Leicestershire and try for a fresh start in Lincolnshire. They would make only occasional trips back to visit old friends, and to place flowers on Lynda’s grave.

  But after the inquiry was reopened they were run to earth in Lincolnshire by reporters, and the torment began anew. And Eddie gave a short statement that provided a headline: CATCH HIM AND END THIS HELL.

  With the inquiry beginning all over again there was a terrible change in the grief-stricken Ashworth household. Barbara suddenly began experiencing a new emotion: terror.

  On dark nights Barbara Ashworth would now almost see him at the window, with his red-netted eyeball—the bloodshot eye of madness. In the morning she would actually dread opening the curtains. It became an ordeal. She never knew whether to jerk them open suddenly or try to peer through the opening, with splinters of fear in her stomach.

  She had a dream and it recurred. In the dream she was being made to hurry across that footbridge by Ten Pound Lane, the footbridge her daughter had been advised to take, but didn’t. A spectral figure with menacing eyes walked behind her, but he was not the man at the window. The face she imagined in waking moments, that one was like the face in the Lynda Mann police Identikit: the young man with the spiky punk hairstyle.

  Occasionally she had other recurring dreams, of an earlier time when the children were younger and everything was back to normal—the recurring dream of parents of dead children, a dream sure to evoke spasms of grief after waking up. But that dream could be interrupted by the other, by the sound of footsteps behind her on the footbridge.

  It finally became impossible to know which was more fearful, closed curtains at night or opened ones by day. And she was often drawn by day to an upstairs window, the one in Dawn’s bedroom, a bedroom kept exactly as Dawn had left it. A room that waited. Barbara could see the churchyard from there. Without willing it, she’d be driven toward that room. She could actually pinpoint the grave, from the bedroom window of her murdered child.

  18

  Dawn Ashworth II

  A peculiar thing happened in the villages of Narborough, Littlethorpe and Enderby. By early December, except for community leaders, people no longer talked about the murders. You would hardly hear them mentioned. When reporters streamed back into the village, now that a new inquiry had been opened, people would shake their heads and move along, refusing to speculate or gossip. They wouldn’t even discuss it in the pubs. The tittle-tattle had ended.

  A spokesman for the Narborough Parish Council probably was correct when he tried to explain his fellow villagers. He said, “People in an English village are more reticent than most, even under ordinary circumstances. And this ghastly business, well, they’re embarrassed to be talking about murder. It’s so devastating it’s shut them up.”

  Three years earlier, some had convinced themselves that the murderer of Lynda Mann might be an outsider, perhaps a transient from the motorway. Now, they could not escape the knowledge that there was a murderer living among them. It was terrifying to parents, and apart from that, it was shaming them all. They lived in a civilized place among reasonable folk, and they felt ashamed. So if the foot-path phantom was still discussed it was done quietly, in the privacy of one’s home.

  About the only Narborough villager who did talk openly of it was the village locksmith, the former army judo instructor who’d been scandalized by seeing the kitchen porter run his hand up between the legs of the girl in the Narborough taxi office. The lock-smith decided it was high time to do something.

  Probably over sixty, his age was belied by a full head of red hair, a hard muscular physique, and the presence of a pregnant wife, who, he said, proved that he was “physically very fit.”

  He was known by villagers to “experiment with alternate lifestyles,” this because he was an Englishman married to an Indian and practiced Buddhism.

  It wasn’t easy getting accepted by the crusty villagers, the ones in tweed jackets and elbow patches, who might speak to him one day but not the next. “The inner village is just that,” he said. “It’s a village, and you’ll never change an English village.”

  The only people who greeted his family consistently were the old people whom he described as “infinitely polite.” His Anglo-Indian daughter, born a fortnight after they’d arrived in Narborough, had several “grandparents” in the village who gave her plenty of attention.

  Once he made up his mind to take a stand against terror, he posted a shocking bulletin on the notice board beside the post office in Narborough village. Among notices like JUMBLE SALE AT ALL SAINTS CHURCH HALL and MAY WE INTRODUCE YOU TO CHURCH BELL RINGING? was a bulletin headlined: PROTECT YOUR DAUGHTERS AND YOURSELVES AGAINST RAPE!

  As a result, the Narborough Parish Council hall became the scene of self-defense classes on Sunday afternoons, varying in size from fifteen women to fifty. And it was the women who took part. The adolescent girls, those who stood to be the next victims of the footpath killer, would come only when their parents demanded it, and then escape at the first opportunity.

  It was frustrating to community leaders that after the kitchen porter was released—and it became certain that the killer was a local man who would strike day or night—the teenage girls, the likely victims, still refused to believe it could happen to them. The older ones, the unlikely victims, were convinced they were in mortal danger. In fact, the locksmith had to turn away some of the very old women to make room for those who at least were possible targets.

  No men were allowed to watch the goings-on. Street clothes were permitted and mats were not used, because as the locksmith explained to them, “Rapists don’t use mats. And I’m not teaching karate, kung-fu or even judo. I’m teaching defense against rape.”

  Ne’er-do-wells in the pubs snickered about the “roly-poly aunties bouncing around like Bruce Lee, bloodying their noses with their flippin mammaries.”

  Villagers reported that there was a whiff of chaos and insanity in the air.

  Littlethorpe doesn’t have the Georgian and Tudor homes found in Narborough. In fact, if it weren’t for a large housing estate built in the 1960’s it could hardly be
called a village. There are two pubs, one of them converted from a big Tudor farmhouse, a few shops, and that’s about it, with the exception of Littlethorpe House, a beautiful old Georgian property that dominates the single commercial street. Littlethorpe House was the home of the village squire in earlier times, and cottages adjoining it in the village square were formerly used by the housemaids, the chauffeur and other servants. The present residents of Littlethorpe House are driven about in a RollsRoyce, a practice that’s said to be “too crusty by half,” but they lovingly maintain the property.

  Down the road from the old part of Littlethorpe village is a housing estate where the majority of the population resides, and it was there that the locksmith went one day, though not to teach self-defense. He did any security work pertaining to the protection of property. The young woman who’d rung him said she might want him to build a protective canopy for their car.

  It was a pleasant twenty-minute walk to her home since, as the sign in Narborough village points out, Littlethorpe is just three quarters of a mile down Station Road, past the Narborough depot, across the river Soar, past fields of grass.

  When the locksmith arrived, he was met by a polite young woman with a baby in her arms and a three-year-old son hiding behind. She showed him what she had in mind and it seemed a simple enough job. He could always use the money and turned down work only if he sensed the customer wouldn’t pay. He didn’t sense this at all with Carole Pitchfork.

  But then her husband showed up and began asking questions, offering a few opinions.

  “He seemed a bit of a know-it-all, a domineering man,” the locksmith later told his wife. “I should imagine that inside his own house his wife wouldn’t have too much to say.”

  That didn’t explain his refusing the work. The man hadn’t been rude. He’d only offered a few remarks. The locksmith simply could not articulate the reason for turning down a good job from people who obviously could afford it.