Manchester Evening News
STEFAN Kiszko spent 16 years in jail for a crime he could not have committed. When he was finally freed in 1992, aged 41, he was a broken man and died two days before Christmas the following year.
His mother Charlotte, who had campaigned doggedly for his release, died six months later. Stefan, a tax clerk from Rochdale, was arrested in December 1975 two months after Lesley's disappearance.
After being taken to the police station from his mother's home in Kings Road, Rochdale - and without any legal representation - he signed a confession to the killing after two days of questioning. It was a confession he later retracted saying he had been bullied into it.
Over the years that followed Stefan refused to repeat the confession despite the fact that under justice system rules he could have been freed much sooner if he had. Police were convinced he was responsible for the horrific crime because he had been put on testosterone injections by the doctor shortly before the killing.
There was also an allegation, which was later proved to be a lie, that he had exposed himself to a group of teenage girls and "girlie magazines" had been found in his car.
Lawyer Campbell Malone and private detective Peter Jackson continued to campaign for a fresh investigation highlighting a series of problems with the case including the fact that Kiszko had an ankle injury which would have rendered him incapable of climbing onto Rishworth Moor where Lesley's body was found.
In 1990 their work paid off. A police inquiry was launched and proof was found that Kiszko absolutely and categorically could not have been the man who attacked the little girl. Suffering from a condition which made him sexually incapable, medical tests revealed he was also infertile so could not have left the fertile bodily fluid left behind by Lesley's killer. The crucial information had not been given to Kiszko's defence team at the time of his trial, therefore as appeal judges later agreed, his conviction was unsafe.
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