Bloodline Detectives - Episode 8 - Blood Bath | Forensic Files

I'm Nancy Grace, and this is "Bloodline Detectives." Every parent's worst nightmare is this--
the police broadcasting the name of their daughter on a loudspeaker. "Is anyone missing a girl named Melanie?"
Only days earlier, 17-year-old Melanie Road, ecstatic about her family's new home in the magnificent city
of Bath in Southern England. Bath's beauty is in its age and distinct honey-colored stone
buildings. But on a summer day almost four decades ago, Bath's rich history is cracked with a murder
that makes national news. There are no witnesses and few leads. When it's over, this will become an iconic case
for the bloodline detectives. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): June 8, 1984, a young woman's body
is discovered on a small road close to her home in Bath, England. The attack was horrendous, horrific, frenzied.
Stabbed 26 times. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Straight away, police cordoned off the area and began an intensive search
to find the person that committed the brutal murder. It's about trying to interpret what
the crime scene can tell you. It's really a picture, and we have to try and fit all the pieces in together.
They actually find 86 spots of blood. And it was, I reckon, probably somewhere in the region of a quarter mile, the full trail.
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): The murder shocks the picturesque city of Bath to the core.
It's a case that shocked the city. It hung over the city like a cloud, that uncertainty,
that unease, that discomfort. This kind of thing didn't happen in big industrial cities
in 1984, let alone genteel Bath. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): After a year of intense investigation,
police are no wiser as to who the killer was. The case goes cold. The case was filed with no further reasonable lines
of inquiry. The resourcing on it had been intense. And if we feel that we've done all that we can,
then that's the point usually when you probably say we think we need to put this to one side
now. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): This is the story of Melanie Road and how police never give up hope
and with the help of familial DNA are able to track down a savage killer, bringing an end to another case for the bloodline detectives.
A man has been arrested. How had they done it? My jaw hit the floor, actually. I didn't think they would ever do it.
It was phenomenal, the amount of work that went into it. At no point did I give up on the investigation.
I always felt if the work's put in, we have a good chance of getting a conviction.
It's got to give some people pause for thought that they could be caught, not just because of something
that they've done in the past, but be something that somebody else in their family
has done in the past. [THEME MUSIC] NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Bath, Southern England.
It's 5:30 in the morning, and local milk man Tony Noonan and his 11-year-old son Ian
are doing the daily milk run. It starts out like every other day, but quickly turns into something shocking.
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Police quickly arrive at the scene and cordon off the area.
Forensics are also called in to carry out a detailed investigation. When you have the report of a murder,
instantly lots of people are called out to control the scene. And they will then also decide to call out forensic scientists
and so forth. So a whole team would have verged onto the location. The crime scene always starts off as an outside scene.
As this was, you have a tent put over the body to protect it. You don't know what the elements are going to be.
It was a bright, sunny day in June. Of course, that could change. And also to protect the dignity of her
from people who were living nearby. At the scene, then and now, the pathologist still comes,
and they examine the body where it lies. And from that, they can make some interpretations.
They would just interpret the injuries, how she's lying, what it looks like, and then take
her away for the post-mortem. They'd even called out a forensic scientist, and the forensic scientist drew a really detailed sketch plan,
drawing the body in position and all the blood spots, and a little area where there was a pool of blood.
They also did a video, took loads of photographs. And they take photographs of the body in situ.
And then slowly, as they gather evidence and swab areas of the body, swab the floor, they take
photographs of each little bit. And it's at that point that found on the wall is a key ring.
And the key ring is a wooden key ring with the name "Melanie" carved into it. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Desperate
to identify the victim, police drive around the area, calling out the name "Melanie" in the hope
that her family will hear them. Today, we tend to identify people through either identification of the body.
So driving licenses, passports, mobile phones. Really, really good and easy. And of course through social media.
Then they didn't have those luxuries. So they knew that she was probably going to be called Melanie.
So they drove around the streets in a police car with a loud hailer on the back saying
"does anybody know a girl called Melanie?" "Is anyone missing a girl called Melanie?"
