“I just didn’t like that man” was the only justification he could offer when he arrived home. The locksmith promised to send the Pitchforks an estimate, but never did.
Modifications were being made in the lifestyle of the villagers. A school bus was rerouted so that no child would have to walk along The Black Pad. The rector of All Saints Church publicly urged young girls to take precautions when going about alone, but of course the girls ignored him. New posters and leaflets were distributed throughout the villages.
After the release of the kitchen porter, the two anonymous donors upped the reward to £20,000 for the killer, bringing journalists running to the new incident room at Wigston Police Station.
Insp. Mick Thomas, who’d been in charge of the house-to-house teams on the Lynda Mann inquiry and had worked on the Dawn Ashworth murder as well, granted a television interview. He was asked if the reward meant that “routine policing had failed and the money was a bribe, a sign of desperation.”
Looking very professional in a dark business suit, Thomas faced the cameras and said affably, “Oh, no, certainly not! The enthusiasm is very good on the enquiry and we’re confident we’ll get the person responsible.”
The enthusiasm was there all right, but so was a note of desperation.
Insp. Derek Pearce was brought into the new murder inquiry to be in charge of the suspect teams, joining Mick Thomas who had the house-to-house teams. Supt. Tony Painter told his two DI’s that they were to help him select the very best men available for this one. “We’re going to end it once and for all,” he said.
As the detectives read Tony Painter, their job was to cement the evidence against the kitchen porter. Police work is an art, not a science, and an artist is not about to back down just because he’s faced with scientific hocus-pocus.
Though one of the detectives chosen to see it through once and for all said, “It seemed to some of us that we might have to accept the genetic fingerprinting, despite what the gaffer believed. It was either that, or turn to somebody who could detect village murders. Somebody like Agatha bleedin Christie and her Miss Jane bloody Marple.”
They referred to this new inquiry as “Dawn Ashworth II.” Since the conclusion of “Dawn Ashworth I,” culminating with the kitchen porter’s arrest back in August, there had been no work done on the hundreds of messages that had come in. Now with the murder investigation reopened they were deluged once more.
Not having worked on Dawn Ashworth I, Pearce had to read every message submitted on that inquiry and examine every lead that had been phoned in since.
As the squad of fifty men began to report and assemble at the incident room in Wigston Police Station, they were told they were not there to make money. There’d be no overtime pay and no expenses on this investigation. They were going to work “lates,” they were going to work weekends, they were going to work more hours than they’d ever worked. They weren’t going to be rich men when this one was over.
There really was no confusion as to a starting point. It was clear to many of the subordinates in the new murder squad that they were not back to square one as the press believed. Some of their superiors were still obsessed with the kitchen porter, and there was a great deal of investigative attention directed toward the Carlton Hayes psychiatric hospital where the boy had worked.
Some members of the inquiry who were reassigned to Dawn Ashworth II would admit privately, “Our job was to get enough evidence to finally make an airtight case against that lad, genetic fingerprinting or no.” And so they tried.
On December 18th, Crimewatch UK screened a segment on the Narborough murders. It showed the re-creation of Dawn’s last walk, and a sad little segment with Barbara Ashworth in which she said, “It’s not only a daughter that we’ve lost, but personally I’ve lost a very good friend. And it’s that friendship that I miss more than anything.”
All of this was in the hope of persuading anyone who might be shielding the footpath phantom to come forth. The announcer said, “There must be husbands who are suspected by their wives.”
The community leaders of Narborough, Littlethorpe and Enderby met on December 6th with Supt. Tony Painter and Chief Supt. David Baker, to offer help and moral support to the new murder inquiry. They’d hoped that all the media from the Midlands would be there but only a reporter from the Mercury showed up, causing parish councillors to call the lack of interest “deplorable.” The unsolved Narborough murders were getting to be old news and people were losing not just interest but hope.
The next day the Mercury ran an editorial that said:
The fact is that there are some people within our community who have a suspicion that a member of their family, or a friend, or acquaintance, is the killer or knows who was involved.
Knowing now that the whole community has joined the hunt should make the killer and the people foolishly protecting him very uneasy in their beds tonight.
One of the members of the Narborough Parish Council, solidly behind the police efforts, was the father of Carole Pitchfork of Littlethorpe. She was his only child and he doted on her. It was said he’d never really approved of the young man she’d married.
During the first days of Dawn Ashworth II, Derek Pearce read eighteen hundred messages that had been ignored since the kitchen porter’s arrest. After Pearce read them, they were read by Insp. Mick Thomas, after which Pearce read them again.
And after the kitchen porter was discharged by the court there was a message blitz. It took six operators to log the phone calls, sometimes as many as a hundred a day. Messages came from bobbies, from people who’d read newspaper stories or seen television coverage, people who’d had dreams. The operators got messages like “I saw a suspicious bloke in a Birmingham cinema who must be your murderer. He laughed when the female star got killed.”
Pearce found himself reading new messages about the punk with spiky hair as though the three-year interruption hadn’t happened. The orange-haired punk was being sighted all over Leicestershire and hadn’t aged a day or changed his hairdo. A punk who, for all they knew, could’ve gone bald.
