Lesley Susan Molseed was an English schoolgirl who was abducted and murdered by Ronald Castree on 5 October 1975 in West Yorkshire. An intellectually disabled man who lived near Molseed's residence in Greater Manchester, Stefan Kiszko ( ), was wrongly convicted of her murder and served sixteen years in prison before his conviction was overturned. His mental and physical health had deteriorated in prison, and he died twenty-two months after his release in February 1992. Kiszko's ordeal was described by one British MP as "the worst miscarriage of justice of all time."
Evidence exonerating Kiszko in the crime was suppressed by three members of the investigation team, who were initially arrested in 1993 before charges were dropped. 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.
Murder 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. Known as 'Lel' to her family, Lesley was born with a congenital condition that included cardiac complications. Despite open-heart surgery at age 3, Lesley was undersized and frail with a reduced mental capacity for her age.
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. The Molseed children had a rota for chores and for Lesley, such an errand would have been routine (as it was for most school-aged children from urban/estate households in that era). Wearing a blue raincoat, carrying a blue canvas bag and £1 in cash, Lesley was last seen by witnesses in Stiups Lane, a pedestrian alleyway leading towards the shop. When she failed to return home, her concerned mother sent her siblings out to look for her. Her stepfather also joined the search but by 3:00p.m., with no sign of her, and no evidence that she had arrived at the shops nor been encountered since, the parents contacted the police. A search around Rochdale and the adjacent M62 motorway was immediately begun.
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 above the carriageway, she was discovered by a driver who had stopped in a nearby layby.Three False Convictions, Many Lessons: The Psychopathology of Unjust Prosecutions David C Anderson and Nigel P Scott Lesley had been stabbed twelve times in the upper shoulder and back: one wound had penetrated her heart. There were no defensive wounds, and a time of death could not be calculated. None of her clothing or possessions were disturbed, but her money was missing and semen was found on her clothing and underwear. Other evidence collected by forensics included foreign fibres, traces of dry wallpaper paste, and 379 other objects in the vicinity.
Stefan Kiszko Stefan Kiszko was a 23-year-old local tax clerk of Eastern European descent. 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. In 1970, Kiszko's father died of a heart attack in front of his wife and son.
Kiszko came to the attention of the murder investigation when four Maxine Buckley (aged 12), Catherine Burke (16), Debbie Brown (13), and Pamela Hind (18) together claimed that he had indecently exposed himself to them the day before the murder. One claimed he had exposed himself to her a month after the murder, on Guy Fawkes Night. 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.
A psychological evaluation showed that Kiszko had the mental and emotional age of just twelve years. He had an unusual hobby of writing down registration numbers of cars that annoyed him, which supported police suspicions. Investigators now pursued evidence which might incriminate him, and ignored other leads that might have taken them in other directions.
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. During questioning, the interviewing detectives seized upon every apparent inconsistency between his varying accounts of the relevant days as further demonstration of his likely guilt. Kiszko confessed to the crime after three days of intensive questioning: he believed that by doing so, he would be allowed to go home and that the ensuing investigations would prove him innocent and his confession false. Prior to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984, suspects did not have the right to have a solicitor present during interviews and the police did not ask Kiszko if he wanted one. His request to have his mother present while he was being questioned was refused and, crucially, the police did not caution him until long after they had decided he was the prime suspect – indeed, the only suspect.
After admitting to the murder to police, Kiszko was charged with Lesley's murder on Christmas Eve 1975. When he entered Armley Gaol after being charged, he was nicknamed "Oliver Laurel" because he had the girth of Oliver Hardy and the perplexed air of Oliver's comedy sidekick Stan Laurel. Later, in the presence of a solicitor, Kiszko retracted his confession. He was remanded until his murder trial, which began on 7 July 1976 under Mr Justice Park at Leeds Crown Court. He was defended by David Waddington QC, who later became Home Secretary. The prosecuting QC, Peter Taylor, became Lord Chief Justice the day after Kiszko was cleared of the murder in 1992.
Trial and appeal
Kiszko's defence team, led by Waddington, made significant mistakes. First, they did not seek an adjournment when the Crown delivered thousands of pages of additional unused material on the first morning of the trial. 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. Kiszko's endocrinologist strongly disagreed with this theory, and if called to testify would have said that his treatment could not have caused him to act in such a way that would make him carry out a murder. He was never called.
