Colin Pitchfork, a baker from Leicestershire, England, became the first person convicted of a crime based on DNA evidence. He was sentenced to life in prison in 1988 for the rape and murder of two teenage girls, crimes that took place in 1983 and 1986. The case didn’t just produce the first DNA-based conviction. It also produced the first DNA-based exoneration, clearing an innocent man who had falsely confessed.
The Murders in Leicestershire
In 1983, a 15-year-old girl named Lynda Mann was raped and murdered near the village of Narborough in Leicestershire. Three years later, in 1986, another 15-year-old, Dawn Ashworth, was killed in a strikingly similar attack nearby. Police suspected the same person was responsible for both crimes, but they had no way to prove it with the forensic tools available at the time.
Investigators did have a suspect. A 17-year-old local man named Richard Buckland had confessed to Ashworth’s murder. But police wanted to link him to both crimes, so they turned to a scientist at the nearby University of Leicester who had recently developed something extraordinary: a method for identifying individuals by their DNA.
Alec Jeffreys and DNA Fingerprinting
Alec Jeffreys, a geneticist at the University of Leicester, had discovered in 1984 that certain patterns in a person’s DNA are unique to each individual, much like a fingerprint. He developed a technique to visualize those patterns from biological samples like blood or saliva, creating what he called a “DNA fingerprint.”
When police brought Jeffreys the evidence from both crime scenes along with a sample from Buckland, the results were unexpected. The DNA recovered from the 1983 and 1986 murders matched each other, confirming they were committed by the same person. But the DNA did not match Richard Buckland. A man who had confessed to murder was, according to the science, innocent. Buckland was released, becoming the first person ever exonerated by DNA evidence.
The World’s First Mass DNA Screen
With no suspect and a new forensic tool at their disposal, Leicestershire police devised an unprecedented plan. They would collect blood and saliva samples from every man between the ages of 18 and 34 living within an 8-kilometer radius of where the bodies were found, roughly 5,000 men in total. The effort required government backing before it could proceed.
To narrow the workload, investigators used a shortcut. They already knew from crime scene evidence that the killer had type A blood, which applies to about 20% of the population. Only samples from men with type A blood would need the full, labor-intensive DNA analysis. Local men were invited to come forward voluntarily. Anyone who refused or ignored the invitation received a visit from police asking why.
Over the course of the screening, more than 4,000 men provided samples. None matched the crime scene DNA. The dragnet appeared to have failed.
How Pitchfork Was Caught
The breakthrough came not from the lab but from a pub. A woman overheard a conversation in which a man mentioned that Colin Pitchfork, a local baker, had paid a coworker named Ian Kelly to go to the testing site and provide blood and saliva samples in his place. She reported what she heard to the police.
Pitchfork was detained and asked to submit his own DNA sample. His genetic profile matched the DNA recovered from both crime scenes. He confessed to both murders. In January 1988, he was sentenced to life in prison. Ian Kelly, the coworker who had posed as Pitchfork during the screening, received a suspended 18-month sentence for his role in the deception.
How Early DNA Testing Worked
The method Jeffreys used in the 1980s was called RFLP analysis. It worked by identifying long, repeating sequences in a person’s DNA that vary from individual to individual. The technique was groundbreaking but had serious limitations: it required a relatively large, well-preserved biological sample to produce results.
Modern forensic DNA testing uses a different approach called STR typing, which can work with far smaller and even degraded samples. Where the original method needed a visible bloodstain or substantial tissue sample, today’s technology can generate a DNA profile from a trace amount of material that would be invisible to the naked eye. This shift made DNA evidence far more practical for everyday criminal investigations and is the standard used in forensic labs worldwide.
Pitchfork’s Current Status
Pitchfork has made multiple bids for release over the decades. He was briefly released on parole in 2021 but was recalled to prison shortly after. Following a lengthy review involving four oral hearing days and over 2,000 pages of evidence, the Parole Board refused to direct his release again, concluding that he still posed a risk to the public. He remains in prison.