The Blooding: How Four Thousand Blood Samples Failed, and a Pub Conversation Solved the First DNA Murder
Lynda Mann was fifteen years old, and on the evening of 21 November 1983 she left her home in the Leicestershire village of Narborough to go and see a friend. She was a schoolgirl at Brockington High. She had told her mother roughly when she would be back, in the way that fifteen-year-olds do, and she had a route home she always used.
That night she did not use it. She took a shortcut instead, along a dark footpath that runs beside the grounds of the old Carlton Hayes psychiatric hospital, between Narborough and the neighbouring village of Enderby. Locally the path had a name. Everyone called it the Black Pad.
When she had not come home by late evening her family began to worry, and then to search. Her stepfather went out into the dark. Neighbours joined in. They walked the roads and the paths of two villages through the night and found nothing. Shortly after midnight the police were told that Lynda Mann was missing.
She was found the next morning, on the Black Pad, a short distance from the hospital fence. She had been raped and strangled. The pathologist put her death in the previous evening, within an hour or two of when she would have been walking that path. She had never got much beyond the point where the shortcut began.
The investigation was led by Detective Chief Superintendent David Baker of Leicestershire Constabulary. He moved his team out of headquarters and into an empty building in the village itself, so that the inquiry sat physically among the people it was asking questions of. He told Lynda's mother he would find the man who had killed her daughter. It is the kind of promise that senior detectives make in the first week and then have to live with.
What the forensic science of 1983 gave him was thin. There was semen, and from it a blood group and an enzyme profile. Type A, with a phosphoglucomutase reading that occurred in roughly one man in ten. That was the entire physical description of the offender: a tenth of the male population.
Everything else was legwork. The team took thousands of statements. They interviewed men from the three villages, checked alibis, chased known sex offenders across the Midlands, looked hard at the psychiatric hospital next to the footpath and at everyone who worked in it. The hospital was an obvious line, and it was worked exhaustively, and it produced nothing. Reports came in of a young man seen running from the area. It went nowhere.
A year passed. Then another. The incident room shrank. The file did not close, but it stopped moving.
On 31 July 1986, two and a half miles away and two years and eight months later, Dawn Ashworth left home. She was fifteen. She went to see friends and was expected back by half past nine. Like Lynda, she attended Brockington High School. Like Lynda, on the way home she left the road for a footpath, this one called Ten Pound Lane, between Enderby and Narborough.
Her body was found two days later, hidden in undergrowth beside the lane and covered with branches. She had been beaten, raped and strangled.
The forensic result came back type A, with the same enzyme profile as the semen from the Black Pad.
At that point the inquiry had a linked double murder, an offender who had killed two schoolgirls three years apart within a mile and a half of each other, and a village population that had begun locking doors it had never locked.
Suspicion settled quickly on a seventeen-year-old local youth, Richard Buckland. He worked as a kitchen porter at the psychiatric hospital. He had learning difficulties. He had been seen near Ten Pound Lane, he knew details about the position of Dawn Ashworth's body that the police believed had not been made public, and under questioning he confessed to killing her.
He also insisted, flatly and repeatedly, that he had had nothing to do with Lynda Mann. That was the problem. The two murders were forensically linked, and the police were certain the same man had committed both. A confession to one and a denial of the other did not fit.
Some fifteen kilometres away, at the University of Leicester, a geneticist named Alec Jeffreys had spent the previous two years working out what to do with an accident. On the morning of 10 September 1984, developing an X-ray film from an experiment on a gene sequence, he had seen a pattern of bands that varied enormously between individuals while remaining consistent within a family. He understood almost at once what he was looking at. He called it DNA fingerprinting, and by 1986 he had already used it in an immigration dispute to prove a family relationship, which was the first time the technique had been accepted in a legal proceeding anywhere.
Leicestershire Police went to see him. They wanted him to do something specific, and it is worth being clear about what it was. They asked him to confirm that Richard Buckland had killed both girls.
Jeffreys compared the semen from Lynda Mann and the semen from Dawn Ashworth against a sample from Buckland. The result came back in November 1986 and it was doubly historic, in a way nobody in the incident room had wanted.
The same man had committed both murders. And it was not Richard Buckland.
The confession had been false. Buckland, a teenager with learning difficulties who had been questioned about a murder, had told the police what they were looking for. Without the test he would in all probability have been convicted on his own words. He was released, and he became the first person in the world to be exonerated by DNA evidence, three months after being charged with murder.
It is difficult to overstate how badly this landed. The force had lost its only suspect, publicly, on the strength of a technique nobody outside a university laboratory had heard of. It had also acquired proof that a double murderer was living, in all likelihood, within a few miles of the incident room.
Baker's team then did something without precedent. In January 1987, Leicestershire Police asked every man aged between sixteen and thirty-four living in Narborough, Enderby and Littlethorpe to come forward voluntarily and give a sample of blood and saliva. It was not compulsory. It could not be. But in three villages of that size, refusing was its own kind of statement, and the pressure was social rather than legal.
They called it the blooding. A thousand men had been tested by the end of January. Eventually more than four thousand went through it, in village halls, over months, with the samples first screened for blood group and only the matching tenth sent for the expensive DNA work.
It did not find the killer.
