Jennifer Kiely grew up in Orpington, south-east of London. She and her partner had three children but, after her third child was born and in 1994 or so, when Jennifer was about 24, her life went off the rails; she probably became mentally ill although she never sought or received treatment, left the family home, ceased contact in 1997 and became itinerant, walking around Canterbury, Brighton and Eastbourne (all in South-East England) mostly at night. She was looked after by friends and the Salvation Army. Her family tried continually to contact her but without success.
Late on Friday 21 February 2005 she was seen, twice, in Eastbourne. On one of those occasions someone was heard shouting, possibly at her, and a number of who were considered suspicious people were seen after the second sighting including a cyclist, an agitated man talking to himself, a running man who climbed a wall then dropped down next to the murder site, two girls with "foreign accents", two men "of Mediterranean appearance" and someone "of Eastern European appearance" who asked a homeless person for directions to the railway station two hours before the first train. Friday night was clubbing night and there were many people outdoors in the early hours of Saturday although the weather was colder than normal for late February with the temperature falling to -1C.
At about 0500 Jennifer was found dead by two council workers in a wood and brick shelter on the seafront. She had been stabbed sixteen times then her possessions - which she pushed around with her in a buggy - were heaped on top of her and set on fire. She was identified using dental records.
The investigation made little progress for many years. Two people were arrested in 2005 but released without charge and her case was linked for years, without evidence, with Mark Dixie, a proven murderer and multiple attacker of women. A (presumably partial) DNA profile of the killer was obtained, but it was not matched at the time or subsequently on the National DNA Database (NDNAD).
Then, in 2017 and 2024, the evidence holding the DNA profile - a discarded cigarette butt - was re-examined. The 2017 test plus familial matching using the NDNAD narrowed the number of candidate matches to several thousand; the (evidently further improved) 2024 test, followed by more familial matching and a targeted DNA sample of presumably a close relative, caught the killer.
He was Keith Dowbekin, who had died aged 60 in 2014. Very little is available in public about him and it is not known which, if any, of the "considered suspicious people" he was or if he was one of the 2005 arrestees.
The DNA situation is messy. It is not known why the cigarette saliva sample was used given that Jennifer may have been raped, although some accounts omit any mention of rape and the police only say that the attack was "sexually motivated". Dowbekin had escaped having his DNA profile added to the NDNAD three times; he was arrested twice in the early 2000s on suspicion of rape but never charged and his DNA samples were only held locally, and he gave a DNA sample in 2003 as a witness to an unrelated murder which was, presumably, destroyed after he was formally cleared. Matching the cigarette saliva sample with the locally-held samples (in Norfolk), which was finally done in 2024, clinched his identification.
He was also questioned about the murder during a routine check in the Port of Dover (2005) but, although he gave some false information, there was insufficient evidence to detain him.
Despite these multiple near-misses, that Dowbekin was caught after almost 21 years was a considerable achievement as British practice is very much oriented to having a large database of DNA (1 in 9 of the adult population now) directly matched, rather than using familial DNA or genetic genealogy.
Crimewatch UK reconstruction (2005 compliation of murders)
Family's despair at lonely death of drifter (The Independent, 2005)
Cold case of woman’s murder in seaside town solved after 20 years due to DNA found on cigarette butt (The Independent, 2025)
Jennifer Kiely 'killer' named 20 years after mum raped, stabbed and set on fire (The Mirror, 2025)
Detectives conclude 2005 Eastbourne murder investigation (Sussex Police announcement, 2025)
I wonder why they are so adamant that the cigarette was the killers? From my understanding she was killed outside? I see cigarette butts laying around all over the place outside. What makes them so sure this particular butt belonged to the person that killed her?
From the Mirror: ‘His DNA was also found in intimate parts of Jennifer's body, which they say confirmed that the attack was sexually motivated.’
Which rather confirms the uneasiness expressed - why use DNA physically on/in the body as secondary to DNA on something separate from the body?
The British press is incapable of describing accurately anything more complicated than a punch in the jaw but, even given that, there is something odd here.
My guess is that the cigarette had a more complete profile.
So the DNA profile found on the body itself might have be consistent with the suspect, but not a strong enough match by itself to be beyond reasonable doubt. The profile from the butt could be "strong" enough that they could say it was from the suspect, beyond reasonable doubt, and was also consistent with the DNA on the body, so linking the suspect to the victim.
Im wondering if the DNA matched between different crime scene samples but the cigarette butt was the most stable so they used that as the primary, like DNA anchor to the scene? Especially if the rape samples had been degraded by the fire etc.
That is a good point. I put across my raised eyebrow about the DNA work because there did seem to be such a concentration on the cigarette butt. (The named killer was himself homeless from time to time and, for all we know, could have slept in the same shelter at different times).
The lack of clarity about whether Jennifer was raped (if she was, surely a sample from her body would have been more appropriate to use?) is also odd.
I wonder if bad forensic work at the time is being covered up.
Maybe there wasn’t any penetration, it was just “around the genital area”, hence the ambiguity about whether she was raped or not, and the exposed semen was too degraded by weather and fire to be as good of a sample as the saliva soaked into a cigarette filter? It was obviously a good enough sample to be able to be connected to the cigarette butt, but maybe the saliva was just a better sample overall - more of it maybe? More for testing, so they used it as the primary source so they could do more tests before using up a smaller sample of semen?
They could, and should, just fucking say that, but I dunno. I just write internet comments for free.
