A man accused of a brutal rape in Salford for which another man spent 17 years in jail suggested his promiscuous lifestyle could explain his DNA being found on the victim.
Paul Quinn, 51, was confronted with the new DNA evidence by police in 2022, only found years after another man – Andrew Malkinson – had been wrongly picked out at an identity parade, convicted and jailed for the rape in Little Hulton.
But years later after scientific advances, police were able to re-test a DNA sample from the victim’s vest top which came back as a billion to one match of Quinn’s DNA profile.
Audio of detectives questioning Quinn in his police interview after his arrest in 2022 was played to the jury trying him for the rape at Manchester Crown Court.
“So how has your DNA, which is one in one billion, ended up on her top?” the detective asks.
“I don’t know. I did not do this offence,” Quinn replied.
Quinn claims a highly promiscuous lifestyle in his youth, having had casual sex with up to 2,700 local women, jurors have heard.
The officer continues: “You are trying to explain away the DNA, by making out you have slept with the majority of Manchester, over a 16-year period.”
Quinn replies: “It could’ve been from contact with her.
“I have not beat her, I have not raped her. If I had done it, I would’ve told you because I would’ve been ashamed, but I haven’t done it.”
Quinn, aged 29 at the time of the attack, was only linked to the crime years later, after scientific advances in testing DNA samples.
Quinn told the officers, for around 16 years, from the age of 18, he had a party lifestyle at the weekends and would go out with friends and family, take ecstasy pills and other drugs and sleep with two or three women each weekend.
He said he was married in 1996 and had two children living at home at the time of the offence, but added: “I admit, I have cheated on my wife hundreds of times.
“We have met girls everywhere, it was just the lifestyle we were leading at the time.”
He also said he met some women through his job working for a landscape fence building company, though he would never use a protection while having sex with random women.
The detective said at a rate of two women a weekend, this equated to, eight a month, 96 a year, over a period of 16 years, and he never used a condom once.
“Ever caught an STD?” the officer asked.
“No,” replied Quinn, “Call me bloody lucky.”
Earlier, the court heard Quinn’s ex-wife, Catherine Quinn, divorced from him in 2016, said her then-husband came home without his shirt on the night of the rape, July 19, 2003.
She told the jury she told him she hoped the shirt would not be found near the scene of the crime, less than a mile from where they lived in Little Hulton.
The rape victim, a woman in her 30s, had been dragged from the street beside a motorway embankment, brutally beaten, with a nipple almost severed and her cheekbone fractured and strangled unconscious before being raped twice.
Days after, local shopping centre security guard Andrew Malkinson was wrongly picked out by two witnesses at an identity parade.
He became “the victim of a most terrible miscarriage of justice” jurors heard, before new DNA evidence linked father-of-five Quinn to the attack, which he denies.
Mr Malkinson made multiple appeals for authorities to review his case before his final attempt led to his appeal against his conviction being granted by the Court of Appeal.
Mr Malkinson, now aged 60, and originally from Grimsby, Lincolnshire, was released from jail in 2020.
Quinn, who moved to Exeter, Devon in 2017, has pleaded not guilty to two counts of rape, grievous bodily harm and attempting to choke or strangle his victim to render her unconscious while he carried out the attack.
The trial was adjourned until next week.
