Authors: Paul Britton
‘How were you rough with her?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Just tell me.’
‘I hit her.’
‘What did you hit her with?’
‘That.’ He raised his fist.
‘Where?’
‘In the face. It was here, round the chin.’
‘Around the chin?’
‘I think so, yeah. I hit her in the mouth.’
‘Did you do anything else?’
‘I just hit her three times.’
‘Was that before you indecently assaulted her?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Was that because she didn’t want to do it?’
‘Yeah.’
Near the end of the interviews, the kitchen porter was asked to explain again why he had killed Dawn.
‘… she started panicking so I thought, If I leave her she’ll tell her mum and dad and I’ll be in trouble. So I did something about it. She started screaming so I put me hand over her mouth and with me other hand I fingered her. I took her pants off and had sex with her and buried her and that’s all I remember doing. I walked straight back down the lane.’
On the face of it, the teenager’s admissions sounded conclusive, yet punctuating his answers were constant denials and U-turns. At the same time, I could get no sense of calculated deception or someone constructing a defence; the kitchen porter simply rambled, often aimlessly.
I could see why David Baker was troubled. Whatever the reason, the teenager had a remarkable knowledge of the location, injuries and the attempt to conceal Dawn’s body - most of which had never been made public.
There were four possibilities. One that he simply made it up and by some amazing coincidence his fantasies or his lies were so correct that it led him to be charged; the second that the police had unwittingly conveyed the details to him; the third that he was a participant in a two-handed murder but didn’t leave any semen or forensic evidence at the scene; and the fourth that he witnessed what had happened.
The first option was too far-fetched. If he’d given vast amounts of incorrect detail and amongst it provided a few pieces that were correct, I’d have been more likely to entertain the possibility.
It was also clear from listening to the tapes that the police hadn’t fed him information and, despite their obvious frustration at his erratic answers, there was no indication that he’d been pressurized or browbeaten.
My psychological analysis of the crimes had indicated a lone killer, which ruled out the possibility of the kitchen porter being a participant. That left only the fourth option - did he witness the murder, or stumble upon the body afterwards? It was time to revisit Ten Pound Lane.
I pulled off King Edward Avenue and retraced Dawn’s last walk along the rutted farm track. This time I’d remembered my Wellingtons although the extra weight made the incline seem steeper. I walked all the way along the path and turned right towards the M1 footbridge. Occasionally, I stopped and turned, checking the line of sight and seeing where the farm gate and a particular section of footpath disappeared from view. You could have been on the path and seen what happened that afternoon.
Closer to the footbridge, I stepped into the corner of a field and looked across at Ten Pound Lane. Because of the elevation, I could see clearly where Dawn had been found as well as the spot where she was most likely acquired. Someone crouching or sitting near the hedge could easily have watched what happened virtually in secret.
But why would he say that he touched her? And was the vantage point close enough for him to know that Dawn’s underpants had been pulled down and that she’d been left lying on her side?
These were questions that the tapes couldn’t answer.
A few days before Christmas, I reported back to David Baker and Tony Painter. From their point of view I couldn’t tell if I was delivering good news or bad news. Both were fairly confident before I started that the police interviewers hadn’t contaminated the kitchen porter’s recollections or applied undue pressure.
‘Is this kid innocent or is he a co-conspirator?’ asked Baker.
‘It’s not that cut and dried,’ I said. ‘He wasn’t fed information during the interviews or pressured into making a false confession if that’s what you mean.’
‘Then he had to have been there?’
‘Quite possibly. I think he might have seen what was going on.’
‘Jesus!’ Painter shook his head.
‘It also explains the differences in his accounts about Dawn Ashworth and Lynda Mann. In one he was remarkably accurate and in the other seemed to have no idea. It suggests he wasn’t involved in the first murder.’
Baker nodded and pushed back his chair. ‘So we carry on looking for the killer.’
‘I’m afraid so.’
He rose to his feet. ‘Well, we’re going to end this once and for all. If technology can find this kid innocent then technology can show us who the real killer is.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We’re going to find the man who shed the semen.’
