Man found guilty of rape after Andrew Malkinson served 17 years for his crime

A man has been found guilty of rape after another man wrongfully served 17 years for the crime.

In 2003, a young mother was dragged into bushes on an embankment next to the M61 motorway in Salford, Greater Manchester, in the early hours and beaten, choked and raped.

Security guard Andrew Malkinson was wrongly picked out at an identity parade. He was convicted and handed a life sentence with a minimum term of seven years in 2004, but stayed in jail for another decade because he maintained his innocence.

On Friday, a jury at Manchester Crown Court found Paul Quinn, 52, guilty of the rape.

Mr Malkinson said after Quinn was convicted: "I am content that the right result has finally been achieved for the victim, myself and the public. But the truth is that if the police had acted as they should have done, Paul Quinn could have been caught a long time ago.

"Instead, they wanted a quick conviction and I was a handy patsy forced to spend over 17 years in prison for his horrific crime.

"All those responsible for allowing this dangerous man to wander free whilst I was locked up must now be held to account."

Quinn's DNA had only made it into the system after police began retrospectively collecting samples from convicted sex offenders - as a 16-year-old in the 1990s, Quinn had been convicted of raping a 12-year-old girl.

At the time of the 2003 rape, Quinn had lived not far from the scene in Little Hulton, Salford.

Armed with Quinn's name, police launched a massive operation to build up a picture of his life, spanning the decades from his time in Salford to his new home in Exeter.

Father-of-six could offer no explanation to police for the presence of his DNA other than that he had been "highly promiscuous" in 2003, implying, according to the prosecution, that the victim may have been one of his many sexual partners.

He has other convictions for sexual offences and violence, and police say there is a "distinct possibility" he has committed others.

"A despicable, dangerous, disturbing character," is how Detective Chief Superintendent Rebecca McKendrick, the senior investigating officer for Greater Manchester Police, described Quinn.

"He was not only able to commit an extremely violent sexual attack in 2003 but was then able to sit back, live his life, have more children, carry on working, do all of those things knowing that Mr Malkinson is in prison for the offence that he committed."

Mr Malkinson, from Grimsby, North East Lincolnshire, applied for his case to be referred for appeal by the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) on two occasions, but was turned down.

Now aged 60, Mr Malkinson was released from prison in December 2020 and his conviction was finally quashed by the Court of Appeal in 2023 after DNA evidence from the victim's vest top linked another man - Quinn - to the crime with a billion-to-one match in 2022.

On Friday, Quinn was convicted of two counts of rape - causing grievous bodily harm and attempting to choke or strangle his victim to render her unconscious while he carried out the attack - after a six-week trial at Manchester Crown Court.

'Missed opportunities to catch Quinn'

A public inquiry is now under way after a 2024 review found failings that could have exonerated Mr Malkinson a decade before he was eventually released from prison as further fallout from the case continues.

James Burley, who led the law charity APPEAL's investigation into Mr Malkinson's wrongful conviction, said: "We welcome the conviction of the true perpetrator of this appalling crime for which Andrew Malkinson spent over 17 years wrongly imprisoned.

"However, the grim reality is that Paul Quinn could have been caught years ago and certainly back in 2012, when his DNA was uploaded to the national database.

"By that point, the authorities had for some years had a searchable DNA profile recovered from the victim's clothing which did not match Mr Malkinson.

"Yet neither Greater Manchester Police nor the Criminal Cases Review Commission bothered to arrange a further search of the database until 2022, when APPEAL had presented further DNA evidence supporting Mr Malkinson's innocence.

"As a consequence, Mr Malkinson spent a further 8 years wrongly imprisoned whilst a violent offender lived freely. New periodic DNA searching rules must be brought in to ensure this situation is never repeated."

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The charity urged to disallow prosecutions based solely on unsupported eyewitness identification evidence in the future.

There was no DNA evidence linking Mr Malkinson to the crime, and when the victim gave evidence against him in 2003, she had doubts she had picked out the right man, but police dismissed this as "just trial nerves".

Five former Greater Manchester Police officers and one currently serving with the force are under investigation by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), with both the chair and chief executive of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) having resigned.

(c) Sky News 2026: Man found guilty of rape after Andrew Malkinson served 17 years for his crime