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The next two years were "simply insane", adds Jeffreys. He was inundated with calls from families, mostly of Bangladeshi or Pakistani origins, who had been caught up in immigration disputes. "The university switchboard jammed on several occasions with the calls coming into us." A company, Cellmark, was set up in 1987 to take up these cases and took over much of the Jeffreys caseload.
"Then, out of the blue, I got a call from Leicestershire police, who were investigating the rape and murder of two schoolgirls, Linda Mann and Dawn Ashworth, who lived in the village of Narborough outside Leicester." A local man, Richard Buckland, had just confessed to the murder of Dawn but refused to confess to the killing of Linda. Use your DNA fingerprinting technology to prove he killed both girls, they asked him.
So Jeffreys set up his tests, using - in this case - a version of DNA fingerprinting called DNA profiling. Only a limited number of repeated regions are counted, a technique that is quicker to use and requires smaller samples. It was a perfect opportunity to show off the forensic value of genetic fingerprinting, Jeffreys realised, and, as the tests were being completed, he worked through the night to finish them off as quickly as he could. "I just couldn't wait any longer," he says.
He pulled the film from its developing tank. "I had expected to draw a blank and to find there was not enough DNA in the samples of semen that had been taken from the girls' bodies to produce results." He was wrong. The film was covered in black bands, which showed that the semen from both girls came from the same man, but that Buckland's DNA was completely different. He was not the murderer, the tests indicated. "It was a blood-chilling result," adds Jeffreys.
The police's response was terse and Anglo-Saxon. For his part, the geneticist began to worry that the whole concept of DNA profiling was "up the spout" and that there were things going on biologically that science still did not understand. Then the Home Office repeated the tests and produced the same results as Jeffreys. "I was fretting all the time, but they gave me strength," he adds.