Colin Pitchfork killed two 15-year-old girls in the villages of Narborough and Enderby, a few miles south of Leicester. Lynda Mann died on a footpath in November 1983. Dawn Ashworth died less than a mile away in July 1986. Both were raped and strangled. At the time of each killing Pitchfork was a married man in his twenties with a young family and a steady job as a baker.
The case is remembered for how it was solved. Leicestershire Police took samples from the bodies to Alec Jeffreys, a geneticist at the University of Leicester who had discovered DNA fingerprinting in 1984. His first result cleared a 17-year-old who had confessed to Dawn's murder, making him the first person anywhere to be exonerated of murder by DNA. Police then asked thousands of local men to give blood. Pitchfork paid a colleague to give a sample in his name, and he was found only when that colleague talked about it in a pub. In January 1988 Pitchfork pleaded guilty and became the first person convicted of murder through DNA profiling. His later path through the parole system, including a release in 2021 that lasted less than three months, has kept the case in the news for more than a decade.
Pitchfork was born in 1960; Parole Board records give his age as 27 at sentencing in January 1988 and 65 in October 2025. He grew up in the village of Newbold Verdon, in west Leicestershire, and lived there until he married in 1981, the Leicester Mercury reported in 2021. Villagers described him as a loner. He went to Market Bosworth High School and Bosworth College in Desford, and at 16 began training as a baker at a college in Leicester.
He later told a parole panel that he had grown up feeling compared with his sister and in competition with her, and he described his offending as a response to how he believed the women in his life, chiefly his mother and later his wife, had treated him. The panel recorded that account as his own explanation, not as a finding.
He married in May 1981 and later lived in Littlethorpe, the village next to Narborough. He and his wife had two sons. He kept working as a baker, and the man who later took a blood test in his name was a colleague from the same bakery.
The 2025 Parole Board decision, which reviewed his whole history, sets out how his offending began. He started exposing himself to girls at about the age of 10 or 11, soon after an early puberty. He told the panel that at first he imagined it as a way to find a girlfriend, and that later, once he could drive, he treated it as a game of avoiding the police. He had previously estimated that he exposed himself more than 1,000 times. He chose girls of about 14 to 16, the decision says, and planned the incidents to avoid detection.
The courts caught up with only a fraction of this. At 17 he was fined for indecent exposure. At 18 he was given two years' probation for another offense, and two years after that he received the same for two more. He kept the full scale of his behavior from the probation officer he was seeing in those years.
At 19, in 1979, he committed his first contact offense. He was driving home from work, he told the 2025 panel, saw a girl at the edge of a residential area and meant to expose himself, but saw no one else around. He seized her from behind, threatened to kill her and sexually assaulted her before running off. She was 16. This was one of the two indecent assaults to which he later pleaded guilty. Neither surviving victim has been publicly named.
His marriage did not stop any of this. The Parole Board noted that he went on offending throughout the marriage and while having affairs, and that he presented to his wife and family as a caring husband and father.
Lynda Mann was 15 and lived in Narborough. Her mother, Kath Eastwood, called her Lindy. She had an older sister, Sue, and a much younger sister, Rebecca, who was two years old in 1983. The family's later statements describe a home in which her death never stopped being present: her mother told the BBC in 2015 that Pitchfork had taken her own life as well as Lynda's, and said she had moved the family because she feared her daughter's killer would strike again.
On the evening of Monday, November 21, 1983, Lynda left home on foot. Accounts differ on the errand: the BBC has said she was making her way to a friend's house, while a 2021 Leicester Mercury report says she was walking home from babysitting. Her route took her along the Black Pad, a footpath in Narborough.
Pitchfork was out in his car that evening with his son, then about three months old, asleep in a carrycot in the back. He told the 2025 panel that he had "an hour to spare." He said his wife had recently discovered an affair and that he felt controlled by her, and that he was driven by anger and a wish to hurt someone. Driving through a quiet area, he saw Lynda. He pushed her over, raped her and strangled her with her own scarf. He then drove home and put his son to bed.
