Leicestershire Police used DNA profiling developed by Alec Jeffreys to investigate the murders of Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth in Narborough, Leicestershire, England. DNA testing first exonerated Richard Buckland, who had confessed, making him the first person cleared by DNA evidence. A subsequent mass screening of over 4,000 local men led to the identification and conviction of Colin Pitchfork in 1986 — the first criminal conviction worldwide obtained through DNA evidence, a watershed moment in forensic criminal investigation.

The Narborough murders and the first DNA conviction generated Joseph Wambaugh's The Blooding (1989), one of the first non-fiction crime books centred on DNA evidence. The case established the narrative pattern of DNA as the infallible witness — a motif that transformed crime fiction and also raised literary and philosophical questions about determinism, bodily identity, and the ethics of mass biological surveillance that remain central to contemporary poetry and fiction.