Guardian Unlimited
For almost 30 years Ronald Castree walked free, as another man was jailed for his crime. But advances in forensic science meant justice was finally served
When Ronald Castree stabbed schoolgirl Lesley Molseed to death on a lonely stretch of Yorkshire moorland 27 years ago, he began a course of events which were to destroy a second innocent life. As well as murdering the child, he stayed silent as a blameless man was convicted of the killing and sent for 16 years to prison where he was attacked by fellow-inmates and routinely bullied and humiliated.
Awkward, vulnerable and a loner, this second victim, tax clerk Stefan Kiszko, was eventually cleared, but developed schizophrenia in jail. He died a recluse at 44, less than two years after being released. His mother Charlotte, exhausted by leading a tireless campaign for justice, followed him four months later to a grave in Rochdale cemetery, which is still marked by a vase of plastic roses. Because Kiszko had no other relatives, the Government never had to pay out agreed compensation of over £500,000.
Kiszko's acquittal was based on scientific evidence about semen in the case, which showed that he could never have been the man who killed Lesley - evidence never shown to the defence or court at his original trial.
Fittingly, it was the revolutionary discovery of DNA-tracing which made it just as certain that Castree was convicted today, in spite of attempts in the witness box to pin the crime on a third man, convicted violent paedophile Raymond Hewlett, who has always denied it.
The story revealed at Bradford crown court showed that the real murderer - an office worker at the time but more recently a dealer in second-hand comics - should have been a prime suspect in Lesley's death in 1975. Castree lived on the same Turf Hill estate in Rochdale, had no safe alibi and, most tellingly, was convicted within a year of the Molseed murder of abducting another young local girl and trying to assault her in an empty house.
Unlike frail Lesley, who had survived open-heart surgery and weighed less than four stone, this child punched and kicked her way to freedom and identified Castree to police. His seediness was more widely known at the time. His then wife told his murder trial that he had been serially unfaithful and taunted her about getting a divorce.
Lesley was abducted when she went on a Sunday errand to the local shops to buy bread and an air freshener, skipping off in her older sister's floppy Bay City Rollers socks. "A dainty little imp," her mother April Garrett told the Bradford jury. "I wish you could have seen her."
No one did for four days, until a van driver who had kipped overnight in a layby above Halifax got up to relieve himself and to his horror found the girl's body, bloodied by 11 stab wounds.
Within days, West Yorkshire police were on to Kiszko, who lived in Rochdale with his mother, and excitedly detailed his 'odd' behaviour, including noting down the numbers of cars whose drivers had annoyed him. One of them had been seen near by the layby at the estimated time of the murder. The treatment of Kiszko by a team including Supt Dick Holland, who was later involved in the bungled hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, was a disgrace. Kiszko was not told that he was entitled to a solicitor, was denied the company of his mother and a confession was obtained as he sat alone and dazed with detectives.
Three teenage girls, who were praised by the trial judge in 1976 for their "bravery and honesty", gave evidence that the baffled, hounded clerk had stalked them and exposed himself. Only in 1991, when the scale of the miscarriage of justice was exposed, did they admit that they had made up the claims for a laugh. (Unlike the original trial judge, they did not apologise to the Kiszkos).
Worst of all, the forensic evidence which eventually cleared Kiszko - the fact that he was impotent but the Molseed semen traces contained sperm - never reached court.
After the acquittal, Holland and a Home Office scientist Ronald Outteridge were served with summonses for suppressing evidence, but the case was stayed by a magistrate on the grounds that the head of the inquiry, Chief Supt Jack Dibb, might have been responsible, and too much time had passed for a fair trial.
Holland died earlier this year but Outteridge gave evidence at Castree's trial and maintained that the man who left the semen might not have been the girl's killer. The decision not to prosecute the pair, initially private but revealed after pressure from MPs, has left the wrongdoing unresolved, even though the scale of the miscarriage has been detailed in several books.
It damaged the reputation of those involved but did not prevent their promotion; the prosecutor Peter Taylor QC was made Lord Chief Justice the day after Kiszko's acquittal and the defence counsel, David Waddington, who made a series of tactical errors, became home secretary and continued to hold pro-capital punishment views.
Nonetheless, the cruelty of what was done to Kiszko has helped raise awareness of the danger of manhunts in the frightened and vengeful mood which follow terrible crimes such as Lesley's murder. The jury trying Castree was repeatedly warned to treat all the evidence including the DNA matches with great care.
The relentless work to unpick Kiszko's conviction, led by his mother, lawyer Campbell Malone and the international group Justice, also inspired many similar campaigns, a lot of them successful. Finally and crucially, it led to a re-examination of Lesley's underwear in the late 1990s which produced DNA samples. When Castree was arrested and swabbed in 2006 after an entirely unrelated incident in Oldham, the net which had been so terribly miscast fell at last on the right man.
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