Lynda did not come home, and she was found the next morning on the footpath. Police analysis of the semen recovered from her body, the Forensic Science Service later recorded, showed only that her killer had type A blood and an enzyme profile shared by about one man in ten. There were no other leads, and the inquiry was eventually scaled back.
In 1985 Pitchfork attacked another girl. He grabbed her from behind, held a screwdriver to her neck and told her he would kill her if she screamed, then sexually assaulted her. The Parole Board gives her age as 15; The Independent, reporting in 2021, gave it as 16 and dated the attack to October 1985. The law then allowed the offense to be charged only as indecent assault. She survived and has never been publicly named.
Dawn Ashworth was 15 and lived in Enderby, the next village to Narborough. She was the only daughter of Barbara Ashworth. Her uncle, Philip Musson, would become one of the family's main public voices. Her mother, who later moved to Liskeard in Cornwall, has spoken of Dawn's many ambitions, of being robbed of the grandchildren Dawn might have given her, and of the last Mother's Day card Dawn made her, with "It's great to have a mum like you" written in bold letters across the top. She brings it out every year.
On Thursday, July 31, 1986, during the school summer holidays, Dawn left home to go to a friend's house. Barbara Ashworth told the Mirror in 2023 that it happened in broad daylight, at about four o'clock in the afternoon. On her way Dawn took a short cut along a path called Ten Pound Lane.
Pitchfork told a psychiatrist after his arrest, and the Parole Board in later years, that he had meant only to expose himself to her, but that he was overtaken by rage and a desire to make someone pay. Dawn fought him. He beat her, raped her and strangled her, and hid her body. She did not come home. She was found two days later, hidden under branches in a field. The pathologist described a brutal sexual assault. The attack matched the killing of Lynda Mann, and the semen again came from a man with the same blood type.
Police soon had a suspect: Richard Buckland, a 17-year-old from the area who had learning difficulties and who knew Dawn. Under questioning he described details of where her body had been found that had not been made public, and he went on to confess to her murder, though he repeatedly retracted and repeated the admission. He denied any part in Lynda Mann's death. He was charged with Dawn's murder. Detectives believed the same man had killed both girls and wanted to tie him to the first killing too.
Buckland was wholly innocent of both crimes.
David Baker, the detective chief superintendent leading the inquiry, had read a local newspaper report about Alec Jeffreys, whose laboratory at the University of Leicester had found, on September 10, 1984, that repeated stretches of DNA produce a pattern unique to each person. The technique had been used to settle an immigration case, in which it proved that a Ghanaian boy was his mother's son, and paternity disputes. It had never been used in a criminal investigation. Baker approached Jeffreys in 1986 and asked him to compare semen from both girls with a blood sample from Buckland.
Jeffreys has said he expected it to fail, believing that the DNA in samples that old would have broken down. Instead the result was clear. "It showed first that both of the girls had been raped and presumably murdered by the same man," he later said, "and secondly that the young man who had been charged with one of the murders, his DNA was not on either of those victims." The work drew on methods Jeffreys had developed with Peter Gill and Dave Werrett of the Forensic Science Service, including Gill's technique for separating sperm from other cells in a sample. Because nothing like it had been done before, police asked the Forensic Science Service to check the result. It confirmed that Buckland could be excluded.
The charge against him was dropped. The Forensic Science Service later described him as the first person in the world to be exonerated of murder through DNA profiling. Jeffreys said he had no doubt that Buckland would otherwise have been convicted.
With its suspect gone, the inquiry turned to a plan with no precedent: a DNA screen of the male population. Police wrote to the men of three villages around the two crime scenes, asking them to give blood and saliva voluntarily so they could be eliminated. Baker later recalled sending 5,000 letters to men aged between 18 and 34; other accounts give the age range as 17 to 34. Blood grouping was carried out first, and the Forensic Science Service ran full DNA profiles only on the roughly one man in ten who shared the killer's blood type. The exercise became known as the Blooding. Over about six months some 5,000 men were tested (one 2021 account says more than 5,500). None matched.
