Cold Case Investigators is sensitive and unsensational – but has one fatal flaw

Recent data from the Office for National Statistics shows that the number of sexual offences reported in England and Wales is at a record high. But the number of survivors dropping out of the justice system has also grown year-on-year due to court delays and fear of reliving trauma in court.

“Every contact leaves a trace,” said Clare Seal, detective constable on Operation Karabiner, one of the cases here. While not every suspect would be on the database set up in 1995, explained forensic scientist Stephen Paddock, developments in technology now meant that the tiniest of DNA specimens could be used to search the database for relatives of potential perpetrators, too.

Then there was Andy, a 57-year-old man raped in broad daylight aged 16 in 1983. It was extremely tough to watch this sweet man revisit something he’d clearly tried hard to forget in the intervening decades. He had been returning from his girlfriend’s house when “the event” – which also marked the end of that relationship – happened.

Back to the present and officers found a DNA profile matching a man in Brighton who had been previously arrested for similar offences. The semen sample now crucial to this case had been taken in 1983 before the establishment of a DNA database. Four decades after the crime, Paul Arthur King was convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison for the offence.

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