Customer Reviews

The Blooding

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4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

I read some of the other reviews of this book and found the last 2 to be completely incorrect. This is in fact, not a book for the weak at heart, but it never promises to be. This is very graphic and detailed. So, if you don't like this, don't read this book, but for other true crime fanatics like myself, you will most assuredly love this read. It starts in high gear and stays there throughout. There are no long intros or set-ups, this book hits the ground running and will never leave you thinking that your time could be better spent as some of the other reviews suggest. Sure, if you can't handle the bloodiness and truth of true crime, then go curl up in a corner and read a Harry Potter book!

This story is set in three neighbouring villages with which I am familiar. The crimes were committed in the eighties, but I only came to know the villages many years later, when I worked in Narborough (the middle of the three villages) from 1998 to 2002. I heard occasional references to these crimes, although never any in-depth conversations. Even now, the topic is too sensitive, so the only way I could find out what really happened was via this book.

Wambaugh gives an excellent account of the crimes and the often futile attempts to solve them. Perhaps occasionally it is more graphic than it needs to be, describing the state of the bodies in intimate detail, but its easy to gloss over that (it is in print, not on film) and there's not too much of that. Some of the main characters, including the policemen and their suspects, are described in great detail. While some may feel that this is just padding, I feel it all helps to make it a good story.

Again, plenty of pages are devoted to false leads, but this may help us to understand why detective work is never as simple as we would like it to be. At one point, after the second murder, the police think they've got their man. The parents can't believe that he would do such a thing and it is at that point that the new science of DNA testing is brought in. The parents are convinced their son in innocent. The police are convinced that he is not only guilty of that murder, but also the earlier one. Did the same man commit both murders and was this particular man guilty? The DNA test results eventually provide answers, but to find out what those answers were, you must read the book.

I'm a big fan of the forensic programs on Court TV, and I always check the date of the featured crime (almost always murder and/or rape) to see if it occurred before or after DNA testing became common in the United States. If it occurred after 1992, the perp is usually doomed. Even decades-old cases can be solved if blood/semen/saliva samples were properly stored from the crime scene. According to a prophecy in the weekly "New Scientist," there will soon be kits available that will allow police to process DNA samples in less than two hours.

In "The Blooding," former policeman, Joseph Wambaugh writes about the first serial killer who was caught and convicted through the use of DNA testing: two teenage girls in the English village of Narborough were brutally raped and murdered in 1983 and 1986, and it took four years, a scientific breakthrough, and the blood of 5,000 men to capture the killer, Colin Pitchfork. DNA testing also freed the suspect that police had already jailed for the crime.

On September 10, 1984, at nearby Leicester University, Dr. Alec Jeffreys (now Sir Alec) discovered that each human being (except for identical twins) has a unique genetic profile. At first, his DNA profiling technique was used to sort out immigration cases. Then the Leicestershire constabulary became familiar with DNA 'fingerprinting' and collected blood from over 5,000 men in the ultimately successful search for their murderer.

(By 2004, the UK had a national database of 2.5 million genetic profiles from convicted criminals. Statistics show that 38% of all crimes are detected where DNA has been loaded onto the UK national database, compared with a 24% detection rate overall. And 48% of burglaries are detected where DNA has been loaded onto the database, compared with a 14% detection rate for burglaries overall.

Nowadays, even British bus drivers are issued DNA testing kits to help catch passengers who spit at them.)

Wambaugh does not spend much time exploring the scientific aspects of the Narborough Village murders. He tells the interwoven stories of the victims, their families, the murderer, and most especially the policemen who were involved in the hunt.

From the shadowy paths that wound past the grounds of the local psychiatric hospital to the ancient, smoke-filled pubs where the villagers spent their free hours, this author will have you living and breathing the horror of these crimes. There are a few of the patented Wambaugh belly laughs as the Leicestershire police invent their own techniques for 'blooding' the local men. One of my favorite scenes takes place after Colin Pitchfork is apprehended, and he insists on telling his bored interrogators his whole life story before he will confess to his crimes.

Everyone comes to life in a Wambaugh story, but most especially the policemen.