Pitchfork was among the men asked to give blood, and he was asked more than once. According to the Parole Board, he became alarmed. He paid a colleague at the bakery, Ian Kelly, to go to the testing center in his place. He fixed Kelly's photograph into his own passport so neatly that no tampering could be seen, and Kelly practiced Pitchfork's signature. Kelly then gave blood and saliva while claiming to be Colin Pitchfork. Press accounts put the payment at 200 pounds.
The reasons Pitchfork gave Kelly differ between accounts. The Independent reported that he said he wanted to avoid police harassment because of his convictions for indecent exposure. A 2020 Leicester Mercury account says he claimed he had already given blood once while posing as a friend who wanted to avoid the police because of an old burglary conviction, and so could not give it again in his own name.
On August 1, 1987, in The Clarendon, a pub in the Clarendon Park area of Leicester, a woman overheard a bakery worker saying that he had taken the blood test in place of a colleague. Reports differ on who exactly was speaking and how soon she acted; it is clear that she eventually reported it to the police, and that the colleague named was Pitchfork. Baker later said that once the information reached his team, Pitchfork was arrested the next morning. He was arrested at Littlethorpe in September 1987.
His blood was tested, and his DNA profile matched the semen recovered from both girls.
Pitchfork confessed. "He admitted the offences straight away," Baker said in 2021, "but he didn't show any remorse whatsoever." Under questioning he also admitted exposing himself to more than 1,000 women and girls.
Brian Escott-Cox, who prosecuted the case, told the Sunday Mirror in 2021 that Pitchfork had treated his interrogators with something close to contempt, at one point sending officers out to fetch him fish and chips, and that he repeatedly said how easy it was to fool people by telling them what they wanted to hear. That is the prosecutor's recollection, more than 30 years after the fact.
The case came before Leicester Crown Court in January 1988. Pitchfork pleaded guilty to the murders and rapes of Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth, to two indecent assaults on other girls, and to conspiring to pervert the course of justice by means of the substitute sample. On January 22, 1988, he received the mandatory life sentence for each murder, with concurrent terms of 10 years for each rape and 3 years for the other counts. A further allegation, that in June 1987 he had picked up a girl who was hitchhiking, driven her the wrong way and asked her for a kiss before taking her where she wanted to go, was left on file and never tried.
A psychiatrist from Broadmoor who examined him for the court concluded that he had a personality disorder of a psychopathic type, with serious psychosexual pathology, and would remain extremely dangerous while it continued. The sentencing judge called him a danger to young women and described the killings as "particularly sadistic." The Lord Chief Justice of the day, Lord Lane, advised: "From the point of view of the safety of the public I doubt if he should ever be released."
Ian Kelly was also prosecuted for his part in the deception, though the published accounts of the case do not record the sentence he received.
In 1988 the Home Secretary, not the judge, fixed how long a life prisoner had to serve as punishment. The BBC has reported that the then minister chose not to order that Pitchfork never be released. In 1994 the Secretary of State set his tariff at 30 years. In August 2008 the High Court set the minimum term at 30 years as well.
Pitchfork appealed. On May 14, 2009, the Court of Appeal, with the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, presiding alongside Mr Justice Lloyd Jones and Mr Justice Wyn Williams, reduced the minimum term by about two years, to 27 years and 242 days, in the case cited as R v Pitchfork [2009] EWCA Crim 963. The court found his progress "exceptional." It said he had worked to address the reasons for his offending, had been educated to degree level, had never been placed on report in 20 years in custody and was trusted to help look after other prisoners. It singled out his work transcribing printed music into Braille, a specialized skill whose results, with the support of the Royal National Institute of Blind People, were used across the country and abroad. The families of both girls strongly criticized the reduction. The new term ran out in September 2015, 28 years after he was remanded in custody in 1987.
