The name Colin Pitchfork might not be as recognizable as Charles Manson or Jeffrey Dahmer. But for those in the forensic science community, it’s a name that holds weight. Pitchfork was the first murderer to be caught using DNA analysis.
When 15-year-old Dawn Ashworth was raped and murdered in Leicestershire, England, in late July 1986, Alec Jeffreys was a genetics professor at the nearby University of Leicester. A few years earlier, he had discovered that patterns in some regions of a person’s DNA could be used to distinguish one individual from another.
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Source: Chemical & Engineering News