The murder of Lesley Molseed and miscarriage of justice of Stefan Kiszko: Observer, 17 November, 2007.
Mum shouted me to the front door. I knew something strange had
happened as soon as I saw the Fletcher brothers, Steven and Philip. For the
first time, they actually looked like brothers, standing close together and
speaking almost as one.
''Have you heard about Lesley?''
I didn't know anyone called Lesley.
''It's this girl. They can't find her and want everyone to help.''
My Sunday dinner had just been put out so I couldn't join the search parties. The Fletchers headed off with the other kids. They thought they stood a better chance of finding her than the grown ups because she was one of them. They knew the short cuts, the hidey-holes, the millponds and the mill yards, the abandoned cars, the tree swings, the secreted piles of wood ready for bonfire night. They imagined she'd be in the long grass somewhere, cradling a doll and sobbing. Christopher Robin had come to scruffy old Rochdale and they were putting up trestle tables and baking cakes for the hero's party.
There was no party. Three days later, Lesley's body was found on nearby moors. She had been stabbed in the back, shoulders and head. Semen was on her clothes. A blue linen bag with a crest of Tweety Pie was by her feet; her mum had given it to her for the shopping trip she never completed. She was eleven-years old, the same age as me.
Everything changed. We weren't allowed out any more. Mum walked
us to school, met us at the gates. The world became a cave, the light sucked
out. Lesley's murderer was among us. He was beyond the fence at the bottom
of the garden. He was in the back entry, flitting between the bins and boxes.
He walked the park at night, a few steps behind the last boy or girl home,
waiting.
It was hard to believe we were so close to something that was on the national
news every day. Lesley's face was everywhere, in the papers and on television.
Her watery eyes, half-smile and halo of curly hair were branded into our consciousness.
And if you got on your bike, cycled down the main road and through a few back
streets, in about ten minutes you'd be at the house where she had lived with
her mum, dad, brothers and sisters. I thought: Lesley dying wasn't the same
as if it had happened to me, was it? Life wasn't like that, surely.
Rochdale got a Christmas miracle. Stefan Ivan Kiszko, a 24-year-old civil servant, was charged with Lesley's murder on Christmas Eve, 1975. The tension and fear that had fallen over the town ebbed away within hours. Streets and parks were safe again. We could play out.
Neighbours on our street said Kiszko was a 'monster' and a 'beast'. One even called him a bastard. People wanted to do to him what he had done to her. They hoped, when he was jailed, that fellow prisoners would attack him, mutilate him, make him pay. A group of local housewives said they were going to march on Parliament and demand the restoration of the death penalty. Frank, two doors down from us, said hanging was too good for him.
Much was made of Kiszko's east European roots - his mother was Slovenian and his father, Ukrainian. Steven Fletcher told me Kiszko used to live on the other side of an iron curtain where there were forests, black lakes, ugly misshapen people and a fog that never lifted. These people weren't civilised. You couldn't bring them to England and expect them to stop behaving like animals.
My mum heard that Kiszko had something wrong 'down below'. I
asked what she meant.
''His things haven't grown properly.''
At his trial the court was told he had a condition called hypogonadism, which meant his sexual organs were under-developed. He had been prescribed testosterone and the prosecution claimed it led to sudden, uncontrollable sexual urges. For months afterwards, anyone at school showing signs of excitability was teased: 'What's up, are you on Kiszko pills or something?'
After hearing evidence for two weeks, the jury, with a 10-2 majority, found Kiszko guilty and he was given a life sentence. The Rochdale Observer assiduously profiled the town's 18-stone demon. His hobbies and interests included stamp collecting, botany, photography, playing the accordion and visiting garden centres. They seemed an unlikely fit for a child killer but such was the hysteria, these downbeat pastimes served only to heighten the enigma of his assumed evil.
The case sullied Rochdale and its people, who had already taken a battering. Through the 1970s cheap imports had led to the closedown of much of the textile industry, the town's principal source of employment. Round-the-clock working in the mills had become a four-day-week, three, two, one, gone. Now, this grisly tale was also attached to the town, seeming to drag the place back to medieval times.
Kiszko, meanwhile, went to prison where he was often attacked by other inmates and regularly put in solitary confinement for his own safety. The rest of us went to school, walked the streets, grew up and started a Youth Opportunities Programme at, say, Turner Brothers' Asbestos or Asda Queens, the town's first 'superstore'. The death of Lesley Molseed didn't scar us or change our lives particularly. Nor did it mark the loss of innocence or anything so melodramatic. In fact, the whole wretched episode was handled with impressive grown ups' expediency: a very bad man did a very bad thing and went to jail - job done.
Sixteen years later this proved to be cartoon justice. They had got the wrong man. Medical and forensic tests showed that Kiszko had never been able to produce sperm cells, unlike the man who had killed Lesley. Mutterings had emanated for years across Rochdale. Kiszko hadn't done it, they said. In taproom terms, the consensus was that the police had fished out the village idiot and sweated him into a confession. They had, after all, been under immense pressure. Ten weeks with an unsolved child murder in a relatively small town is a long and dark passage of time.
Suddenly, on Kiszko's release in 1991, each of us who had been near-neighbours to the story had to re-evaluate our feelings. We were now in our late-twenties, many of us with children of our own. It had turned out that the very bad man had been among us all those years while an innocent, naïve man had been sacrificed in his place. It was hard to discern what was most shocking, the gross evil that robbed Lesley of her life or the abject failure of the institutions we were taught to trust. As Kiszko was fed into and out of the judicial system, among police and their affiliates, how many ears fell deaf or eyes turned blind? How many of them had flickers of doubt over whether this gauche, child-man, softly spoken and gentle, might not have done it?
Those people who had so fervently vilified Kiszko now had to cope with a guilty conscience. Charlotte, Kiszko's mother, was inundated with letters, many of them apologies from those who had spoken ill of her son. She was made the town's 'Woman of the Year' in 1993 and there was reconciliation between the Molseed family and Kiszko's. There felt to be, finally, a communal healing, sprigs of goodness from colossal bad.
My dad remembers driving past Kiszko a few months after his release. He was carrying bags of shopping along Oldham Road. He said Kiszko (now referred to as Stefan by locals) was shuffling his feet as he walked and looked a 'broken man'. Within two years he was dead, aged 41.
When the formality of re-opening the murder case was announced, most people in the town were largely indifferent. All those twists and turns had left them emotionally punch drunk. Even when Ronald Castree was charged with Lesley's murder last November, there was scant reaction. The local papers have tried to muster triumphalism over this week's guilty verdict but it feels forced. The awful circumstances of Kiszko's treatment have burdened us with doubt. Why hadn't Castree pleaded guilty, knowing it might have significantly reduced the sentence he would receive? Why wasn't the jury's verdict unanimous rather than the same 10-2 return that sent Kiszko to his torment?
Whether these questions qualify as desolate cynicism or necessary scepticism is impossible to tell. What each of us knows unequivocally, however, is that the series of events that began on an overcast Sunday in the autumn of 1975 have made different people of us all.