The Final Card
Murder, disappearance, and the true story of the board game, Clue.
Written by Mary Pilon
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Board Espionage
As the Axis Powers showered the United Kingdom with bombs, Anthony E. Pratt and his wife, Elva, invented a game. It was about death.
A professional pianist who worked at a Birmingham tank factory, Pratt was a fan of murder mysteries, including those by fellow Brit Agatha Christie. In late 1943, he and Elva jotted down rules and images for a board game that they intended to be a tribute to the criminal tales they adored. They hoped that it would help them pass the time while sheltering from Nazi attacks.
Originally called “Murder!,” their game featured a villainous priest, Reverend Green, and suspicious healthcare workers, Dr. Black and Nurse White. The weapons included a bomb, syringe, poison, and a fireplace poker, and took place in a grand manor befitting a Julian Fellowes franchise, complete with a gun room, cellar, conservatory and ballroom. The goal was simple and sinister – find out who committed the murder, where, and with what weapon, by asking questions and using the process of elimination. Later, it would be known as Cluedo, a portmanteau of “clue” and “ludo,” which means “I play” in Latin.
Today, the game is published by Hasbro. Pratt’s creation has evolved from sleuthy success to cultural staple. The original remains a ubiquity in household closets and several spinoffs – like Simpsons Clue, Big Bang Theory Clue, Golden Girls Clue and the Walking Dead Clue – line store shelves. Of course, countless theatrical productions, and the cult classic 1985 film starring Tim Curry, have kept Clue alive for millions for close to 80 years.
But few are aware of the game’s real DNA. Behind its cardboard parlor rooms lies a surprising connection to real-life crime solving. Within its legacy lurks a mystery that is far beyond the contents of a small beige "confidential" envelope.
And, by 1996, Pratt, the game’s enigmatic inventor, had gone missing.
The Geneticist and the Unsolved Murders
On the evening of November 21, 1983, Lynda Mann had not come home.
After babysitting in her hometown, Narborough, United Kingdom, the 15-year-old was seen taking a shortcut instead of her normal route, but she hadn’t returned to her parents. Her family and friends immediately suspected that something was amiss. The police were called and a hunt ensued.
Her body was found the next morning. Mann had been raped and murdered on a deserted footpath. Although a semen sample was taken at the scene, there were no other strong leads. The case remained open, and the community was rattled, as the perpetrator was unknown and at large.
Three years later and a village over in Enderby, Dawn Ashworth, also 15, failed to return home after a visit to a friend’s house. Two days later, her body was found in a fashion horrifyingly similar to that of Mann’s, near a wooded footpath. Semen was also found of the same blood type as the sample collected at the Mann crime scene.
Police initially suspected Richard Buckland, a porter at a local hospital. Buckland, 17, had learning difficulties and, under questioning, admitted to the Ashworth murder but denied having committed Mann’s. Police looking at her case could find no evidence tying him to the crime.
Efforts to solve the cases had reached a standstill. That’s when the Leicestershire Police picked up the phone to call someone unlikely to try and help them – Dr. Alec Jeffreys.
In the mid-1980s, Dr. Jeffreys caught the attention of scientific luminaries when he was able to prove the true father of a child using technology that would become known as “genetic fingerprinting.” Increasingly, he and his lab were asked for help in confirming the biological identities of parents and children in immigration cases.
Could that same technology be used to solve a crime? It would be the first time DNA fingerprinting would ever be applied in such a manner.
It was a long shot. But the Leicestershire detectives were desperate. A murderer-rapist was on the loose.
The Inventor of Clue Goes Missing
Born in 1903 in Balsall Heath – a working-class neighborhood near the city center – Pratt was the son of an upholsterer who worked in the growing car trade. By 1911, his mother, father, and older brother had moved to a larger home with eight rooms and a live-in servant.
As a child, Pratt was interested in chemistry, but poor eyesight held back his scientific pursuits. Yet his piano skills sharpened, and at 15, he left his education at a Roman Catholic school and embarked on a full-time career as a musician.
