Even though the discovery of chemical DNA can be dated to 1869, it was the Russian-born biochemist Phoebus Levene, in 1911, who first discerned that individual cells each contain a nucleus made of nucleic acid. There are two types of nucleic acid, which he called ribonucleic acid (RNA) and deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), according to whether they contain ribose or deoxyribose. Within each nucleus are twenty-three pairs of chromosomes made up of DNA. Within each pair, one chromosome comes from the father's sperm, the other from the mother's egg. By the 1940s, scientists realized that DNA forms the building blocks of life and dictates not only our hair and eye color, but everything about our physical makeup.

So how does DNA issue its instructions? Scientists knew it had to be in some kind of code and that every code would be unique to each individual. The answer came in 1953, when two scientists based in Cambridge, England—James Watson and Francis Crick—determined that the structure of DNA is a double-helix polymer, a spiral consisting of two DNA strands wound around each other. Biophysicist Maurice Wilkins's work on X-ray diffraction had proved crucial to Crick and Watson; all three men were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work in this field.

Four chemicals make up DNA: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T). Strung together in an extremely long sequence, the chemicals on one chromosomal strand always align with the chemicals on the other strand; that is, A always joins with T, and C always joins with G. A section of DNA code might be arranged thus:

Although large chunks of DNA are universal (because each of us has the same body parts and organs), some sections of DNA vary from individual to individual. By studying these polymorphic segments, scientists can determine whether a particular strand of DNA could have come from a given individual. By comparing prints of several different polymorphic sequences from different specimens to one another, scientists can tell whether the specimens match.

The procedure for creating a DNA fingerprint in a criminal investigation is shown in the following steps (the sample used is blood, but it could be any bodily fluid or tissue):

1. Blood samples are collected from the victim, defendant, and crimescene.

2. White blood cells are separated from red blood cells.

3. DNA is extracted from the nuclei of white blood cells.

4. A restrictive enzyme is used to cut fragments of the DNA strand.

5. DNA fragments are put into a bed of gel with electrodes at eitherend.

6. Electric current sorts DNA fragments by length.

7. An absorbent blotter soaks up the imprint; it is radioactively treated,and an X-ray photograph (called an autoradiograph) is produced.

Once the autoradiograph has been analyzed and an apparent match found, the question is one of probabilities: What is the statistical likelihood of two people sharing this DNA profile? According to Sir Alec Jeffreys (see the Colin Pitchfork case on page 71), the answer is fewer than 1 in 1 nonillion (1 followed by thirty zeroes)—a figure billions of times greater than the current world population.

If only a small amount of DNA is available for fingerprinting, a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) may be used to create thousands of copies of a DNA segment quickly and accurately. Developed in 1983 by the Nobel Prize-winning American biochemist Kary B. Mullis, PCR allows the investigator to obtain the large quantities of DNA necessary for high-quality forensic analysis. It is a three-step process carried out in repeated cycles, and requires as little as a single DNA molecule to serve as a template.

The initial step—denaturation or separation of the two strands of the DNA molecule—is achieved by heating the sample to around 95°C (203°F).

DNA—the future of forensic science. Here a laboratory technician reviews a DNA autoradiograph. (FBI)

Each strand is a template on which a new strand is built. Steps two and three involve cooling and reheating the sample, a process that doubles the number of copies. At the end of the cycle, which lasts about five minutes, the process begins again. Usually 25 to 30 cycles produce a sufficient amount of DNA.

Despite teething problems with overzealous laboratories scrimping on their test procedures in order to produce quick and profitable results, DNA profiling has survived the most rigorous courtroom scrutiny and continues to prosper. With its unparalleled ability not only to convict the guilty but to free the innocent—by May 2006 in the United States, no fewer than 175 wrongfully convicted prisoners had been exonerated—it is the greatest advance in forensic science since the advent of fingerprinting. 

The Romanovs

DATE: 1918

LOCATION: Yekaterinburg, Russia

SIGNIFICANCE: One of the twentieth century's greatest mysteries was finally solved by DNA typing.