Pitchfork spent about 24 years in high-security prisons, followed by a long period in category C training prisons. Prison and probation reports described his conduct as consistently good. He completed a long series of programs aimed at his offending, among them anger management, relapse prevention, the core, rolling and extended versions of the Sex Offender Treatment Programme, and a program on healthy sexual functioning. By 2013 assessors judged that the treatment had been intense and broad enough to address his identified risk factors.
He set up and developed Braille services in prison, worked for 14 years as a Listener (a prisoner trained to support others in distress) and was praised as a disability orderly. In 2015 a forensic psychologist found him low in psychopathic traits compared with other male offenders, while warning that some traits needed watching and could return if he fell into grievance thinking.
As his minimum term neared its end, both families went public. In 2015 Lynda's sister Rebecca Eastwood started a petition against his release; it reached 19,222 supporters and went to the Parole Board before his 2016 hearing. Kath Eastwood wrote to the Parole Board that the idea of her daughter's killer walking free repulsed her. Barbara Ashworth said, at every stage, that life should mean life. Alberto Costa, the Conservative MP for South Leicestershire, whose constituency covers Narborough and Enderby, took up the families' cause and pursued it in Parliament and with ministers for the next decade.
The Parole Board heard his case in April 2016. On April 29 it refused release but recommended a move to open conditions, and in June the Justice Secretary, Michael Gove, accepted that recommendation. Pitchfork moved to an open prison in August 2016, later reported to be HMP Leyhill in Gloucestershire. In 2017 the families were told he would begin unescorted days out, and that November he was seen walking around shops in Bristol city center. Kath Eastwood said the thought of his release gave her sleepless nights.
On May 3, 2018, the Parole Board again refused release. "At last the Parole Board have made the right decision," Kath Eastwood told the BBC. He stayed in open conditions, where he would spend just over five years in all and take many periods of temporary release without incident. Later evidence showed some concerns in this period that did not lead to sanctions: monitored phone calls in 2018 and 2019 in which he called his probation officer "stupid, lying and narcissistic," and an episode in 2020 in which he gave a shop worker chocolates and told her he was married when he was not.
His next hearing was postponed from November 2020 and held by video link on March 22, 2021. On June 7, 2021, the Parole Board announced that he was suitable for release. The panel had read more than 1,100 pages and heard from Pitchfork, his probation officers, the police and a prison psychologist; all of the professional witnesses supported release. It found that his behavior in custody had been positive and included extensive efforts to help others.
The families and Costa reacted with anger. Philip Musson said there was no parole for Dawn or Lynda. Barbara Ashworth told the Daily Mail that Pitchfork had ripped her family apart and could still hurt other girls. David Baker said he believed Pitchfork had fooled the Parole Board, and Alec Jeffreys, who rarely commented on cases, said he agreed that Pitchfork should not be released.
The Justice Secretary, Robert Buckland (no relation to Richard Buckland), used the reconsideration mechanism introduced in 2019 and asked the board in late June to look again, arguing that the decision was irrational because the panel had not given enough reasons for accepting the professional evidence. On July 13, 2021, His Honour Michael Topolski QC refused the application. He called the case one of "considerable seriousness, complexity and notoriety" and wrote that the terrible consequences of the rapes and murders would "forever darken the lives of the families concerned," but found that the decision was not irrational.
A week later the Ministry of Justice said Pitchfork would not have to sign the sex offenders' register because his crimes predated it, then apologized and confirmed that he had always been eligible and would be added on release.
Pitchfork left prison on September 1, 2021, after 33 years and 11 months in custody, and moved into an approved premises, a probation hostel. His license carried 36 conditions beyond the standard ones, which the Ministry of Justice called among the strictest ever set: GPS tagging, a curfew, polygraph tests, limits on contact with children, disclosure of the vehicles he used and the people he spoke to, restrictions on technology, and a ban on entering Leicestershire without permission. "I don't think he should be breathing the same air as us," Barbara Ashworth said.
