Big Optimism: 'Eureka moment’

The history of DNA profiling and criminals. And victims.

Photo by Sangharsh Lohakare on Unsplash

There are six names that will come up prominently in today’s edition of Big Optimism—heroes, victims, and villains.

The hero comes first: the man who invented DNA fingerprinting. Then, the first criminal case it solved.

His name: Alec Jeffreys, born January 9, 1950, in Oxford, England. He was a scientist by nature long before he became one by training.

As a child, his father gave him a chemistry set. He expanded it by foraging for chemicals like sulfuric acid, which led to an accident and a permanent scar on his chin.

As an adult, he wore a beard to cover it up.

Jeffreys won a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, and studied biochemistry. After graduating in 1971, he spent four years earning a doctorate studying mitochondria in cultured mammalian cells at Oxford.

From there, he moved on to a fellowship at the University of Amsterdam and, eventually, the University of Leicester’s Department of Genetics.

Now, the second name, and the first victim: Lynda Mann, who was 15 when she was murdered on November 21, 1983, in Narborough, Leicestershire.

The details were every bit as horrible as you can imagine. But the case quickly went cold.

Just six miles from the crime scene, at the University of Leicester, Jeffreys was studying deoxyribonucleic acid—DNA.

On September 10, 1984—42 years ago this week—he spent 30 minutes examining an X-ray film from a DNA experiment involving his technician and her family. He had what he later called his “eureka moment.”

As he stared at the film, he realized that everyone on the planet has a unique DNA pattern, with the exception of identical twins.

DNA fingerprinting was born.

Within six months, a lawyer used it to establish a family relationship for a boy seeking legal immigration status.

The third name: Dawn Ashworth, who was 15 when she was murdered on July 31, 1986, in Enderby—about as close to the University of Leicester as the place where Lynda Mann was killed.

Again, all the same horrible details were present—details that I frankly don’t want to go into here.

Police quickly realized that Lynda and Dawn had been killed by the same monster.

But they couldn’t find him.

The fourth name: Richard Buckland. He was 17 years old, and police knew for sure that he knew Dawn Ashworth.

They arrested him, interrogated him, and he confessed.

Case closed, right?

Except that while Buckland confessed to killing Dawn Ashworth, he vehemently denied killing Lynda Mann—and the police were absolutely convinced that one murderer had killed both girls.

They persuaded a judge to keep Buckland locked up for several months. In the meantime, they reached out to Jeffreys, hoping he could examine the DNA evidence and prove that Buckland was the killer in both cases.

Jeffreys came back with some good news and some bad news, from an investigative perspective:

The police were absolutely right that the same man had killed both girls.

But it also absolutely wasn’t Buckland.

In retrospective accounts, Buckland is described again and again as “a youth with learning disabilities,” and the suggestion is that he confessed to something he didn’t do under intense questioning.

It happens more often than people like to admit.

But now the police were left with two murders, a panicked population, and no leads.

This was where things went in a direction that I’m not sure they could go today: The police mounted a pressure campaign for every single man in the area to submit voluntarily to a blood test, so that his DNA could be profiled and compared with DNA recovered from the crime scenes.

Yet after obtaining DNA from almost every man who could possibly have committed the heinous crimes, they came up short.

No DNA match.

Now, the fifth name: Colin Pitchfork, a married father of two.

He was the murderer.

At first, he escaped even this region-wide DNA dragnet by paying “a mate” £200 to use a forged passport, pose as Pitchfork, and submit a blood sample in his place.

But Pitchfork’s “mate”—the sixth name, Ian Kelly—got drunk in a pub and told all about it.

A woman who heard the story told the police, and both Kelly and Pitchfork were quickly arrested.

I feel like a brief explanation is necessary here: Why would anyone give a fake DNA sample in a case involving two murders and sexual assault?

The most charitable explanation is that the story Pitchfork had given Kelly was the kind of thing that might have sounded convincing only to someone who was drunk in a pub.

Pitchfork said he had prior convictions for indecent exposure and thought the police would unduly harass him.

Kelly received two years in prison for the DNA fraud.

Pitchfork pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison for the rapes and murders.

England is England, so life didn’t quite mean life. He was released in 2021, but 11 weeks later, at age 61, he was returned to custody for violating the terms of his release by approaching a lone woman. His latest request for release was denied in 2025.

As for Jeffreys, he’s now Sir Alec John Jeffreys.

Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth are, I hope and pray, resting in peace. At least we can say there was some modicum of justice.

Richard Buckland disappeared into obscurity. Believe me, I spent a lot of time trying to find out what happened.

Colin Pitchfork is right where he belongs.

Meanwhile, millions of people of his ilk have been convicted as a result of Jeffreys’s discovery.

And at least thousands of innocent people have been exonerated—many after serving years in prison for crimes they did not commit.

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7 other moments from history this week

• Sunday, September 6: “I wanted my freedom.” — Martina Navratilova, requesting political asylum in the United States on this day in 1975, at 18, during a trip to the U.S. Open. She defected from Czechoslovakia for good and went on to win 18 Grand Slam singles titles.

• Monday, September 7: “Nobody else was offering to do anything to save me.” — Beth Allen, born three months premature in Brooklyn, on the incubator care that saved her life on this day in 1888, created by Dr. Martin Couney. Couney would go on to run incubator exhibits for decades, saving thousands of premature infants who had nowhere else to go.

• Tuesday, September 8: “The Kennedy Center exists not for Washington alone. It exists for the entire nation.” — Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, in her dedication for the Kennedy Center’s opening-night program on this day in 1971. The evening’s premiere was the world premiere of Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass,” commissioned in honor of the president for whom the center is named.

• Wednesday, September 9: “We are going to cut down this senseless loss of lives. We are going to cut down the pointless injury. We are going to cut down the heartbreak.” — President Lyndon B. Johnson, signing the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act into law on this day in 1966. The act created the federal vehicle safety standards and the agency that became the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

• Thursday, September 10: “I do not fear anyone. I do not have to know the names and the faces of those I will exceed.” — Abebe Bikila, in a 1965 Sports Illustrated interview with John Usherwood, reflecting on the mindset behind his gold medal in the Rome Olympic marathon on this day in 1960. He ran the 26.2 miles barefoot, becoming the first sub-Saharan African Olympic champion, and won it again four years later in Tokyo — this time in shoes, six weeks after an appendectomy.

• Friday, September 11: “Naturally I did not know at that time that with this step we began the road toward the unification of the two states and with it a new chapter in the history of Europe.” — Gyula Horn, the Hungarian foreign minister who announced the border opening, reflecting in his memoir on the decision made on this day in 1989. Tens of thousands of East Germans crossed into Austria within weeks, a crack in the Iron Curtain that preceded the fall of the Berlin Wall by two months.

• Saturday, September 12: “Easy, kid, I already lost.” — Abimael Guzmán, to the officer who cornered him during his capture in Lima on this day in 1992, according to that officer’s own account. The arrest of the Shining Path’s founder, whose insurgency had killed an estimated 30,000 people over twelve years, effectively ended the group’s campaign of violence.