History records that on July 17, 1918, Czar Nicholas II of Russia; his wife, Alexandra; their five children; and four members of their entourage were executed in the cellar of a house in Yekaterinburg, Siberia, on orders of Lenin, the newly instituted leader of the Bolshevik revolution. Their death brought an end to the three-hundred-year reign of the Romanovs and touched off worldwide interest in their fate. Although for decades Soviet governments forbade all mention of the deposed royal family, some were prepared to flout the law. The fateful house where they were executed became a shrine, with pilgrimages so commonplace that in 1977 it was bulldozed to the ground.

For one man, Gely Ryabov, finding the burial site of the Romanovs became an obsession. Using his privileged position as a filmmaker for the Interior Ministry, he delved into secret archives and in the late 1970s managed to track down the children of Yakov Yurovsky, the Bolshevik guard who had overseen the executions. Yurovsky's son provided Ryabov with a hitherto unknown note that described the disposal of the bodies in a swampy meadow near Yekaterinburg. With its help, Ryabov located the layer of logs shallowly covered with dirt that lay over the muddy spot where the remains were buried. A local historian helped him, along with a geologist who scaled a pine tree to spot traces of the old road traveled by the truck that carried the corpses.

Ryabov, aware that such activities would bring censure at best and probably much worse, carried out most of his work at night, but eventually he uncovered a pile of black and green bones that he felt sure were those of the former czar and his family. Also recovered from the burial site were scraps of expensive clothing that seemed to correspond roughly in gender, age, and size to the Romanov family and entourage.

As the communist stranglehold weakened in 1991, the work to establish the identity of the corpses began. Using computer superimposition software, Aleksandr Blokhin and other researchers first compared the battered skulls with photographs of the czar and czarina. Initial results suggested that these were indeed the Romanovs. But for a positive identification they turned to DNA typing.

Advanced DNA

The problem was especially daunting because the scientists had only bone to work with. Unlike living tissue or vital fluids, bones contain very little DNA, and these bones were in particularly bad condition. Some were so fragile that they turned to dust when touched. One of Russia's foremost DNA specialists, Pavel Ivanov, took the bones to Britain for further study by the Home Office Forensic Science Service. Conventional DNA analysis established that five of the nine skeletons were members of one family—a man, a woman, and three children. But because of their age and deteriorated condition, the bones did not provide scientists with all that they needed to know.

They turned instead to mitochondrial DNA, which is found in specific structures within the body's cells and is passed down intact through the maternal line. The forensic team asked for and received a blood sample of Queen Elizabeth's husband, Prince Philip, who is a direct descendant of Czarina Alexandra's sister. If the bones were genuine, the team said, then Prince Philip's DNA should match that of the woman and the three children in certain familial respects. The results enabled chief researcher Peter Gill to announce a "complete match"; the bones' provenance had been established "virtually beyond doubt." Gill declared himself and his team "more than 98.5 percent certain that the remains are those of the Romanovs."

However, one mystery endured. History records that eleven people were executed in the cellar, yet only nine corpses were recovered. Yurovsky's note tells of burning two other bodies but gives no reason why. Curiously enough, the two bodies not found were those of the Crown Prince Alexei and his sister Anastasia, both of whom were rumored to have survived the assassination. In 1920, a woman who became known as Anna Anderson surfaced in Berlin, claiming to be Anastasia. Over the years she convinced many people, including some distant members of the royal family, of her claims, but she was never officially regarded as the missing princess. Others regarded her as a fraud. She died in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1964, still sticking to her story. Nothing found at the burial site appeared to refute her claim.

But in 1994, the truth became known. Before her death, Anna Anderson had undergone an operation. To provide legal cover in case of a possible compensation claim, the hospital had retained a sample of tissue.Supporters of Anderson commissioned Gill to test the sample and compare it with the Romanovs' DNA. In June 1994, Gill flew to the United States in secret to collect the sample. His findings, released the following October, exploded the myth. DNA typing proved that Anna Anderson was an impostor. She was not Princess Anastasia but a neurotic Polish peasant named Franzisca Schanzkowska who had vanished in 1920. Later that same year, she was pulled from a canal in Berlin and began her long-standing deception. Members of the Schanzkowska family, who had long-suspected that Anna Anderson was their missing relative, provided the samples that fixed her identity.

