The Footpath Murders

This podcast is supported by Progressive, a leader in RV Insurance.

RVs are for sharing adventures with family, friends, and even your pets.

So if you bring your cats and dogs along for the ride, you'll want Progressive RV Insurance.

They protect your cats and dogs like family by offering up to $1,000 in optional coverage for vet bills in case of an RV accident, making it a great companion for the responsible pet owner who loves to travel.

See Progressive's other benefits and more when you quote RV Insurance at Progressive.com today.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates, pet injuries, and additional coverage and subject to policy terms.

On a deserted footpath early on the morning of November 22nd, 1983, a hospital worker witnessed a terrible sight.

It would be the first case case in the world where DNA evidence helped find the killer.

Narlborough, England, a quiet little village of about 6,000 residents where violent crime is almost unheard of.

It is something you expect to happen in a city.

not in a small village community.

15-year-old Linda Mann was a typical teenager.

Quiet but popular, she liked school and enjoyed being with friends.

On a cold November evening, Linda left her home in Narlborough to walk the mile or so to her friend's house.

When Linda didn't return home by midnight, her frantic parents called the police.

Early the next morning, Her semi-nude body was discovered along a secluded footpath known locally as the Black Pad.

Detective David Baker was called to the scene.

Her clothing was in a state of disarray, her jeans removed

and her underclothes were strewn about.

It was a cold night and she'd got a scarf around her neck and the scarf had been used to strangle her.

She was very brutally attacked, sexually assaulted.

Word of Linda's murder travelled quickly in the otherwise quiet village.

The people were horrified and very worried, particularly those with young girls, young daughters.

A search of the crime scene turned up little of substance, but the autopsy provided some important clues about Linda Mann's last moments alive.

The absence of injury to her private parts and also generally on her body, there was very little injury to her, would suggest that it was not a violent attack and that she may have died very quickly.

The conclusion was that she was strangled and then then raped.

A semen sample taken from Linda's body turned out to be an extremely important piece of evidence.

It came from an individual with type A blood and a PGM1 plus enzyme profile.

But this matched 10% of the adult male population in England.

Since Linda Mann's body was found only a few hundred yards from a local psychiatric hospital, some speculated that the killer may have been a patient.

Others weren't so sure.

The thing that I was very anxious to establish is that it was unlikely to have been a psychiatric patient from the hospital.

It was much more likely to be a man leading a normal life,

perhaps with a family,

certainly one who had friends, relatives, and contacts who thought of him as a normal individual.

Linda Mann was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Former cop turned author Joseph Wambaugh wrote a best-selling book entitled The Blooding.

It chronicles the events surrounding the murder of Linda Mann and the history-making investigation which would follow.

It's very unusual in a village like Narborough in Britain for a complete stranger

to ambush and murder someone on a footpath.

I mean, it was so unheard of.

Police questioned thousands of people about Linda Mann's whereabouts on the night she was killed.

They put more into a murder investigation over there, which they call an inquiry, than we do here because they have so few murders compared to us.

Linda Mann was buried in a churchyard not far from where she was murdered.

On the day of her funeral, police set up a surveillance and videotaped the crowd for anything or anyone unusual.

Often one finds that criminals will revisit the scene of the crime or some other

activity associated with the crime.

But it was of little help.

The investigation dragged on for months, then a year.

With no eyewitnesses, few strong leads, and several false trails, the murder hunt hit a dead end.

It's always frustrating when you've not got an answer to a problem.

And I mean, you're forever looking over your shoulder, A to C what you've missed, and then trying to guess what might happen in the future.

And the search for Linda Mann's killer continued for the next three years.

Three years had passed since the murder of Linda Mann, and life in the small village of Narlborough was beginning to return to normal.

Until the afternoon of July 31st, 1986, Another 15-year-old schoolgirl, Dawn Ashworth, was walking home from her part-time job at a newsstand.

Instead of taking the main road, she took a shortcut down a thickly overgrown footpath called Ten Pound Lane.

When Dawn didn't return home by 9.30 that night, her parents called the police.

Another teenage girl was missing.

Dawn Ashworth went missing last night.

We all hope and pray that this was not a repeat of the Linda Moon case.

Yes.

Two days later, police discovered Dawn Ashworth's nude body under some heavy brush and hay.

She was discovered less than a mile from where Linda Mann was murdered three years earlier.

Like Linda Mann,

Dawn Ashworth had been strangled and sexually assaulted.

Dawn had quite marked injuries to her gentilaria, which would indicate it was a very violent attack.

And her injuries elsewhere in the body would also indicate that she had suffered violent injury therefore she'd been attacked violently which would indicate that she had put up a fair struggle before she died.

Seemen samples taken during Dawn's autopsy revealed that the attacker had the same blood type as Linda Mann's murderer.

There were other similarities as well.

There were signature elements in the crime, certainly.

Both murders took place on footpaths.

Both girls were teenagers.

Both girls were walking alone.

Both manually strangled.

Both

severely sexually assaulted.

All schoolgirls were advised to travel in groups and not to walk anywhere alone.

Dawn Ashworth's father had given his daughter the same advice.

I warned her and warned her about the dangers of going down there on the road.

We've got to find the fiend, really, that did this to my daughter, to our daughter

and

stop it from happening again police launched an extensive investigation into the murder of dawn ashworth and within a week police got a break witnesses saw a young man in the vicinity of ten pound lane on the afternoon of dawn ashworth's death He was 17-year-old Richard Luckland, a kitchen worker at the psychiatric hospital, located just a few hundred yards from where both Linda Mann and Dawn Ashworth had been murdered.

Police brought him in for questioning, and he quickly became their prime suspect.

For one thing, he knew details of the murder which weren't in the newspapers.

In addition to that, when we'd questioned Mr.

Buckland, he couldn't really account for his movements on

that particular afternoon.

Finally, after 15 grueling hours of interrogation, Richard Buckland confessed to the rape and murder of Dawn Ashworth.

Police finally had their man.

Given the similarities between the two murders, police were convinced that Buckland also raped and murdered Linda Mann three years earlier.

Buckland denied it.

Was he telling the truth?

The answer lay just a few miles away in a university laboratory.

My very last words to her were, were, I love you.

And not a lot of parents ever get to say that, you know.

In 2010, Aubrey Sacco vanished while hiking in the Himalayas.

Now, after 15 years of searching, her parents share what they've uncovered in a three-episode special of Status Untraced.

Dads are supposed to find their daughters when they're in trouble.

Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Richard Buckland confessed to killing Dawn Ashworth, but insisted he had nothing to do with the murder of Linda Mann three years earlier.

Police were convinced he was lying and set out to find the truth here at the University of Leicester, ironically less than 10 miles away from where both teenagers were murdered.

Dr.

Alec Jeffries, a geneticist, had been researching hereditary diseases when he accidentally discovered an amazing technique called DNA or genetic profiling.

There was a case of Eureka.

You could see individual identification.

You could see parentage analysis, paternity disputes, sorting out immigration cases.

David Baker said, well, look, let's cement the case against this young man.

Let's go to this geneticist at Leicester University, this Dr.

Alec Jeffries, and take the semen samples from both murders and cement our case with this new thing called genetic fingerprinting, whatever it is.

And let's just prove that he did both of them because we know he must have done both of them.

Dr.

Jeffries wasn't sure that he could do what Baker wanted because this sort of analysis had never been done before.

Dr.

Jeffries' breakthrough technique for analyzing DNA is called restriction fragment length polymorphism, or RFLP.

It can identify an individual based on just a small amount of their DNA.

DNA that can come from semen, blood, hair roots, and other cells.

DNA is a complex chemical which is present in all living cells.

It's a little like a computer program, containing coded instructions on how to make a human being.

No two individuals have the same DNA pattern, except for identical twins.

Dr.

Jeffrey's task was to take the semen recovered from Linda Mann and Dawn Ashworth and compare it to the blood sample from Richard Buckland to see if it was a match.

First, white blood cells from Richard Buckland's blood sample were treated with a special chemical solution that allows the DNA, a sticky white substance, to float free.

Next, the DNA is cut into smaller pieces using special proteins called restriction enzymes, which act like chemical scissors.

The DNA fragments must then be sorted out by a process called electrophoresis.

The DNA is marked with a radioactive dye and placed in separate lanes on an electrophoretic gel.

Then it's subjected to an electric field.

Under ultraviolet light, you can see how the electrical current draws the negatively charged fragments through the gel to the positive end of the tray.

The separated fragments are then visualized on X-ray film called an autoradiogram, which resembles a barcode showing an individual's unique genetic makeup.

Dr.

Jeffries first used this technique to resolve an immigration case and after that a paternity dispute.

But this would be the first time it was ever attempted in a criminal case to reveal the identity of a double murderer.

Let's start with Linda Mann.

This is her DNA profile taken from her hair.

Next track is a mixture of cement and vaginal fluid from that victim showing her DNA profile as expected plus a single man semen DNA profile.

Next victim, Dawn Ashworth.

This is her blood DNA profile, a band here and another one off to the left.

Trace amounts of semen recovered from that victim both revealed two faint bands

whose position on the autoradiograph is very similar to the semen profile seen from Linda Mann.

So first conclusion, both girls have been raped and therefore presumably murdered by the same man.

What about the prime suspect Richard Buckland?

This is his blood DNA profile here and here.

Completely different from the Seaman profile.

Conclusion both girls have been raped and therefore presumably murdered by the same man and that man was not the prime suspect Richard Buckland.

