[6][7] Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway were best friends who lived near each other on the Moulsecoomb estate in the north of Brighton but attended different schools.

[16] The bodies of the girls were found in Wild Park by searchers Kevin Rowland and his friend Matthew Marchant on the afternoon of 10 October 1986.

He told detectives that on the evening in question, he had gone to Moulsecoomb because he intended to steal a car from the nearby University of Sussex campus.

Bishop told detectives he had planned to see his teenage girlfriend that evening but failed to turn up because he bought some cannabis and went home instead.

However, he was acquitted on both rape and murder charges at his trial in December 1987 at Lewes Crown Court after two hours of deliberation by the jury.

The pathologist and forensic investigation team failed to record the temperatures of the bodies and therefore could not accurately state the time of death.

Police believed Bishop discarded the top after attacking and killing the girls and were confident the clothing held a cache of forensic clues.

The police did not properly preserve the evidence, allowing Bishop's defence team to cast doubt on the reliability of the material.

He was found guilty of the kidnapping, molestation and attempted murder of a 7-year-old girl in Whitehawk 10 months earlier and was sentenced to at least 14 years before eligibility for release.

Senior scientific adviser Roy Green at Eurofins was asked in August 2012 to re-examine the evidence and recovered a billion-to-one DNA match linking Bishop to the discarded sweatshirt.

[25] In May 2016, Bishop was removed from his cell at Frankland Prison in County Durham and taken to the local police station, where he was arrested for the murders of Hadaway and Fellows.

On 2 February 2018, the Press Association reported that Bishop was to stand trial at the Old Bailey accused of the murder of the two girls killed in Brighton in 1986.

[4][24][27] Prosecutor Brian Altman QC told the jury the case against Bishop was not just based on his attempt to kill another child in a similar manner, but on "other compelling evidence."

He explained, "significant part of the enquiry had been to re-evaluate various areas of scientific work that were performed for the purposes of the 1987 trial but through the lens of modern-day techniques, DNA profiling which although available in 1986 and 1987 was then in its infancy.

This produced skin flakes which, when analysed used the most up-to-date profiling techniques, gave a result "that was one billion times more likely if Bishop's DNA was present than if it was absent".

[28][29] Bishop suggested that Fellows's father, Barrie, was to blame, telling the jury the police spent "32 years building a case against the wrong man".

Bishop was not in court every day for his nine-week trial and complained to the judge about feeling suicidal over his temporary stay at Belmarsh, requesting his return to Frankland.

At this trial, Altman argued the forensic samples taken as "tapings" in 1986 were so carefully handled by the police and preserved by scientists that he could present them as a "time capsule" to prove Bishop's guilt.

On 10 December 2018, after a nine-week trial, a jury of seven men and five women returned a guilty verdict after two-and-a-half hours of deliberation.

[30] In May 2021, Jennifer Johnson, Bishop's girlfriend at the time of the murders, was found guilty of perjury and perverting the course of justice, having admitted she lied about the sweatshirt in the original trial.

At the time of the murders of Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway, Bishop, who was 20 years old, was working as a roofer and living in a ground floor flat in the Hollingdean area of Brighton.

"[39] Bishop was convicted of the abduction, molestation, and attempted murder of a 7-year-old girl, Rachael Watts,[40] in the Whitehawk area of Brighton.

In 2005, there was debate over whether he should be classified as mentally ill.[41] In 1991, criminologists Christopher Berry-Dee and Robin Odell had suggested a link in their book A Question of Evidence between the then still-unsolved Babes in the Wood case and the 1978 murder of Margaret Frame in Brighton.