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
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
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