Marion Crofts murder in 1981 solved through advances in DNA

Marion Crofts, the youngest of three sisters, was ambushed by a brutal sex maniac as he cycled to a clarinet lesson at a Hampshire school.

Ordinarily, her father, Trevor, would have driven her there but on this tragic occasion, he chose to play cricket, a decision that was to haunt him for the rest of his life.

It was Saturday, June 6, 1981, when the shy 14-year-old set off from her home in Fleet for the orchestral practice in Farnborough, her route taking her alongside Basingstoke canal, but within minutes she was mercilessly attacked.

Beaten unconscious with fists and kicks to the head that resulted in a bleed on the brain, she was helplessly dragged into woodland near the side of the road, raped and murdered.

Her bike was pushed into bushes and her music case hurled into the canal where it was recovered by a canoe scout.

As concern for her safety mounted because she had uncharacteristically failed to return home for lunch, her frantic father drove along the route which she would have taken, but it was a police dog handler who finally made the sickening discovery of her badly beaten body dumped in undergrowth.

Police, led by Detective Chief Inspector Harry Pilbeam, head of the county's CID, set up a massive operation to trace the killer, their initial and mammoth task trying to trace dozens of people - probably from Hampshire and South of England - who included participants and spectators at a Sealed Knot Society 'Cavaliers and Roundheads' mock civil war pageant, attenders of a local carnival, as well as boy scout canoeists, other boating enthusiasts and picknickers at the canal.

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"We must hear from all members of the public who were in the vicinity on Saturday," said Inspector Graham Hawken, Hampshire Police's press liaison officer.

"In particular, we are trying to trace a yellow car, and a man who was jogging in the woods with a Labrador dog."

In a bid to jog potential witnesses' memories, Pc Lesley-Jane Allen retraced the last minutes of the teenager's life in a reconstruction ride a week later.

Police filmed their colleague who was dressed in identical clothing to that of Marion's - a fawn anorak and blue jeans - and carried a large parcel in a plastic bag on the back of her bike. She had natural light brown hair but it was coloured to resemble that of the tragic victim. O

fficers had experienced difficulty in finding someone who looked like the teenager but Pc Allen volunteered after reading about the appeal in the Echo.

"All sorts of people have come forward and I am sure we are going to get more information after this," Pilbeam told journalists.

In fact, 97 new statements were collated, and more than 130 people, who had been in the area on the day of the murder, came forward.

As police intensified their inquiries, Marion's funeral took place with cremation at Aldershot on June 17.

But time passed and inevitably news of the hunt slipped from the front pages.

However, two years later, there was speculation the sex killer might have struck again following an equally horrific murder in a quiet Lincolnshire village because of the similarities in the two cases, and in 1986, a summit of the county's top detectives took place at New Scotland Yard to pool information to establish potential links between 20 unsolved child murders or abductions in the last decade.

Marion's case was one of them.

Marion Crofts - 14-year-old murder victim. (Image: Submitted)

In reality, police suspected the killer was a local man and one person in particular came under focus but they could not break his alibi.

However, they had indelible undisclosed evidence - the killer had left traces of his DNA on her body and clothing, and their hopes of an arrest were boosted in 1999 when a DNA profile was obtained from the material.

It was only a question of time before the trail blazing technique would unmask the killer and eventually a match was found through the national DNA database.

It was that of Tony Jasinskyj, a lance corporal who worked close to the murder scene as a chef with the Army Catering Corps at barracks and was living in married quarters about a mile and a half from the murder scene with his pregnant wife, Michelle, with whom he had six children.

He had been one of hundreds of people who had been initially questioned. Though he came under major suspicion, police could not break his alibi he had been at work.

His DNA had been taken with a mouth swab after he had assaulted his wife when she told him she was leaving him because of his increasing violence towards her. He was eventually traced to an address in Leicester where he was employed as a security guard and living with his second wife.

Arrested and charged with murder and rape, Jasinskyj appeared at Winchester Crown Court in 2003. Though he pleaded not guilty, the DNA evidence was overwhelming with jurors being told the chances of him not being the killer were one in a billion.

His trial lasted four weeks but it took the jury only three hours to reach their verdict. Passing a life sentence for the murder with a concurrent ten-year term for rape, Judge Michael Brodrick condemned him for committing "a cruel and callous murder."

Pc Allen reconstructing Marion's ride. (Image: Echo)

The former soldier refused to admit his guilt and took his case to the Court of Appeal on the basis the DNA evidence was flawed because the attacker suffered from a chromosome disorder which eliminated him but his argument was firmly rejected, the Lord Justice Phillips telling him he was being "fanciful" and the verdict was "entirely safe."

He was to later admit in prison he was guilty, saying he felt "very remorseful" for what he had done.

But his first wife could never forgive him. Denouncing him as "a psychopath," she recalled in a press interview she felt sick when learning the gruesome details of the murder.

"I sat in the court room with Marion's parents and saw their grief, the grief they have suffered for 21 years because of him. He deserves everything he gets."