During the 1920s, Pratt performed in hotel lobbies, bars, country estates, and aboard cruise ships, which afforded him passage across the Atlantic. Census records show that by 1939, Pratt was making music, as well as teaching it, and living with his parents. He read voraciously – fiction including Charles Dickens, and Jane Austen, detective stories including those by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Raymond Chandler, as well as nonfiction tomes about history, criminal psychology and philosophy. Among his fascinations were the gangsters of America in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as how criminals were tracked down, brought to trial and how legal arguments and evidence were presented in court.
“He was very clever," Pratt's daughter, Marcia Lewis, said in an interview. “But I think sort of to a large extent self-taught.”
When Hitler invaded Poland in September of that year, children were evacuated, including from Pratt’s neighborhood, and the Blackout began. The British Army mobilized, and gas became rationed. Pratt worked as a fire warden for Air Raid Precautions and in one of Birmingham’s factories that manufactured parts for tanks.
These factories “endured a long bombing campaign,” according to the Guardian. During the Birmingham Blitz of 1940 to 1943, the Luftwaffe destroyed 13,000 buildings and took more than 2,200 lives. Pratt’s hometown was a particular target, according to the Balsall Heath Local History Society, because of its closeness to railway lines. The war years also brought personal loss for Pratt. His brother died of cancer in 1939, and two years later, Pratt’s father died, too.
But then, Pratt fell in love. Through friends at a local tennis club, he met Elva Rosalie Hill, Lewis said. On December 18, 1941, the two were married. Elva Pratt was born in Australia but moved to the United Kingdom with her family when she was five years old. Her mother (Lewis’s grandmother) had fallen ill and Elva Pratt was pulled out of school when she was 14 to look after the family. “It was just expected she would do that,” Lewis said. She added, “Although she hadn’t much formal education, she was the one who was full of practical common sense.”
Much of which she applied in developing Clue with her husband, as they sat behind blackout curtains, night after night.
“I think that was something that helped with the creation of Cluedo,” Lewis said. “They had time to think.”
They wondered, would anyone else be interested in playing this game?
The Pratts lived near a couple in Kings Heath, the Bulls, who had invented games themselves and even sold one to Waddingtons, the famed British game maker.
Feeling inspired, the Pratts designed a prototype for their murder mystery game and tested it with their friends. Then, and now, product testing provided a fun way of working out game mechanics and kinks in the play, and clearly, having friends who had experience in the industry would have provided invaluable feedback.
“It dawned on me that this wretched old war was killing the country's social life,” Pratt said, according to the Guardian. He was nostalgic for the pre-war days, when “we lived like lords. All the bright young things would congregate in each other's homes for parties at weekends. We would play a stupid game called Murder, where guests crept up on each other in corridors, and the victim would shriek and fall to the floor. Then came the war and the blackout and it all went, 'pouf!' overnight, and all the fun ended. We were reduced to creeping off to the cinema between air raids to watch thrillers ... I did so miss the partying and those awful games of murder.”
On December 1, 1944, Pratt applied for a patent, which looks familiar to Clue fans today: a grid of squares for “moveable pieces” representing persons to move from room to room, instructions for a pack of cards corresponding to rooms, people and weapons. Drawings showed weapons like the ax, a revolver, a bottle of poison and a bomb.
In 1945, the Bulls brokered an introduction to Norman Watson with Waddingtons. He struck a deal to publish the game, but postwar material shortages delayed Cluedo from landing on shelves until 1949. Watson had brought Monopoly to the U.K. during the Depression era and aided the Allies during the war with printing services. He would later expand the business to include greeting cards, packaging, and other games.
Watson’s granddaughter, Amanda Latchmore, a yoga teacher in North Yorkshire, said that her grandfather died when she was 16. “So my knowledge of him in his working life is limited,” she said. “But like his father and his sons, he cared about the workforce, was generous and had integrity. Qualities that generally seem absent in CEOs of today.”
Maggie Graham, the daughter-in-law of Beric Watson (the third Watson generation to run the company), wrote a short play about the company’s role during World War II and has researched its history. She had never met her husband’s grandfather, Norman Watson, “but from all I've heard and read, he comes across as an incredibly hard-working and dedicated man who never lost his sense of fun. Norman, his sons, and his father before him, were all well-liked and respected by their staff for the fairness and care they showed to them.”
Graham said that she doesn’t “know for certain how it changed them as a company. It must have cemented Norman's determination to make Waddingtons into one of the world's best-known manufacturers of board games.”
