For almost 23 years, sex offender Paul Quinn kept the secret to himself of his brutal rape of a young mother in Salford.
Quinn’s conviction following a six-week trial at Manchester Crown Court is partial justice for the victim and Andrew Malkinson, the innocent man Quinn knew had been wrongly jailed for 17 years for the 2003 attack in Little Hulton.
Ex-police officers are now under investigation for gross misconduct, two heads of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) have resigned, and a public inquiry was launched to look at how the wrong man was jailed.
A review of the case by Chris Henley KC in 2024 found a series of failings could have exonerated Mr Malkinson a decade before he was released from jail in 2020.
Within hours of the attack, in the early hours of July 19 2003, the police investigation quickly went wrong.
The victim gave a description which two local police officers believed closely matched Mr Malkinson, a security guard at a local shopping centre.
She told police she had clawed at her attacker’s face, snapping a nail and leaving a deep scratch.
But when Mr Malkinson was arrested he had no such scratch and vehemently protested his innocence.
A day later the victim picked out Mr Malkinson at an identity parade.
A second witness picked a different male then changed her mind and picked out Mr Malkinson.
They had both travelled to the parade in the same police car.
At his trial, the victim said she had doubts about her identification of Mr Malkinson, but was reassured by detectives her wavering was just “trial nerves”.
No DNA could be found linking Mr Malkinson to the crime and his prosecution rested on identification evidence.
In March 2004, he was sentenced to life with a minimum of seven years in prison.
Two years later the Court of Appeal dismissed his first appeal.
But in 2007 a DNA profile was recovered from the vest top worn by the victim.
It ruled out Mr Malkinson but identified a profile from another man, “Unknown Male 1″, which “ought to have set alarm bells ringing”, Quinn’s trial heard.
By 2010, Mr Malkinson was eligible for parole, but remained in jail because he maintained his innocence.
A year later, the CCRC refused to refer his case back to the Court of Appeal, dismissing the significance of the new DNA evidence.
Paul Quinn had been convicted of having sex with a 12-year-old girl in 1992.
In 2012 police conducted an operation to harvest DNA profiles of known sex offenders, taking a swab from Quinn.
From this point his DNA profile was now on the national database.
In 2020, the CCCR again decided not to refer Mr Malkinson’s application to the Court of Appeal.
The Henley review found if analysis of the “Unknown Male 1″ DNA sample had been carried out, a potential match to Quinn would have been made.
The same year Mr Malkinson was released from prison on licence after serving 17 years, four months and 16 days.
A check on the police database in October 2022 showed a one in a billion profile match between the DNA sample from the rape victim’s vest top and sex offender Paul Quinn, now living in Devon, but at the time living just a mile from the crime scene.
In July 2023, Mr Malkinson’s conviction was quashed by the Court of Appeal.
He said “the system” had let him and the victim down and accused the police of a “cover up”.
Greater Manchester Police apologised to him.
Since then, the public inquiry launched, the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) has five former and one serving police officer under investigation and both Helen Pitcher, chairwoman, and Karen Kneller, chief executive of the CCRC have resigned.
By Pat Hurst, Press Association.