Baker explained that he’d been granted permission to carry out voluntary blood tests on every male resident of Narborough, Enderby and Littlethorpe. The age span would take in anyone aged between fourteen and thirty-four at the time of Lynda’s murder and also every non-alibied male who’d lived, worked or had some connection with the three villages in the previous five years, including patients of Carlton Hayes hospital.
The boldness of the plan took me by surprise. Before the Bostock case, no-one had used a psychologist to profile a murderer, yet Baker had been open to the possibility and broken new ground. Now he was launching a unique operation to DNA test thousands of people.
‘Of course, it has to be voluntary,’ said Baker. ‘We’re sending letters to each of the men, asking them to submit blood and saliva samples so we can eliminate them from the inquiry.’
It can work, I thought, considering the possibilities. The thinking was brilliant. We all agreed that a local man or someone who had lived locally in the recent past was the killer. Most of the men would willingly submit, ruling themselves out of the investigation. Those who didn’t would come under closer scrutiny, drastically shrinking the pool of possible suspects.
What are the killer’s options, I thought. If he gives the samples, the laboratory technicians will link him to the murders. If he doesn’t take the test, the police will come calling and this time turn over every stone.
‘What if someone takes the test for him?’ I said, thinking out loud.
Baker replied, ‘We’re going to want proof of identity. It won’t be fail-safe but hopefully good enough.’
‘If someone took the test for him, it would have to leak out,’ I said. ‘They won’t be able to maintain the silence, especially if the testing stays in the news.’
On 2 January, 1987, the story broke and the Leicester Mercury announced: BLOOD TESTS FOR 2,000 IN KILLER HUNT. The national press quickly picked it up and journalists arrived from London to report on the operation. Soon they were joined by counterparts from around the world.
Two testing sites were set up at the Danemill School at Enderby and Blaby District Council in Narborough. Letters were then posted to men born between 1 January 1953 and 1 January 1970 who lived in the three villages. There were two testing sessions, morning and evening, three days a week.
Blood and saliva samples were taken by police surgeons and then sent to the East Midlands Forensic Centre’s laboratory in Huntingdon and the Home Office’s central research establishment at Aldermaston.
The first sample was taken on 5 January and by the end of January 1,000 men had taken the tests. The laboratories struggled to keep up but fell well behind. Suddenly the ‘two month operation’ was beginning to look like a serious miscalculation. At enormous cost, it would run months longer.
On a positive note, there was a 90 per cent response to the letters. Men were genuinely volunteering when they had no legal requirement - a sign of how strongly the communities wanted to catch the killer. All those who didn’t respond to the letters earned closer scrutiny, although initially many of the murder squad spent their time criss-crossing the country, chasing men who had moved out of the area.
The media had labelled the tests as ‘The Bloodings’ - a term meaning to give the first taste of blood to the hounds before the hunt. My own involvement in the case had ended, but periodically I read stories or heard it mentioned on television. I knew that Baker and his team were under pressure as the cost of the operation mounted.
Among the thousands of men who’d been interviewed and logged during the inquiry was Colin Pitchfork, a twenty-five-year-old baker who had moved from Leicester to a new housing estate in Littlethorpe several weeks after Lynda Mann’s body was found.
When asked about the evening she disappeared, Pitchfork said he dropped his wife Carole at an evening class in Leicester at 6.00 p.m. and then returned home to babysit their three-month-old son until he picked her up again at 9.00 p.m. when the class finished. It meant that he wasn’t alibied at the crucial time, but because he hadn’t lived locally at the time of the murder and the killer wasn’t thought likely to have taken a baby along with him, he was given a low priority classification.
There were thousands of names on the computer, each of them given a classification and listed under various categories depending on their age, address, criminal background, alibi and association with the area, for example visiting a relative or attending the hospital.