I have never been able to pick up one of this author's books without reading it through to the end, and "The Blooding" is no exception.

A fifteen year old girl is raped and strangled, her body left along a footpath near an English Village called Narborough. Though a massive effort is launch to find the killer, he remains at large for years. Then the Killer strikes three years after the first murder, killing another young girl in the same brutal fashion, and leaving her body only a short distance from the first. The police do not give up, but this man continually evades detection until several years later Scotland Yard comes a calling with a new tool: DNA. The first time its was used to solve a police case, and to actually track a killer not just to reinforce a case. In a very controversial move, nearly 4000 men in and around the town of Narborough are tested, everyone from teen to old man are 'blooded' meaning their DNA of their blood is tested against the samples of the killer. Never has any police force taken such a massive Orwellian move, compelling every male able to commit the crime to come forward for testing. Even so, the killer continually evades being blooded, but it was a matter of time and dogged police work.

Warbaugh's best work since The Onion Field, may be uncomfortable for some people because of the details of the murders etc, others - believers of the right of individual - will be upset with the Orwellian dragnet, but its a fascinating detailed account that often compels as repels in the same breath.

I'm a big fan of the forensic programs on Court TV, and I always check the date of the featured crime (almost always murder and/or rape) to see if it occurred before or after DNA testing became common in the United States. If it occurred after 1992, the perp is usually doomed. Even decades-old cases can be solved if blood/semen/saliva samples were properly stored from the crime scene. According to a prophecy in the weekly "New Scientist," there will soon be kits available that will allow police to process DNA samples in less than two hours.

In "The Blooding," former policeman, Joseph Wambaugh writes about the first serial killer who was caught and convicted through the use of DNA testing: two teenage girls in the English village of Narborough were brutally raped and murdered in 1983 and 1986, and it took four years, a scientific breakthrough, and the blood of 5,000 men to capture the killer, Colin Pitchfork. DNA testing also freed the suspect that police had already jailed for the crime.

On September 10, 1984, at nearby Leicester University, Dr. Alec Jeffreys (now Sir Alec) discovered that each human being (except for identical twins) has a unique genetic profile. At first, his DNA profiling technique was used to sort out immigration cases. Then the Leicestershire constabulary became familiar with DNA 'fingerprinting' and collected blood from over 5,000 men in the ultimately successful search for their murderer.

(By 2004, the UK had a national database of 2.5 million genetic profiles from convicted criminals. Statistics show that 38% of all crimes are detected where DNA has been loaded onto the UK national database, compared with a 24% detection rate overall. And 48% of burglaries are detected where DNA has been loaded onto the database, compared with a 14% detection rate for burglaries overall.

Nowadays, British bus drivers are issued DNA testing kits to help catch passengers who spit at them.)

Wambaugh does not spend much time exploring the scientific aspects of the Narborough Village murders. He tells the interwoven stories of the victims, their families, the murderer, and most especially the policemen who were involved in the hunt.

From the shadowy paths that wound past the grounds of the local psychiatric hospital to the ancient, smoke-filled pubs where the villagers spent their free hours, this author will have you living and breathing the horror of these crimes. There are a few of the patented Wambaugh belly laughs as the Leicestershire police invent their own techniques for 'blooding' the local men. One of my favorite scenes takes place after Colin Pitchfork is apprehended, and he insists on telling his bored interrogators his whole life story before he will confess to his crimes.

Everyone comes to life in a Wambaugh story, but most especially the policemen.

I have never been able to pick up one of this author's books without reading it through to the end, and "The Blooding" is no exception.

This isn't a novel as such, but rather a factual account of the hunt to find the murderer of two teenaged girls in 1983, in the small English village of Narborough, in Leicestershire. It's also the story of the first time that DNA was used in solving a crime. The girls were killed four years apart, both being young and both virgins. The killer raped and sodomised the girls before strangling them, merely pulling their bodies off the beaten village pathway. It's not a pretty story but the true account of the extraordinary effort by the police to find the killer, eventually using the new method of DNA testing from blood and semen samples given by thousands of local men and boys, and called by the police "blooding". The staggering thing is that the killer was, and is, a sociopath who has absolutely no conscience or feeling that what he did was in any way wrong, and that while he wasn't labeled as criminally insane, even with these horrific crimes, he is simply a vile man whose mind is wired in this way. He received a double life sentence but without any specific time put on his detention. I hope that he is still in jail.