As they zigzagged up and down the streets in Lansdowne, they eventually went round into St. Stephen's Close, which
was where she'd actually lived. And her mom was there, and she heard the car outside.
And of course her daughter Melanie had been out the night before, but it wasn't unusual for her not to necessarily come
home. She would often go and stay with a friend and then ring in the morning on the old fashioned landline
telephone. So she went out into the street, and she'll describe how she was almost chasing the police car down the street banging
on the back saying, "we've got a daughter called Melanie, and she didn't come home last night."
And that's how they found out that it was their daughter and that she'd been killed.
I don't criticize them for doing that. Certainly I can imagine the effect it must have had on the family.
But the officers wanted to identify as soon as possible who their victim was, because that's when an investigation
can often really start. Bearing in mind a lot of murders are committed by people known
to the victim, so they wanted to know who the victim was straight away. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): With Melanie's family now informed
of her murder, the police in Bath need to recruit experienced homicide detectives from other areas to carry
out an intensive investigation. In those days, it was a case of, there was no dedicated
murder team. It was a case of they would bring in everybody from that local division.
So all those CID officers who were placed in Bath were on it. Would then bring people in from the surrounding areas.
So those from Bristol would come in, and Somerset. And people that were working on the crime squads or the drug
squad, they would be drafted in and seconded to come and help as well. And all these detectives were divided up into action teams
and then sent out. They run out of senior crime officers, so a detective who was originally going to be part
of the house-to-house team, in fact two, they were both asked to help out the scene-of-the-crime work.
So they had to look and see if they could follow the trail and identify any potential blood spots.
And as soon as they knew it was blood, they would draw a yellow circle around it, give it a number,
and move on. Now, they actually find 86 spots of blood. And it was, I reckon, probably somewhere
in the region of a quarter mile, the full trail. That enabled the forensic scientists
and the scene-of-the-crime officers to then go and swab each of those spots. Today, we know that we swap with cotton wool sticks.
They get like cotton wool buds. In those days, it was like a cocktail stick with a little bit of cotton on the end.
And it seems really ancient and antiquated, but it works. And they took those meticulously not just over one day,
over several days. You also have an incident room set up. Now, an incident room then is nothing like a modern day
incident room. No computers. So what you actually had was statements coming in, in paper form.
It was all run on an old fashioned card system. So every single thing is meticulously indexed,
and the names of everybody that's spoken to, anything that's relevant. And it's run by the senior investigating officer.
He's also called out specialist search teams. And I've seen photographs and videos of them
with scythes, scything through long grass in order that they can then search the ground,
looking for a murder weapon. They already knew right from the first moment there were stab wounds.
So they knew some form of weapon capable of causing a stab wound. So you're talking a knife, a screwdriver,
something like that. The searches that they did along Camden Crescent, when you drop down this what is now completely overgrown area,
and would have been at the time in 1984, but they've gone through, they've cut it all back.
They've absolutely stripped out all the vegetation, to see if the weapon had been discarded just over the fence
there. But definitely that one was never found. And to this day, we have no idea what happened to it.
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): News of Melanie's murder spreads quickly throughout the picturesque city
and shakes local residents to their very core. It struck fear into Bath. It didn't just make local or regional news.
This was national news, because this kind of thing doesn't happen in Bath. This was such a savage attack on such an innocent victim.
And it looked straight away like a stranger attack, as if it wasn't someone who had known Melanie.
The police were very concerned that the young people, particularly women, were doing the right--
what they perceived to be the right thing, and were doing everything they can to make themselves safe
and to get home safe and certainly not to be out and about on their own at night.
Pictures of Melanie went out in a hope that people saw her walking home, so that we would know exactly which route she took home.
They even put out messages at cinemas. So whilst you're watching your film, back then halfway through there would be some sort of adverts,
and up would come a story about Melanie asking the public if they've got any information.
NANCY GRACE: British detectives are using the scientific forensics available at the time.
