Melanie Road, 17, was sexually assaulted and stabbed after a night out with friends in Bath in 1984. Photo / Getty Images
Melanie Road was just 17 when she was brutally murdered in 1984. Detective Julie Mackay reveals how luck, persistence and a DNA clue finally helped her crack the notorious cold case.
A 17-year-old girl was walking home from a nightclub in Bath in the early hours of June 9, 1984, when she was chased or dragged into a cul-de-sac, raped and stabbed 26 times. At 5.30am a milkman and his young son discovered her partially clothed body, but police officers arriving at the scene had no idea of her identity. The only clue they found was a keyring bearing the name Melanie.
Just 200 yards from the crime scene, in the suburb of Lansdown, Jean Road, a teacher, and her husband, Anthony, a civil servant, felt a gnawing anxiety having realised that the youngest of their three children had not returned home after a night out. They tried to keep their rising panic in check, telling themselves that their daughter, a deputy head girl at her school, had probably stayed at a friend's house.
At 9.15am they heard the metallic sound of an amplified voice in the street. As it grew louder they could make out a single word: Melanie. Jean leapt up and ran outside. "Does anyone know Melanie?" the voice boomed from a police car. She ran after it and started frantically banging on the boot. "We have a Melanie," she cried. Moments later her world imploded as she learnt her daughter was never coming home.
Melanie's murder kicked off a nationwide manhunt. From a trail of blood that led away from the crime scene and semen swabbed from her body, the police elicited vital information about the killer: he shared a blood group with only 3 per cent of the population. It was a strong lead and 94 men were arrested, most within the first year. It often seemed likely that the case would be solved — only for the leads to go nowhere. In the end it took 31 years to track down her murderer.
The fact that it was solved at all is largely down to advances in forensic science and the determination of a police unit led by Julie Mackay, a detective sergeant and single mother of three. In person, Mackay, 54, smiles a lot but the overwhelming impression is one of steeliness. In her personal and professional life she has faced down numerous challenges, from a divorce and various health issues, to misogyny in the police force. "What'll you do if you find a robber? His ironing?" one sergeant said to her after she was partnered with a female officer in 1989, a first in the history of Avon and Somerset police force.
We are meeting to discuss her new book, To Hunt a Killer, which she wrote with Robert Murphy, a crime correspondent for ITV. It reveals how Mackay and her team tracked down and caught Melanie's murderer, who had been hiding in plain sight for decades.
Years after the murder the police acquired a powerful new weapon for solving crimes. In 1995 the UK National DNA Database was established, collating DNA samples from crime scenes, convicts and anyone arrested on suspicion of committing a crime. DNA became a regular part of detective work, and in 2001 police reinvestigating Melanie's murder tried what is known as a familial search of the database. Instead of seeking an exact match to the DNA from the crime scene, they searched for any close matches, which might indicate a relative of the killer. But the effort, at a cost of £20,000 ($39,000), drew a blank. None of the matches led the investigation any further forward. Yet again, the case went cold.
Then, in the autumn of 2009, Mackay joined Avon and Somerset police's cold case unit to oversee 33 unsolved murders. In her book she describes visiting a warehouse where the force stores the evidence of unsolved cases: "I could see shelves going up, floor to ceiling. How tall was the room? Three storeys? Some of the shelves were buckling under the weight of large green crates stacked up. I started looking at their labelled codenames: Operation Arrow, Operation Sussex. One was the first murder I'd worked on — the stabbing of a gay man in Bristol in 1989. Twenty years later that murder was unsolved. Melanie's murder inquiry was codenamed Operation Rhodium. 'How many boxes are there?' I shouted to [her colleague] Gary [Mason]. 'We don't really know. It's a paper case. There were 30,000 documents. It was the last murder before they brought in computers.' I groaned."
Mackay began with a 47-page report written on the first anniversary of Melanie's murder and quickly got to grips with the case. "It documented everything that had happened," she says, "the initial police response, the swabbing of the blood, the injuries Melanie sustained, the sexual assault that had taken place. It was horrific."
An appeal for the public's help in finding the killer had aired on BBC's Crimewatch UK a few weeks earlier and produced a strong response. "There was loads of publicity, loads of leads coming in," recalls Mackay, who has since retired from the police force. They received the names of 72 suspects, including one from a cancer nurse claiming a patient had confessed on his deathbed to killing Melanie.
As Mackay examined the case once more, the hope was that the DNA found at the murder scene could be matched with one of the new suspects. Mackay and her colleagues took swabs from them all. She anticipated a breakthrough — but her efforts were in vain. Tests ruled out the deathbed story (the dead man's DNA was available from stored medical samples) and the other suspects also failed to throw up a match.
The trail went cold once more but Mackay was determined to carry on, in part because of "dear old Jean" Road. The devastation still felt by Melanie's mother was palpable. "It broke my heart," Mackay says. "I just wanted to wrap her up in my arms because no one should have to go through that, should they?"