A policewoman or other operator would record the new information received by telephone. The messages would go to Pearce who had to spend an enormous number of hours evaluating and deciding what he wanted done. He could give a message a high priority, or put a low code or a medium code on it, or decide it was nothing at all, in which case he’d write, “No further action.” The message would then go through the computer system with an action allocator getting the print-out. The action teams might receive a message saying, “Interview subject and eliminate him,” or “Trace man seen walking dog in King Edward Avenue at 5 P.M.”
As part of the management team Pearce didn’t just assign the actions, but made sure the teams followed up on the high-priority markings and didn’t just turn to a message that seemed more intriguing. As he put it, he’d “occasionally grab the stickers at the bottom of the piles to make sure the lads weren’t sloughing off something promising.”
In the pile of eighteen hundred messages that Pearce had to allocate was one that pertained to someone whose name had popped up on the Lynda Mann inquiry because he was unalibied and had a prior arrest record for flashing. Of course, hundreds of names had been called in anonymously by wives, lovers, rivals, neighbors, bosses, employees and nutters, many of those names belonging to people with prior indecency arrests. This one wasn’t worth special attention, because in the earlier inquiry he’d been shown not to have moved to the village until one month after Lynda Mann’s murder.
The anonymous message said: “You ought to have a look at a man in Littlethorpe named Colin Pitchfork.”
19
The Blooding
Blooding
1. The letting of blood, bleeding; wounding with loss of blood.
2. The action of giving hounds a first taste of and appetite for blood.
—The Oxford English Dictionary
By late December, after many members of the inquiry ha
d voluntarily given up their Christmas holiday to work on old and new leads—and after the Leicester Mercury had printed a special four-page edition containing every salient fact and photo that might help the police, and shoved this edition into every letter box in the three villages—Supt. Tony Painter and all subordinates were required to suspend their disbelief. It was going to be assumed that genetic fingerprinting actually worked.
The ranking officers held a gaffers’ meeting with DI’s Derek Pearce and Mick Thomas. The subject was blood. Chief Supt. David Baker said, “We’re going to try something that’s never been done.”
Baker had sold his superiors on an idea—a campaign of voluntary blood testing for every male resident of the three villages. Anyone who’d been old enough to have murdered Lynda Mann in 1983, young enough to have produced the indications of a strong sperm count found in the Dawn Ashworth semen sample.
Both inspectors felt that Tony Painter was still convinced of the guilt of the kitchen porter. He’d wanted the Regional Crime Squad to do covert surveillance on the boy after his release from prison, but the police administration would not permit it. They knew that Tony Painter still kept the kitchen porter’s file under lock and key.
But David Baker had apparently begun to believe in science. Alluding to the kitchen porter, he said that day, “He’s either a coconspirator or he’s innocent.”
By that they understood that Baker must have been pondering genetic fingerprinting. Regardless of what reservations any of them had over the guilt or innocence of the kitchen porter, or the efficacy of genetic fingerprinting, David Baker had decided that he was going to seek permission to do it, and he did.
The inspectors privately paraphrased Tony Painter’s reaction as something like: All right, we’ll blood-test them all and then we’ll prove that our lad did kill Dawn Ashworth.
In a compromise with his second-in-command, Baker never admitted publicly that the kitchen porter was probably innocent. His reasons for blood testing didn’t mention Dawn’s killer or killers. He kept it intentionally ambiguous so that everyone could save face.
He simply said to his two DI’s, “Find the man who shed the semen.”
The decision was made, and announced the day after New Year’s 1987, that the murder inquiry was about to embark on a “revolutionary step” in the hunt for the killer of Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth. All unalibied male residents in the villages between the ages of seventeen and thirty-four years would be asked to submit blood and saliva samples voluntarily in order to “eliminate them” as suspects in the footpath murders.
The headline on the 2nd of January announced it:
BLOOD TESTS FOR 2,000 IN KILLER HUNT
As several members of the inquiry later said, “We had to have blind faith in genetic fingerprinting.”
The planning period for this revolutionary step had been brief, but the police were publicly assured by the county council, the parish councils, the rector of Narborough and the vicar of Enderby that they would support the scheme. All agreed to urge young men in the villages to come forward, since no one could be compelled to do so. One or two community leaders openly expressed pessimism that the experiment would succeed, but everyone was running out of other ideas.
The logistical task was far bigger than first anticipated. The age span took in anyone who’d been between the ages of fourteen and thirty-one at the time of the Lynda Mann murder in 1983. Wanted for testing was every unalibied male who’d worked in or had some connection with Narborough, Littlethorpe and Enderby, not merely residents of the three villages. And that included hundreds of patients at the Carlton Hayes psychiatric hospital.
In the beginning, testing sessions were set up at two locations three nights a week from 7:00 to 9:00 P.M., and one daytime session was scheduled each week from 9:30 to 11:30 P.M. The young men were asked to come at a time specified on a form letter sent to each resident listed on the house-to-house pro formas.