But in 1984, those techniques are crude by today's standards. It will take time and the landmark use of a new science
to discover who murdered Melanie Road. Next on "Bloodline Detectives". NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Bath, Southern England.
On the morning of June 8, 1984, teen girl Melanie Road is murdered a short distance from her own home.
Melanie is a straight A student, about to take college entrance exams. She has a bright future ahead of her.
She had everything to look forward to. She had a pick of universities. She was going to do well in her exams.
She had a holiday booked. She had a really close and strong group of friends. Her family had just moved to Bath recently.
They'd been living all around the UK with her dad working for the Ministry of Defense.
Melanie adored Bath straight away. Her parents didn't know it so well, and Melanie would always say to her mom,
please come into the city center. It's the most amazing city. And Jean Road always found that later hard to take,
because it was Bath, in a way, that did this to Melanie. I know her mother was deeply, as you'd expect,
traumatized by what happened, and is a very, was a very private person. Didn't really court any media attention,
didn't really want any media attention, but obviously wanted the case solved, and wanted that closure, and wanted
a body that she could bury. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Early on, police were able to piece together Melanie's movements the day
before the murder. Melanie's mom drove her into the city center. She dropped her off at a very nice hotel.
And they had an event up. Melanie got out of the car. She opened the door, and she looked across,
and she saw there was a big welcome. She said to her mom, look, they laid out a red carpet.
What a way to go. And that sentence was the last Jean Road ever had from her daughter.
After that, Melanie went out to play tennis, I believe, with friends. And then she carried on out for the rest of the evening
and went to a nightclub. On the Friday night, Melanie had been-- she'd been out to a bar.
She'd been out with her boyfriend and some other friends. His brother had come home.
They'd been to a few pubs and clubs. He'd left the club and they'd partied in the center of Bath.
So her friend and boyfriend had gone one way, and she was just going to take the walk
home that she normally did, which was up Lansdown Hill. Walking home half past 1:00, 2:00 in the morning
on a Friday, Saturday night was not unusual for her or anybody else. Bath was considered to be a really safe place.
And she'd done it many times before. And why was tonight any different? But of course, on that particular night,
it was drastically different for her. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): At the time of the murder,
Bath is a busy tourist destination for many national and international visitors.
Bath is and always has been a busy, busy place. Bath Festival was on. But also it's a place for tourists,
American tourists, tourists from the Far East, all over Europe. They come to this magnificent city.
So that must have been really difficult for police officers to try and work out who had even been in the city
in the first instance. Anything out of the ordinary you would want to know, for example, the festival.
If you could get-- if you knew of any parties, knew of any festivals, then you would approach the organizers
and see if they had names of everyone that attended. It's a starting point. Yes, it gives you a great, long list
of people you need to speak to, but you have actually got people to speak to. It only takes one person to say the person
I was in that hotel with that night went out and came back with a cut to the hand.
That can lead you to the offender. So you couldn't ignore these lines of inquiry.
But it obviously makes the investigation take longer. There was a college that was not
far from where she was killed, which hosted air traffic control people. And a lot of those were from Saudi Arabia or Arab countries.
And there was a theory going round in Bath, that it was the Arabs that were responsible.
And it must be one of those just because it was close by. And there was a lot of work put into that.
And of course some of those had left the following day. So that then heightened suspicions.
"Well, it must have been them because they've gone home." But it takes a lot of time and effort to do that.
International inquiries are challenging today. They were even more challenging back then.
So trying to understand that. But it didn't stop it happening. The amount of detail that everything
went into with every single person was incredible. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Melanie's autopsy reveals
answers as to what may have happened the fatal morning of June 8. So we know there were 26 stab wounds.
But when I say 26, some of them were little, gentle stab wounds, particularly those in the back.
But the little stab wounds in the back, we think are just as likely to be forcing her to move from where he
originally came in contact with her to make her go to whatever location he wanted, jabbing her gently in the back,
causing minor punctures. But we also know that some of the more significant stab wounds were concentrated around the breast.