Just as Monopoly, a game about money and real estate, thrived in the early 1900s and 1930s, times of economic upheaval, Clue, a game about death, thrived in the postwar era. All told, 384,000 British soldiers and 70,000 civilians died during World War II. If you didn’t lose someone, you knew someone who did.
Clue, like Monopoly, represented escapism, a form of role-playing. Its subject matter, as well as the ability to have a sense of control within a contained world, was precisely why people wanted to play. The game allowed Pratt and fellow players to reconnect with a past that was long gone.
In 1953, Pratt sold his overseas rights to Waddingtons for £5,000, roughly $146,000 dollars today. At the time, this seemed like a considerable sum, and with their daughter, Marcia, born, gladly welcomed.
Executives with the gamemaker told Pratt that the game was not selling well in the United States, Lewis said. “They didn’t really think it would come to much.”
Instead, the game became a massive bestseller.
The Pratts “missed out on millions,” Lewis said. “Of course, it was a tempting offer and I had just been born, so he probably thought it was the responsible thing to do. Of course, other than an accountant, he didn't have access to any sort of expert advice. People in those days, ordinary people didn’t. So there was no way of knowing what Waddington’s were telling him was actually right.”
And for decades, that’s how the story went. Until Pratt himself became a character with a mystery worthy of a Clue card.
“Wrong guy or crap science”
When Jeffreys received the call about the Narborough cases, he eagerly accepted.
A prodigious scientist, Jeffreys had spent more time in genetic labs than anywhere near the criminal justice system. Curious by nature, Jeffreys adored a chemistry set that his father gave him and studied genetics throughout the 1970s and 1980s, earning a Ph.D. at the Genetics Laboratory at the University of Oxford. As a researcher at The University of Leicester, Jeffreys was originally seeking ways to trace genes through families and found a piece of DNA that was “repeated on different chromosomes in the cells of men and women,” according to The Guardian.
Working tirelessly at his laboratory, he discovered what we now know today as genetic fingerprinting, a scientific method for identifying individuals. When Jeffreys was coming of age, the idea of identifying someone from something as minute as a drop of blood felt more befitting of science fiction, let alone technology that could be used to solve crimes.
But with the advances in DNA fingerprinting, using the new scientific innovations to eliminate suspects seemed less far-fetched, just as Clue’s rules had encouraged players for decades.
“Players should use all six suspect pawns on the board, even if there are fewer players,” Pratt’s rules state. “Leaving out pawns can make it harder to solve the case.”
Investigators on the Mann and Ashcroft cases crafted a plan for Jeffreys to analyze the semen samples found at both the Mann and Ashworth crime scenes and compare it to a DNA sample of Buckland, who had been taken into custody.
What Jeffreys found shocked the police.
Yes, the same man had raped and murdered both Mann and Ashworth.
But it wasn’t Buckland.
“There were two explanations: wrong guy or crap science,” Jeffreys told Radio Times in 2015. “My big worry was that the science was fundamentally flawed. [The police officer leading the inquiry] was so certain he’d got the right guy. I was really worried about this. I was running scared.”
The DNA was tested by someone other than Jeffreys and it resulted in the same outcome. Buckland was cleared of Dawn and Lynn’s murders, the first time in the world that DNA evidence was used to clear an innocent person of a crime.
And the hunt for the actual killer began.
Millions Lost and an International Manhunt
Hoping to celebrate the 150 millionth worldwide sale of Clue, Waddingtons executives realized that they had a problem. They couldn’t find the game’s inventor, Anthony E. Pratt.
Consider it an unintended consequence of not paying residuals.
Like Lizzie Magie, Monopoly’s inventor, Pratt did not reap a financial windfall from his creation.
“I know my mother especially thought that Waddington had been sort of quite hard-nosed about it when it became clear that Cluedo had sort of really taken off big time, especially in America,” Lewis said. “And Waddington’s, there was never any sort of generosity from them to say, look I know we had a deal, but it did better than we ever thought it would. Because Waddington has made an absolute killing on it.”
Regardless, in the mid-1990s, the company called out to the public to try and find him. They even set up a hotline and told reporters they hoped that tips would come in.
The Baker, The Pub, The Revelation
Something was off with Colin Pitchfork.
His family, friends, and colleagues at Hampshire’s Bakery in Leicester, noted that he worked hard but was prone to moody outbursts. Oval-faced and with a receding hairline of brown hair, Pitchfork was married to a social worker, a father, and a former scout. In spite of his stable-sounding life on paper, several people who knew him noted that he had a tendency to chat up female customers and employees in a way that made them feel uncomfortable.
When word came through the bakery that a campaign had launched to gather blood samples from all local males between 16 and 34, some of them found it odd that Pitchfork didn’t jump to provide a sample.
Horrified by the rape-murder cases, the community had generally rallied to try and seek justice for the Ashworth and Mann families. Rather than try to assemble a case around one person who is in the crosshairs of police suspicion, Jeffreys and investigators explained that they needed to assess the entire list of suspects and eliminate innocent ones based on facts. It was a large-scale version of crossing out weapons, rooms, and suspects with the proverbial pencil.
More than 3,600 samples were gathered, a 98 percent response rate for voluntary testing, according to Joseph Wambaugh’s The Blooding: The Dramatic True Story of the First Murder Case Solved by Genetic “Fingerprinting”, an account of the case published in 1989. Wambaugh did not respond to requests for comment.
In spite of the high turnout, they still hadn’t found a match. Scientists and law enforcement were exhausted and discouraged.
Pitchfork approached Ian Kelly, a 23-year-old employee at the bakery. Pitchfork concocted a story about how he had taken the test for someone else who was fearful of cops. Would Kelly mind providing a sample for him? Kelly declined, but agreed when Pitchfork pressed him a second time. With the help of a fake ID and a lift from Pitchfork, Kelly provided a sample, posing at Pitchfork.
The two drove away from the testing site and went about their shifts at the bakery.
It should have been a normal night out at the pub. Beers poured, the din of laughter, friends and coworkers converging.
Kelly, the 23-year-old bakery employee, sat with a woman who worked managing the bakery outlets. Noshing on a cob (a roll of meat and cheese), he blurted out something that shocked her.
He had taken Colin Pitchfork’s test.
It didn’t sit well with her. She reported the conversation to investigators.
With warrants in hand, they showed up at the doorstops of Kelly and Pitchfork.
Using the process of elimination with the DNA samples, Jeffreys and law enforcement were able to rule out people who didn’t match what genetic samples had been gathered at the crime scene. Eventually, they paired an accurate blood sample from Pitchfork with semen that had been gathered at both crime scenes.
After years of searching, the killer had finally been caught.
For years, people in and around Narborough walked in fear. The Mann and Ashworth families suffered unspeakable loss. Once apprehended, Pitchfork confessed to other crimes of exposing himself, sexual assault, and violently threatening other girls and women. It’s possible that the true impact and scope of his crimes will never be fully known. While Pitchfork’s arrest meant a brutal reckoning with a psychopath run amok, having him behind bars brought a widespread sense of relief.
Not only did Jeffreys find the right killer in Pitchfork and aid in his conviction, but he exonerated a man, Buckland, who could have been wrongfully imprisoned.
When Pitchfork was convicted, Jeffreys said, “I felt relief because he was a serial murderer and would kill again,” he told the University of Leicester. “And because if the operation had failed, then the public's perception of forensic DNA would have been shattered. Also, here was a serial killer in the region who knew what I was doing and where I worked and where my family lived. That feels very uncomfortable, so on a personal level, it was a great relief when he was trapped."
His revolutionary approach to problem-solving in crime began in earnest when, as a 10-year-old boy, he picked up a Cluedo game in Luton, Bedfordshire – about a 90-minute drive away from where the Pratts first ginned up their idea. The game inspired the science; the science changed the real world of crime.
And now, the real world of crime is fueling an untold burst of content, for better or worse. Although art and science are often pitted against each other, Clue’s invention and the breakthrough of genetic fingerprinting, all of which took place within mere miles, prove otherwise.
Perhaps that’s the irony of what hath Pratt wrought: not murder, but a new era of freedom. Jeffreys and Pratt never met. Yet their interests, curiosities, play, and fates intertwined, a dance between art and science that continues today.
And it was born from a desire to play during one of the world’s darkest hours. Pratt didn’t know the outcome of his game, or even if anyone else would play it. Yet it’s hard not to consider the Butterfly Effect of Clue’s invention, an outcome far beyond the 324 possible murder scenarios that can be contained in the game’s envelope. Pratt dared to play and so did Jeffreys, often against dark circumstances. The world is better for it.
In 1987, Pitchfork was arrested, and the following year, he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Jeffreys used genetic fingerprinting to confirm the remains of SS officer “Angel of Death” Josef Mengele, and his work helped correctly identify the Golden State Killer, Joseph James DeAngelo, Jr. Hundreds of geneticists are continuing Jeffreys’s work worldwide. In 1994, Jeffreys was knighted.
As a result of his work, 614 people have been exonerated due to DNA testing, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. Thirty-eight of them were on death row.
Clue’s Inventor: Found
Pratt was unaccounted for. It appeared he had gone missing and made international headlines just as his inspiration Agatha Christie had in 1926.
Tips flooded in, some stronger than others. One of the calls that came into Waddington’s was from Gillian Lewis, the superintendent of Bromsgrove Municipal Cemetery, located outside of Birmingham. He recognized Pratt’s name – it was on one of the tombstones.
After selling the Cluedo rights to Waddingtons, the Pratts used some of the funds to purchase a sweets and tobacco shop in Warwickshire. The first check “did make a difference to their lives,” Lewis said, noting that it eventually allowed the family to move to Bournemouth, a place Pratt had long dreamed of settling. They lived there for more than 20 years, managing holiday lodging. Lewis had what she described as a “very happy childhood.”
But due to the massive inflation of the 1960s and 1970s, the Clue money “massively lost value,” she said. There were also issues with tax authorities and a “long-running dispute” about the one-off lump sum payment, Lewis said. Pratt took on work as a solicitor’s clerk and, according to his daughter, he returned to making music and enjoyed reading, including his lifelong penchant for detective fiction.
The search for Pratt was “absolutely stupid,” Lewis said. “Because they should have known that he probably wouldn't still be alive at that point anyway. And they'd only have to ask a few questions among newspaper reporters. I think it was just a big sort of fabricated campaign to get publicity.”
The truth was that Pratt, thankfully, met an ending far less violent than those of the characters in his game.
The family moved to Birmingham in 1980, to be closer to Lewis, who lived there at the time. In 1990, Elva died, and Pratt developed Alzheimer’s, spending his last years in a care home. He died in 1994 at 90 years old.
Today, if you make the trip south of Birmingham, through the lush, green, tree-lined roads into Bromsgrove and into town, and enter the gates on Church Lane, you’ll find Pratt’s tombstone, which notes both his roles as “a very dear father” and “inventor of ‘Cluedo.’”
But perhaps his greatest legacy is the game still enjoyed by millions and the real-life exonerations that fiction and scientific rigor helped make into a reality.
It’s “amazing,” Lewis said of her parent’s legacy, particularly in the generation of forensic scientists that cite Clue as part of their inspiration.
Pratt was not, as the New York Times noted in 1996, “shot to death by Mrs. White or Miss Scarlett with the revolver in the dining room or kitchen, or stabbed to death by Professor Plum or Colonel Mustard with the knife in the library or lounge. Nor was he done in by anybody in the conservatory, or anywhere else. Instead, the man who made mayhem into a children’s game died peacefully of natural causes in a nursing home.”
If you or someone you know is in crisis, please contact the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), rainn.org, 800-656-HOPE or the National Child Abuse Hotline, childhelphotline.org, 800-422-4453.
Mary Pilon is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker, journalist, and licensed private investigator. She is the co-director of Dreambreaker: A Pickleball Story forthcoming from Peter Berg’s Film 45 and is currently directing a feature film with Scout Productions and Conde Nast Entertainment about French bulldogs, based on her Vanity Fair article. She worked as a producer for NBC’s Olympic team, as a story editor on HBO’s BS HIGH and is the author of several bestselling books, including “The Monopolists’’ and “The Longest Race,” with Olympian Kara Goucher. She previously covered sports at The New York Times and business at The Wall Street Journal. Find her at marypilon.com.