Conclusion

The outcome of this investigation has still not satisfied everyone. Resolute supporters of Anna Anderson, oblivious to the evidence of her genes, continue to insist that she was the missing princess.

Colin Pitchfork

DATE: 1983

LOCATION: Narborough, England

SIGNIFICANCE: This landmark case can claim a double triumph—the first suspect eliminated by genetic fingerprinting and the first murderer caught by it.

One of Britain's longest and most exhaustive manhunts began on an icy winter day in late 1983. It was twenty past seven on the morning of November 22 when a hospital porter making his way to work in the village of Narborough, near Leicester, took his usual shortcut along a lonely footpath known as the Black Pad. A few yards along the lane, he saw, sprawled on some grass and white with frost, the body of fifteen-year-old Lynda Mann. Nude from the waist down, she had been strangled and raped the previous evening while on her way to visit a friend. Semen traces showed that the killer was a Group A secretor (see the Joseph Williams case on page 249) with a strong phosphoglucomutase (PGM) 1+ enzyme. Taken together, these two factors occur in only 10 percent of the male adult population, a scarcity that heartened detectives. Although this could not positively identify the killer, it would certainly reduce their list of possible suspects.

Initial inquiries centered on Carlton Hayes Hospital, a nearby mental institution. When that failed to bear fruit, the search radiated out to include the adjacent villages of Enderby and Littlethorpe. Despite their conviction that the killer was a local man, investigators canvassing the three-village area were stymied at every turn. Only later would the awful realization sink in that they had actually questioned the killer during this sweep.

The computer had flagged the man for two reasons: (1) he had previous convictions for indecent exposure, and (2) he had been referred for therapy as an outpatient at Carlton Hayes Hospital. Although unable to provide an alibi—he claimed to have been taking care of his son—the fact that at the time of the murder he had lived a few miles beyond what police regarded as the probable catchment area outweighed all other considerations, and he was eliminated from the inquiry. (He did not move to Littlethorpe until a month after the killing of Lynda Mann.) Also, the likelihood of a parent taking time off from child care duties to commit such a horrendous murder was thought too grotesque to countenance.

Gradually the investigation into the murder of Lynda Mann ran out of steam, stifled by a lack of clues and diminishing public interest. On the first anniversary of Lynda's death, someone left a tiny cross at the spot where her body was found. A year later the commemorative ritual was repeated. Before it could happen a third time, the killer struck again.

Second Murder

Dawn Ashworth was also fifteen. A schoolgirl from Enderby, she disappeared in broad daylight on the afternoon of July 31, 1986. Two days later her hideously violated body was found less than a mile from the spot where Lynda Mann met her death. She had been torn to bits. Semen tests confirmed that detectives were hunting a dual killer. In the aftermath of this murder, investigators got their first real lead. A kitchen porter at Carlton Hayes Hospital, a slow-witted youth of seventeen, seemed to know an awful lot about the killing of Dawn Ashworth. Even though a blood test showed he was not a PGM 1+, Group A secretor, his confession had the ring of authenticity to it, especially to the officers who had spent almost three years tracking Lynda Mann's killer, and despite the lad's troubling insistence that he knew nothing about the first murder.

Just about the only person who believed that the boy knew nothing about either killing was the suspect's own father. He wondered if the magazine article he had recently read about a thirty-six-year-old scientistat nearby Leicester University who had perfected a system of identification based on DNA called genetic fingerprinting would clarify matters.

In the autumn of 1984, Dr. Alec Jeffreys, a research fellow at Leicester University's Lister Institute, stumbled upon the discovery that would play a pivotal role in this and countless subsequent cases. Although the existence of DNA had been known for decades, this unassuming scientist perfected the means whereby identifiable genetic markers could be developed on an X-ray film as a kind of bar code and then compared with other specimens. Although accounts vary of how Jeffreys actually became involved in the murder investigation, he was eventually asked to extract DNA from the killer's semen and compare it to the kitchen porter's blood sample. His results stunned those leading the investigation. Not only had the porter not killed Lynda Mann, but he hadn't killed Dawn Ashworth, either! His entire confession had been a fabrication! Just about the only good news that Jeffreys had to offer the jaded officers was confirmation that one man had killed both girls. On November 21, 1986, legal and forensic history was made when the teenaged kitchen porter became the first accused murderer to be set free as a result of DNA fingerprinting.