Your last sentence calls it. There is just so much unnecessary and almost reflexive secrecy about British cases, which makes writeups difficult (far too many "probably"s in what I wrote).
If it was in a place in the woods with very little or no other other debris, it would make sense that a cigarette butt, especially a fresh one that just happened to be right by a body, would likely belong to the killer.
Edit: Had to fix that comma. I normally try not to change comments but it was driving me insane.
Great write up, never heard before, just a heads up,I swear the thumbnail picture is of sally anne bowman who was murdered in 2005?
Grrr ... I added a gratuitous image of Jennifer Kiely as the first link to stop this happening.
I use RedReader, a very text-oriented Reddit client which puts text first and images/video a far distant second. Computing like it is 2005 🤣
🤣🤭 these things happen! Don't sweat it, great write up tho.
Oh trying this thanks!
Those articles are devastating. Her mother, her former partner, her kids, they all tried so hard for her to come home when she was alive. She was loved, she had people who wanted to take care of her. There are so many people who wish they had that. Horrible what mental illness can do and that it ended this way.
This is so sad. It sounds like she may have suffered from some PPD and never got the help she needed.
Yes. There is assorted speculation that her illness was schizophrenia, post-partum depression or something else, but it can only ever be speculation.
However, people who refuse or do not seek out treatment and/or self-medicate unsuccessfully cannot be forced to be treated except in very narrowly defined circumstances.
I thought forensic genealogy was illegal in the UK?
I don't think they use it like we do in the US, but they run it through something like CODIS but not genealogy databases.
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This appears to be the case.
Familial DNA - uses large DNA profiles against a single private national database; computationally intensive; has a low failure rate.
Genetic genealogy - uses small DNA profiles against a combination of public databases; less computationally intensive but requires much semi-manual effort (construction of family trees); has a high failure rate.
(On the last, you hear little about the ~1/3 of genetic genealogy attempts which are scrapped)
Does this just mean they narrowed it down to several thousand people in the offender database then?
I interpreted it as they found an offender in the database they were distantly related to, built out their family tree of thousands of people, and narrowed it down from there.
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Lmao how can you say arresting a perp because their second cousin did a DNA test is wrong but arresting someone because their second cousin committed a crime is right?
This is a very interesting point.
The answer from a UK perspective is that:
The NDNAD is regulated, and that regulation makes a difference: there are continual tweaks to what it can contain and one very big change - in 2012 (Protection of Freedoms Act) all DNA profiles of those who had been found Not Guilty of an offence or offences in scope (and had no other Guilty verdicts for an offence or offences in scope) were deleted. The police hated that because about a sixth of the database instantly vanished.
Commercial DNA databases are not regulated, so the accuracy of profiles is not verified. And the owners only started to put up disclaimers after the Golden State Killer case that uploaded profiles may be used to support crime detection, so existing profiles had been involved without the uploaders' consent. (If I remember rightly, there was a fuss at the time because the suspected GSK's profile was uploaded with false covering details, just in case someone got suspicious and started digging).
But the thing with forensic genealogy is that the accuracy of the profiles doesn’t matter. A forensic genealogy hit is just like someone calling in a tip and saying “this guy did it” it’s just a pointer and then you go and verify with an actual swab.
That’s the brilliance of it. We’re not convicting off of any shady technology. It’s just a little tip-off.
Nobody is stopping UK people submitting their DNA details to public databases and, in fact, there was an astonishing paper (which I will find), albeit with a small sample size (10), which showed that 40% of British volunteers could be identified using those "American" databases and genetic genealogy.
Edit: Found it.
Genetic genealogy is not officially used in the UK because personal data are much more tightly regulated here and consent for the use of the data therein may not exist for large parts of those public databases, which existed well before genetic genealogy was invented.
Also, familial DNA is powerful when you have a big national database (6.2 million individual profiles) and big computers to do the algorithmic matching. (So powerful that it is used sparingly - how cases are chosen is not made public - but there are always fewer than 50 instances a year [PDF] and sometimes fewer than 10 a year).
I wonder why this is showing in my feed with a photo of Sally Ann Bowman, a different murder victim?
It's picking up the link describing Mark Dixie, who killed Sally Ann Bowman and was a suspect in this case for about 12 years but with no concrete evidence linking him to it. (As was Peter Tobin, almost predictably).
(That there was a degraded DNA sample available, which would not have matched Dixie, didn't stop the speculation - over the years there have been several unresolved cases with full DNA profiles of the perpetrator available which have been linked to Tobin, Black, Halliwell etc., absurdly).
Edit: Fixed by putting a link to a picture of Jennifer Kiely before that one 🫣
I wonder how much faster they would have identified her killer if genetic genealogy had been used rather than familial DNA.
I was trying to work that out and failed. There are too many unknowns.
It appears that nothing could have been done by any method until 3 years after the perpetrator died because the science had to improve to cope with the degraded sample. But that is a mass of assumptions in itself ...
This is a good write up OP, thank you. It’s sad that, although the crime is now technically ‘solved’, there still is so much we don’t know, and there can never really be justice, because the perp is long dead :/
Thank you. An irony is that, all things being equal, the killer, who was also homeless, should have (on the balance of probabilities) been dead. He was 50 or 51 at the time of the murder and, on average, homeless people in the UK live to 47 ...
I wonder what else he had been up to in the 30+ years prior.
For a second I thought this said Jennifer Kesse and I felt my heart skip a beat
All solved murders matter
Of course they do