Description
World Productions for ITV
From the director of Broadchurch and the producers of Line of Duty, Code of a Killer tells the extraordinary true story of how a brilliant scientist and a progressive police detective united to create the biggest advance in modern criminal investigation.
Leicestershire, 1984. Alec Jeffreys (John Simm, Life on Mars), a scientist at Leicester University, unlocks a remarkable technique to read every individual's unique DNA fingerprint. Only four miles away, DCS David Baker (David Threlfall, Shameless) is a tenacious detective leading the search for the murderer of a local schoolgirl...
Two years later a second schoolgirl is discovered strangled. Soon after a young man is arrested and confesses to her murder, but he denies the first. Certain the same man killed both girls, DCS Baker approaches Dr Jeffreys, hoping to use his DNA test for the first time in a criminal investigation. Could Jeffreys’ test find a match between the suspect's DNA and samples from the murdered girls? Jeffreys is anxious that the science may not work with degraded DNA from crime scenes. But it does. And as Baker thought, the same man killed both girls. Just not his suspect; the confession was false. Used for the first time, DNA fingerprinting has saved an innocent teenager.
In a storm of controversy, the suspect is released and the world introduced to DNA fingerprinting. Still certain that the murderer is local, Baker proposes the world's first DNA manhunt, screening the blood of over five thousand local men in an attempt to catch the killer before he strikes again...
Two investigators, one story, the single biggest advance in the history of criminal enquiry.
Ratings:
- ITV (UK) - Ratings winner, #1 in its timeslot