DNA links convicted predator to 1998 Beverley attack, 14-year sentence

A preserved DNA sample finally gave a name to the man who walked out of a Beverley bedroom in 1998 and seemed to vanish into time. Andrew Pennington, 62, of High Street in Rawcliffe near Goole, has been jailed for 14 years after modern forensic review linked him to the attack on a woman in the early hours of July 23, 1998.

Pennington had already pleaded guilty to attempted rape, indecent assault, burglary and burglary with intent to steal. The sentence was handed down at Hull Crown Court on May 20, 2026, bringing a long-delayed answer in a case that had sat unsolved for nearly 30 years.

The attack happened after the woman returned home from work. Pennington entered her Beverley home, attacked her, tried to remove her clothing and threatened rape and violence before fleeing when a lodger came back to the property. The lodger chased him, but Pennington got away and was never identified at the time because the original investigation stalled under the forensic limits of the day.

That changed when Humberside Police’s Major Crime Review Team reopened the file in September 2025. Officers re-examined evidence from the victim’s clothing and found DNA that matched Pennington. Detectives also revisited his criminal history, including a rape conviction in 2018 for an offence committed in 1988 in York, along with three Humberside burglaries from 1997 where his DNA had already surfaced.

Those earlier offences mattered. In one 1997 burglary, Pennington admitted forcing entry and stealing underwear, cash and photographs, a pattern investigators said pointed to sexually motivated offending. That history, combined with the DNA recovered from the Beverley case, helped link him back to the attack when the old file was pulled apart again.

Pennington was interviewed in March 2026 and admitted the 1998 attempted rape and burglary, along with a second burglary from 1997. He later pleaded guilty at Hull Crown Court on April 16, 2026. By the time of sentencing, the victim had told the court she no longer felt safe in her own home and had lived with the fear that he might return.

For Humberside detectives, the case marked the second time a cold-case review had helped put Pennington behind bars. For the victim, it finally turned a 1998 attack that had sat in limbo for decades into a conviction, a sentence and a name attached to the man who once thought the passage of time had erased him.