In November 1966, in a small village in Berkshire, every man between the ages of sixteen and fifty was asked to roll up his sleeve and give a blood sample so police could find a killer. Nothing like it had ever been tried in the country before. More than two hundred men came forward, and one of them was the man they were looking for. He gave his blood like the rest and walked out without a suspicion falling on him.

The case comes from the village of Binfield, in Berkshire, in the mid-1960s. Yolande Waddington was seventeen years old, and just five days into a new job when she was killed on a dark road on her way home. Janet Wigmore and Jacqueline Williams were both nine. They were close friends in the same class at the village school, and they died six months later, half a mile apart.

The man who killed all three was David Burgess. He was nineteen. He had been born in that village, drank in its pub, and worked in its gravel pit. When the village was asked to prove its innocence, he queued with his neighbors and held out his arm.

Binfield sits on high ground between Reading and Newbury, off the main road and easy to miss. In the 1960s it was farmland, lanes, and little else. There was one pub, the Six Bells, which closed at eleven. There was a primary school, a scattering of farms, and the gravel pits where much of the local young workforce was employed.

Fishers Pit was still being worked. Blakes Pit, across the road, had been exhausted and abandoned, which meant it belonged to the children now. At Stonefields, a small council estate built in the 1940s, lived the families who worked the land and the pits rather than owned them. There were no roadside cameras, no national databases for anything.

Forensic science in 1966 meant fibers, footwear marks, and blood typing, which could tell you a stain did not come from someone but could never confirm that it did. The best science could do was place people in categories and narrow the search. Yolande Waddington was born in Maidstone, Kent. By the mid-1960s her family lived in Newbury, about nine miles from Binfield, and she was a seventeen-year-old wanting a more independent life than she had at home.

The job at Oakwood Farm must have seemed exactly that. Peter and Rosemary Jagger farmed at Clay Lane and needed someone to live in and look after their small daughter. Yolande started work on Sunday, 23 October 1966. She liked the child, liked the freedom, liked her evening walks, which in that part of Berkshire in late October meant walking in darkness along unlit roads with deep hedges and muddy tracks.

She had a boyfriend she wrote letters to. Everyone in Binfield knew there was a new girl at the Jagger house. In a village that size, you do not need an introduction to know who someone is, where they live, and what time they tend to come home. At a quarter past ten on the night of Friday, 28 October, Yolande left Oakwood Farm to post a letter to her boyfriend.

The walk to the village postbox took about fifteen minutes. At ten-thirty-five she went into the Six Bells. She did not sit down or ask for a drink. She bought a packet of Players Number 6 cigarettes at the bar and went back out into the dark.

That was the last confirmed sighting of Yolande Waddington alive. Somewhere between the pub door and the farm gate, within roughly ninety minutes, she was taken from the road, her wrists bound with baler twine, stabbed twice, and strangled. No one in the pub that night reported hearing anything. On Sunday, 30 October, farmworkers found bloodstained clothes under bales of straw in a cowshed at Clay Lane, on land belonging to Peter Jagger’s father.

With the clothes were a comb and a white headband. Yolande’s body lay in a waterlogged ditch a short distance away. She was naked. The forensic examination was carried out by Keith Simpson, the Home Office pathologist whose name appears in the worst cases of that whole era.

Her hands had been tied with baler twine. She had been stabbed twice in the trunk, the wounds around two inches deep, neither fatal. What killed her was a length of the same twine pulled tight around her neck. Death was timed between half past ten that Friday night and midnight.

Whoever did it was already on the road when she left the pub. He had not come from far away, because there had not been time to come from far away. Officers from the Regional Crime Squad arrived, then men from Scotland Yard, which is what rural police forces did in 1966 when faced with a case they could not solve alone. More than four thousand statements were taken.

In a parish of a few hundred people, that number shows how wide the search reached. Blood analysis of the stains on Yolande’s clothes found a blood type that was not hers. Someone else had bled in that shed. By the science of the day, that was the most valuable thing they had, because it meant every man in England could be excluded except one.

The shed where her clothes were found was known locally. It was one of those places every village has, where young couples go when they have nowhere else, which meant whoever took her there knew the place existed and knew what it was for. That thought belonged to Detective Chief Inspector George Brown of Berkshire Police. He had a blood type that did not belong to the victim, and a village with a finite number of men.

He decided that if he could not identify the culprit directly, he would identify him by elimination. Working alongside him was a young Scotland Yard inspector named Jack Slipper, a name that would become famous later that decade for entirely different reasons. On 13 November 1966, Binfield church hall opened its doors, and ninety-six men came forward voluntarily to give blood. By the end of that first campaign the figure stood at around 130.

As the search widened to neighboring villages, it passed two hundred. Think about what was actually being asked. Not in a city where you are anonymous, but in a village where the man behind you in the queue is your brother-in-law and the man in front is your boss. Refusal was not a crime.

