Lesley Molseed

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.

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.

Lesley Molseed, born Lesley Susan Anderson, was an English schoolgirl who was abducted and murdered on 5 October 1975 in West Yorkshire.

Stefan Kiszko, an intellectually disabled man who lived near Molseed's residence in Greater Manchester, was wrongly convicted in her murder and served sixteen years in prison before his conviction was overturned.

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 30 ft above the carriageway, she was discovered by a driver who had stopped in a nearby layby.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.