The result shocked the police.

It was a blow to us.

They didn't basically didn't didn't believe a word that we were saying and that was quite right.

Healthy scepticism of an entirely new technology.

And indeed I didn't believe the results myself so we did retesting.

The testing was done again independently by Home Office forensic scientists all pointing to the same conclusion, namely that Buckland was not the guilty party in this case.

After four months in custody, Richard Buckland was released and became the first person in the world to be exonerated of murder through the use of DNA profiling.

I have no doubt whatsoever that he would have been found guilty had it not been for the DNA evidence.

He would have been jailed for life.

I mean that was that was a remarkable occurrence.

But why did Richard Buckland confess to a crime he didn't commit?

Then the pressure started getting really hard.

He just didn't have a chance.

He had to have discovered the body himself because in the terms of his confession he was able to give a very detailed description of her clothing, where the body was, in what position it lay, the ligature and so on, details that nobody could possibly know unless they'd actually seen the body.

With Buckland now out of the picture, a double murderer was still loose.

And of course, the next stage was for David Baker then to make what I think was an incredibly courageous decision.

A DNA manhunt.

Police sent letters to all men between the ages of 13 and 33 living in the villages of Narlborough and Enderby.

The letter asked each man to volunteer volunteer for a blood and saliva test.

I'm sure they expected that the real killer, if he was indeed a resident of the villages, would probably try to

escape responsibility of giving a blood sample.

DNA testing would only be performed on those who have the same blood type as the killer, which was about 10%.

It was really an attempt to try and flush out the guilty party.

Which is what it did.

But not the way police have hoped.

The trap was now set.

A DNA manhunt to flush out the killer of Linda Mann and Dawn Ashworth.

It was a bold plan.

More than 5,000 men voluntarily gave blood and saliva samples.

But one worker at this local bakery didn't.

His name was Colin Pitchfork and was already known to police for earlier convictions for indecent exposure.

He didn't want any further involvement with the police, so he persuaded co-worker Ian Kelly to take the blood test for him.

Kelly lived outside the area and wasn't asked to take the test himself.

Kelly was the perfect foil.

Pitchfork spun him a yarn that he'd already given blood on behalf of somebody else who couldn't go because he was wanted by the police, etc., etc.

And Kelly ostensibly swallowed that hook line and sinker.

Since police required identification before taking a blood sample, Kelly needed some photographic proof he was Colin Pitchfork.

They both went down to a photo booth and took a passport-sized photo of Ian Kelly.

Pitchfork took his own passport, slit the plastic casing with a razor blade, and neatly inserted Kelly's photo in its place.

Ian Kelly then took the blood test for Colin Pitchfork.

Of the more than 5,000 men who voluntarily gave blood and saliva samples, none matched the profile of the murderer.

But no one could anticipate what would happen next.

On a summer's evening, one year after Dawn Ashworth was found brutally raped and murdered, Ian Kelly joined fellow bakery workers at this local pub, and the conversation turned to the DNA manhunt.

A young woman in the group overheard Kelly bragging that he had taken the blood test for Colin Pitchfork.

She thought to herself, there's something not right about this.

This isn't something that someone normally does, no matter how afraid he is of the police.

And so she put in a call to the Leicestershire Murder Inquiry Team.

And that's what made them focus on Colin Pitchfork.

Police quickly located Pitchfork to to question him about the blood test and what he might know about the two murders.

Within a very short time, he confessed to killing both Linda Mann and Dawn Ashworth.

Pitchfork believed in DNA fingerprinting right away, and he knew that it was as good as an inked fingerprint, and he knew he was finished when they arrested him.

So he confessed quite readily.

Without this breakthrough, The chances are the police would have never caught Pitchfork.

And I think it's fairly clear that had he not been caught, then he would have killed and killed and killed again.

Colin Pitchfork was 27 years old, married with two children.

His wife had no idea she was married to a serial killer.

I think he was able to deceive her perfectly well so that nobody in the whole world knew that he was the guilty person.

It's the same story.

The wife, the brother, the mother, the friends of serial killers never suspect that they could could be serial killers.

On January 22nd, 1988, Colin Pitchfork became the first person ever to be convicted in a murder case solved by DNA profiling and was sentenced to life in prison.

For his part in the deception, Ian Kelly was convicted of conspiracy to pervert justice and sentenced to an 18-month prison sentence, which was suspended.

He served no time for his crime.

I think we've learned a lot from the deaths deaths of both of these two girls.

Certainly the scientific advances that have been made with DNA has spread itself now throughout

the world.

It was this case of all cases

on which DNA really cut its teeth in a forensic sense.

The door has been opened to a whole new aspect of medical investigation.

People will be talking about this case 100 years from now, not because of my book, but because of Alec Jeffries' discovery.