The DNA of a Killer

Available for over a year

In the mid-1980s, Colin Pitchfork raped and killed two Leicestershire schoolgirls. Despite exhaustive investigations, he evaded capture, largely due to a false confession and a bogus blood test which threw police off his scent. That was until a chance remark in a pub redirected them to the true perpetrator of the crimes. The proof of Pitchfork's guilt lay in a new revolutionary genetic technique developed at the University of Leicester. Three decades on, Martin Ballard tells the story of how a double murderer became the first killer to be caught using DNA fingerprinting and speaks to those involved, from the man who led the police investigation, and the University of Leicester scientist who made the breakthrough, to an exclusive interview with the mum of one of the victims.