He Was The First Killer Caught Using DNA Evidence

Though DNA may be the building block of life, one of the biggest forensic breakthroughs came about because of stone cold murder. In 1983, 15-year old Lynn Mann was brutally raped and strangled to death by an unknown man in Leicestershire, England. Three years later, the crime remained unsolved until another young girl, Dawn Ashworth, paid for that delay with her life-also raped and strangled to death.

The only clues leading to the murderer were DNA evidence from the crime scenes of semen samples characteristic of only 10% of men. And so began the race against time to find rapist and murderer Colin Pitchfork.

A hospital porter who often used The Black Pad as a shortcut between Narborough church and Carlton Hayes Hospital was on his way to work at 7:20 on Tuesday morning, November 22nd, when he glanced through the wrought-iron fence, toward the wooded copse and grassy fields of the hospital grounds, white with frost on that cold morning. He saw what looked like a partly clothed mannequin lying in the grass by a clump of trees. He stopped and gaped. She was naked from the waist down. There was a smear of red about her nose. He was not sure if she was real.

The porter ran out of The Black Pad onto the road and flagged down a car driven by a colleague, an ambulance driver from the hospital. The ambulance driver and the porter jogged back to The Black Pad and looked through the fence.

"Is it a dummy?" the porter asked.

The ambulance driver ran to the head of the path and found the iron gate wide open. He entered the grassy field and approached. Lynda Mann's jeans, tights, underpants and shoes were in a rolled-up heap about 10 or 15 feet away. Her legs were extended straight out, her head turned to the right. She was supine with the upper part of the donkey jacket hiked under her head, the sleeves partly pulled up her arms. Her chin was bruised and there was bright coagulated blood from her nose. Her scarf was wrapped around her neck and crossed at the back, and a piece of wood about three feet long lay under her right leg.

Perhaps the ambulance driver was familiar only with victims very much alive and breathing, including those who screamed and thrashed inside straitjackets. Maybe he felt the need to display medical training in the presence of the porter. For whatever reason, he reached down and felt the throat for a pulse, even though rigor was present throughout.

Lynda Mann was white as china. As rigid and cool as a shop mannequin.

It had been an unforgettable year for the Leicestershire Constabulary. The county police agency averaged about one homicide a year and usually that was a domestic killing. But that year had seen four murder inquiries, two of them major, culminating in the tragic discovery in July of the body of five-year-old Caroline Hogg, who'd disappeared from a fun fair near her home in Edinburgh.

The Leicestershire police always believed that the child's killer had arbitrarily dropped her body by the A444 road while passing through from Scotland to some southerly destination, but because they'd found the body, they had to launch an inquiry from their end.

Detective Superintendent Ian Coutts, born and reared near Glasgow, went up to Scotland for assistance with the Hogg case, and to gain access to the Edinburgh computer. The 50-year-old Coutts was a "typical Glaswegian": gregarious, outgoing, tough, solid and compactly built. It wasn't hard to imagine broad foreheads like his greeting adversaries with a "Glasgow kiss," the kind that leaves many a bloody nose in northern pub brawls.

It took an enormous amount of work to back-record and convert material that had to be manually accessed with the Leicestershire card index system.

Then there had been the Osborne murder, the case of a pet groomer brutally stabbed to death and left on Ayelstone Meadows. That one had required a scene-of-crime fingertip search for evidence in ferocious driving rain. They'd remember that one. On the Osborne inquiry they'd had to access a West Yorkshire computer and put their material into it. Until that terrible year they'd always had sufficient data-processing capability in their own computer terminals.

There was a joke making the rounds of the Leicestershire Constabulary that year: "Did you hear the good news? Yuri Andropov died. The bad news is they dropped his body in Leicestershire."

But until November of 1983 there had never even been a murder inquiry in the villages of Narborough, Enderby and Littlethorpe.

The detective chief superintendent in charge of Leicestershire Criminal Investigation Department was 47-year-old David Baker, a 27-year police veteran. Baker was a family man with an accommodating style. He looked more like an avuncular shopkeeper than a policeman, but he was, in the words of close associates, "one hundred percent copper." He had five kids, and managed a squash game at least once a week in a losing battle with middle-age spread.

At 8:30 A.M. Chief Supt. Baker arrived in Narborough, logging his location as "a wooded copse running alongside a footpath known as The Black Pad." There were many police officers already at the scene, and Baker called at once for a Home Office pathologist. The Lynda Mann murder inquiry had officially begun.

This story was originally featured on The-Line-Up.com. The Lineup is the premier digital destination for fans of true crime, horror, the mysterious, and the paranormal.