He was back in prison in less than three months. On October 14, 2021, when a polygraph examiner asked whether he had talked to any lone women, he said that during a break in the test he had spoken to a woman on her own in a car park near the probation office, telling her where she could get a better view of some boats; he received a warning letter. On November 5 he shouted at his community probation officer, who had kept him waiting, so loudly that the hostel manager came to check on her. A polygraph examiner suspected him of using counter-measures to influence the test, reported at the time to involve breathing techniques. On November 19, 2021, the Secretary of State revoked his license and he was arrested and returned to a closed prison. The Probation Service said he had not committed any further offense and that the recall was a preventive step. Press reports at the time said he had approached young women on several occasions while out walking.
"I'm pleased that he's been put away and women and girls are safe and protected from him now," Barbara Ashworth said. The Justice Secretary, Dominic Raab, said parole decisions in cases like this needed a more precautionary approach.
The review that followed was delayed, partly by an investigation into other historic matters, and the hearing was put back several times. Costa applied for it to be held in public under a 2022 rule change; in March 2023 the board's chair, Caroline Corby, refused, citing threats made against Pitchfork, the risk that publicity would feed his grandiosity and the fact that much of the key evidence could not be heard in public. One of the six victims involved opposed a public hearing; the other five did not object.
The panel sat in April and May 2023. In June it found that the 2021 recall had been flawed and not supported by the evidence. The Secretary of State accepted that there was no evidence Pitchfork had worn a high-visibility jacket to pose as a litter picker, and that apart from the car park conversation, which he had volunteered himself, there was no evidence he had approached young women. The panel also noted that his probation officer had not been consulted about the recall. It directed his release, adding new conditions such as an exclusion zone and disclosure of relationships. It had also emerged that the polygraph condition imposed in 2021 had never been lawful.
On July 5, 2023, the Justice Secretary, Alex Chalk, applied for reconsideration. Later that month a Parole Board judge found the decision irrational, because the panel had not given enough weight to several parts of the evidence, and ordered a fresh hearing. A new panel heard the case on October 2 and 3 and November 6, 2023. On December 7 it refused release, saying it could not be sure the behaviors that drove his offending were gone, that his explanations of his time on license had been protracted and inconsistent, and that it did not think he was being open and honest.
Pitchfork then used the same mechanism. In February 2024 a Parole Board judge found the December decision irrational, because the panel had not addressed his prison offender manager's recommendation that he be released, and ordered a complete rehearing. It was the first case in which first the Secretary of State and then the prisoner had won reconsideration. Barbara Ashworth said words failed her: "He's killed two schoolgirls. I know what I'd do, I'd throw away the key." Costa complained that the rules gave Pitchfork a limitless number of challenges, letting him seek reconsideration of a decision that had already been reconsidered.
In May 2024 Corby ruled that the rehearing would be held in public, with the Secretary of State's support. Two months later the panel chair reversed that decision. New allegations about Pitchfork's recent conduct in prison had come to light, the evidence about them would have to be heard in private, and Pitchfork had said he would not give evidence in public. It later emerged that a young fellow prisoner had alleged that Pitchfork sexually assaulted him by touching his upper thigh through his clothing. Police took no further action because the complainant did not support a prosecution. Pitchfork was removed from his trusted peer-support job in June 2024, after concerns that he was spending large sums buying goods for younger prisoners in breach of prison rules, and was moved to another prison that November.
He sought judicial review of decisions to withhold police body-worn camera footage of the complainant's interview. On February 4, 2025, Mr Justice Chamberlain refused permission, finding no arguable case, and made a temporary order protecting the new name Pitchfork now uses.
The panel, chaired by His Honour Peter Rook KC, heard evidence on March 28 and May 15 and 16, 2025, and, after a delay caused by a family bereavement on the panel, on October 3, 2025. The dossier ran to more than 2,000 pages. Victims observed by video link, and victim personal statements were read to the panel.