It was a social crime. Everyone would know who had refused. Nobody refused. The samples went to the Metropolitan Police Laboratory, where they were examined by Margaret Pereira, one of the pioneers of forensic blood grouping in the country, later head of its biology division.

No sample matched. Blood typing is a tool of exclusion. It cannot tell you a stain came from a particular man. It can only tell you whether that is possible or impossible.

It is a sound way to narrow a list of suspects, but it carries a catastrophic feature. If a man is wrongly excluded, he is not merely unproven. He is struck off entirely. By April 1967 the investigation had ended without a name.

The village moved on and cautiously began to become normal again. The screening had been wrong. On Monday, 17 April 1967, at four in the afternoon, Janet Wigmore and Jacqueline Williams rode off on their bikes after school. Both were nine, in the same class, and they did this most days.

About twenty minutes later, Janet’s father, Tony Wigmore, saw the two girls playing in the lane behind his house. That was the last time anyone saw either of them alive. When Janet had not returned by quarter to seven, her father took the car to look for her. Terry Williams, Jacqueline’s father, came out too, and other villagers joined as the light faded.

Blakes Pit sits at the junction of Webb’s Lane, Admore Lane, and Lambdens Hill. It had been worked out and abandoned, and the children of Binfield, as children do, had taken it over with dens, earth mounds, and shallow ponds full of frogspawn. Tony Wigmore drove there in the gathering dusk. He found the two bikes first, lying in the pit.

At about half past eight he found his daughter lying face down in the water below one of the banks. It took police until quarter to eleven that night, working under lights, to find Jacqueline. She was about a hundred yards from her friend, face down in a pond covered with leaves and branches. Keith Simpson carried out these post-mortems as well.

Janet had been stabbed five times, three wounds to her neck proving fatal. Jacqueline had been manually strangled and then drowned. The two girls died between half past five and quarter to seven that evening. Eighty officers were brought in, with Scotland Yard again joining.

The gravel pit was drained, the ground examined with metal detectors. Villagers gave 1,350 statements, and every household was asked to account for the whereabouts of its members between 5:30 and 6:30 that Monday evening. That questionnaire is the detail that stays with you. A printed form distributed door to door in a place where everyone knows everyone, asking each family to specify exactly where they were during one hour of one Monday.

In a village this size, such a form does not just collect information. It divides the community into those with a ready answer and those who have to think about it, and everyone learns which neighbor is in which group. Something had changed in Binfield that had not changed in October. When Yolande Waddington died, the village could keep a certain distance.

She had been there five days. She was someone else’s daughter from another town, and the grief was genuine, but it left room for the comforting idea of a stranger on the road. Janet Wigmore and Jacqueline Williams belonged to them. Everyone in that parish knew both children by face and name, and knew the house each belonged to.

There was no way of exporting this to the main road out of sight. Parents stopped letting children out of their sight, and the belief everyone in Binfield held and exchanged was that the hand that did this in April was the same hand that did it in October, which meant it had been among them all along. David Burgess was born in Binfield, the second of five brothers. His mother had come from Yorkshire to work in domestic service.

His father’s family had been in the village for generations. The family lived at Stonefields. At the age of eight he lost his left eye in an accident, and wore a glass eye afterward, which those who knew him said gave him a fixed, staring look. He went to the village primary school, then to Welling school in Burghfield Common, where he was described as normal and ordinary.

One girl who knew him said he was hard to befriend. He left school at fifteen and worked on the land. He was a skilled poacher, very good at taking rabbits. By 1967 he drove a tipper truck at Fishers Pit, working alongside his older brother John.

Fishers Pit sits directly opposite Blakes Pit. John Burgess told police that on the evening of 17 April, after the last of their colleagues had left at six, his brother crossed the road to check some rabbit traps and returned to the office after ten to twenty minutes. The brothers finished at quarter to seven and went home. What is striking about David Burgess in the weeks that followed is how much he talked.

He spoke to the investigators and told them he knew he was in a suspicious position, given he was near where the girls were found. On 20 April he gave an interview to the Reading Evening Post and volunteered, unprompted, that police had already interviewed him after the Waddington killing because he had reported losing a knife similar to the one used in that crime. A few days before his arrest, in the Six Bells, David Burgess bought a drink for Terry Williams, whose nine-year-old daughter he had killed. Then the clothing test results came back from the laboratory.

Janet Wigmore’s blood type was AB with the M-N factor, a combination shared by about one and a half people in every hundred. Stains of that blood type were found on the right shoe Burgess had been wearing on the day the girls died. He was charged with killing Janet Wigmore on 7 May 1967, and with killing Jacqueline Williams on the 25th of the same month. The trial began at Gloucester Assizes in July 1967.

Burgess’s account was that he had gone to check his traps and come across a man standing over the body of one of the girls in Blakes Pit. He gave the man a name. He said the man was called McNab, from Reading, and that he had chased him off, and that McNab had returned a few days later and threatened him. The court established that McNab did not exist.