In 1983, a rapist and killer struck in Leicestershire, England, leaving a dead girl in a wooded pathway near an insane asylum. A year later, in another part of the same county, Dr. Alec Jeffreys uncovered something called a genetic fingerprint, of which no two are alike unless they belong to identical twins.

With that, the biological leftovers of the killer's attack became evidence that could theoretically put him away, if he can first be persuaded to take a voluntary test.

Joseph Wambaugh's 1989 true-crime story "The Blooding" is perhaps the author's most accomplished book, as he delves headlong into a strange netherworld where science and crime intersect, both in terms of genetic fingerprinting of which this case provided the first working model, and of the psychopathic mind of the killer, whom Wambaugh studies at length in the book's second half.

"The Blooding" captures a small British community in a state of terror, and details a frustrating, often misguided investigation that gets its man only after much confusion. "As with many police investigations the secret ways of people often produced peripheral mysteries as baffling as the one in question," Wambaugh writes, and to his credit he follows at least a couple of them at such length you think you are about to discover the killer at last before hitting a dead end.

Say this for Wambaugh: No one else makes police investigation seem so thrilling and comprehensible, and at the same time so worthy of respect. Here he is working far away from his California home base, but the differences in culture and police technique only seem to serve to sharpen his focus. He even manages to delineate a few of the key investigators, though here, unlike his more famous "The Onion Field", Wambaugh's interest remains firmly on the case at hand, however absorbingly he may portray certain indescribable emotions, like that of a father called upon to identify the body of his daughter, "the cruelest, most ravaging sight this world has to offer," he writes.

As Wambaugh notes at another point, "murder annihilates privacy," and in this case this means not only the agony of a murder victim's parents but the ethical question of mass-collecting DNA samples for possible use against a suspect. For it is clear without this innovation of Dr. Jeffreys' and its employment by the Leicestershire constabulary, a killer would have gone free, perhaps while an innocent man was put away.

Humane, electric, alive both to individual moments large and small as well as to the overall significance of the case, "The Blooding" is so good you may close it as I did feeling guilty you enjoyed a book so given the circumstances that produced it.

This gripping narrative details the first use of DNA fingerprinting in a murder case. In 1984 British authorities found the raped and strangled body of teenager Lynda Mann in the woods near Narborough, England. With a possible suspect in custody, a local scientist named Alec Jeffreys persuaded detectives to let him use the suspect's blood in a new DNA procedure that could certify the young man's guilt. Authorities quickly agreed, but to everybody's surprise the results showed the suspect to be innocent. When young Dawn Ashworth was found similarly brutalized three years later, DNA testing showed that the same fiend had committed both crimes. Scotland Yard then ordered every male in the district to submit a blood sample in a massive (and ultimately successful) search for the killer.

Author Joseph Waumbaugh applies his straightforward, readable style in THE BLOODING. He teaches us about the two crimes, the British legal system, the false leads that are part of detective work, and initial skepticism toward DNA fingerprinting. Wambaugh also shows how this now-common technique helped authorities clear an innocent suspect and eventually catch a brutal killer.

I lived in Narborough between 1960 and 2004 and was one of first set of people to be tested as my home was less than a couple of miles from the murder sites. Despite much local outrage at this book I feel it does reflect the way we all felt. It is a long time ago now but rarely spoken about. Narborough is still considered a village by the locals - not a town - and this book is well worth a look. If you ever visit just don't talk about it!

This starts as an "ordinary murder mystery." It's pace is fast, even though the crime solving process is painstaking. Wambaugh describes the early days of DNA, resistance to it, and skepticism about it, from the public, the police, and even from science. The British police and science use DNA to eliminate suspects, and finally, identify the bloody murderer. Told in chilling Wambaugh fashion. A terrific read, one of his best.