On the morning of August 2, 2003, there was a knock on Andrew Malkinson’s door. It was the police. They told him he fit the description of a man who brutally attacked and raped a teenage mother of two on the side of a highway in Little Hulton.
They arrested him for attempted murder and rape. Mr Malkinson appeared in a series of videos convinced everything was about to be ‘clarified’. But the victim identified him.
It is almost impossible to understand the terrifying nightmare that consumed his life from that moment on.
READ MORE: Manchester Police issue statement ahead of BBC documentary about Andrew Malkinson
Just over six months later he was wrongfully convicted of rape by a jury at Manchester Crown Court and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of seven years. As Mr. Malkinson was being sent downstairs, he said loudly: “I am completely innocent.”
He spent a staggering 17 and a half years behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit; If he had made a false confession, he could have been released after six years.
The Wrong Man: 17 Years Behind Bars, airing on BBC Two tonight (6 June), reveals the shocking failings of the British legal system and the appalling miscarriages of justice suffered by Mr Malkinson.
On March 30, 2004, Mr Malkinson, then 37, began a life sentence in the sex offender wing at HMP Frankland.
The rape conviction came despite no forensic evidence showing he was at the scene. The prosecution’s theory was that the attacker was forensically aware and wore a condom.
During the hearing, the prosecution lawyer said yes when the victim was asked if the man who raped her was in court. When asked how sure he was, he said ‘100 percent’.
The press, including MEN, reported on the nature of the attack; The police appeal wrote that the lawsuit and Malkinson were described as a “dangerous man” and a “monster” by the woman who was raped by police. More recent news has turned to the campaign to clear Mr. Malkinson’s name.
MEN chief correspondent Neal Keeling followed the case from the beginning and features in tonight’s BBC documentary. Her involvement in the case, as the MEN’s Salford regional correspondent at the time, began just days after the rape, which occurred in the early hours of July 19, 2003.
The victim, then 33, had been rowing at home with her boyfriend. He left the property and assumed he was going for a short walk. However, he decided to walk to his home, which was miles away.
On the way he walked down Armitage Avenue in Little Hulton and a man shouted from the bushes: “I suggest you come to the bushes, I have a gun pointed at you”.
He continued walking but was caught by a man who followed him for two-thirds of a mile on the motorway bridge where Cleggs Lane at Little Hulton meets Buckley Lane at Farnworth. During the attack, the woman’s cheekbone was broken, her voice box was injured, and her chest was lacerated.
Manchester Police gave Mr Keeling a description of the victim’s rapist in his report.
He was described as being 6 feet tall, with a “bodybuilder type” physique; He is in his early to mid 30s. He had a flat stomach and muscles, olive skin, and thick wavy dark brown or black hair. His chest was shiny and hairless.
Mr Malkinson is 1.70m tall, has chest hair and is originally from Grimsby. He lived in the Walkden area for a short time after returning to England after living abroad.
Ten days after the rape, the police published an e-fitna against the suspect based on the victim’s description. Mr Malkinson’s life changed when two parish officers in the Little Hulton and Walkden area stopped him as he was riding an off-road motorbike with the son of a couple with whom he was staying in Walkden at the time.
Officers thought Mr Malkinson looked like the man wearing the e-fit and he was later arrested. A judge would later recommend that the two officers receive commendations.
Mr Malkinson, now 58, has since described his arrest as a “state kidnapping”.
‘I am an ordinary citizen and ordinary people should be aware that these things can be taken. When you’re new, this can happen to anyone, and once they get a hold of you, they don’t want to let you go.
“You can’t prepare yourself, you don’t see it coming. “This is just nonsense and your life changes in an instant,” he said.
Once identified, Mr. Malkinson was taken into custody to await trial.
Recalling standing in the dock waiting to learn his fate, he said: “I looked around the courtroom, I saw the jurors, I saw the judge, and I can’t believe this is happening. It’s so crazy it’s like a parallel nightmare world. The whole world hates you right now.”
Looking back on the years he spent behind bars, he said: “I was just so scared. For the first few weeks or months, you think you won’t be able to do it.
“One week goes into the next and then it drifts away and it’s hard to describe this slow cycle of time where nothing happens for months. It’s like a different dimension of time,” he said.
“I would wake up and go, oh shit I’m still here. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could just sleep and not wake up?” he added.
Immediately after the hearing, Mr Malkinson appealed against his conviction. The objection was based on contaminated swabs and weaknesses in identification evidence.
The case was dismissed in 2006 after the Court of Appeal ruled that the reasons were not strong enough to overturn the conviction.
The following year, the top portion of the victim’s vest was tested again for DNA. A man’s DNA was found and it did not belong to Mr. Malkinson.
Mr Malkinson appealed to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), the only body that can refer a case back to the Court of Appeal, but his application was rejected. The CCRC did not consider the new DNA evidence to be a strong enough reason to investigate further.
In a letter he sent from prison to his former partner and best friend Karin following the verdict, Mr Malkinson wrote: “It’s like the walls are closing in on me. You are crushing me.
To be eligible for parole, Mr. Malkinson was told he would have to attend a criminal conduct program that required him to admit the crime for which he was convicted. He refused. It was deemed ‘denial’ and he was not released on parole.
After 14 years behind bars, Mr Malkinson turned to APPEAL for help in 2017. They took up his cause.
APPEAL requested access to the victim’s clothing to conduct further DNA testing, but police were unable to find significant evidence in the case. APPEAL later discovered that police destroyed the victim’s vest top, which had another man’s DNA on it, in 2016.
Fortunately, APPEAL discovered that samples of destroyed items in the case, including the top of the vest, were retained by an agency independent of the police.
Preliminary results confirmed that the victim’s upper vest belonged to an unknown male.
Mr Malkinson was released on a life sentence in 2020 after more than 17 years in prison, meaning he was still considered a sex offender in the eyes of the law.
APPEAL made a further submission to the CCRC after learning that two witnesses in Mr Malkinson’s case, who claimed they saw him following the victim on the night of the attack, had been convicted on 26 counts of dishonesty.
In January last year, two years after Malkinson was released, the CCRC decided to send the case back to the appeal court based on new forensic evidence, including a key match from the national DNA database.
It turned out that the DNA matched that of a man previously unconnected to the investigation and unknown to the victim, referred to as Mr. B, who lived near where the attack took place.
In July the Court of Appeal overturned Mr Malkinson’s conviction after hearing that a major advance in DNA evidence had resulted in the arrest of a new suspect.
Despite a DNA match to Mr B, no one has yet been charged with the attack. Mr Malkinson has not yet received any compensation and is currently living on benefits.
He said: “I wanted to prove my innocence and that’s what I did, but I lost 20 years of my life and no apology or platitudes about lessons learned can ever make up for what they did to me.
“The damage is done. The pain doesn’t go away. It just won’t go away.”
Regarding how this experience affected him, he said: “Sometimes I need a reality check on my thoughts when the panic, nightmares and flashbacks become overwhelming,” he added.
“I have a panic attack and when I should be spending as little time as possible reliving it, I often spend too much time thinking about what happened. But of course some remembrance is needed. I feel like I need to tell the story.”
Before the documentary to be released tonight Manchester Police apologized To Mr. Malkinson.
A GMP spokesman said: “We are truly sorry for our failures that led to Andrew Malkinson being wrongfully convicted.
“The issues raised in tonight’s BBC documentary are part of an ongoing investigation with which we are co-operating fully. We must bring the real culprit to justice. We have recently sent a file to the CPS.”