and since, the fragile young man had been unable to deal with the pressure of being under suspicion and had made a false confession. Much to the relief of his parents, he was released.

The police then sought Jeffreys’s assistance in organizing the world’s first DNA manhunt – an undertaking immortalized in novelist Joseph Wambaugh’s true-crime epic The Blooding. The mass test, involving almost 5,000 men from the neighboring villages where the killings had occurred, finally unearthed the culprit – but only by chance, when a man was overheard boasting in a pub that he had taken the test for someone else. The man who had missed the “blooding” confessed, and gave a blood sample that matched the crime scene samples.

Back in Melbourne, at the State Forensic Science Laboratory,Victoria Police forensic scientist Dr. Stephen Gutowski had been following the Narborough case and the work of Professor Jeffreys with increasing excitement. At a Copenhagen conference in August 1985, Gutowski had seen Dr. Ivan Balazs of Lifecodes Corporation, New York, present his work using DNA profiling for paternity testing. He could see that this work, in concert with Professor Jeffreys’s research, was about to propel forensic biology in a dramatic new direction.

DNA Profiling as the Future of Crime Investigation

By September 1986, with the enthusiastic support of his immediate superiors at the lab, Gutowski began assembling the scientific equipment necessary for DNA profiling. Over the next 18 months, he and his colleagues assessed the different techniques available in the U.S. and the UK. Victoria Police finally chose the U.S.