Carol Ann Stephens: How forensic science advances in DNA could catch the 1959 child killer

More than six decades after the abduction and murder of a schoolgirl, police have reopened the case in the hope that developments in forensic science can help solve some unanswered questions.

Carol Ann Stephens, aged six, disappeared off the streets of Cardiff in April 1959 and her body found two weeks later more than 50 miles away near a remote culvert in Carmarthenshire.

The last known sighting of Carol was after she walked back from a corner shop, known as Wilkins, where she would often run errands for her mother and buy sweets. Later that day, she was seen knocking on the window of a car door that was parked on Fairoak Road outside Cathays cemetery.

As part of ITV Wales' Cold Case Detectives series, which follows the work of South Wales Police on a number of unsolved cases, we explore how advances in DNA uncover new evidence which could lead to this child killer.

It's hoped that recent developments in forensic science since the incident might reveal traces of the killer such as blood, semen or saliva, on the little girl’s clothes.

Investigator James Phillips works through old material to see if there is a realistic chance of finding offenders' DNA from the historical evidence. He explained: "When I joined the police force in 1988, DNA wasn't a thing. Where’s previously you would need a large amount of blood, large amount of semen in perhaps the early 90’s for a profile, now they can pick up DNA profile from a slap from the back of a hand on someone’s face."

There are over four million items of forensic evidence kept in storage which date back to the 1930s from police forces across the UK.

It's clear that by keeping all of this material, investigators at the time had "the foresight to think about how quickly forensic developments might have progressed" in the future.

Amy Lewis, who works in forensics, echoed this by acknowledging there does not need to be a great deal of contact to obtain a DNA profile: "Touch DNA is say you’ve grabbed me on my arm, you would leave DNA on my arm from sweat, skin cells, maybe even some hairs, and then we would sample that area where we know you’ve touched to recover the DNA you’ve left on the surfaces."

Key to solving the case of Carol Ann Stephens is understanding what lines of inquiry were followed back in the 1950s and incredibly, most of the case papers have survived. 

Looking back through archive material, police find out that a young boy was with Carol the moment she entered the mysterious car. The six-year-old would hold the answers to vital questions including the specific vehicle Carol got into, as well as a description of the man driving it.

But whilst a number of witness statements were collected following the incident, unlike today, children were not questioned and so no evidence was gathered from the boy.

Despite this, Senior Forensic Scientist, Claire Morse, has started to re-examine all the clothes Carol was wearing at the time of her disappearance, including her cardigan, skirt and glasses.

"We will recover everything that we can from her items of clothing, we are really looking for DNA, if we can find DNA from somebody that’s not Carol Ann, we need to try and find out who that person is, it could be a legitimate contact but it could be an offender. So DNA from touch, semen, saliva or blood is going to be the easiest thing for us to look at.

"It is a very difficult case. Carol Ann was found in a culvert, she was wet, and had probably been in water for several days. So the fact that she’s been in water means that any DNA blood, semen, saliva could have been lost, but there’s always a chance with these things and that’s why we keep going with them", she explained.

Returning to the exact location where the schoolgirl's body was found in 1959, detectives conclude that Carol would have been dumped near the culvert by someone who knew the area well given its remoteness.

It led them to a suspect who was also identified at the time. Previous evidence included a report from a local shopkeeper who said he had a suspicious conversation with the man days before the murder, as Detective Gerry Blake explained: "The storekeeper had been told a story which he thought was strange and it was about picking up young girls."

Detective Blake went on to say that there was "a lot of circumstantial evidence" at the time, but that "there wasn’t that golden nugget" when it came to the forensic evidence and so there was not enough evidence to charge in 1959.

In addition to this case, the cold case detectives are also reviewing other unsolved murders and more than 300 historical sex crimes from the archives.

To find our more about the disappearance of Carol Ann Stephens and similar cases, catch up with Cold Case Detectives on ITVX.