Killer Colin Pitchfork has plea for release from prison rejected

Colin Pitchfork, who was convicted of raping and murdering two teenagers, has had his application to be released from jail rejected by the Parole Board, which also said he should not be moved to an open prison.

A panel found that Pitchfork, 65, who was jailed for life in 1988 for raping and strangling Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth, both 15, in Leicestershire in 1983 and 1986, posed a risk of reoffending.

He was initially released in September 2021, prompting a public outcry, but was recalled to prison two months later for breaching his licence conditions when he approached a lone woman while she was litter picking.

The latest decision by the Parole Board, published on Thursday, followed hearings conducted in May and October and included consideration of a dossier submitted by the justice secretary of more than 2,000 pages opposing Pitchfork’s release.

Dawn Ashworth was 15 years old when she was murdered by Pitchfork in Leicestershire. Photograph: Topham/PA

The panel said: “All the professional witnesses at the hearing concerned with the management of Mr Pitchfork’s case did not support his release or his progression to an open prison. The panel was told that Mr Pitchfork did not have sufficient controls to manage himself safely and that the panel’s findings about his custodial behaviour had led to a potentially unexplored area of risk.”

Considering the circumstances of Pitchfork’s recall to custody in 2001, the board said on the balance of probabilities he had shown “confrontational behaviour”.

It said: “He appeared to lack internal controls around appropriately managing negative emotions and unhelpful thinking. The panel considered Mr Pitchfork to be ill at ease with people exercising authority over him and could not cope with being told ‘no’, for example when asking for curfew times to be changed.”

In June 2023, the Parole Board found the decision to recall Pitchfork to prison in 2021 to be flawed and directed his rerelease. But it was blocked by the then justice secretary, Alex Chalk, who applied for the decision to be reviewed.

In December of that year the Parole Board said he should not be released or transferred to an open prison. Pitchfork successfully applied for reconsideration of that decision, prompting the latest set of hearings, which were delayed by an unsuccessful judicial review he brought against the board.

Pitchfork was the first man to be convicted in the UK using DNA profiling and was handed a minimum jail term of 30 years, later reduced to 28 years.