That is typical of a sexual motive. The word "frenzied" doesn't even begin to cover
it, what happened to Melanie. And the most horrific thing is that as she lay dying,
she was raped twice. And so the responsibility of the pathologist is to take those swaps and to ensure that we can-- in those days,
it was just to take swabs to identify there was semen present. And from that, the only way that they
could interpret who it may belong to was through blood grouping. So our pathologist, having taken those swabs and samples,
they get stored then. Depending on the different sample, specific ways that we store them, they get sent to the forensic science
service. They have responsibilities around keeping it. And we, the police, we have the clothing and those other items
that come from them, we keep those ourselves and keep those in storage. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Days into the investigation,
police have yet to find any witnesses to the brutal murder. Look at that area of Bath.
It's a reasonably expensive part of the city. It's leafy. It would have been very quiet at that time of night.
Most people would have been fast asleep. And you know, in that case, yes, you do think, well,
proximity to other properties should have raised an alarm. There were possible sightings of her.
There were a couple people phoned in saying they thought they saw her walk across Lansdown Road.
Which is the route we think that she probably took. But they could never be 100% definite.
It is bizarre that nobody saw him at the time. But what happened when he got home and who was living with?
And yeah, why? Why did he manage to get away with it at that point? You look at the media appeals, they talk about has someone
been talking about it more? Have they been talking about it less? It makes me smile when I look on the TV
and then see the SIO saying you know, if I'd done something bad, my wife would know about it.
If I were worried about something, my wife would know. I couldn't keep it from her.
And this chap now has had four days to live with this. Somebody close to him will realize that something is up.
He's got to be a very hard man indeed to be able to keep it to himself. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): During the intense investigation,
police focus on blood spots leading away from the scene. As Melanie was being attacked, she put up a fight.
And the knifeman was himself cut. So as she lay dying, he fled. As he ran away, he ran down the road and down some stone steps
and onto Camden Crescent. He left a trail of blood. Our general interpretation is her blood spots
are potentially her being carried or walking injured to where her body was found.
The blood spots that were identified as his are likely after the attack, as he is making his departure.
That blood was preserved at the time. It was analyzed. Of course, these were the days before DNA.
All they could do was take a blood type. Melanie had blood group A. Her killer also had blood group A.
But he had a really rare protein makeup within his blood. Only 3% of the male population have this protein makeup.
So that meant that when men were being tested, they could eliminate people quite quickly.
They couldn't tell who the killer actually was, but they could rule people out straight away.
The days before there was DNA? That seems like the stone age in crime fighting. But as we'll see next, the next 30
years and the birth of the bloodline detectives will change it all. The savage murder of Melanie Road close to her home in Bath
England in June 1984 has become a perplexing problem for police. Investigators have numerous leads,
and receive over 1,000 calls from the public, leading to lots of arrests and hundreds of man hours
in questioning. When we're doing murder investigations, we tend to break it down into categories.
The first category is the people that Melanie was out with on the night. So you start with those.
You then look at the others who she might be associated with in the club. So did she talk to anybody else?
Were there any men that were interested in her? Did they follow her from the club?
The next thing then, is of course, is then you look at your suspects. So how do people become suspects?
So in 1984, quite frankly if you didn't look the right way, you couldn't have an alibi, you had a conviction for life crime
or sexual assaults, there was a good chance you were going to be arrested and brought
into custody for it. As for suspects, I suppose if you think when you dealt with a murder inquiry, anyone who was remotely put forward
as a suspect were arrested. So you arrested 90 to 100 people. That wouldn't happen now.
You've got to-- nowadays you have to justify being able to arrest someone. But back then, you were allowed to,
and you tended to arrest lots of people. So those people would have been looked at closely.
It was difficult, wasn't it? Because the nature of where she was killed suggests that it should be somebody local.
Because although it was in Lansdown in Bath, it was in, I wouldn't call it a back street, but an area
that the general public wouldn't walk through. So that's the first thing, that yes, you
think that it's going to be somebody local, but you couldn't exclude that. Everything was open.
