Innocents: A Compelling True Crime Account of a Wrongful Conviction and a Killer Unpunished

by Jonathan Rose

Lesley Molseed was eleven when she was killed in 1975. For sixteen years Stefan Kiszko served a prison sentence having been wrongly convicted of her murder by police anxious to find a culprit.

English justice catastrophically failed little Lesley Molseed and her family even though, at the trial of the man wrongly suspected of killing her, the finest barristers of the day were in court. One would go on to become Home Secretary, the other Lord Chief Justice at a time when Stefan Kiszko was serving a sixteen-year sentence and suffering unimaginable torment in prison as his mother and aunt and a small team of loyal supporters sought to overturn the miscarriage of justice. Their eventual success was followed by tragedy as first Stefan, then his mother died premature deaths, exhausted by their fight to have him proclaimed innocent. Further tragedy affected the families of other children, criminally abused by Lesley’s unpunished killer. Justice repeatedly failed the Innocents – and this is the story of that failure.

Genres: True Crime, Crime

455 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 1997

About the author

Jonathan Rose is the William R. Kenan Professor of History at Drew University. His fields of study are British history, intellectual history and the history of the book. He served as the founding president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, and as the president of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association. His The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, won the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History, the Longman-History Today Historical Book of the Year Prize and the British Council Prize. He is co-editor of Book History, which won the Council of Editors of Learned Journals award for the Best New Journal of 1999. He held visiting appointments at the University of Cambridge and Princeton University and he reviews books for the The Times Literary Supplement and the Daily Telegraph.

Reviews

[Ken Howard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the almost unbelievable story of the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history. Please read