NEMESIS FOR THE SERIAL KILLERS ; In a Secret Warehouse, Boxes Packed With Forgotten Clues Are Being

Jan 26, 06:04 PM

THE SCENE is a darkened street in Gloucester locally known as Asylum Lane a grimly appropriate name, given the act of psychopathic depravity about to unfold here. Intending to wind down after an arduous shift, a petite student nurse stops at her local off-licence.

Soon after she leaves the shop, however, a sexcrazed body- builder emerges from the shadows and overpowers her. Stifling her screams with a beefy hand, he drags the young woman to wasteground and brutally rapes her.

For the victim, then aged 30, this was the night that all the clocks stopped. Unable to erase the appalling ordeal from her thoughts, she became clinically depressed, abandoned her nursing career and never married or had children.

And as her attacker escaped, her torment was exacerbated by the fear that he was still somewhere out there. The attack took place on November 3, 1991, and for the next 16 years it seemed she would never escape this waking nightmare.

But then, when she had given up hope of seeing the man face justice, police contacted her with the news that he had been identified.

A few days ago, her attacker a serial rapist named John White was convicted and jailed for life. So now, at last, the clocks have restarted, and, at 47, the former nurse can pick up the threads of her life.

White was the latest offender to be trapped by Operation Advance, an all-too-rare Home Office you start thinking you're safe, think success story, which involves using the latest techniques in genetic fingerprinting to re-examine thousands of unsolved serious sex crimes committed during the past 18 years.

Since the initiative began in 2004, 36 other sex fiends, the majority of them rapists, have been jailed after being identified by DNA tests, and four more are awaiting trial.

A further 31 were caught in a pilot scheme, and many more historically high-profile 'cold cases' have been resolved, where once they seemed beyond detection.

Like John White, the perpetrators doubtless believed they had got away with their evil misdeeds after escaping the law for so long.

Twenty years to the week after the first murderer was convicted on DNA evidence, however, his demise serves as a timely reminder that thanks to the extraordinary advances in forensic science there really is no hiding place for violent and sexual criminals.

'The message to the offender is clear: "Before you start thinking you're safe, think again," ' says Lincolnshire Chief Constable Tony Lake, forensics spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers.

'Given the speed at which science is moving, there's always a chance we'll be able to break down some strand of evidence we couldn't use before.' That landmark first DNA court case ended on January 23, 1988. It signalled a revolution in crime detection, and some criminologists regard it as the single most important development in policing since the creation of the Bow Street Runners. Yet, at the time, it attracted remarkably little attention.

Perplexed by the sexually motivated murders of two teenage schoolgirls in the small Leicestershire town of Narborough, one in 1983 and the other in 1986, police called in Alec Jeffreys, a brilliant young geneticist at Leicester University.

He had recently devised the first system of identifying individuals and their family members from unique patterns in their DNA, and quickly saw that this could be invaluable in discovering the identity of criminals, who invariably leave traces of cellular material, such as blood, semen, saliva or strands of hair.

Leicestershire detectives had already arrested a local boy, but were puzzled because, although he had 'confessed' to the second murder, he vehemently denied the first. They hoped Jeffreys would be able to link him to both.

In fact, by comparing semen samples from the two murders, the scientist concluded that both came from the same person but neither was from the boy in custody.

All 5,000 adult males in the locality were asked to provide blood or saliva swabs.

After attempting to dodge the test by persuading a friend to substitute his sample, Colin Pitchfork, a local baker, supplied the DNA that sealed his guilt.

Since then, tens of thousands of serious criminals have been jailed using refinements of this great British scientific discovery. It has also settled innumerable paternity cases, and only this week DNA analysis confirmed that human remains found in the Ural Mountains belonged to two members of the Russian royal family executed by the Bolsheviks 90 years ago.

In an interview to mark his achievement, Jeffreys now Professor Sir Alec (he was knighted in 1994) admitted that even he is astonished at the strides that have been made since that 'eureka!' moment when he compared X-rays of DNA belonging to one of his lab technicians with that of the man's relatives, and noticed similarities in the structure.

