The first DNA crime test didn’t catch the killer. It freed an innocent man.

The first DNA crime test didn’t catch the killer. It freed an innocent man.

The events leading to the first forensic DNA case began in 1983. Lynda Mann was only 15 years old when, returning home from babysitting one evening in the Leicestershire village of Narborough, she was raped and murdered as she took a shortcut along a footpath known by villagers as the Black Pad. It was a path that would be unlikely to be known by anyone who wasn’t local, suggesting the killer was someone from the area. At the time, the biologica…