Barbara Davies at the British
newspaper the Daily Mail offers a piece on the release of murderer and rapist Colin
Pitchfork, the subject of Joseph Wambaugh’s outstanding true crime book The Blooding.
Those who walked past Colin
Pitchfork in Bristol city centre recently are unlikely to have suspected that
there was a notorious double child killer in their midst.
During three decades spent in
jail for the rape and murder of two 15-year-old girls, the 56-year-old has lost
much of his hair. His sullen features are partially masked by a thick white
beard.
Casually dressed in a pale
Adidas jacket, jeans and trainers as he browsed cookery books and visited a
Jobcentre and three banks, the former baker certainly bears little resemblance
to the grim black-and-white police mugshot taken of him when he was snared by
Leicestershire police back in 1987.
But for the families of
Pitchfork’s teenage victims, Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth, these images of the
unaccompanied killer out on day release recently from an open prison are
devastating indeed.
Aside from stirring up
agonising memories of how the father-of-two from Leicestershire brutally
snuffed out the lives of both girls, three years apart, they provide the
clearest evidence yet that Pitchfork — the first murderer in the world to be
convicted thanks to DNA evidence — is being prepared for a life of freedom.
… Author and ex-police
detective Joseph Wambaugh (seen in the below photo), whose book, The Blooding, is widely regarded as the
definitive work on the case, told me that former baker Pitchfork is a
‘psychopath’ and ‘he will be a danger until he’s too old to be and he’s far
from that’.
You can read the rest of the
piece via the below link:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5094839/Double-child-killer-Colin-Pitchfork-day-release.html
Note: You can read my Q&A
with Joseph Wambaugh via the below link:
