I WAS INNOCENT
I was jailed for 17 years for crime I didn’t commit – police are corrupt & they’ve been trying to cover up what they did
CONVICTED of a rape he did not commit, Andrew Malkinson has told how he considered suicide several times during the 17 long years he spent behind bars.
This week, as he finally won the battle to clear his name, he said of his sentence: “I was in total shock for the first weeks, even years.
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“I can’t articulate how I even managed to get through it.
“I contemplated suicide many, many times.”
He told BBC Radio 4: “It’s taken an extremely heavy toll on my person, my psyche, my psychology, my being, my soul.
“I spent 17 years on my guard against every threat, 17 years counting down the minutes to lock-up so I could be behind my door and safe from other prisoners — but not safe from my own mind.”
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Andrew had been jailed in 2004 for a brutal attack on a woman in Salford, Manchester.
Yet DNA evidence that could have freed him had been sitting on a police database since 2012.
Recent advances have now linked a 48-year-old man to the crime.
He is expected to be charged.
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Andrew served most of his sentence at HMP Frankland, Co Durham, which has housed some of Britain’s most dangerous inmates, including armed robber Charles Bronson, serial killer Levi Bellfield and Wayne Couzens, who murdered Sarah Everard.
His nightmare began in the summer of 2003 when he was working as a security guard at a Manchester shopping centre.
He bedded down on a pal’s sofa in Grimbsy on the night a 33-year-old woman was raped, choked and left for dead on a motorway embankment.
The friend would later say they were confused about the exact night he stayed over.
Andrew became a suspect after two police officers, who had earlier pulled him over for riding on the back of an off-road motorbike, thought he fitted the attacker’s description.
Andrew was convinced an identity parade would prove his innocence.
He said: “My fervent hope was that this will be cleared up soon.
“I thought, surely the identity parade will fix this.
“But then I was identified by the victim and the world opened up underneath me.”
It later emerged that another witness had initially chosen a different man at the line-up but changed it to Andrew after leaving the room with cops.
There was no DNA linking Andrew to the attack and police ignored the victim’s testimony that her attacker was tall with a Bolton accent and hairless chest — none of which matched Andrew.
The case went to court in 2004.
The jury was never told that the witnesses had criminal convictions or that one was a heroin addict.
Nor were they shown pictures that proved the victim had put up such a ferocious fight she broke a finger nail — while Andrew did not have a mark on his face.
Andrew was convicted by a majority verdict and given life with a minimum of seven years.
He said: “I was kind of paralysed. It felt like it was all being manipulated around me.
“It’s like a slow-motion car crash. You’re going through the windscreen and there’s nothing you can do.
"It was like a bad dream happening in real time.”
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As the bars of his prison cell crashed shut behind him, he faced a “horrendous” first few months inside, fearful of other inmates and trying to work out who he could trust.
He banned his mum Tricia, now 76, and half-sister Sarah, from visiting.
Andrew, originally from Grimsby, said: “My mother had her son convicted of a horrific rape.
“If you saw the newspaper headlines, emotive case . . . she suffered immensely.
"I wouldn’t let them visit me. It’s too emotionally taxing.”
Andrew’s only chance of being freed early was to admit his guilt or sit in rehabilitation therapy sessions listening to actual rapists, paedophiles and sex attackers talk about their crimes.
He admitted he was “tempted” but quickly ruled it out, saying the idea was “even more horrific” than spending more time in jail.
He stressed: “The idea of lying in this group and listening to horrific stories . . . the guys who came out of those therapy sessions looked really burned out by the experience, and these people were guilty, I assume.
“So the idea of sitting there and pretending I’d done something as horrific as that — I couldn’t even contemplate it.”
He added that the thought of making up a twisted, “extremely emotive” narrative in which “the victim is saying things like, ‘I’ve got babies, please don’t kill me’,” would have stuck in his throat.
Trapped in prison, he tried to protest his innocence, but his pleas fell on deaf ears.
To find a way to get through it, he turned to Buddhist meditation and studied maths and science.
He said: “It’s been a heck of a devastating experience and I don’t even know how I managed to get through it.
"I contemplated suicide many times. I never told the authorities.
“You’d be on 24-hour watch and 24-hour watch makes your life even more unbearable because there’s someone opening your [door] flap every few minutes.”
Andrew had a failed appeal attempt in 2006.
And he twice begged the Criminal Cases Review Commission to examine his imprisonment, but to no avail.
He finally got help from legal charity Appeal, which found a DNA sample on the victim’s camisole was partially matched to another man added to the police database in 2012.
But other clothes that might have given more definite DNA samples had since been destroyed by Manchester cops.
Andrew was released from jail for good behaviour in December 2020 before awaiting this week’s appeal.
As he was finally cleared after two decades, he blasted Manchester Police, calling them “corrupt” and accusing them of trying to conceal their own incompetence.
He said: “Greater Manchester Police have been scrambling to cover up how they wrongfully convicted me for 20 years.”
Addressing the rape victim, he said: “I am so sorry that you were attacked and brutalised that night by that man.
"I am not the person who attacked you, but what happened to me is not your fault.”
Manchester Police Assistant Chief Constable Sarah Jackson, issued an apology to Andrew, but he said it now feels “hollow”.
Emily Bolton, director of charity Appeal, said: “Faced with compelling DNA evidence proving Andy’s innocence, the Court of Appeal had no choice but to finally throw out his conviction.”
Andrew, who now wants to start afresh abroad, said reforms are needed to stop other people going through a similar ordeal.
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He said: “I’m just an ordinary guy. I’m an everyman. I was just picked up and kidnapped by the state. That’s how it felt.
“I slowly, painfully, discovered aspects of myself I never knew existed, but it was a terrible, terrible way to learn how to be a survivor.”
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POLICE FACING BLAME
AFTER the Court of Appeal quashed Andrew’s conviction, these are the questions investigating force Greater Manchester Police must now answer:
- Why did police not disclose pictures to Andrew’s defence team which supported the victim’s account of breaking a fingernail scratching her attacker’s face? His face was clear of any marks.
- Why did cops not reveal the criminal past of two witnesses who placed Andrew at the scene. One was a heroin addict and both had a criminal past involving dishonesty.
- One of the witnesses was arrested for driving offences on the day he told police he’d seen the attacker through a car windscreen. Why was this not revealed?
- Why did one of the key witnesses identify a different man in the identity parade but change her mind after leaving the room with a police officer?
- The victim and one of the witnesses were driven together to the line-up in a breach of identity parade guidelines. Why was this allowed to happen?
- Why were the victim’s vest top, bra, knickers and other clothing destroyed by GMP while a preservation order was still in place? Retesting was only possible because small samples from her clothes were found in a national archive by Andrew’s legal team.
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