There was no such man. He had been invented, given a name, a town, and threatening behavior, and presented to the jury as an alternative to the truth. They were not fooled. On 21 July 1967, David Burgess was convicted of both murders and sentenced to two life terms.

He was twenty. Fishers Pit and Blakes Pit face each other across a single lane. You can walk from one to the other in under a minute. His brother placed him on the wrong side of that lane, alone, for a period of ten to twenty minutes.

Within an hour, both girls were dead. That was the basis of the case. The blood on the shoe told the jury what he had done in those minutes. The case of Yolande Waddington, by that same measure, was no case at all.

There was no brother, no time frame, no shoe. The only test capable of proving it had already been carried out in a church hall, and its result had been wrong. Shortly afterward his family left Binfield. They had lived there for generations, then they were gone.

And that should have been the end of the matter, but it was not. Yolande Waddington’s file remained open. Everyone in Binfield knew exactly who they believed had killed her, and the police thought so too. What no one could do was prove it, because the only physical evidence that could have done so, the blood of a second person on her clothes, had been tested against David Burgess’s blood in November 1966 and cleared him.

In prison, David Burgess talked again. In Durham, he confessed to two prison officers that he had killed Yolande Waddington, and over the years he said the same to fellow inmates. These statements reached investigators, who went to see him and confronted him. He denied it, and told them something that proved an accurate reading of his position over the next four decades: “You will have to prove it.

” They could not, and time did what time always does. In May 1996 he was released on license. He failed to report to Leyhill prison when required. He was involved in drunkenness and violence.

Then he disappeared entirely and remained at large for seventeen months until February 1998, when he was arrested in a car park in Portsmouth after an armed robbery on a branch of Lloyd’s Bank in Havant. That June he was jailed for ten years. In January of that same year, it was quietly announced that the exhibits from the Waddington case were to be re-examined for DNA. Nothing came of it.

The technology of 1998 still needed a visible stain, and what remained in those boxes after thirty years was not a stain. What had changed by 2010 was the level of sensitivity. A technique known as low-copy-number analysis had come into use, capable of building a profile from a few dozen cells rather than a stain you could see. It is a controversial science, debated in British courtrooms, but what it could do was reach material that all previous methods had been forced to leave alone.

When the major crime review team of Thames Valley Police reopened the case in September and took the exhibits to the LGC forensics laboratories, this was what they were looking for. Skin cells, touch traces, the remains of a man who had touched a girl’s belongings forty-four years earlier. They found his profile on three items. On a polythene fertilizer bag from the shed, on the comb, and on the white headband belonging to Yolande Waddington.

He was arrested and charged on 15 November 2011. The trial began at Reading Crown Court on 18 June the following year, before judge Andrew Nicol, and lasted five weeks. His defense was that he had been in the Six Bells that night drinking Guinness, had seen the girl come in, that she left around half past ten, and that he went home about a quarter of an hour later. The jury also heard from a woman named Eileen Truckle.

She had grown up in Binfield. In January 1963, when she was seventeen, she was walking home from a phone box on Admore Lane when David Burgess, her neighbor, followed and attacked her. It happened three years and nine months before Yolande Waddington posted her letter, on a lane minutes from where the two girls would later leave their bikes. The defense did not give in easily.

The jury was urged not to be fooled by the science, and it was argued that other men might have entered the shed with her, including a striking suggestion that the original 1966 investigators had been corrupt. The jury listened to all of it. On 20 July 2012, David Burgess was convicted of her murder. Three days later he was sentenced to life with a minimum of twenty-seven years.

He was sixty-five. Nine of the jurors returned to court to watch the sentencing. The judge spoke of the cost of the crime and its effect on the place where it occurred: it had spread fear and suspicion. Outside court, Yolande’s brother Giles read a family statement and broke down while doing so.

He had been waiting since he was a boy. The gap of forty-six years between crime and conviction was the longest in British legal history at that time. The evidence that settled the case had been sitting in storage all along, waiting for a science that would not exist for another thirty years. Someone in 1966 had the presence of mind to keep a comb and a headband.

That is the only reason there was a trial at all. One question still hangs over the case. In November 1966, David Burgess gave his blood sample along with every other man in that village, and the sample did not convict him. When police were later asked how that had happened, they gave two answers.

Perhaps the sample had been mislabeled. Or perhaps he persuaded someone else to go to the church hall and give a sample in his name. There is a third answer that emerged during the trial, and it is the hardest to accept. The blood taken from that shed in 1966 was degraded and mixed.

The examiners were reading it for blood groups and the M-N factor, and what they got was incomplete. David Burgess was type A with the M-N factor. The crime scene sample, read through that haze, was classified as belonging to someone else. It was not a match that had been missed.

It was a non-match recorded on the basis of a profile not good enough to record anything. No one can now say which of those three it was. What is known is that Binfield did what no community had truly done before, that it did so voluntarily, and that the technique that would one day become mass DNA screening, and would help catch any number of killers, failed the first time it was tried, in a village hall in Berkshire.

And six months later, two nine-year-old girls rode out on their bikes after school.