The sleepy suburb of Keyworth, nestled southeast of Nottingham, was shattered on October 30, 1983, when 16-year-old Colette Arum vanished during a 20-minute walk to her boyfriend’s house. Her body was discovered the next morning in a field off Thurby Lane, less than two miles from her home. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled.
For 26 years, her killer remained a ghost, taunting detectives and her family with a chilling letter that read, “You will never get me.” But relentless forensic science and a groundbreaking familial DNA search finally unmasked the predator: Paul Hutchinson, a local man who had lived just streets away from Colette and had hidden in plain sight for a quarter of a century.
The investigation began with a frantic phone call from Colette’s mother, Jackie, who knew something was wrong when her daughter failed to arrive at her boyfriend’s house. “I knew my daughter so well,” Jackie later recalled. “She was so predictable.
I knew something was wrong.” Police initially dismissed her concern, but Jackie’s persistence led to a search that revealed no trace of the teenager. The next morning, a businessman driving to work spotted a naked body in a field.
Colette had been dumped like refuse, her head wound bleeding, her life stolen in a vile and vicious attack.
Detectives quickly established a link to a stolen red Ford Fiesta found near the crime scene. Tire tracks matched the vehicle, and forensic examiners found blood and semen inside. Witnesses described a stocky white male with wavy hair who had been seen following young girls in Keyworth that evening.
A landlady at the Generous Britain pub in Costock reported a stranger with blood on his hands who washed them in the toilets. Police seized paper towels from the pub, but 1980s DNA technology could only confirm the blood type, not identify the killer.
The case went cold. Colette’s family was torn apart. Jackie moved abroad, haunted by the thought that her daughter’s murderer was living freely.
“He was getting on with his life, whereas he destroyed ours,” she said. But Nottinghamshire Police never closed the file. In 1997, forensic scientist Dr.
Tim Clayton attempted to extract a DNA profile from Colette’s clothing and postmortem samples. He succeeded only in obtaining a partial profile from a sealed microscope slide containing semen. It was not enough to match any suspect on the national database.
The breakthrough came in 2004 when Detective Superintendent Kevin Flint reopened the investigation. “We ran it as though it were a murder that had occurred today,” Flint said. The team digitized over 2,500 statements, 5,000 documents, and nearly 700 exhibits.
Dr. Clayton reexamined the paper towel from the pub using advanced DNA analysis. He found a mixture of DNA—Colette’s and an unknown male.
By subtracting her profile, he finally obtained the full DNA profile of her killer in 2007. But when he searched the national database, there was no match. The killer had never been arrested.
Frustrated but determined, Flint authorized a familial DNA search—a technique that looks for partial matches among relatives. The search identified a young man who shared many DNA markers with the killer but was too young to have committed the crime. That led detectives to four brothers from the Home Pierrepont area, where the stolen car had originated.
One of them, Paul Hutchinson, had moved to Keyworth in 1983, living just a few streets from Colette. He was a married man, seemingly ordinary, but he had a history of deception.
On April 7, 2009, police raided three properties and arrested Hutchinson and his two surviving brothers. Two cooperated; Hutchinson remained silent. Forensic tests confirmed that his fingerprint was on the taunting letter sent to police in 1983.
His DNA matched the killer’s profile. “It was fantastic news,” Flint said. “We’d found our man.”
Hutchinson initially pleaded not guilty, blaming his deceased brother, but DNA from the dead sibling eliminated him. Faced with overwhelming evidence, Hutchinson changed his plea to guilty in January 2010 and was sentenced to life imprisonment.
For Colette’s family, the conviction brought a bitter closure. “I miss her smile, I miss her laughter,” Jackie said. “It’s all those years ago, but it’s like it was yesterday.”
The case stands as a testament to the power of forensic science and the dogged determination of detectives who refused to let a predator escape justice. Paul Hutchinson, the mystery predator who evaded capture for 26 years, finally faced the consequences of a crime that had torn apart a community and left a family forever shattered.