It made two findings of fact on the balance of probabilities, the civil standard used in parole hearings. First, that Pitchfork had deliberately used counter-measures during the 2021 polygraph test; the panel accepted that this did not necessarily show he was hiding the truth, but said it was concerning given his history of deception. Second, that in 2024 he had groomed the young prisoner, Witness A, with a sexual motive, and had repeatedly touched or tried to touch his upper thigh after being told the advances were unwelcome. Pitchfork denied the allegation and said he was not sexually attracted to men. These were findings by a parole panel, not criminal convictions.
The panel also looked again at the 2021 recall and, unlike the 2023 panel, found it justified, though not strongly so, on the combination of his confrontation with his probation officer, his sense of entitlement toward hostel staff and the polygraph counter-measures. It rejected the allegation of "aimless walking," since his GPS tag showed nothing of the kind and his license had not barred him from the forest where he went litter picking.
No professional witness now supported his release. The psychologist who had worked with him for years revised his assessment of the risk of further violence from low to moderate and no longer recommended release. In a decision dated October 27 and announced on October 30, 2025, the panel refused release and declined to recommend open conditions. It found that Pitchfork still had only limited internal controls and poor insight into his risky thinking and behavior, that traits seen on license, such as entitlement, grandiosity, hostility to authority and lack of openness, remained, and that the Witness A finding revealed a new risk that had not yet been explored. It listed the work a future panel would expect to see.
The decision was provisional for 21 days. Pitchfork did not ask for reconsideration, the Leicester Mercury reported on November 21, 2025, so it became final. The Parole Board published a redacted version of the 32-page decision on November 13, 2025, citing exceptional public interest.
As of October 15, 2026, Pitchfork remains in prison, serving his life sentence in closed conditions. No later Parole Board decision, court ruling or news report was found when this was checked. Under the law the Ministry of Justice sets the date of his next review; Costa said in November 2025 that he would be eligible to apply again within two years. If he is ever released he will remain on license, and liable to recall, for the rest of his life.
The case opened the forensic use of DNA. Profiling is now used by police around the world, and in 1995 Britain set up its national DNA database. Matt Ridley, writing in The Spectator in 2024, noted that DNA's first act in criminal justice was to clear an innocent man, and that Pitchfork was the first person in the world, not just in Britain, convicted through it. David Baker believed that without the technique Pitchfork might have gone uncaught for ten years. Baker received the Queen's Police Medal and, in 2022, an honorary doctorate from the University of Leicester. He died at Leicester General Hospital on March 20, 2026, aged 90.
The families never stopped carrying the case. In 2020 the two mothers were invited to meet Alec Jeffreys for the first time, at a University of Leicester event on March 6 marking 35 years of DNA fingerprinting; the organizer said the killer's name would not be mentioned.
The American writer Joseph Wambaugh, a former Los Angeles police officer, flew to England days after the sentencing and told the story in The Blooding (1989). ITV dramatized it in Code of a Killer, a two-part drama broadcast in April 2015, with John Simm as Jeffreys and David Threlfall as Baker. The case was also the subject of the first episode of the BBC Two series Catching Britain's Killers: The Crimes That Changed Us in 2019 and of a Channel 5 documentary, Child Snatcher 3: Who Took Lynda & Dawn?, in 2025.
The parole fight shaped policy debates as well. After the 2021 release Robert Buckland and then Dominic Raab launched a review of the parole system, and later ministers promised a ministerial check on the release of the most dangerous offenders and a change in the law so that the worst killers would never be released. Costa continued to press for limits on repeated reconsideration applications.
Proven by his own guilty pleas, and final: the rapes and murders of Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth, two indecent assaults on other girls, and the conspiracy over the substitute blood sample.
Never tried: the June 1987 allegation involving a girl who accepted a lift, left on file in 1988.
Not a criminal finding: the 2024 allegation about a young fellow prisoner. Police took no action. A Parole Board panel found it proved on the balance of probabilities in 2025; Pitchfork denies it.
