profile. next victim, dawn ashworth. this is her dna profile her, a band here and at one off to the left. trace amounts of semen recovered from that victim both revealed two faint bands whose position on the radio graph is similar to the semen profile seen from lynda mann. first conclusion, both girls had been raped and presumably murdered by the same man. what about richard buckland? this is his dna profile here and here. completely different from the semen profile. conclusion, both girls had been raped and presumed to have been murdered by the same man and that man was not the prime suspect richard buckland. the result shocked the police. it was a blow to us. they basically didn t believe a word we were saying.
your ticket to a better night s sleep richard buckland confessed to killing dawn ashworth, but insisted he had nothing to do with the murder of lynda mann three years earlier. police were convinced he was lying and set out to find the truth here at the university of lester, ironically less than ten miles away from where both teenagers were murdered. dr. alec jeffries, a gentleman net cyst, had within researching hereditary diseases when he accidentally discovered an
dna that can come from semen, blood, hair roots and other elements. dna is present in all living cells. it s a little like a computer program containing coded instructions on how to make a human being. no two individuals have the same dna pattern except for identical twins. dr. jeffries task was to take the semen recovered from lynda mann and dawn ashworth and compare it to the blood sample from richard buckland to see if it was a match. first, white blood cells from richard buckland s satchel was treated with a chemical reaction that allows the dna to float free. next the dna is cut into smaller pieces using special proteins called restriction enzymes.
that was quite right. healthy skepticism of an entirely new technology. we did retesting. it was done independently all pointing to the same conclusion, namely that buckland was not the guilty part party in the case. after four months in custody richard buckland was released open became the first person in the world to be exonerated of murder through the use of dna profiling. i had no doubt whatsoever he would have been found guilty had it not been for the dna evidence and jailed for life. that was a remarkable occurrence. but why did richard buckland confess to a crime he didn t commit? the pressure started getting really hard. he had to have discovered the body himself. in the terms of his discussion he was able to give a detailed description of her clothing, where the body was, in what position it lay, the ligature and so on, details that nobody
up a fair struggle before she died. semen samples taken revealed that the attacker had the same blood type as the man who attacked lynda mann. both girls were teenagers. both girls were walking alone. both women were strangled, both severely sexually assaulted. all school girls were advised to travel in groups and not to walk anywhere alone. dawn ashworth s father had given his daughter the same advice. i warned her and warned her about the dangers of going down there on the road. we ve got to find the one who did this to my daughter, to our daughter. and stop it from happening again. police launched an extensive investigation into the murder of dawn ashworth and within a week police got a break. witnesses saw a young man in the vicinity of ten pound lane on if afternoon of dawn ashworth s death. he was 17-year-old richard buckland, a kitchen worker at the psychiatric hospital located just a few hundred yards from where both lynda mann and dawn ashworth had been murdered.