Blood Justice (St. Martin's True Crime Library) by Tom Henderson

Author:Tom Henderson [Henderson, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250098214
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2015-09-15T06:00:00+00:00

57

“THE BLOODING”

The Blooding, Joseph Wambaugh’s 1989 best-seller, soon became required reading for task-force members. For them, the book, a recounting of a manhunt for a serial killer in England and the new technology that finally caught him, was both a primer on DNA, and an encouragement that their serial killer—who, like the villain of Wambaugh’s book, had raped and murdered two women and had avoided capture for years despite intense publicity and ongoing investigations—could be caught.

DNA has become so much a part of the law-enforcement vocabulary—and a major part of the plot of crime novels, movie scripts and popular TV shows such as CSI—that it’s often forgotten just how recent its application to solving crimes has been.

Lynda Mann, 15, was raped and murdered on November 21, 1983, on a dark, wooded footpath outside the quaint English village of Narborough.

Despite a massive investigation involving 150 police, thousands of man-hours of work, hundreds of interviews, numerous suspects, and intense media coverage on TV and radio and in the tabloids, the murder went unsolved.

In September of 1984, crime detection would change forever, though no one knew it at the time. That’s when Alec Jeffries, a 34-year-old research scientist at England’s Leicester University, looked at X-ray films that had just been developed and had his “Eureka!” moment.

He stared at clear, visual proof that his theory was correct—that if you identified regions of the DNA molecule that had the most variation from person to person and came up with a way to highlight those regions with a radioactive probe, you would have the equivalent of a genetic fingerprint.

Jeffries took DNA from blood cells and cut them into pieces by adding enzymes. The bits were dropped onto a gel and exposed to an electric field, which caused the larger fragments to separate from the smaller. Radioactive material was added and the sample then X-rayed.

The film, when developed, showed Jeffries that his theory was correct. The DNA separated into bands that looked much like a bar code, and each person’s bar code, with the exception of identical twins, was distinct.

Jeffries immediately applied for a patent and his wife, Susan, drew up a list of commercial applications. At the top was settling immigration disputes, a very big issue then in Great Britain. Foreign citizens claimed to be blood relatives of British citizens. If their claim was true, they were entitled to enter into the country. But many of the claims were fraudulent and there was no easy way to prove the issue one way or another. Until now.

Another application was to determine the suitability of bone-marrow transplants.

A third was improved animal husbandry.

On July 31, 1986, another 15-year-old girl, Dawn Ashworth, went missing. Raped and then murdered, her body was discovered on another dark, wooded footpath just a few hundred yards from where Mann’s body had been found.

This time police were quick to solve the murder. They arrested a porter at a nearby mental hospital, a misfit with a history of molesting young girls, and he quickly confessed to the murder.

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