Contested within the parole system: whether the 2021 recall was justified. The 2023 panel said it was flawed and based partly on incorrect information; the 2025 panel said it was justified on three narrower grounds. Early press reports that he approached young women on several occasions were not borne out in the 2023 decision, which found evidence of one conversation, disclosed by Pitchfork himself.
Details that vary between sources: where Lynda was going that evening (to a friend's, or home from babysitting); the age of the girl attacked in 1985 (15 or 16); the number of men tested (about 5,000, or more than 5,500) and the age range they were drawn from; the exact date of his arrest in September 1987; the reason he gave Ian Kelly for needing a substitute; and whether the Ten Pound Lane site is described as being in Enderby or Narborough. Some press summaries say he pleaded guilty in September 1987; the Parole Board records his guilty pleas and sentence on January 22, 1988, and press reports say he confessed after his arrest in September 1987.
1960: Colin Pitchfork is born; he grows up in Newbold Verdon, Leicestershire.
About age 10 or 11: begins exposing himself to girls.
Age 16: starts training as a baker at a college in Leicester.
Age 17: fined for indecent exposure; probation orders follow at 18 and 20.
1979: first indecent assault, on a 16-year-old girl.
May 1981: marries and moves to Littlethorpe.
November 21, 1983: rapes and murders Lynda Mann, 15, on the Black Pad footpath in Narborough; she is found the next morning.
1985: indecent assault on a teenage girl, threatened with a screwdriver.
July 31, 1986: rapes and murders Dawn Ashworth, 15, near Ten Pound Lane; she is found two days later.
1986: Richard Buckland, 17, confesses to Dawn's murder and is charged; Alec Jeffreys's DNA test shows one man killed both girls and that it was not Buckland, and the Forensic Science Service confirms it. The charge is dropped.
1987: over about six months, some 5,000 local men are blood tested; a bakery colleague, Ian Kelly, gives a sample in Pitchfork's name using a doctored passport.
June 1987: alleged incident with a girl who accepted a lift (later left on file).
August 1, 1987: a woman overhears the deception being discussed in The Clarendon pub, Leicester.
September 1987: Pitchfork is arrested at Littlethorpe; his DNA matches both crime scenes and he confesses.
January 22, 1988: sentenced at Leicester Crown Court to life after guilty pleas.
1989: Joseph Wambaugh's The Blooding is published.
1994: Home Secretary sets a 30-year tariff.
1995: national DNA database established.
August 2008: High Court sets the minimum term at 30 years.
May 14, 2009: Court of Appeal reduces it to 28 years (27 years and 242 days).
April 2015: ITV broadcasts Code of a Killer; parole review begins and Rebecca Eastwood starts a petition.
September 2015: minimum term expires.
April 29, 2016: Parole Board refuses release, recommends open conditions; Michael Gove accepts in June.
August 2016: moved to an open prison.
2017: unescorted days out begin.
May 3, 2018: release refused.
March 6, 2020: the two mothers are invited to meet Alec Jeffreys at a University of Leicester event.
March 22, 2021: parole hearing.
June 7, 2021: Parole Board finds him suitable for release.
July 13, 2021: Robert Buckland's reconsideration application is refused.
September 1, 2021: released to a probation hostel.
November 19, 2021: license revoked; recalled to a closed prison.
March 2, 2023: request for a public hearing refused.
June 15, 2023: new panel finds the recall flawed and directs release.
July 2023: Alex Chalk's reconsideration application succeeds.
December 7, 2023: release refused after a rehearing.
February 2024: Pitchfork's own reconsideration application succeeds.
May 16, 2024: public hearing ordered; reversed in July 2024 after new allegations.
February 4, 2025: High Court refuses his judicial review application.
March to October 2025: final hearings.
October 30, 2025: Parole Board refuses release and open conditions (decision dated October 27).
November 2025: he does not seek reconsideration; the decision is final.
March 20, 2026: David Baker dies, aged 90.
October 15, 2026: still in prison; no later decision found.