Blooding by Joseph Wambaugh

Author:Joseph Wambaugh [Wambaugh, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2012-03-20T00:56:59+00:00

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 had 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:

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