How billion-to-one DNA match led to Russell Bishop's murder conviction
In 1986 and on his rearrest in 2016, Bishop changed his story several times before DNA linked him to a sweatshirt near the scene.
Monday 10 December 2018 17:22, UK
After 32 years, paedophile Russell Bishop has finally been convicted of the "babes in the wood" murders after advanced forensic techniques revealed his DNA linked him to his young victims through a discarded sweatshirt.
The jury heard new evidence showed he had left skin flakes containing his DNA - a billion-to-one match - on the arm of the girls he sexually assaulted, strangled and dumped in a woodland den.
Nigel Pilkington, senior lawyer for the Crown Prosecution Service, said: "The pathologist took a taping from Karen's left forearm that has been kept in the archive as a matter of historical fact.
"It's just been there. It's like a piece of Sellotape, you can't see anything.
"There is no blood there, but after 32 years it revealed its secret which is that it contained Bishop's DNA."
In police interviews in 1986 and on his rearrest in 2016, Bishop changed his story several times about whether he touched the girls' bodies after joining the two young men who found them.
Confronted with the new evidence of his DNA on Karen's arm, he eventually claimed he had taken her pulse to see if she was still alive.
In a bid to ensure Bishop did not get away with the girls' murder again, Sussex Police brought in the same cold case forensics team which had helped convict the racist killers of black teenager Stephen Lawrence.
In retesting the sweatshirt, investigators found another billion-to-one match to Bishop's DNA.
They also found its fibres on the clothes of victims Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway and fibres from their clothes on the sweatshirt. The sweatshirt had on it Bishop's hairs and fibres from clothes taken from his home.
It also contained fragments of maroon paint from a car he had resprayed.
Similar paint fragments were also found on the girls' clothes.
The sweatshirt was spotted by searchers on grass not far from the murder scene in Wild Park and on Bishop's route home from there.
He claimed the sweatshirt was not his.
There was other forensic evidence from an expert from the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, who examined ivy hairs found on the sweatshirt and the girls' clothes.
She concluded they matched ivy that grew prolifically in the den where the bodies were found.
Prosecutor Brian Altman said: "The science alone is quite simply so overwhelming as to prove not only that this defendant wore the sweatshirt, but also that it was worn by him when he killed those two girls."
Also crucial in the prosecution case was the evidence that three years after his original acquittal for the murders, Bishop kidnapped, sexually assaulted and tried to kill another young girl.
Unusually, jurors were given details of the conviction, for which Bishop is still in jail.
None of this would have counted for anything until the scrapping of the double jeopardy law in 2005.
The abolition meant that suspects could in future be tried twice for the same offence, so long as there was "new, compelling, reliable and substantial evidence".