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In October 2008, on the 25th anniversary of the murder, Nottinghamshire police announced they had new evidence, derived using the latest forensic DNA analysis techniques. (DNA profiling didn't exist when Aram was murdered, and the national DNA database wouldn't come into existence for another 12 years.) They could now "say with certainty" that Aram had been in the red Fiesta, and that her killer had gone to the Generous Briton. They also had his DNA profile. But it didn't match any of the four million profiles on the database. A new tactic was called for.
The database was searched again, this time for "near misses": profiles similar enough to the killer's that they could belong to a member of his family. The DNA of the 300 closest (male) hits was then re-examined, this time looking at markers on the Y-chromosome: as all the DNA on this is passed from father to son, it's a very good indicator of familial relationships between men (allowing for mutations, my father, uncle, cousin and his son all have the same Y-chromosome as me, inherited from my grandfather). But all 300 near misses came back negative. As more profiles were added to the database, the same checks were carried out.
Eventually, after 600 near misses had been re-tested, the markers on the 19-year-old careless driver's Y-chromosome came up as a match for the killer's. His father and two uncles were arrested in April 2009. Their swabs were flown to the forensics lab by helicopter (the custody clock was ticking) and a positive match to the killer's profile confirmed within nine hours. The careless driver's father, Paul Hutchinson, a 51-year-old newspaper delivery agent, was charged with Colette Aram's murder. He pleaded guilty on 21 December, and on 25 January was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Hutchinson's DNA profile was generated from cells recovered from the car and the paper towel by the Home Office's Forensic Science Service (FSS); the later work – the familial testing and confirmation that Hutchinson's DNA matched the profile generated from the crime stains – was carried out by an independent competitor, LGC Forensics, a division of LGC Ltd. At one time the police would automatically have gone to the FSS for all their forensic work, but since 1999 the industry has been privatised, with different companies competing for police business. Once the state-owned Laboratory of the Government Chemist, LGC Ltd was sold off by the Major government for £5m in 1996. In February this year, LGC was valued at £257m. It's grown in other ways, too, since privatisation: staff numbers have increased from 270 to more than 1,500, and several other firms have been bought up – including, in 2005, Forensic Alliance, then the UK's largest private provider of forensic science services to the criminal justice system.