December 5, 1975. The aunt and uncle of a 19-year-old woman named Lindy Sue Biechler
decide to pay her a visit at her apartment in Manor Township in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
They expect she will be in high spirits, having just tied the knot, so they wanted
to visit her to catch up and exchange recipes for dishes they’ve talked about recently.
Something is wrong. The front door is open. When they step inside, they see blood on the other
side of the door and all over the walls. A trail of blood on the carpet leads them to the living
room. There they find their niece slumped in a corner with a knife sticking out of her neck.
The police later said there had been a significant struggle. She had fought bravely. The killer had
used two knives to stab her 19 times in various parts of her body. His DNA was
all over the place, although DNA profiling was yet to become a thing in murder investigations.
It was obvious to the detectives that the attacker had been cut during the struggle.
He’d even used one of the victim’s towels, which was wrapped around the knife's handle protruding
from her neck. This was not a crime committed with the greatest of care. It was a vicious
attack by someone who’d gone completely wild. When DNA profiling was introduced to criminal
investigations, you'd think it would have been easy enough to catch this killer,
whose DNA was indeed plentifully dispersed. But when it was introduced in the 1980s,
Biechler’s killer remained at large. An extremely violent fiend was allowed to prowl the streets,
unpunished for his crimes. In fact, it took until 2022 for cops to finally get their man.
It wasn’t easy. But a coffee cup helped a lot!
We’ll tell you in detail in a few minutes just how a cup led to this man being sent to prison
for the rest of his life, but first, we want to tell you about another case, which might help you
understand things better. This was the case that changed the landscape of criminal investigations.
November 21, 1983. A 15-year-old girl named Lynda Mann had just finished babysitting at
a house in Narborough, Leicestershire, a small and peaceful village in the middle of England.
Crime was a rarity for this village, never mind murders. So, when Mann didn’t return
home that night, her parents didn’t immediately think something awful had happened. They knew
from the parents of the girl she’d been babysitting that she’d taken a different
route home that evening, a quieter one, and so they spent the night searching that area.
It wasn’t until the next morning that she was found. Her dead body lay on a footpath aptly named
the “Black Pad.” She’d been strangled. Police did have some biological forensic techniques back
then, but nothing like what we have today. All they knew about Mann’s killer was that he had type
A blood, and with an enzyme profile, they could narrow down the killer to about 10% of the male
population. That was still a rather large net, even in a relatively small village in England.
The killer remained at large. The parents waited and waited. Nothing.
July 31. 1986. At 4.30 pm, a girl named Dawn Ashworth left her friend’s house in Enderby,
Leicestershire, a village close to Narborough.
She set off down a footpath known as Ten Pound Lane and was never seen alive again.
Two days later, a person out for a walk saw what looked like a body covered in branches.
She’d been strangled, just like Mann, although it was obvious she’d put up quite a fight.
The cops now knew they were looking for a serial killer. The two crimes were almost
identical and had happened within a matter of a few hundred yards from each other. This was
shocking to the residents of the area, who’d never experienced anything like it. A local
newspaper ran the headline, “Killer in our midst,” with the subheading, “If we don’t
catch him, it could be your daughter next.” Police talked with a 17-year-old kid named
Richard Buckland. He knew Mann, and he lived in Narborough. Maybe the police should have gone
easy on him since he had learning difficulties. They didn’t, and after a few interrogations,
Buckland admitted that he had murdered Ashworth but not Mann. The cops thought he was lying,
they thought that the two murders were almost certantly connected.
Even so, it looked like young Buckland was going to spend a long time in prison.
As all this was happening, a geneticist named Alec Jeffreys was working at the
nearby Leicester University. He’d been researching how illnesses are inherited
through families. He was taking DNA from human cells and putting them on photographic film,
after which he put them in a photographic developing tank.
When they came out, on the film were a sequence of bars, the type of image you’ve likely seen before.
Jeffreys had a eureka moment, and his discovery changed the world. It would lead to millions of
arrests. He was able to identify people by looking at their DNA sequence. He soon gave
a talk on this, and people in the crowd laughed. To most folks, it sounded ridiculous. As if, they
thought, DNA sequencing couldn’t be that easy. He published a paper and was quickly called up,
but not to look at unsolved murders. He was asked to check if certain children were actually born
to British citizens. The parents were trying to get them citizenship, and the government
had been giving them a hard time about it. If what Jeffreys said was true, he’d know if the
kids were the parents' biological offspring. Then he got a call from the police. They said,
“Hi. We have a man in our cells who we believe killed two girls. He’s admitted to one murder,
but we want to see if he killed another person. Surely you can look at our swabs and determine if
the biological evidence comes from the same guy.” Jeffreys said, no problem, I’m on my way. He took
samples from Buckland and did his thing. The police waited in anticipation for the results,
only to find that Jeffreys said this kid is not your killer,
but one man certainly killed those two girls. The cops, still thinking it had to be Buckland,
started questioning if Jeffrey's technique really worked. Many people doubted him,
so why not? Still, they sent out letters to men born between 1953 and 1970 in the nearby areas.
They told the men that they had to be tested at either a local school or a council office. 5,511
men did the tests in all. None were a match. This was big news all over the world. The Los
Angeles Times wrote, “Police investigating the murders of two teenage girls near this
small Midlands village are applying a new scientific technique. Some predict it could
be the most significant breakthrough in resolving serious crime since fingerprinting was invented.”
The Times was right. Now we must introduce a man named Colin Pitchfork.
He was 23 years old at the time of the first murder. He wasn’t a loner or anything. He had
a job. He had friends. He was apparently very good at decorating cakes. But his
employers said he loved to flirt a bit too much, and women were often bothered by him.
His name was on the sheet of the people that had been tested, but the police didn’t know
that when it came to his turn, he’d gotten a buddy to test in his name. He’d gone as far as
to put the other guy’s photo in his passport. The guy that did the test for him told a bunch
of friends when they were drinking in a pub, and as things tend to happen, the story got out. It
got as far as a local cop, who then told his senior officers, and soon the two men were in
police custody. That’s when Pitchfork was tested. Not too long later, a detective asked Pitchfork
why he’d killed one of the girls. He replied, “Opportunity. She was there, and I was there.”
Months later, he was handed a life sentence. Court-appointed psychiatrists said Pitchfork
had a “personality disorder of psychopathic type accompanied by serious psychosexual
pathology.” They added that he “will obviously continue to be an extremely dangerous individual
while the psychopathology continues.” As we said, this pretty much changed the
world. Soon DNA dragnets were implemented where men in the countries of the UK, US,
Canada, Australia, France, Germany, and the Netherlands were asked to give DNA samples.
These countries now have millions of DNA samples in their databases. Experts also
occasionally dig up bones to test, just as they did with the Nazi doctor of death, Josef Mengele.
In the US, men are freed from death row with new DNA evidence. Such evidence has saved
many people from being executed, and many more are being released from prison today
because their DNA has proven their innocence. Still, many innocent people remain behind bars.
As Jeffreys said about Buckland, “I have no doubt whatsoever that he would have been found
guilty had it not been for DNA evidence.” And now and again, cops get their man with
the help of coffee cups. This brings us back to the start and the murder of Lindy Sue Biechler.
The cold case was reopened in 1997, and the DNA evidence was analyzed. It
wasn’t until the year 2000 that it went into the US national database of DNA.
It still took many years for anything to happen, but at one point, experts could
say that the man who killed her was likely from a small town in Italy called Gasperina.
They only discovered this in 2018 when new DNA genealogy analysis techniques became available.
They knew that about 2,300 people with Italian genetic ties lived in the Lancaster County
area around the time of the murder. As one investigator said, “These restrictions further
narrowed the scope of the subsequent research because there were very few individuals living
in Lancaster at that time of the crime that were the right age, gender and had
the family tree consistent with these origins.” One of the names on this list was David Sinopoli.
They knew this man had once lived in the same apartment complex as Biechler,
but that was hardly enough to put handcuffs on him. Still, he was the right age,
and all of his grandparents came from Gasperina. They knew that he’d worked for a long time at a
commercial printing company. Through his social media profile, they also knew he was into hunting.
He sometimes went to Italy to do that. Some very compelling evidence was the fact that in 2004,
he was sentenced to a year of probation for invasion of privacy and disorderly conduct.
He’d admitted to police that he’d spied on a woman who was at a tanning salon.
46 years after the murder, he lived in the same area. He was 68-years-old,
seemingly happily married to his second wife with whom he had one child. He’d had another
two kids with his first wife. His profile didn’t scream out murderous psychopath.
Investigators wanted his DNA and decided a stealth mission was the best way to go
about it. Police generally don’t jump in with potential suspects
when there’s little to no evidence. Anyway, it’s not hard to get someone’s DNA profile,
although, as you’ll soon see, this is a controversial subject.
They followed Sinopoli around for a while. One day, he was about to board a flight with
his wife and another couple from Terminal A at Philadelphia International Airport,
and the police was waiting nearby. Just before he joined the line for boarding,
he threw away a coffee cup he’d been drinking from. Police rushed in, taking the cup out of
the trash. God knows what other folks in the airport who saw this thought about that.
The last news reports we can find say that he later was picked up
charged with criminal homicide. There have been scores of people
who were arrested after long periods of time once DNA genealogy analysis was used,
but perhaps the most well-known case was that of the Golden State Killer, Joseph James DeAngelo.
Between 1974 and 1986, he killed at least 13 people and committed over 50 ghastly crimes
against women, as well as tons of burglaries. In 2016, investigators used DNA genealogy technology
to build around 25 family trees for the person they believed was the killer. Soon, the police
noticed DeAngelo’s name was in those family trees. In 2018, investigators took swabs from his car’s
door handle, and later they went through his trash and got a sample from some used
tissues. Not long after, he was in the interrogation room telling detectives,
“I did all those things. I destroyed all their lives. So now I've got to pay the price.”
As for the law about collecting DNA, that would depend on which country you live in. You’d think
the police would need a warrant, but they would have to have compelling evidence to
get one. That’s not always easy, especially in the cold cases we’ve discussed today.
There was an interesting case in the US related to a crime committed against a woman in 2006
in Maryland. Police interviewed around 20 suspects, and all of the men volunteered
to give a DNA sample. None were a match for the DNA found at the crime scene.
One man refused to give a sample, although he volunteered to do an interview. His name
was Glenn Raynor, and he was the victim's former classmate. He might have thought he
got out of giving the DNA sample, but when he left the interview room, the police took
swabs from the chair where his arm had rested. He was a match! This became a big case. Raynor’s
lawyers argued that the police had breached his genetic privacy, violating the Fourth Amendment.
They lost. It was ruled that the cops had the right to take that sample, even without a warrant.
Rights activists said this was a matter of concern, stating that people shed hundreds
of thousands of skin and hair cells daily, and police should have some strong evidence before
collecting them. If not, they believe we are ushering in a state of pervasive surveillance.
The ACLU commenting on such behavior, said in 2020, “Warrantless access to unavoidably shed DNA
is a troubling trend in police investigations.” In Gaynor’s case, he might have gotten away with
the crime had he done the interview dressed in a hazmat suit. Of course,
he would also have to refused any cups of coffee the interviewers offered.
Realistically, it doesn’t really matter what you do. The cops will get the DNA sample in the end.
They will have their family trees and will have whittled down the suspects. That’s when
they’ll start their surveillance, following someone around everywhere they go, knowing
they’ll leave something behind. An invasion of privacy, perhaps, but it’s also effective.
In 2019, a man was arrested for serious crimes against women two decades after
he committed them. The California resident had turned up in one of those family trees,
and the cops proceeded to surveil him. One day he left a spoon behind after eating at Baskins
Robbins. Soon after, he was in handcuffs. In 2019, a man from Minnesota named Jerry
Westrom was eating a hot dog at a hockey game while being watched by detectives.
He threw away the napkin he’d used to wipe his mouth, and the detectives surreptitiously pulled
it out of the trash. He was later charged with stabbing a woman to death in 1997. In court,
his lawyer said, “Somebody sick, pathological, murdered her. Westrom isn’t the guy.”
That’s not how the jury saw it. He was convicted of first-degree premeditated
murder and second-degree intentional murder. Another case we found involved a murder that
took place in Florida in 1981. The woman had been strangled with a wire hanger. In 2018,
some of the DNA evidence taken at the crime scene underwent genetic analysis. In one
of those family trees, a name popped up. That was 58-year-old Joseph Mills.
At the time of the murder, Mills worked at the Publix Dairy Warehouse.
He also coached at the Lakeland Volunteers football program. The night of the murder,
he’d given a ride home to one of the young players, who happened to be the victim's son.
One day in 2019, they went through his garbage. They pulled out two cotton swabs and a plastic
spoon, but the thing with the best sample was two adhesive patches for his colostomy bags. If you
didn’t already know, these bags collect poop when people have various medical conditions.
In 2022, the son and kid who Mills had coached said in court, “I saw the crime scene,
I saw what you did, and then you act like my friend. I rode in the car with you.” His
older brother said, “I hate you; you can’t die and burn in hell fast enough for me.”
It should be pretty obvious to you by now that if the police want your DNA,
they will get it with or without your permission. You are literally all over
the place. You leave behind more waste than you could ever imagine. You’re like a walking ball of
fluff in a world made out of sticky tape. Does that mean the cops have the right to
take a part of you whenever they want it? This is the argument since we all know that
the police can sometimes be blamed for overreach. Is nothing private anymore?
Should the cops need a warrant to search your trash just as they would to search your house?
As you know, here at the Infographics Show, we don’t tell you what is right or wrong.
We just tell you the stories. So, let’s see what you have to say in the comments.
Now you need to watch this very educational show, “Degrees of Murder - What Do They Mean?” Or,
see the terrifying future in “The End of Civilization (Century by Century).”