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Verdict too late for innocent man broken by his 16-year jail ordeal
YESTERDAY'S verdict came too late for Stefan Kiszko.
The innocent man, who spent 16 years in prison for Ronald Castree's despicable crime, was so physically and mentally broken by being wrongfully convicted he died of a massive heart attack less than two years after his release from prison
"Nobody likes a child molester in prison," Bradford Crown Court heard, something the mild-mannered tax clerk discovered on numerous occasions when he was beaten and kicked by fellow inmates.
When the 23-year-old first joined the hard-cases inside Armley Jail in Leeds on Christmas Eve, 1975, the awkward social misfit was nicknamed "Oliver Laurel" because he had the girth of Oliver Hardy and the perplexed air of Olly's comedy sidekick Stan Laurel.
He was there on remand, after being taken from the spotless semi-detached home he shared with his mother, Charlotte, in Rochdale. When he was convicted of Lesley's murder the following summer, he still naively believed he would be proved innocent and allowed home within weeks.
Instead, he was to become the victim of one of the most shameful and prolonged miscarriages of justice in British history.
The West Yorkshire detectives who forced a confession from him during three days of questioning in 1975 are all dead now and were never forced to stand trial for the way they treated him, so the world will never know how Mr Kiszko was persuaded to sign what effectively became his death warrant.
That typed, three-page "confession", which goes into great detail about what Mr Kiszko did to Lesley, is now known to be nothing but fiction.
Even after he was convicted, Mr Kiszko was told he would only be eligible for parole if he finally admitted to Lesley's murder, otherwise he would spend the rest of his life behind bars.
But, despite the daily fear of retribution from inmates, the mild mannered 'mother's boy' never bowed to pressure.
It is testament to Mrs Kiszko's utter devotion that even in the damning newspaper reports which appeared the morning after her son's conviction, she was determined to maintain his innocence.
"Stefan is the best and most devoted son any mother could wish for. I know in my heart he is innocent," she told a Yorkshire Post journalist outside Leeds Crown Court.
"He was a quiet, home-loving boy who never went out to pubs and clubs. Most evenings he would stay at home and watch television with me."
Like Lesley Molseed, Mr Kiszko was dogged with severe health problems as a child. He was born with XYY syndrome, a condition where a man has an extra Y chromosome and suffers from abnormalities in growth and behaviour. It meant that at 23, he had never had a sexual thought.
Two months before Lesley's murder, he was sent to the doctor by his mother because he was chronically tired. He was anaemic and also diagnosed hypogonadal – meaning his testes had never descended and he was sexually incapable.
The doctor prescribed him injections of the hormone testosterone, which was to convince police that they had the right man when he was arrested four months later.
The jabs had made him sexually aroused and he secretly bought girlie magazines, which police found in his car, along with sweets they thought could have been used to entice a child.
They also had testimonies from three teenage girls who claimed he "flashed" at them. Years later all three admitted they made the whole thing up.
Terrified, he made a written confession to Lesley's murder with no solicitor present. When he was eventually allowed a lawyer, he immediately retracted his "confession" but was still charged and put on trial in July 1976 at Leeds.
In court, a professor was there for the defence, preparing to say that the prescribed testosterone injections could not have turned him into a killer. But the defence chose not to call his evidence.
The most devastating injustice of all was vital evidence that the police never put before the court. There was no DNA technology available in 1975, but police still had samples taken from Lesley's clothing showing sperm heads in the semen left on her body. A police doctor who also examined Mr Kiszko, saw that he was sexually immature and sent a sample for examination that showed Stefan had a zero sperm count.
The crucial evidence was never put before the court.
When police finally re-tested Mr Kiszko 16 years later in jail, he still had a zero sperm count. Testosterone made him sexually aroused, but could not have made him fertile.
His mother had never doubted her son's innocence, and did everything in her power to prove what she knew to be true.
She hired a private detective with her own savings and wrote to MPs, police officers, judges and solicitors to bring her son back to her.
Eventually she found a solicitor called Campbell Malone who believed in her, and who finally convinced police to reopen the case.
On his appeal in 1992 judges took one look at the overwhelming evidence and ordered he be released from prison the next day, and his conviction immediately quashed.
When Mr Kiszko went home in 1992, his bedroom was just as he left it, his pyjamas on the bed and his beloved and immaculate Hillman Avenger still in the garage.
He died less than two years later, two days before Christmas, after collapsing at home from a heart condition. His mother followed him to her grave six months later, without ever finding out who really killed Lesley.
One woman who knew the family said Mrs Kiszko had been euphoric at having her son back home, but he never recovered from the cruel injustice. The woman described him looking haunted and sickly on the rare occasions he plucked up courage to leave the house.
"I saw him in Morrisons about six months after his release and strangers were going up to him and trying to shake his hand and saying how they didn't know what to say but they were just really sorry. But he just looked terrified," she said. "He hated all the attention and I think he never trusted anybody apart from his mum and his auntie after what happened to him.
"After all those years in prison he never lost his gentleness, and he was always polite, but I think his faith in humankind had completely deserted him.
"Everybody around here feels guilty about what happened. This is quite a small town and lots of people knew one or other of the Molseeds.
"Her murder shocked the whole country and people wanted justice.
"I suppose after all these years they've finally got that, but after what happened to Stefan it just kind of leaves you hollow. It doesn't feel like a happy ending."
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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