The Blooding: A True Story of the Narborough Village Murders

joseph wambaugh

When a child's killer eludes the police, fear grips an English village.

In the early 1980s, Narborough was a quintessential English village with two pubs, two churches, and one terrible secret. Lynda Mann, a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, had walked along the footpath called the Black Pad dozens of times before the night she disappeared. She was returning home from a friend's house on November twenty-first, 1983, when her killer attacked, stripped, and strangled her.

This is a meticulous account of one of the most exhaustive manhunts in English history. Even after a second girl's similar murder, Scotland Yard had no answers. As the Midlands seethed with fear that the killer would strike again, the police experimented with a new technology: DNA identification. Their attempt to avenge Lynda would change the course of police work forever.