Every man who came forward was eliminated. The screen ran through the spring and into the summer of 1987 and produced, in terms of the objective it had been designed for, nothing at all. If the case had rested on the science alone it would have stalled there, because the man they wanted had simply not come.
On Saturday 1 August 1987, four bakery workers were having a drink in a pub in Leicester. One of them, a 23-year-old named Ian Kelly, said something he should not have said. He explained that he had given a blood sample under someone else's name. He had gone to the screening on 29 January carrying a passport with his own photograph and another man's details in it, and he had signed and bled as that man. He had been paid two hundred pounds.
The man he had done it for was a colleague at the bakery named Colin Pitchfork.
Pitchfork had asked several people before Kelly agreed. His explanation had been that he had previous convictions for indecent exposure, that the police would fasten onto him because of it, and that he could not face being dragged into a murder inquiry over something unrelated. He had worn Kelly down over weeks.
A woman at the table, Jackie Foggin, heard him say it. She did not go to the police that day, or that week. She sat on it for six weeks, and on 18 September 1987 she told them.
Kelly was arrested the same day. On 19 September, Detective Inspector Mick Thomas and a team went to a house in Littlethorpe and arrested Colin Pitchfork. He was 27, married with two children, and worked as a cake decorator. He lived roughly a mile from where Lynda Mann had died.
He confessed almost immediately. His account of the first murder was that he had been out in his car with his baby son asleep in the back, that his wife was at an evening class, and that he had been driving around exposing himself to women, which he told detectives he had done to more than a thousand of them since his early teens. He saw Lynda Mann walking alone on the Black Pad. He said he had strangled both girls to stop them identifying him.
His DNA was taken and compared to the two crime scenes. It matched.
At Leicester Crown Court on 22 January 1988, Pitchfork pleaded guilty to two murders and two rapes, to sexual assaults on two other girls, and to conspiring to pervert the course of justice. A psychiatric report placed before the court described a psychopathic personality disorder with serious psychosexual pathology. The sentencing judge said that from the point of view of public safety he doubted whether the man in front of him should ever be released, and passed a life sentence. The Home Secretary later set a minimum term of thirty years, reduced on appeal in 2009 to twenty-eight.
Ian Kelly was convicted of conspiring to pervert the course of justice and received eighteen months, suspended.
Colin Pitchfork was the first person in the world convicted of murder on DNA evidence.
Conclusions and Open Questions
The case is closed in the only sense that matters. There was a guilty plea, a full confession, and a genetic match to both scenes. Nothing about the identification is in dispute, and this is not a case where an alternative suspect is waiting in the margins.
What remains open is what the investigation actually proved, and the answer is less flattering to forensic science than the anniversary coverage usually allows.
The mass screening did not catch Colin Pitchfork. It has been described ever since as the moment DNA came of age, and more than four thousand men were tested at real public expense over the better part of a year, and the man responsible was not among them, because he arranged for somebody else to bleed in his place. The screen's actual function turned out to be different from its stated one: it made not attending conspicuous, and it forced the offender into a second crime, the substitution, which required an accomplice. That is what broke the case. One theory, argued by several writers on the investigation, is that this was the point of the exercise all along, that Baker's team understood the screen as a flushing operation rather than a matching one. The evidence for that reading is thin. The contemporaneous statements describe an inquiry that genuinely expected to find its man in the samples, and the six-week silence between the pub and the phone call suggests nobody had told the villages that a conversation was what the police were waiting for.
Which leads to the second uncomfortable point. The case turned on a woman deciding, after six weeks, to make a phone call. Had Jackie Foggin gone home that Saturday and said nothing, the screening would have finished, the incident room would have closed again, and the two files would have gone into a cabinet with a genetic profile and no name to hang it on. The national DNA database that would eventually have caught him was still eight years away.
The third point is the one that has aged best. The first thing DNA fingerprinting ever did in a criminal investigation was to clear an innocent teenager whom the police were on their way to convicting. Richard Buckland had confessed. He was seventeen, he had learning difficulties, and he had been interviewed about a murder until he said what was wanted. Everyone in that incident room believed they had their man, and they were wrong, and the only reason the system found out is that a university laboratory fifteen kilometres up the road happened to have invented the means. There is no way to know how many similar confessions in the years before 1986 were never tested.
The last question is not evidential at all but institutional, and it is still live. Pitchfork was granted parole in 2021 and released on licence in September of that year. He was recalled to prison in November after breaching his conditions by approaching young women while out walking from his hostel. A further parole decision in June 2023 was reviewed and overturned after the Lord Chancellor intervened. He challenged the refusal on procedural grounds and won another hearing. In October 2025 the Parole Board again refused release, and also refused to move him to open conditions. He remains in prison, and as a life-sentence prisoner he remains entitled to periodic review, which means the families of two fifteen-year-old girls have now spent nearly forty years being told, at intervals, to prepare for the possibility that he will be let out.
The sentencing judge in 1988 said he doubted the man should ever be released. That was an opinion, not an order, and the difference between the two has occupied the courts for two decades.
What the villages got in the end was a name, an admission, and the beginning of modern forensic identification. What they did not get was any explanation beyond the one Pitchfork gave himself: that he strangled two schoolgirls so that they could not describe him. Detectives at the time did not accept it as a motive, and neither, on the record, did the psychiatrists.