Lesley Molseed murderer sentenced to minimum 30 years

54-year-old Ronald Castree has been found guilty of the murder of schoolgirl Lesley Molseed more than 30 years ago.

Castree, of Brandon Crescent, Oldham, had denied the killing but was convicted by a jury at Bradford Crown Court.

The guilty verdict came after 11 hours and 38 minutes of deliberations and was a majority decision.

Castree, who ran a comic shop on The Landing, Oldham Road for a period in the 1990s, shrugged his shoulders but showed little other emotion as the foreman returned the verdict in the packed court.

Castree was sentenced to life in prison and the judge ordered he serve a minimum of 30 years.

Passing sentence, Mr Justice Openshaw said: "This was a truly dreadful crime. Lesley Molseed was only eleven.

"She was vulnerable, not just because of her age but because of her learning difficulties.

"You approached her, you would have no difficulty in luring her away for she was trusting."

The judge added: "You repeatedly stabbed her. You left her for dead, drove back to Rochdale and carried on with the rest of your life as if nothing had happened.

"It was a pretence you kept up for 32 years. Your past has now caught up with you."

Lesley's mum April was in court throughout. She told the jury how Lesley was "enchanting" and a "little imp" and as the guilty verdict was read out, members of Lesley's family shouted "yes" and hugged each other in the gallery.

Lesley left her home in Turf Hill at about noon on Sunday, 5 October, 1975, to buy bread and an air freshener from a local shop for her mother, April Garrett. Her body was found dumped on the moors above Ripponden in West Yorkshire. She had been stabbed 12 times and then sexually assaulted. The brutal killing outraged local people.

In one of the worst miscarriages of justice in English legal history, Stefan Kiszko spent 16 years in prison after being wrongly convicted in 1976 for the murder until he was released in 1992. He died of a heart attack the following year at his mother's home aged 44; his mother, who had waged a long campaign to prove her son's innocence, died six months later.

As part of his condition Stefan Kiszko would have been physically incapable of the sex crime of which he was convicted; the semen found on Lesley's body contained heads of sperm - which Mr Kiszko could not possibly have produced as he was infertile. Something which was never disclosed to his defence.

After Mr Kisko's release detectives reopened the case and named Raymond Hewlett as a prime suspect. Lesley's family, including her father Fred Anderson, her mother and her sister Julie demanded access to police evidence so they could consider a private prosecution against Mr Hewlett. However, although Mr Hewlett was never traced, samples of his DNA held by police eliminated him from the enquiry.

In November 2006 West Yorkshire police arrested Castree in connection with a separate matter, for which he was subsequently cleared, but officers compared a DNA sample taken from Castree in 2005, when he was arrested but never charged for another sex attack, and found it was a direct match with the sample from the 1975 murder scene; Castree was charged with murder on Tuesday 7 November 2006.

During the trial, the jury at Bradford Crown Court heard Julian Goose QC, for the prosecution, tell them that Mr Castree abducted Lesley from near her home as she went to run an errand for her mother.

He drove her to a "lonely scene" on moorland between Oldham and Ripponden, stabbed her repeatedly and left her for dead, he told the court.

This was a frenzied attack upon a small, weak, 11-year-old child

He said: "The identity of the murderer was contained within the sperm from the semen within Lesley's knickers.

"The prosecution's case is that the semen was the defendant's and that his motive for murdering Lesley Molseed was sexual."

Dr Gemma Escott explained to the jury that DNA taken from the underwear of murdered schoolgirl Lesley Molseed meant the chances of the semen samples belonging to anyone other than the defendant, Ronald Castree, were one in one billion.

She explained the pants were destroyed in 1985 but adhesive tapes used to remove material from them were retained by the Forensic Science Service.

The scientist said she extracted a DNA profile from this residue in 2000 as part of a cold case review of the murder.

She confirmed that she later found there was a direct match with another sample which was taken from Mr Castree.

She told the jury she had to be very careful with the wording of the statistical significance of this match.

"The probability of obtaining that profile if the semen did not originate from Ronald Castree is in the order of one in one billion," said Dr Escott.