DNA ‘matches roofer
A TRACE of DNA found on the arm of a dead nine-year-old girl is a “billion times more likely” to belong to roofer Russell Bishop than anyone else, a murder trial heard yesterday.
The sample was recovered from sticky tape used to detect scientific clues on Karen Hadaway’s body after she was strangled in a woodland glen with her friend Nicola Fellows.
A scientist concluded the DNA trace was “one billion times more likely” to be Bishop’s genetic fingerprint than an unknown man’s, the jury heard.
Bishop, then 20, is accused of sexually assaulting and strangling Karen and Nicola, also nine, in Moulsecoomb, near Brighton, in October 1986.
Karen had been wearing a long-sleeved green top that day but was clad only in a T-shirt when the bodies were found, the Old Bailey heard.
“There was no other opportunity for his DNA to get on Karen’s left forearm,” said Brian Altman QC, prosecuting.
“We suggest it can only have got there if the defendant stripped and killed her.”
Sticky tape applied to the girls’ bodies and clothes was re-examined in 2014, nearly three decades after the murders, after a cold case review.
Strips of tape used to obtain fibres, hair and specks of paint on Bishop’s clothes were also analysed. They, too, implicated him, the jury heard.
Mr Altman said there is a “wealth of evidence to show that this man, to the exclusion of anyone else in the world, is guilty of the murders of those two little girls 32 years ago”.
Forensic scientist Roy Green tested the strip taken from Karen’s arm at her autopsy in 1986, the court heard. Mr Green discovered the trace of Bishop’s DNA using the latest scientific tests, said Mr Altman.
Bishop, 52, of Hollingdean, Brighton, denies two counts of murder. He was cleared of killing the girls at Lewes Crown Court in 1987, but the acquittal was quashed by the Court of Appeal, the jury was told.
Three years after he was cleared, Bishop abducted, sexually assaulted and strangled a seven-year-old girl at Devil’s Dyke on the South Downs, about 14 miles from Brighton.
Bishop was convicted of attempted murder, kidnap and indecent assault, the jury was told. The trial continues.