For those charged with finding the double killer, the verdict had wider ramifications—if DNA typing was so accurate, then why not conduct a mass testing of the local male population? After all, there were precedents for such action (see the Peter Griffiths case on page 127).

Early in 1987, investigators decided to draw blood from every local male between the ages of sixteen and thirty-four for DNA testing. By the end of January one thousand men had been tested but only a quarter had been cleared, because the laboratories were overwhelmed by samples. (In its original form, DNA typing was a laborious, time-consuming procedure, often taking weeks. The process has now been reduced to a matter of days.) It was the same the following month: hundreds more tests, but no clues. Of course, the police did not expect the killer to volunteer blood, but they were hoping to flush him out. Those who refused to cooperate with the official request soon found themselves under the most intense scrutiny. It was a war of nerves that paid off in the strangest way.

Conspiracy

On August 1, 1987, a quartet of drinkers in a Leicester pub, all bakery workers, were discussing the notorious sexual liaisons of a fellow employee named Colin Pitchfork, when one of the four, Ian Kelly, dropped a conversational thunderbolt—Colin, he said, had bullied him into taking the blood test on his behalf. A deathly hush fell over the table. It was broken at last by another man present, who chimed in that Pitchfork had approached him also, offering two hundred pounds (three hundred dollars) if he would act as a stand-in, but he had declined. Pitchfork had told both men that he was scared to take the test because his record—he had convictions for indecent exposure—meant that the police would give him a hard time. Kelly, a timid, malleable person, finally caved in under Pitchfork's relentless pressure and, using a faked passport, had gone along and given blood in Pitchfork's name.

A woman sitting at the table listened to these revelations with an anxiety born of suspicion. Like everyone else who worked at the bakery, she knew Pitchfork as an overbearing lecher, forever harassing the female employees. But did that make him a murderer? And then there was Kelly and possibly the other man to consider. If she went to the authorities, what would happen to them? For six weeks she wrestled with her conscience, then contacted the police. First, detectives arrested Kelly; later that day, September 19, 1987, they called at the Littlethorpe home of twenty-seven-year-old Colin Pitchfork. He took his arrest philosophically and made no attempt to deny either killing.

For those who had staked their reputations on the efficacy of DNA testing, this would be the acid test. A sample of Pitchfork's blood was rushed to Jeffreys's laboratory. After painstaking examination, the genetic bar code was found to be identical to that of the DNA sample from the killer-rapist. Colin Pitchfork was the 4,583rd male to be tested, and the last. The principle had been vindicated.

On January 22, 1988, Pitchfork pleaded guilty to both murders and was jailed for life. The judge, recognizing Ian Kelly's role in the affair as that of gullible pawn, gave the hapless bakery worker an eighteen-month suspended sentence.

Conclusion

This verdict reverberated around the world. Within a year of Pitchfork's conviction, American DNA laboratories had been consulted in more than one thousand criminal cases. For Dr. Alec Jeffreys the accolades outweighed the income. He never made any fortunes from his invention, but in 1994 the quiet professor from Leicester did receive a knighthood.

Kirk Bloodsworth

DATE: 1984

LOCATION: Baltimore, Maryland

SIGNIFICANCE: After a convicted killer had spent a year on death row and almost a decade behind bars, his fate rested in the hands of DNA typing.

On July 24, 1984, Dawn Hamilton, nine, was found raped and bludgeoned to death with a rock in a wooded area near her home in Rosedale, a suburb of Baltimore. Two weeks later, police arrested local resident Kirk Bloodsworth after receiving an anonymous tip from a caller who said that the twenty-three-year-old Eastern Shore waterman resembled a composite sketch circulated in local newspapers. According to prosecutors, Bloodsworth had returned to his hometown of Cambridge, some one hundred miles south of Baltimore, shortly after the slaying and told acquaintances he had "done something terrible" that could harm his marriage. Bloodsworth, an ex-Marine with no previous criminal record, insisted that he had been referring to his marijuana use and the anguish it had caused his wife.

At his first trial in 1985, despite alibi witnesses placing Bloodsworth at home or with other people during most of the day of the killing, he was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. A year later, the Maryland Court of Appeals overturned the sentence and ordered a new trial because, it said, police had failed to inform Bloodsworth's attorneys at the time about another suspect in the case, a newspaper deliveryman who was seen in the woods just before Dawn's body was discovered. Allegedly, this man's shirt was stained by a spot that might have been blood.

Bloodsworth fared little better at this second trial. He was convicted again on the same charges, but this time the judge sentenced him to three terms of life imprisonment.

In all the time he spent behind bars, Bloodsworth maintained his innocence. Finally, in 1992, his attorney, Robert E. Morin, was granted permission to reexamine the physical evidence in the case. Using forensic techniques developed since the original investigation, a spot of semen less than one-sixteenth of an inch wide was discovered on the victim's panties. In handing over the evidence to Morin, the prosecution signed a letter stating they would "agree to [Bloodsworth's] release" if a laboratory ever "determines with scientific certainty" that any sperm found did not belong to Bloodsworth and if prosecutors confirmed the results independently. This final clause was critical. Much of the controversy that has surrounded DNA typing has concerned the quality of testing (some laboratories, in their haste to grab a share of the lucrative DNA market, have done less than exemplary work). Maryland state prosecutors, quite reasonably, wished to have the tests performed by two independent sources, one of their own choosing.

Innocent

A California laboratory hired by the defense, Forensic Science Associates, determined that the DNA of the semen did not match a sample of blood provided by Bloodsworth. Their report concluded: "He has been eliminated as a potential source of the sperm from the panties." The second test was carried out by America's most sophisticated facility—the FBI Laboratory in Washington, D.C. Their scientists also confirmed that the sample exonerated Bloodsworth. In the face of these results, and mindful of her office's earlier promise, Baltimore County state's attorney Sandra A. O'Connor formally moved to dismiss the charges against Bloodsworth in 1993, saying that there was "insufficient evidence" to mount a new trial. O'Connor, known as a tough prosecutor and an advocate of capital punishment, pointedly refrained from saying that she believed Bloodsworth innocent; she offered no apologies. "I am saying there is not enough evidence to convict him." She admitted that had investigators had the DNA test available to them in 1984 or 1987, "we would not have charged him. We would have continued the investigation." She concluded the statement by saying there is an "ongoing investigation" of the case, but she said that "there are no suspects at this time."

Released on June 28, 1993, after nine years in prison, Bloodsworth announced his intention to remarry. He was officially pardoned on December 22, 1993.

Conclusion

At the time of Bloodsworth's release, Peter Neufeld, chairman of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers' DNA task force, said that nationally about a dozen inmates had been freed because of DNA testing. The list is still growing. 

Tommie Lee Andrews

DATE: 1986

LOCATION: Orlando, Florida

SIGNIFICANCE: This case ended with the first American trial to admit DNA typing into evidence.

On May 9, 1986, Nancy Hodge, a twenty-seven-year-old computer operator at Disney World, was in the bathroom of her apartment when she heard a noise behind her. She turned to see a stranger looming in the doorway, knife in hand. In the brief violent struggle, she caught a glimpse of his face before being thrown to the floor. At knifepoint she was raped three times. Throughout the ordeal, the attacker covered her face so she could not see him. Afterward, he grabbed her purse and fled.

Over the following months, the rapist honed his strategy. Always he made sure that the victim could not identify him, usually by covering her head with a sheet or blanket. Then he would switch on the light as a prelude to the assault. Another quirk was to invariably take away some item belonging to the victim, often a driver's license. By December 1986, Orlando detectives were hunting a serial rapist who had struck no fewer than twenty-three times in the southeastern part of the city that year.

The rapist's pattern served him brutally well until February 22, 1987. He broke into a twenty-seven-year-old woman's home in the usual way, through a window, then beat and slashed her into submission with a knife. Half-smothered with a sleeping bag, the woman stifled her cries rather than wake her two children, who were asleep in the next room. But on this night, the rapist slipped up: Experts found two fingerprints on the window screen.