The manslaughter claim undermined Kiszko's claims that he was totally innocent and destroyed his alibis (a defence known in legal parlance as "riding two horses"). In fact, his innocence could have been demonstrated at the trial. The pathologist who examined the victim's clothes found traces of sperm, whereas the sample taken from Kiszko by the police contained no sperm. There was medical evidence that Kiszko had broken his ankle some months before the murder and, in view of that and his being overweight, he would have found it difficult to scale the slope to the murder spot. The sperm findings were suppressed by the police and never disclosed to the defence team or the jury; neither was the medical evidence of his broken ankle disclosed to the court.
Kiszko gave evidence that, in July 1975, he had become ill and was admitted to Birch Hill Hospital, where he was given a blood transfusion. In August, he was transferred to a Manchester hospital and diagnosed as anaemic along with what he understood was a "hormone deficiency" (which was in fact Klinefelter syndrome).Rochdale Observer – 14 November 2007 Kiszko agreed to injections to rectify the latter problem and was discharged in September. He said correctly that he had never met Lesley and therefore could not have murdered her, and he claimed he was tending to his father's grave with his aunt at the time of the murder, before visiting a garden centre and then going home. When asked why he had confessed, Kiszko replied, "I started to tell these lies and they seemed to please them and the pressure was off as far as I was concerned. I thought if I admitted what I did to the police they would check out what I had said, find it untrue and would then let me go."
Kiszko's conviction was secured by a 10–2 majority verdict on 21 July 1976 after five hours and thirty-five minutes of deliberation. He was given a life sentence for committing Lesley's murder. 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". The evidence given by Hind was read out in court. Park said that Buckley's "[s]harp eyes set this train of inquiry into motion". He also praised the police officers involved in the case "for their great skill in bringing to justice the person responsible for this dreadful crime and their expertise in sifting through masses of material", adding, "I would like all the officers responsible for the result to be specially commended and these observations conveyed to the Chief Constable." DS John Akeroyd and DS Holland were singled out for praise.
Sheila Buckley, whose daughter Maxine played a major part in securing Kiszko's conviction, criticised the police for not arresting Kiszko earlier and told the Manchester Evening News that "My daughter had a nightmare life until this monster was arrested. He frightened several local girls in his campaign of terror."Manchester Evening News, page 4 - 22 July 1976 Even Albert Wright, Kiszko's solicitor, thought that his client was guilty but that it was a case of diminished responsibility and that he should not have been convicted of murder.
After a month in Armley Gaol, Kiszko was transferred to Wakefield Prison and immediately placed on Rule 43, a segregation policy to protect prisoners from other inmates, as in the eyes of the law, he was now a convicted sex offender. 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. The appeal is dismissed."
Time in prison Attacks After his conviction, Kiszko was hated by most inmates, receiving multiple taunts and death threats in the first months after his conviction. He was physically attacked on four occasions. The first was on 24 August 1976, one day after being transferred to Wakefield Prison, when he was set upon in his cell by five prisoners who stole his watch, smashed up his radio, cut his mouth and injured both his knee and ankle. The attackers said they did it for Lesley and her family.Delusions of Innocence: The Tragic Case of Stefan Kiszko – Page 22.The Innocents – How justice failed Kiszko and Lesley Molseed – page 205 On 11 May 1977, he was hit over the head with a mop handle, leaving Kiszko in need of 17 stitches to a head wound.The Rochdale Observer 04 Apr 1992, Sat ·Page 9 In December 1978, he was punched once in the face by a prisoner in an unprovoked attack while in the prison chapel.The Innocents – How justice failed Kiszko and Lesley Molseed – page 234
In March 1981, Kiszko was again punched in the face by a prisoner in an unprovoked attack while in the prison yard, but this time Kiszko retaliated. Blows were exchanged and the two had to be separated by guards. Both men were given a loss of privileges for 28 days. On each occasion, the attacks on Kiszko earned him no sympathy from prisoners or guards because of the crime for which he had been jailed.
Mental illness