Very soon they decided to include every male born between January 1, 1953, and December 31, 1970, who “lived, worked, or even had a recreational interest” in the area. A letter was sent to several policemen.
When the Eastwoods were contacted by journalists at their home in Lincolnshire, Eddie said the family was in favor of the tests. He wished they could force suspects to take the test, “because the person they want is not going to volunteer.”
Of course just about every member of the murder squad believed this as wholeheartedly as did Eddie and Kath Eastwood.
As Derek Pearce later said, “We just hoped that it might somehow flush him out.”
By the end of January a thousand men had taken the tests and only a quarter of that number had been cleared. The forensic laboratory was swamped, and it seemed certain that testing was going to take longer than the early estimate of two months. Teams of five doctors were drawing blood at each location, and police reported a 90 percent response to their letters. The 10 percent who did not respond were of course the subject of police interest.
Journalists from many parts of the world were now arriving in Leicestershire to try to pry information out of tight-lipped police officials about the unique experiment. Tony Painter relieved his inspectors, Pearce and Thomas, of the television interviews. Painter took them on with the manner of the self-made police administrator. His words were fastidiously chosen, his diction and syntax exact. One reporter writing for an American magazine described his manner as “that of a kindly uncle speaking to a dull child.”
True enough, in that up-by-the-bootstraps career cops often think of journalists and all civilians as untrustworthy naïfs who can never hope to understand evil and villainy. Painter’s style was to let his long upper lip curve into a weary but tantalizing smile, and say, “There are certain matters about which I cannot speak.” When the kitchen porter had been in custody, everything was “sub judice,” therefore something about which he could not speak.
He certainly would never reveal who had posted the large reward, causing journalists to waste an hour and a half finding out that they were only a pair of businessmen, one of whom employed Barbara Ashworth. The reward hadn’t been posted by Boy George or Princess Di. It hadn’t even been put up by a local favorite like Humperdinck. It had been posted by public-spirited entrepreneurs who were hardly newsworthy in the first place. If only he’d said that much, but they knew administrators like Tony Painter were like that. By our secrets we measure our worth.
When journalists asked why police had chosen the youthful age group for blooding, Painter could simply have said, “Rapists are young.” Instead, he replied, “There are certain police matters …”
But Tony Painter never forgot the Ashworths, and visited them loyally to give encouraging reports of “certain progress.”
The cops quickly began to refer to their testing sessions as bloodings. They would say, “We have to bloody this bloke.”
The way the bloodings worked was simple. As the donor arrived with his letter, he’d be directed to one of several policemen waiting at a row of tables. He’d be interviewed and identified, no easy task in that there were really no credible identity cards issued in England. The driving license did not bear a photo or a thumbprint, and so the only trusted identity card was a self-employment card, and so-called 714, with the bearer’s photo. If he had no current photo the police would take a Polaroid shot which they would later present to a neighbor or employer for identification. Or course, a passport was the best proof of identity.
After being put with a policeman, the subject was asked a few questions (which some resented) having to do with his whereabouts during the two murders. A form was filled out and the donor, along with his form, was taken to a printed register by the same officer who’d conducted the interview. A registration number and an identification sheet were issued, and the donor was walked to a doctor who drew blood and took a saliva sample on a card covered with clinical gauze. A splash of blood was squirted onto another gauze sample card and a sticky label was attached to the
syringe, which, minus its disposable needle, became a self-sealing vial.
If the subject was found by the laboratory in Huntingdon not to be a PGM 1 +, A secretor, the analysis generally went no further. If he was, the sample was sent to the government laboratory at Aldermaston where Jeffreys’s DNA test was done.
There were action teams, inquiry teams and suspect teams. The miles driven by members of those teams during the next several months were far greater than any ever logged before by the Leicestershire police. These mobile bloodletters swarmed over several counties. They learned to be very clever in suggesting, cajoling, imploring people on their list to come in, but in dozens of cases, a young man simply lived elsewhere and could not comply. In those cases they’d go to him, take him to a doctor’s surgery, and authorize payment to the physician for drawing the sample. A team might log as many as five hundred miles in one day on its never-ending quest for blood.
Supt. Tony Painter kept up the pressure from his end. He continued to visit council meetings and church halls and school fetes, and maintained a relationship with all community and church leaders. But it wasn’t very easy to get the blood of those who didn’t or couldn’t respond to the letters. And it was blood they were after now. The murder squad on Dawn Ashworth II was tireless and implacable in its quest. It simply wanted blood.
One of the detective constables selected for Dawn Ashworth II was John Damon. He’d been on Dawn Ashworth I and was among the most popular members of the new murder squad because of his sharp wit and droll sense of humor. He was a good storyteller and impressionist, the kind who would don his cowboy hat and do John Wayne when the urge struck him. DC Damon was about Pearce’s age, a burly cop whose deep baritone voice matched his bulk. He was a tournament-class darts player who seldom had to buy a drink if the bets were on. He was one of those detailed to work on the Carlton Hayes connection.
Blooding Page 15