Just months before his 1981 wedding, 21-year-old Colin Pitchfork was arrested for indecently exposing himself to young girls.
It was not the first time he had been caught flashing but, yet again, he somehow escaped with no more than a rap on the knuckles.
That court appearance came just two years before Pitchfork killed for the first time – and by then he was already a master at running rings around the authorities, who he'd convinced he would 'outgrow his problem'.
When he was finally arrested in 1987 for the murder of schoolgirls Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth, he scoffed at how easy it had been to pull the wool over people's eyes ever since he began offending as a sweet-faced but depraved Boy Scout.
Pitchfork delighted in the authorities' inability to curb his disturbing compulsions.
In police interviews, he said that attempts to help him by referring him to The Woodlands, a day hospital for 'neurotic disorders', were 'a waste of time. A bleedin' waste'.
Pictured: Colin Pitchfork on his wedding day. Pitchfork pleaded guilty to both murders in September 1987 and was sentenced to life in January 1988. The judge said the killings were 'particularly sadistic' and at that time said he doubted Pitchfork would ever be released
He told officers: 'Probation officers and psychiatrists, these people are quite happy if you tell them what they want to hear. I can't believe how easy it is to spin yarns to these people.'
It was this extraordinary capacity for deceit that most stunned Joseph Wambaugh, the former Los Angeles police detective who wrote a decisive account of Pitchfork's crimes. For his 1989 book The Blooding, Wambaugh was given extensive access to Pitchfork's case files and taped confessions, and gained an unparalleled insight into the man's evil mindset, not to mention his delight in dissembling.
Yesterday, the author, now 84, told me: 'It is virtually impossible for murdering sociopaths to become other than what they are.' It was not safe to release the 'deceitful' killer because he 'didn't have a conscience'.
A mugshot of Colin Pitchfork, the first murderer convicted and jailed using DNA evidence
Wambaugh says: 'Murdering psychopaths have a poorly defined superego, that thing we call a conscience. He does not remotely think