Computers were still relatively new in criminal investigations in Britain so it was very difficult to cross-reference names and salient facts to see if they turned up more than once in the inquiry. For this reason Pitchfork didn’t attract attention, even though he eventually appeared on three different indexes: the resident list, the prior sexual offences list and the outpatient list at Carlton Hayes where he’d been referred by magistrates after an indecent exposure conviction in 1980.
He’d worked at Hampshires Bakery in Leicester since he was sixteen years old and at the age of nineteen had met his future wife Carole while both were volunteers at the Dr Barnardos Children’s Home in Leicester. When their son was born in August 1983, Carole was keen to move out of the city and chose Littlethorpe because her father lived in Narborough.
A blooding request was sent to Pitchfork in January 1987 and a reminder two weeks later when he failed to report. Before this aroused any close scrutiny, a blood and saliva test was given on Tuesday evening, 27 January, at Danemill School. A passport was given as proof of identity along with a driving licence.
In due course, a letter arrived at the house in Haybarn Close saying that Colin Pitchfork’s test was negative, eliminating him from the murder inquiry.
By April, the murder squad had blooded nearly 4,000 men and teenagers, although the results were still running way behind. The response rate was 98 per cent, well above expectations, but the list of possible donors kept growing and the costs escalating.
Throughout the summer the operation continued, with mobile blood vans visiting housing estates and factories, but by then the murder squad was cut back and the media began asking questions about whether it had been an expensive waste of police resources and taxpayers’ money.
David Baker deserved a break and it came on 1 August when an ‘oven hand’ at Hampshires Bakery, Ian Kelly, aged twenty-four, was drinking at a Leicester pub with workmates and the conversation turned to Colin Pitchfork.
‘Colin had me do that blood test for him,’ said Kelly.
‘What test?’
‘The one for that murder inquiry.’
Kelly explained that Pitchfork had buttonholed him and spun a yarn about having already taken the test for someone else - a friend who’d been in trouble for flashing when he was younger. He explained that he hadn’t lived in the village when the first girl was murdered, so he thought the police wouldn’t bother testing him.
Six weeks later, a bakery manager who had listened to the conversation mentioned it to a local policeman. The information was relayed to the murder squad and a comparison was made between the signatures on the house-to-house file and the blood testing form - they didn’t match.
On Saturday 19 September, Kelly was arrested at his home and immediately broke down and admitted giving a blood sample for Pitchfork. He explained how Colin had cut and replaced his passport photograph with one taken of Kelly and then driven him to the school, waiting outside while the samples were taken.
As Kelly was charged for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, detectives arrived at the house in Haybarn Close, Littlethorpe, taking Colin Pitchfork into custody at 5.45 p.m. After reading him his rights, a detective asked, ‘Why Dawn Ashworth?’
The baker shrugged. ‘Opportunity. She was there and I was there.’
Because I have no official link to the investigations that I assist in, it’s not uncommon for me to hear nothing about the outcome. In this case it wasn’t until months later that I discovered the details of Colin Pitchfork’s arrest and interviews. David Baker invited me to a Mess Dinner for the Leicestershire Constabulary, a sort of night out with the top brass that is held several times a year.
Pitchfork’s confession was described as ‘cold’ with no sign of remorse. On 21 November, 1983, he’d dropped his wife at college and gone cruising, looking for girls to flash. His baby son was in a carrycot on the back seat as he drove from Leicester to Narborough and turned up Forest Road beside Carlton Hayes.
He passed Lynda walking towards Enderby and then parked his car in the driveway leading to the Woodlands Day Hospital. Then he waited beneath a street lamp as Lynda approached. When he exposed himself, he expected her to run towards Enderby but instead Lynda ran back towards the Black Pad and into the darkness.
Pitchfork confessed, ‘This is the thing I don’t understand about flashing. One per cent of the time you get someone who goes mad and screams and you have to disappear quick. But all the others walk by you. Just walk by you and ignore you. But she turned and ran into a dark footpath. She backed herself into a corner … her two big mistakes were running into the footpath and saying, “What about your wife?” She’d seen my wedding ring.’