We knew the offender was injured because of the blood. And that blood had been identified
as being the same blood group as semen found on the body. So anyone who became of interest in the inquiry,
they had samples taken from them to see if they were the right blood group. Most people they were able to eliminate,
but there were some that were the right blood group. And those that were the right blood group,
they then went on to ask for alibis. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Despite a huge investigation,
police are nowhere near to finding Melanie Road's killer. And slowly the case goes cold.
When you haven't been successful in identifying an offender, especially in a homicide case,
there's no set rules about stop investigating after 6 months, 12 months, 2 years, 5 years.
Every single one's taken on its merits. And in fact, really the direction generally
comes from, have we exhausted every available inquiry available to us? In the case of Melanie, it was after 12 months
that they felt that they'd done everything that they could. They've got all the leads they could possibly have.
They've done matrixes and likelihood matrixes. Who else can they get to try and solve this problem?
If they've done this after 30 years, surely there was nowhere else to go. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): For 10 years,
the case sits in a state of limbo, officers occasionally adding new information to it.
But it's not until the introduction of DNA technology that the case starts to build momentum once again.
In 1995, it was really very basic. So we talk about-- when you talk about DNA alleles, if you imagine a bar chart,
an allele is just one of the bars on a bar chart. And then it was just eight alleles.
So eight bars. So that was all you would ever compare in 1995. Unfortunately on this particular case,
albeit they did get DNA, and they got DNA that they could load onto the DNA database,
it didn't match anyone. But what it did for the team then who were reviewing it,
they could then look at those people that are the right blood group, those people that were
deemed persons of interest. They could look to go back to them, take a swab and eliminate them on DNA.
And that's the process they went through. So they identified a large number of persons of interest,
and went back and swabbed all of them. Some had died, and some they weren't able to locate at that point.
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): In 2011, British detectives investigating the brutal 1984 rape and murder of 17-year-old
Melanie Road in the town of Bath, Southwest England are looking for a new forensic advancements
to help identify her killer. And that's when they learn about familial DNA. Now, what a familial run is all about is asking the DNA
database, is there anyone on there with similar-ish DNA that might be related to your offender?
Now, we know the person who's on the DNA database is not the offender, but we're looking for people
with similar-ish DNA. The DNA database then come back with lists. Two lists of hundreds of names.
And they've got a name. They've got a few numbers, which is barcode numbers and this sort of thing.
And then they've got what they call a likelihood ratio, which at the top of the list is the one whose DNA is
genetically most similar. It's what is described in our business as a screamer. Because the second one down on the list, the likelihood ratio
figure they provided was so much lower that it's like saying that the person on the top of the list is screaming at you,
you must eliminate that person's father. Because it was a parent-child familial list as opposed to a sibling familial list.
So we went out and we swabbed that person's father, expecting it to be a success.
And he was eliminated. So that was in 2011. What happened in 2000-- late 2014 coming into '15, Judy made a decision that we ought
to try another familiar run. Because every year loads and loads of new DNA profiles
are being loaded into the national database. We knew our offender hadn't been loaded on there,
but it was possible that a relative of our offender in those interim years had been added to the database.
The thing about familial work is that it's only as good as the date that you did that run.
And our date had been in 2009, '10. So by the time we go on to 2013, I was asking to have
a rerun of the familiar work. But because it had been so expensive, there was a lot of reluctance to do that.
Of course when we went back to the lab, the cost has come down dramatically. It's only about five grand now, because things
have moved on so much. And you think, gosh, why didn't we do this earlier? And away we went.
We got the authority to do a new run. And then they sent it back to us in May, June time it was.
And the top of the list, the screamer that we'd had before was now number two on the list.
So we knew straight away that we've got a new screamer. And if it's above the one that was there already,
then that's obviously our first port of call. And of course, when we look into her,
she was just a girl who'd had a domestic incident with her boyfriend. It was relatively minor.
Things had just got a little bit out of hand. But because of the policies that we have around domestic abuse,
it doesn't matter whether you're a male or a female perpetrator, we always do positive intention.
