A 70-year-old man has been found guilty of the murder of 86-year-old woman in 2013 after new DNA was found on her nail clippings.
Una Crown was found with her throat cut, stab wounds to her chest and her clothing set on fire in her bungalow in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, on January 13 2013.
Police did not initially consider the retired postmistress’s death as suspicious and there was a two-day delay in preserving the scene due to a ‘grave error of judgment’.
Former kitchen installer David Newton, of Magazine Close in Wisbech, was found guilty of her murder after thinking he had got away with it for more than a decade.
It is not fully understood why he went to the victim’s home, but the prosecution said he had been pestering elderly women for money on the phone the night of her death.
Money was missing from Mrs Crown’s handbag and Newton was ‘spending freely’ on fruit machine at a local men’s club the day Ms Crown was found, John Price, prosecuting, said.
New forensic testing was able to show his DNA beneath her fingernails
Detective Superintendent Iain Moor of Cambridgeshire Police said afterwards that ‘mistakes were made during the initial investigation in 2013, for which we have apologised to Una’s family’.
He said: ‘Vital evidence was retained from the 2013 crime scene, in the form of DNA under the fingernails of Una Crown’s right hand.
‘It was through pioneering new techniques, testing for male DNA only, that gave the evidence breakthrough which has been so crucial.
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‘For more than a decade he thought he had gotten away with this most horrendous crime, but today’s result shows you cannot hide forever.’
Mr Moor said he hoped that the guilty verdict ‘gives Una’s family the closure they deserve and the answers they have longed for’.
He added: ‘My thoughts are very much with them at this time.’
Mrs Crown’s body was found in her hallway by John Payne, the husband of her niece Judith Payne, who had driven to collect her to take her for Sunday lunch at their house.
Mr Price said the reason why Newton ‘went to her house on that night and as to why he then did to her what he did, these are not matters that the prosecution need prove’.
Newton is to be sentenced by judge Mr Justice Neil Garnham.
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