Stefan Kiszko
Convicted of the (sexual) murder of a young girl in 1976,
Stefan Kiszko spent 16 years in prison until he was released in 1992.
Lesley Molseed, of Rochdale, Greater Manchester, was stabbed 12 times and then sexually assaulted in 1975. Her body was dumped on the moors above Ripponden in West Yorkshire. The brutal killing outraged local people.
In December 1975, detectives arrested and charged Stefan Kiszko, a tax clerk from Rochdale who had never been in trouble with the law.
After two days of questioning he signed a confession. He later complained that the confession had been bullied out of him but was convicted of murder and jailed for life.
Fourteen years later his lawyer Campbell J Malone with the help of private detective Peter Jackson from Margate urged the Home Office to reopen the case, which was then referred back to West Yorkshire police.
New inquiries showed that semen found on Lesley's body contained heads of sperm. Mr Kiszko, however, was infertile. A fact that the forensic Scientist Peter Guise and his superior Ronald Otteridge had failed to point out!
He was freed in 1992 and it was stated in a national news paper that he was to be paid £500,000 in compensation. He died a year later. His mother Charlotte, who had campaigned tirelessly to prove his innocence, died six months after him. Her Estate was valued at £125,000, far short of the reported £500,000
Stefan Kiszko suffered from XYY syndrome, a condition in which the human male has an extra Y chromosome. Such males are normal except for - sometimes slight - growth abnormalities and minor behavioural abnormalities.
One of Stefan Kiszko's "behavioural abnormalities" was jotting down the registration numbers of a car if he had been annoyed by the driver. This led, in part, to his wrongful conviction - he had at some point prior to the murder unwittingly jotted down the number of a car seen near the scene of the crime. It was argued that only someone at the scene could have known the number of this car...
As part of his condition Stefan Kiszko would have been physically incapable of the sex crime of which he was convicted. Something which was never disclosed to his defence...
A future Home Secretary (Lord Waddington now Governor of Bermuda) and a future Lord Chief Justice (Sir Peter Taylor) were among the barristers in court when he was wrongly convicted.
In January 1995 Chief Superintendent Richard Holland and Pathologist Ronald Outteridge were accused of preventing the course of justice.
In May 1995 Rochdale Magistrate Miss Jane Hayward dismissed the case and no action has been taken
The Police Force and The Director of Public Prosecution have refused to publish the report into how he was wrongfully jailed.