And in this case, it was to arrest her. And as soon as she gets arrested, she automatically gets a DNA mouth swab done.
So that's how she'd ended up on the system. So we rang her up and explained that she's
on the top of our list. You know, who's her dad? Because of her age, it was going to be a father or an uncle,
or even potentially a grandfather. So we want to understand about her family tree.
And of course she'd come from Bath, and then she told us about who her dad was, Christopher Hampton.
Yes, he'd lived in Bath, but now he lived in Bristol, and where we might find him.
And so it was down to Gary. He made all these phone calls. He did all this legwork.
He'd already spoke to lots of people. And he rang up Christopher Hampton. I told him I was the cold case team,
and that I was investigating the murder of Melanie Road back in 1984 in Bath. And the reason I'm speaking to him
is his daughter's DNA, because we have DNA of the offender, his daughter's DNA is similar.
So we now want to eliminate him. When I arrive at the car park in Ashton, I got out the car,
shook his hand, produced my warrant card. And then we sat in the police car, and I explained to him yet again,
it's to do with the murder of Melanie Road. We've got two consent forms. One of them is for the police.
And I read it through with him. He read it and signed it. He then signed an identical consent, which comes
with a sealed swab package. And after that, I simply ran through, asked him to open his mouth, rubbed the swab
on the inside of his mouth, the same on the other side, put both of the swabs in little tubes,
sealed them in a tamper-proof bag. And I explained to him the results take about five weeks.
Did you want me to notify you when the result come through? And he said, yes. But he was no more nervous.
He behaved no differently from anyone else. Within a short period of time, a number of swabs
were submitted to the forensic science service, asking them to get DNA from the swabs
and compare it to Melanie's murder profile. As we'll see next, a forensic technique unavailable in 1984
becomes a breakthrough weapon for the bloodline detectives. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): After 30 years, police in Bath,
England are using familial DNA to develop a strong lead in the rape and murder of teen girl Melanie Road.
A DNA sample taken from Christopher Hampton is sent to the lab, and cold case officers are waiting
patiently for the results. Would this be the answer they're waiting for? Or would it be another false hope?
We'd been working with our scientist, Mike Wheelhouse, on this case for years. And I'm talking about 8, 9, 10 years he'd been involved in it.
And Mike had just sent an email through to Gary, saying, "oh, I think I've got a hit on Operation Rhodium."
Oh my God. This is the biggest news of this century. What do you mean, you got a hit?
And he sent an email. He hasn't picked up the phone. And what's more, he didn't put the name in the email.
I can remember the first line of the email was something like, "it looks like we may have
a result on Operation Rhodium." We've got to double check it and triple check it,
but it looks good. I tried to phone the lab immediately to say, who is it? You know, who's the match that we've got?
But the scientist was in a meeting. But he obviously spoke to Gary really quickly,
then we came back and we were told it's Christopher Hampton, and Gary rang me. And then of course, there's those decisions
about what do you do. But the decision was to arrest him that day. He was arrested as he came home from work.
And on his arrest, the only significant sort of thing he said was, when his wife said "I'll see you later,"
he said "no, you won't." So she said, "well, I'll see you tomorrow." And he said "no, you won't."
And that sort of tells a tale. And his behavior was, he was just calm. It was almost as though he'd been waiting for it.
It was an acceptance, I would say. He came in, and I know when he was interviewed,
he produced what they call a prepared statement. So that's a statement that he prepares with his solicitor,
and it basically said, "I did not rape or murder Melanie Road." And that's the only thing it said.
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): With a positive hit on Christopher Hampton, police are now able to tell Melanie
Road's family the good news. All through this, we still had contact with the family,
all the way through, throughout the whole 30 years. But certainly in the recent years and whilst
I was involved in it, I definitely had contact with the family. You know, Jean in particular.
So we got to the night, and suddenly it was the case solved. Right, we need to get out and see the family.
