Man broke into Wiltshire pensioner's home before cutting phone lines and raping her
Watch: The full story of how police caught the village rapist 40 years after attack
A man who broke into a Wiltshire pensioner's home, cut her phone lines and raped her has been jailed - 40 years after the attack.
Violet Brown was asleep in her home in Collingbourne Ducis in November 1980 when two men broke in.
One raped her – with Violet describing him as "the nasty one"- as the other watched.
They then locked the 71-year-old in her house and cut the phone lines. She was found by the postman the following morning.
Kenneth Wells - known as Kenny - admitted rape, burglary and false imprisonment and the 63-year-old was jailed for 15 years at Winchester Crown Court on Monday 4 October.
"It completely destroyed her life", said Louise Kennelly, an Investigator at Wiltshire Police.
"She became a shadow of herself and she could no longer stay in her home."
Violet Brown was described as an avid churchgoer and member of the village Women’s Institute before the attack.
She died in a care home in 1996, aged 87.
Wells was always the prime suspect, he was questioned the following day but was released due to a lack of evidence.
Forensic officers took tapings for fibres to try to connect the scene with an offender’s clothing, but were unable to.
The case was reviewed by Wiltshire Police and forensic scientists using the DNA-17 technique, which looks at 34 points at a sample’s DNA. DNA 17 has been used as a technique since 2014.
When police checked the tapings from the bedsheets and Miss Brown’s nightclothes, they found semen which they linked to Wells.
It was a "billion-to-one" chance the samples were not from Wells.
Wiltshire Police arrested him at his home in Salisbury this year.
As he was handcuffed in the police car he asked the officer "are you winding me up?"
Asked if Wiltshire Police could have secured this conviction earlier, Det Chief Insp Darren Hannant told ITV News: "Once a scientific development takes place and we are familiar with it, we will review investigations to try to progress and prosecute offenders.
"Our Major Crime Team deal with live investigations which are most pressing in time. Some cases are slower to progress.
"It doesn’t make it any less important to deal with."
The case, codenamed Op Music, involved investigators re-interviewing witnesses from 1980 and rebuilding the case.
The inquiry had to bring in a police search team to find documents lost in Wiltshire Police archives.
Major Crime Investigating Officer Gary Crisp said: “In many ways this case has been about joining together the old-fashioned meticulous detective work of the team who initially worked on the investigation back in 1980, with the modern-day advances in scientific discovery.
“That said, our first job was to locate the paperwork from 1980 and trawl back through all the statements, documents and samples taken at the scene and work out what evidence we had.
“Interestingly, the police officers working at the time collected forensic samples without really realising the importance of what they had. Back then, DNA was not yet a tool for police officers to use, so they would have collected the sample in case of hair or clothing fibres. But, when you fast-forward to today, not only do we have the advantage of DNA, but our technology is now so advanced, that we could prove it was a direct link to Kenneth Wells and nobody else.
“We know how much of an impact this horrendous crime had, not only on Violet, but on every single officer involved in the case back then, the horrible nature of this crime really stayed with them. So it was an honour to pick up this case and see it through to a conviction.”