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In the end, the police accepted Buckland's innocence and on 21 November 1986, at Leicester Crown Court, he was cleared of the girls' murders. Thus the first use of DNA fingerprinting in a criminal case was to help free an innocent man. "I am pretty sure that, given his confession, Buckland would still be in jail today," adds Jeffreys. "Worse, the real perpetrator would have gone on to kill again."
In the end, that perpetrator was caught by a combination of DNA science and "good old-fashioned coppering", as Jeffreys puts it. In January 1987 police asked all local men between 17 and 34 to submit blood for DNA testing in order to eliminate them from their inquiries. By September, 4,000 had provided samples without success - until a chance remark transformed the investigation.
In a pub one day a local man admitted to his mates he had provided blood on behalf of a friend, Colin Pitchfork. One friend told the police, the man and Pitchfork were arrested and the latter's DNA was shown by Jeffreys to match that of the semen from the two girls' bodies. On 23 January 1988 Pitchfork was sentenced to life for the murders of Linda Mann and Dawn Ashworth. "It was the first time on the planet that a criminal investigation had been tackled and solved at a DNA level," says Jeffreys.
Since then, Jeffreys has used DNA profiling to determine a range of intriguing cases. In 1990 he showed that DNA from bones dug up from a Brazilian graveyard by Nazi-hunters was almost certainly that of Josef Mengele, a doctor who had tortured inmates at Auschwitz. A year later, he helped Home Office scientists prove that bones found in a burial pit in Ekaterinburg, 850 miles east of Moscow, were those of the Russian imperial family who had been killed in 1918 during the Russian civil war.
It is a striking body of work, which earned Jeffreys a knighthood in 1994 and which has taken him far from his academic roots and involved him in a startling range of work. He has no regrets, however: "I love it. DNA fingerprinting came out of the blue and turned me round in five minutes flat. There are certain things in science that are historically inevitable, however. I was just lucky that I got to discover DNA fingerprinting. If I hadn't, someone else would have done it by now. I have no illusions about that."