And god, it makes me emotional now, even thinking about, you know, just the joy for that family and the impact
on them after all that time is incredible. Really incredible. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Investigating officers
built an airtight legal case against Christopher Hampton. They are confident as they head to what they think
will be a three-week trial. It was highly charged in Bristol Crown Court. He was there in the dock, a gray, average-looking man,
a forgettable man. And when he was read the charge, just looked straight ahead and just said one word, guilty.
And there was a sigh at that moment from her family. And I know that the investigators who'd
been working on this team found at the moment of both relief and the thought of "thank God.
We've done this for you now, Melanie." When police officers hear sentences, quite often they are not that satisfied with the sentence.
You know, they know that parole might kick in. People might come out early. Interestingly, the judge in this case,
albeit he gave him life and gave a recommended sentence, did say "but it is quite likely you will die in prison."
And hearing a judge say that was in a sort of bizarre way quite pleasing. There had been a cloud over Bath
since Melanie Road was killed. That's more than three decades that uncertainty, that unease,
that discomfort had hung over the city, and you know, people who have lived there over that time.
And to have that crime solved to have somebody sent to jail was just I think a massive sense of relief for the city.
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): The full impact that the murder has on Melanie's family
is heard during the last days of trial. Watching Melanie's family deliver their victim
impact statements was the most highly charged hour or so I've ever spent in court.
Jean, Melanie's mom, stood up in the public gallery. She was in her early 80s at the time.
She used to walk with a stick. She put her walking stick to one side. She didn't want Hampton, her daughter's killer, to see this.
So she walked across unaided to the witness box. And there she delivered the most powerful victim impact
statement I have ever heard. I still to this day choke up if I were to read it. When they read it out, everyone in the court,
including the prison officer, were fighting back tears. The one person who seemed to show no emotion
was Christopher Hampton. The tragedy is not just the loss of, in this case, a daughter.
It's the loss of all the things that would have followed in her life. So every anniversary, every birthday that comes along,
it's what-- for the family members, it's what might have been. It's not a one-off event.
And that's why in part family members will always say to you it never goes away.
And neither should it go away. Because they've lost so much through the actions of
some deranged, vile individual. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): The puzzling case of Melanie Road's murder is finally over thanks
to the use of familial DNA. It was phenomenal. And the reason it was phenomenal was
because from day one, the amount of work that went into it. And if all those brilliant detectives at the beginning
hadn't have done what they did, you know, those of us that followed could not have achieved what we did.
It's got to give some people pause for thought that these techniques now exist, and that they could be caught
not just because of something that they've done in the past, but because of something that somebody else in their family
has done in the past. Melanie's mother, Jane Road, was 81-years-old when Chris Hampton was tried
for her daughter's murder. But she lived to see her daughter's killer brought to justice.
After the trial, Jane Road said what bothered her the most was the striking resemblance
Christopher Hampton's wife and daughter had to her own Melanie. She thought only a monster could have
a family and live with the knowledge that he destroyed another one's. Jane Road may never fully live without the pain of Melanie's
loss, but thanks to the work of the bloodline detectives, at least she knows that the spirit of Melanie Road
may finally rest in peace. [THEME MUSIC]

Brief Summary

The murder of Melanie Road in 1984 remains unsolved until familial DNA leads to the arrest of Christopher Hampton decades later.

Key points

The Investigation Begins. Police struggle to identify the victim and find leads in a chilling case.
The Murder of Melanie Road. A young woman is brutally murdered in Bath, shocking the community.
The Arrest. After years of investigation, police finally arrest a suspect in Melanie's murder.
A Community in Fear. Melanie's murder sends shockwaves through Bath, raising safety concerns.
Familial DNA Breakthrough. In 2011, detectives use familial DNA to identify a new lead in Melanie Road's murder case.
The Arrest of Christopher Hampton. After 30 years, police arrest Christopher Hampton, the prime suspect in Melanie Road's murder.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

I didn't think they would ever do it.

Reaction to the eventual arrest in the case.

2:47WatchApr 1, 2021

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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