'I'm amazed by how far the science has come,' he told me. 'When we first came up with the idea, we could see the potential, but we thought it would be a technology of last resort, to be used in desperate cases. I couldn't have been more wrong.' SOMEWHERE amid the vast industrial sprawl of the West Midlands stands a corrugated iron warehouse whose shelves are packed with row upon row of battered old cardboard boxes.

Distinguishable only by their code numbers, they might easily contain soap powder or cans of soup. In fact, these are the case files on 1.5 million crimes dating back decades.

Depressingly, they include 16,000 rapes and serious sexual assaults committed between 1987 and 2000, a colossal number of which went undetected.

These are the cases being targeted by Operation Advance. On TV, 'cold case' message to the offender is clear: "Before and forensic dramas are much in vogue.

Perhaps understandably, these programmes such as CSI and Waking The Dead create the impression that going back in time to collar old villains is a fastmoving, glamorous task.

The reality, as Orlando Elmhirst explains, is very different. A tweedjacketed former archaeologist ('I changed jobs when I realised my career was in ruins,' he quips), Mr Elmhirst is the Forensic Science Service (FSS) boffin charged with overseeing the operation.

On most days, he dons gloves and a fleece and heads off to the chilly warehouse whose location is carefully guarded hoping to unearth a case that is likely to bring a conviction. As he says, in many ways it is similar to archaeology, because the mountain of boxes is like a vast historical site and his task is to sift through it 'and pick out the nuggets'.

The trick is to find a case in which the attacker's identity was a mystery usually a so-called 'stranger rape' and where samples were collected but were too small or contaminated to provide a meaningful DNA profile at the time, yet might do so using today's state-of-theart methods.

During the early days, scientists needed a stain roughly the size of a 50p piece to extract sufficient genetic material for analysis. Today, it is possible to work with just a few hundred cells: the invisible spray of saliva we all emit without knowing when we speak, for instance, or the film of breath left on a car window.

The very latest genetic fingerprinting softwear, called DNABoost, even identifies an individual profile where the DNA of more than one person is mixed in on a shared cigarette, for example.

Four police forces have tried it and are delighted with the results. With wider use, scientists believe it could help double the number of solvable cases.

The Yorkshire Ripper hoaxer, John Humble who became notorious as 'Wearside Jack' after taunting detectives with calls and letters from his home in Sunderland was trapped many years later by the residue of spit used to seal an envelope. SAMPLES as small as this are now sufficient to be run through the national DNA database, which came on stream in 1995. It already contains 4.25 million profiles and, since everyone arrested for an imprisonable offence is automatically added, it is growing fast.

The computer automatically checks new entries every night, and when two DNA profiles match, or show enough similarities to suggest the donors are from the same family, it registers an alert.

Even if the culprit has fled abroad, he may not be safe, for under a new treaty Britain has reciprocal DNA checking agreements with all G8 countries.

In the first phase of Operation Advance, the Forensic Science Service team identified 270 cases they felt were likely to bring results. About one in nine progressed to court and among these there were only three acquittals; an excellent return. They have reviewed a further 5,000 files, and dozens more prosecutions are expected.

When he picks out a likely winner, Mr Elmhirst admits to feeling a frisson of excitement. The despair of knowing that so many rapes have gone unpunished lifts momentarily and a cry of 'Gotcha!' echoes around the warehouse.

However, before he contacts the relevant police force, which decides whether to reopen the case, colleagues at another anonymous FSS store, where old forensic materials are preserved, must root out the precise sample mentioned in the files.

They invariably find it, because, with commendable prescience, the FSS has never thrown away any likely trial exhibit.

Its vast archive contains snippets of clothing, strands of hair and fragments of broken bottles dating back to its inception in 1935. DNA evidence does not significantly deteriorate over time.

Now this habit of hoarding is paying rich dividends, for using the new extraction techniques, crucial traces of DNA have been found and recovered in the most unlikely and imaginative ways.

