Police have called in a Cracker-style profiler in a bid to solve a 22-year-old murder mystery.

The expert has been helping detectives assess potential suspects in the hunt for the killer of gentle giant Jimmy Adams.

The 46-year-old bar worker was stabbed 22 times in a public toilet in Manningham in May 1981.

The bespectacled knifeman left a mile-long trail of his own blood from the murder scene but he was never caught.

Officers reopened the unsolved case two months ago after technological advances allowed them to create a DNA profile of the wanted man.

They received dozens of calls from the public offering information after making a fresh appeal for help.

Now they have turned to a police offender profiler to try and narrow down a long list of potential suspects.

The national expert has had several meetings with senior detectives on the inquiry to try and pinpoint the killer.

Detective Superintendent Phil Sedgwick, who is leading the investigation, said: "We have had several sessions with a police offender profiler, who is like the Cracker TV character played by Robbie Coltrane.

"What they do is give us general guidelines. It is semi-scientific.

"We are working on a case that happened in the 1980s and we cannot interview 2,000 people because of our commitments to our present day workload.

"We have to apply some meaningful criteria to who we go and see, so we asked the profiler to come and look at all the facts and reach an opinion on who they think we should be trying to see.

"We can then accept or delete names accordingly."

Det Supt Sedgwick said the small team of detectives who were still on the case full-time were working their way through a list of people who they were asking for DNA samples.

He went on: "So far we've seen a couple of dozen people. They are not suspects as such. They were people suggested at the time and who fitted certain criteria suggested by the profiler and the inquiry team, for instance they had links to the victim, lived in the same area or fitted the description given by witnesses.

"Nothing especially interesting has come from it as yet. Some people have been eliminated and we are waiting for other results. We expect to know all the results by the end of January."

Mr Adams, a former Telegraph & Argus newspaper vendor, was murdered as he made his way home from working at the New Beehive pub in Westgate, Manningham, on Spring Bank Holiday, May 26, 1981.

He left the pub at 12.20am to head for his home in Heaton Road but stopped at public toilets on the junction of Carlisle Road and Bavaria Place where he was killed.

The knifeman was seen by three men just seconds after the frenzied killing.

They said he looked like the singer John Denver and wore distinctive thick "bottle bottom" glasses. Police believed his eyesight was so poor that he would not be able to pick up a pint in the pub without glasses.

He was then aged between 25 and 30, was of medium build, between 5ft 5ins and 5ft 9ins tall and had blond collar-length hair.

Anyone with any information should contact the Adams incident room on (01274) 376037.