Murder of Lesley Molseed
His mental and physical health had deteriorated in prison, and he died twenty-two months after his release in February 1992 – before he could collect the money owed to him for his wrongful conviction.
In 2006, a DNA match led to Ronald Castree being charged with Molseed's murder; he was convicted the following year and sentenced to life imprisonment.
[3][4] Lesley Molseed was born on 14 August 1964 and lived with her family – mother April, stepfather Danny, and three siblings – at 11 Delamere Road, Rochdale, Greater Manchester, part of the Turf Hill council estate.
[5] On the early afternoon of Sunday 5 October 1975, Lesley was sent by her mother to a local shop on nearby Ansdell Road to buy bread and air-freshener.
Three days later, around 08:00 on 8 October, Lesley's body was found next to a remote section of the TransPennine railway near Rishworth Moor in West Yorkshire.
Lying face down in tall grass on a natural turf shelf 30 ft (9 m) above the carriageway, she was discovered by a driver who had stopped in a nearby layby.
His father, Iwan Kiszko, had emigrated from Soviet Ukraine and his mother, Charlotte (née Slavič), from Yugoslavia (modern-day Slovenia) after the Second World War, with both parents working in the cotton mills of Rochdale.
West Yorkshire Police quickly formed the view that Kiszko matched their idea of the likely killer, even though he had never been in trouble with the law and had no social life beyond his mother and aunt.
Acting upon the teenage girls' information and their suspicions of Kiszko's idiosyncratic lifestyle – and having allegedly found girlie magazines and a bag of sweets in his car – police arrested him on 21 December 1975.
Then there was the inconsistent defence of diminished responsibility which Kiszko never authorised, on the grounds that the testosterone he was receiving for his hypogonadism might have made him behave unusually.
The judge praised the three teenage girls who had made the exposure claims, Buckley in particular, for their "bravery and honesty" in giving evidence in court and their "sharp observations".
Kiszko launched an appeal, but it was dismissed on 25 May 1978 when Lord Justice Bridge said "We can find no grounds whatsoever to condemn the jury's verdict of murder as in any way unsafe or unsatisfactory.
From late 1979 onwards, he developed signs of schizophrenia and began to have delusions, one for example being that he was the victim of a plot to incarcerate an innocent tax office employee so the effects of imprisonment would be tested on him.
In 1982, he claimed that his parents had a tape recorder hidden in the kitchen and made him sing after turning it on, later selling the songs to Barry Manilow to make money out of his talent.
In April 1983, he was informed that eligibility for parole required an admission of guilt: if he continued to deny murdering Lesley, he would spend the rest of his life behind bars.
In February 1990, the Home Office privately disclosed that Kiszko's first parole hearing would take place in December 1992, by which time he would have served seventeen years in custody.
Kiszko's mother continued to profess her son's innocence, but was ignored and stonewalled both by politicians, including her local MP Cyril Smith and Prime Ministers James Callaghan (from 1976 to 1979) and Margaret Thatcher (from 1979 to 1990), and by the legal system.
Waddington resigned as Home Secretary in November 1990 to take up a peerage and to serve as Leader of the House of Lords; he was replaced by Kenneth Baker.
In February 1991, and with the help of a private detective named Peter Jackson, Malone finally convinced the Home Office to reopen the case, which was then referred back to West Yorkshire Police.
[17] Also that month, the four girls — now aged 27, 28, 31 and 33 — who were involved in the trial admitted that the evidence they had given which had led to Kiszko's arrest and conviction was false, and that they had lied for "a laugh" and because "at the time it was funny".
A decision was made by the prosecuting authorities for a senior police officer to caution Hind and Burke for the criminal offence that each had undoubtedly committed.
Dick Holland, the surviving senior officer in charge of the original investigation, said: "Words can't express the regret I feel for the family and for Kiszko, now [that] it has turned out he is innocent.
He bought a new car (a silver Ford Sierra) and drove it on short journeys to the shops, Morrisons or garden centres, or to visit relatives,[22] but other people's apologies for what had happened, encouragement and support seemed to frighten him.
[27] In 1994, the surviving senior officer in charge of the original investigation, Detective Superintendent Dick Holland, and the retired forensic scientist who had worked on the case, Ronald Outteridge, were formally charged with "doing acts tending to pervert the course of justice" by allegedly suppressing evidence in Kiszko's favour, namely the results of scientific tests on semen taken from the victim's body and from the accused.
[17][31] Ronald Castree (born 18 October 1953 in Littleborough, near Rochdale), a Shaw and Crompton comic book dealer,[32][33] was charged with murder and made his first court appearance on 7 November 2006, where he was remanded in custody.
Originally from the Turf Hill estate of Rochdale,[27] Castree lived in nearby Shaw and Crompton and was a taxi driver for many years.
Forensic expert Gemma Escott explained to Bradford Crown Court the chances of the semen samples belonging to anyone other than Castree were one in a billion.
In the Channel 4 television series Red Riding, the character of Michael Myshkin is based on Kiszko, being a simple-minded immigrant who is coerced into confessing the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl.
The satirical animated series Monkey Dust featured Ivan Dobsky, a character similar to Kiszko, being a simple-minded man convicted of murder after being tortured by police.
[42] In February 2003, a television appeal for new information was made by Detective Chief Superintendent Max McLean of West Yorkshire Police on the BBC One programme Crimewatch, publicly announcing the existence of a DNA profile of the killer for the first time, but no new leads were forthcoming.
