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'Steady guy' hid a terrible secret for 30 years
RONALD Castree lied and lied to detectives when his past finally came back to haunt him.
"I was just a steady guy," he said of the period when he murdered and sexually assaulted Lesley Molseed.
"I used to go to work, get some sleep and watch TV before going on to the next job. Not the most interesting man in the world – but that was pretty much it.
"I was a creature of habit who was just trying to get on with my own life without having much to do with anybody else's."
But nothing could have been further from the truth.
Far from being the hard-working family man he tried to portray when he was caught last year, Castree was a murderous serial sex offender who picked on society's most vulnerable victims in order to carry out his sick fantasies.
Those who knew him in his youth describe a friendless, puny child who was bullied at school before drifting into a string of dead-end jobs.
Castree's early school life at Rochdale's Meanwood Primary was uneventful, with the few schoolmates who do remember him recalling only an unremarkable, bespectacled child who was small for his age.
He had very few friends as a boy, a pattern which continued throughout his life, and which worsened when he briefly moved up to the local comprehensive.
Castree claimed he was a "natural target" for bullies because of his size, but whatever the true reason, some of his fellow pupils took an instant dislike to him and began picking fights with him on an almost daily basis.
He became deeply unhappy and began playing truant rather than face his tormentors.
School life became so unbearable for him in fact, that within just a few months his grandfather had offered to pay for him to attend a private school and the young Castree transferred to the distinguished William Skurr Secondary.
Once there Castree was befriended by the biggest boy in the school, who protected him from further bullying. For a while at least, he was happy enough, and it wasn't until much later in life that he suffered a mental breakdown.
But his academic performance was less than impressive, and when he left school at 15 with no qualifications he drifted into work at a local accountancy office and began studying part time at Rochdale Technical College for qualifications in accountancy, maths, history and geography.
Throughout the 1970s Castree was unrecognisable from the bald, overweight and ruddy-faced 54-year-old in the dock at Bradford Crown Court, and this nine-and-a-half stone man with long, mousy, collar-length hair and a moustache fancied himself as a bit of a ladies' man.
He was still a teenager when he met his first wife Beverley, and the pair were married when she was just 18 and him a year older.
Black-and-white wedding photographs from 1973 show the couple smiling as they cut the cake but in truth the marriage was an unhappy and lonely one.
There were no Friday nights out at the pub, no cheerful Sunday lunches or Saturday afternoons at the match – instead the young Mrs Castree spent much of her married life alone as her husband enjoyed a string of short-term girlfriends and one-night stands.
"I never knew where Ron was for a certain half of the time," she said.
"There was a third party in our marriage, that was the problem. He had girlfriends all over the place."
The couple had few friends, no holidays and no brothers and sisters, and the only social life they had was when they occasionally caught the bus on a Sunday afternoon to visit his parents, Eric and Marjorie, or hers, Marjorie and Leonard.
Castree told detectives after his arrest: "We didn't do pubs or clubs."
A few weeks into their marriage they moved from a town centre flat into a tiny, council-owned, two-up, two-down terraced house on Oldham Road, on the outskirts of town, where they paid a small weekly rent of 2.
The house had a lounge, tiny kitchen, bedroom and bathroom, but the couple endured the cramped conditions because they were saving up for a deposit for a place of their own.
After drifting between warehouse jobs, Castree took a full- time job as an office administrator for a local textiles firm and topped up his income by working as a part-time taxi driver.
It wasn't until the 1990s that he began making around 50,000 a year selling collectable comics, with his firm Aradia Comics, first in Rochdale and then in Ashton-under-Lyne.
In 1994 he told reporters he had been a fan of the genre since childhood.
"The timeless appeal of the comic is escapism," he said.
"As people increasingly need a break from real life it can only mean greater popularity for comics of all kinds." His shops had closed by the time of his arrest last year, and Castree had begun trading over the internet, using sites such as eBay.
Back in 1975 though, his route to work took him through the Turf Hill estate where Lesley Molseed lived, but Castree claimed to have never met any of the family.
A year into their marriage Mrs Castree, tired of her husband's philandering ways, had an affair of her own with a colleague at the pharmaceuticals company where she worked as a receptionist. Castree never found out who the man was and was furious with his wife.
The couple split for a short time over Christmas 1974, but a short time after finding out she was pregnant with her lover's baby, Castree took his wife back.
Jason Paul Simon Castree was born on September 19, 1975 – three weeks before Lesley Molseed was murdered and sexually assaulted.
The couple had two more sons, Nicholas, now 27, and Daniel 22, but split in the mid-1990s and Castree remarried, to divorcee Karen Curtin.
She has five children by two previous relationships and the youngest, aged eight, 10 and 11, are believed to have been living with them at the time of Castree's arrest.
Throughout all those years Castree must have spent hours thinking what he might say if the police finally came to ask him about Lesley Molseed.
What he came up with was hardly plausible.
In 1979 he called Greater Manchester Police and told them he had been robbed of a large amount of cash as he left work.
The officers who interviewed him immediately realised Castree was lying and were going to charge him, but instead Castree made a complaint that he had been assaulted by them.
When he was arrested in 2005 he told murder detectives that those officers in 1979 had threatened to "fit him up with the Molseed job". He made no such complaint at the time and as prosecutors in his trial pointed out – how would it ever make sense for a police officer to threaten to set him up for a crime which somebody had already been convicted of?
Castree has never given any indication what may have led him to abduct the 11-year-old that Sunday afternoon in 1975, sexually assault her and stab her 12 times, but what is known is that he allowed an innocent man to be jailed for his crime and then went on to strike again.
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