The police tightened their surveillance cordon around the neighborhoods where the attacker struck most. Their diligence paid off in the early hours of March 1, 1987, when a woman called to report a prowler. Within minutes, patrol cars were at the scene, just in time to see a blue 1979 Ford racing away. They chased the car for two miles until the Ford spun out of control on a bend and crashed. The driver, twenty-four-year-old Tommie Lee Andrews, worked at a local pharmaceutical warehouse. His fingerprints matched those on the window screen, and he was charged with raping the young mother a week earlier.

But the police wanted more: If they could prove that Andrews was a serial rapist, he would face life imprisonment; a onetime offender might be walking the streets again in a few years. At a police lineup, Nancy Hodge unhesitatingly identified Andrews as the man who had raped her. Yet in spite of a clear identification, the case was far from watertight. Of all the rape victims, only Nancy Hodge had seen her attacker's face, and then just for a few seconds. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously fallible. Not even the fact that Andrews's blood group matched semen samples taken from the victims could be considered significant—so did that of 30 percent of the male population.

Pioneering Technique

While the case was still waiting to go to court in August 1987, assistant state's attorney Tim Berry heard about British successes with DNA fingerprinting and wondered if it might provide the conclusive evidence he was seeking. He contacted Michael Baird, forensic director for a New Yorkbased company called Lifecodes, which had begun DNA testing in America. Baird requested samples of the rapist's semen and blood from the accused man. The tests were carried out by Dr. Alan Giusti. In early October, the results came back: The bar codes from the two sources were identical. Beyond any reasonable doubt, both blood and semen came from the same man.

Now came the hard part—convincing a court that DNA typing was scientifically sound and that it was admissible as evidence. After a lengthy pretrial hearing, the judge agreed that it was, and on October 27, 1987, Andrews stood accused of raping Nancy Hodge. On the witness stand, she identified Andrews as her assailant. His defense—that he had spent that whole evening at home—was supported by his girlfriend and his sister. In submitting the DNA evidence, the prosecutor stated that the odds against Andrews being falsely accused were one in ten billion. It sounded impressive enough until the defense challenged him to substantiate this figure. Caught without the necessary data, the prosecution was forced into a humiliating retraction. How much it affected the jury's inability to reach a verdict is unknown, but the split—eleven to one in favor of conviction— was irrevocable and resulted in a mistrial.

Two weeks later, Andrews stood trial on the second rape charge, and this time the prosecution was fully prepared for any eventuality. Furthermore, they had fingerprint evidence to back up their DNA claims. To no one's surprise, Andrews was found guilty and sentenced to twenty-two years.

At the retrial of the Hodge case in February 1988, the DNA evidence assumed even greater significance. Andrews's alibi was still intact, verified by his sister and girlfriend. Nancy Hodge was equally emphatic in her identification. So everything hinged on the DNA. Using graphs and charts, Baird and David Houseman, a research biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, testified that the DNA in the blood and the semen matched. Baird responded to defense lawyer Hal Uhrig's charge that the test was invalid because not all the DNA molecules had been analyzed by explaining that it was necessary to analyze only those parts of the molecule that differ from person to person, not the characteristics found universally. The jury absorbed all of this and on February 5, 1988, found Andrews guilty. As a convicted serial rapist, he received jail terms totaling 115 years.

Conclusion

After a spluttering start, DNA evidence has now been accepted in courts across the country. There are still challenges to the discipline, chiefly on the grounds of shoddy laboratory work, but thus far, no one has successfully undermined the basic principle. Until that happens, DNA is here to stay.

Ian Simms

DATE: 1988

LOCATION: Billinge, England

SIGNIFICANCE: This case established the principle of "DNA by proxy."

With a brutal winter storm lashing around her, Helen McCourt alighted from the bus in Billinge, a village to the northeast of Liverpool, and steeled herself for the ten-minute walk home. It was a journey she never completed. For reasons known only to herself, the twenty-two-year-old insurance clerk stopped on the way at a pub called the George and Dragon. Like several local girls, Helen had fallen prey to the proprietor's brand of swaggering machismo. But just lately, their affair had soured, especially since they had had some trouble in the bar a couple of nights earlier, when she had ended up fighting with another woman. On that occasion, the proprietor, Ian Simms, had been overheard saying how much he hated his former lover. Tonight—February 9, 1988—Helen McCourt was on a retrieval mission. As she climbed the hill, the pub stood in darkness, but she knew that Simms would be in the upstairs apartment; he always was at this time. No one saw her enter the George and Dragon, and no one saw her leave. In fact, from that day to this, no one has ever admitted seeing Helen McCourt again.