As Jean recounted her memories of Melanie the case took on a particular poignance for Mackay, who was born a few months after Jean's daughter. "Melanie and I were so similar," Mackay says. "She liked to party, she probably worked harder than me at school but we were both active, sporty, outgoing people. We liked to go to nightclubs, we enjoyed our friends. I could see a lot of similarities as I got to know her through Jean."
Mackay conducted extensive reviews of witness statements and exhibits, and continued to investigate new leads. "People just rang up randomly. Whenever a new name came into the inquiry we did everything we could to eliminate them."
In 2010 she made a request for a second DNA search — since new samples were being added to the national database all the time. Once the results were back she went "swabbing happily away all round the country, believing we were going to find our offender". Disappointingly, that led to more dead ends.
In 2014 her request for a third familial DNA search was approved. The cost had dropped to £3000 ($6000) and millions more profiles had been added to the database since their first search for the killer in 2001. When the results came back, there was a new name — or "screamer" — at the top of the list of close matches.
As she explains in her book, "the 'screamer' is the name of the person at the very top of the familial list who has DNA similar to the attacker. He or she is called the screamer because they are screaming out to be eliminated." It was too early to be optimistic — they'd had screamers before — but Mackay set about investigating the new name, Clare Hampton. A little research soon revealed that Hampton lived in Bath, where she had been arrested a few months earlier after a row with her boyfriend in which she broke his necklace. Police were called after neighbours heard shouting and Hampton was swabbed and cautioned.
Mackay's colleagues contacted Hampton to question her about close family members and she told them that her father, Christopher Hampton, was a painter and decorator living in Bristol. He would have been 32 at the time of the 1984 attack and he was in the right area. But according to the police database, he had no criminal record, no cautions, nothing. Could Hampton really have been Melanie's killer? Mackay dispatched her colleague Gary Mason to meet him and find out.
In her book she recounts what happened next: "Gary returned about two hours later, carrying a completed swab and a grin I couldn't quite decipher.
'What was he like?'
'Hampton? Nothing. He was like nothing.'
'Was he nervous?'
'No more than anyone else. I did the usual thing — pulled up, called him on his phone. He came over and sat in the passenger seat of my car. I explained the case, said he was one of many thousands of swabs we were doing. I said he would be eliminated unless he was the murderer, and if he was the murderer, would he like to tell me? Save me from swabbing him. He signed the consent forms, I took two swabs, we shook hands. I asked him if he wanted to be told the result, he said he did, and off he went.' "
Five weeks later the results came back. It was July 2015 and Mackay had just returned from a holiday in Marrakesh when Gary called to tell her the findings. "Julie, we got a hit," he said. "Hampton, Christopher Hampton." His DNA matched the samples found at the murder scene. Mackay couldn't believe it. She told her team she'd be back at work within the hour. "It seemed quite random that his daughter had been arrested. He could have got away with it if it wasn't for her," she says.
That night Hampton, who was living in Fishponds, Bristol, and had spent the day at work painting a nearby school, was arrested and detained for Melanie's murder. He refused to speak to detectives and gave his solicitor a written statement denying the crime. However, shortly before his trial he agreed to admit to murder on condition that a rape charge was dropped. In May 2016 he was sentenced at Bristol crown court to a minimum term of 22 years in jail. The judge said he was likely to spend the rest of his life in prison.
It was hard to reconcile this pallid 63-year-old with the perpetrator of the ferocious attack 31 years earlier. At the time of the murder, Hampton was separated from his wife, with whom he'd had three children. He was living with his then-girlfriend just half a mile from the Roads' home. He had lived an apparently law-abiding life before and after he killed Melanie.
How unusual is it for someone to commit such a crime and not be connected to others? "It's extremely rare," Mackay says. "How do you switch off and never do anything subsequently?" There is no evidence to link Hampton to any other murders, but Mackay does question whether he might be responsible for similar attacks in the same area.
Finally, justice had been done, and Jean Road had found some closure. Melanie's father, Anthony, was lost to dementia when Hampton appeared in court, but Jean read out her impact statement, which Mackay recounts in her book: "The thought of what our lovely daughter had to endure on that fateful night still sucks the energy from within me. Our patience has been tested but we have survived these 31 and a half years, not without heartache and sorrow, while we have waited for justice to take its course to hopefully allow Melanie to rest in peace. I was 49 years old in 1984 when all this happened. Now in my 81st year, I pray that the family will find some peace."
Mackay went on to work as a superintendent after decades of investigating murders and she is now a consultant, focusing on homicide prevention. She is still in contact with Jean. If it hadn't been for the diligence of the police officers in swabbing Clare Hampton and for Mackay's persistence in getting the familial DNA searches approved, justice might never have been served. "I'm just somebody who did her job," she says now. "I was really privileged to do it and super-proud."
Written by: Audrey Ward
© The Times of London
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