The inventiveness used to trap the killer of Marion Crofts, a 14- year-old schoolgirl raped and murdered on a canal towpath in Aldershot in 1981, is a prime example. During the initial investigation, the FSS examined body fluids under a microscope. The test was unproductive, but fortunately the glass slide was retained.

It acted as a time capsule, preserving traces of DNA, and when this was run through the national database 20 years later, it matched that of Tony Jasinskyj, who had provided a swab after being arrested on suspicion of committing another crime.

Jasinskyj, a former Parachute Regiment cook stationed at Aldershot barracks, was duly jailed for life.

Sadly, justice came too late for Marion's mother, who had suffered a complete breakdown and never recovered.

Two months ago, the ingenuity of a forensic scientist also nailed the real killer of Lesley Molseed, a fragile 11- year-old Rochdale girl born with a hole in the heart.

In a case that appalled the nation, she had been sexually assaulted and repeatedly stabbed while running an errand for her mother in 1975.

The original investigation was horribly bungled, with the result that Stefan Kiszko, a local tax clerk with a low IQ, spent 16 years in prison before his conviction was quashed.

He died two years after his release.

Hoping to take advantage of improved DNA analysis, West Yorkshire Police reopened the case in 1999, but their efforts were severely hampered because Lesley's clothing had been destroyed by police.

However, one scrap of forensic evidence remained. At its Wetherby laboratory, the FSS had retained strands of Sellotape used to gather fibres from Lesley's clothes.

The scientist leading the team, Cathy Turner, thought they might have picked up traces of the killer's body fluids, too.

Her hunch paid off and, in a painstakingly difficult operation which carried the risk of destroying the sample for ever if it failed, in 2000, enough DNA was recovered to obtain a full profile. For six more years, this did not produce a match on the database. But it did enable police to rule out Kiszko, plus other possible culprits such as serial childkiller Robert Black and Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe (eliminating suspects is a vital, but often ignored, aspect of DNA profiling).

Then, in 2006, detectives or, rather, the scientists guiding them finally got their man.

Like so many of his ilk, Ronald Castree, a 21-year-old Rochdale taxi driver at the time of the murder, re-offended, and so, three decades later, his DNA found its way onto the database.

At his trial, he claimed his sample must have been contaminated after so many years on the sticky tape either that, or it had been planted there but the jury disbelieved him. This was a crime that had so many victims. Lesley's older brother, Freddie, who should have run the fateful errand, but was out playing football, later killed himself.

Her sisters, Laura and Julie, and her mother, now aged 70, have spent three decades in purgatory.

However, watching Castree being led away to begin a life sentence came as some small comfort; and, as one is always reminded by cold case specialists, the feelings of the victims, or those they left behind, are paramount.

Given the importance they attach to seeing justice done no matter how long it takes, the only surprise is that not every police force takes kindly to receiving a call from Orlando Elmhirst, with news that he has unearthed another 'nugget'.

'Sometimes they are delighted, sometimes they aren't,' he says, adding tactfully: 'The vast majority of forces are positive, but one or two are much slower to respond you'll have to ask them why.' ACCORDING to Chief Constable Tony Lake, the answer, inevitably, comes down to limited resources. 'Most policemen desperately want to solve crimes, but these cases are often expensive and time- consuming, and forces have to prioritise,' he says.

'Frankly, [in Lincolnshire] we do them in down-time when we aren't investigating live cases.' His view is understandable. But when senior police officers feel reluctant to re-open some dog- eared casebook from Dixon Of Dock Green's days, however, they would do well to remember the sentiments of that wretched student nurse who was snatched on Asylum Lane.

'The whole experience was difficult to relive, but it has enabled me to come to terms with what happened,' she says of John White's much belated trial and imprisonment.

'The depression won't go away, but at least I've been able to gain my selfrespect as a result of the court process. And I have been able to take my life back from him.'

(c) 2008 Daily Mail; London (UK). Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved. NEMESIS FOR THE SERIAL KILLERS ; In a Secret Warehouse, Boxes Packed With Forgotten Clues Are Being
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