At eight o'clock that night, her mother, frantic with worry, called the police. In such a close-knit community, news of Helen's disappearance spread like wildfire, and so did gossip concerning an alleged scream— which led police to Ian Simms. When officers came face-to-face with the husky bodybuilder, they were struck by his extreme nervousness—he was so nervous he could hardly speak. And what he did say reeked of hasty and inadequate fabrication. The investigators found mud on his bracelet and on two rings, for which Simms had no plausible explanation. Nor could he account for the two visible scratches on his throat, other than to hurriedly blame them on an argument with his wife. "Then what about the reported scream coming from the direction of your pub at around 5:30 P.M. on the night Helen disappeared?" he was asked. Simms mumbled that he knew nothing about it.

Detective Superintendent Thomas Davies, in charge of the investigation, thought otherwise and impounded Simms's Volkswagen. In the trunk were a bloodstained opal and sapphire earring, later identified as belonging to Helen McCourt, and also eighteen-inch-long strands of hair. Searchers moved upstairs to the apartment. One of the first items they found was a clip from the earring. And there was blood everywhere—enough for forensic scientist Dr. Ian Moore to map out Helen McCourt's last moments alive. The fight had started just inside the door to Simms's apartment. A trail of blood led upstairs, across the landing to a rear bedroom, where splashes on the walls showed how Simms had beaten her to the ground and then had continued his attack at floor level. At some point, he murdered Helen, by either strangulation or pummeling her to death, possibly through stabbing. Afterward, he had bundled her body into the trunk of his car.

Sex Assignation

Late that night, after the pub had closed, with the body of Helen McCourt lying in the trunk of his car, Simms drove the five hundred yards to his home to see his wife and two children before returning to the pub, where he had sex with yet another young admirer. When this girl left at 1 A.M., Simms was then believed to have dumped the body. But where? There was still no sign of Helen McCourt's corpse.

Despite the absence of a body, Davies felt he had enough to prove a charge of murder, and Simms was taken into custody on February 14. The evidence began to pile up remorselessly. Just over two weeks later, a marksman out shooting rats found a woman's purse in a field at Irlam, about seventeen miles from Billinge. It was identified as belonging to Helen McCourt. Detectives extended their search to Hollins Green, and there, on the banks of the River Irwell, they recovered Helen's coat and some items of clothing belonging to Simms, all heavily bloodstained, as well as a knotted length of electric cord. Strands of hair entwined in the cord matched those found in the trunk of Simms's car, leading investigators to conclude that this had been the ligature that choked the life from Helen McCourt.

Among the items of clothing was a sweatshirt bearing the logo of the Labatt brewing company, which coincidentally had been running a promotional campaign at the George and Dragon.

Detectives steadily assembled a vast forensic battery against Simms, more than nine hundred samples. Dr. Moore tested the hair recovered from the car and the electric cord and reported that "there was an unusual color gradation along the length of them, and they matched hairs recovered from Helen's bedroom." Plastic trash bags, used to hold the bloodstained clothes, were matched to bags at the George and Dragon by comparing the heat seal marks, and dog hairs found on Helen's clothes were identical to hairs from Simms's Rottweiler and black Labrador retriever. Carpet fibers from the floor of Simms's apartment were also present on Helen's clothing.

It should have been enough to convince the most skeptical of juries, but given the absence of a body, investigators left nothing to chance. In the first example of its kind, they took blood samples from Helen McCourt's parents in hopes that DNA profiling would match them to blood found at the pub. All three codes matched. After some complex calculations, Dr. Alec Jeffreys declared that the blood from the pub was 14,500 times more likely to be from a child of the Mc-Courts than a random sample from the population.

On March 14, 1989, Simms was jailed for life.

Conclusion

Tragically, the whereabouts of Helen McCourt's body remains a secret known only to Simms. As Dr. Moore reflected, "The only way the body will be found now is if he tells us . . . or it turns up by accident."