Searchable abstracts of presentations at key conferences in endocrinology
Endocrine Abstracts (2011) 25 SE1.4

The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.


I live in Umbria and have recently become concerned for the young couple, Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, convicted of the horrific murder in Perugia on November 1st 2007 of English student Meredith Kercher, They were supposedly acting with an Ivorian, Rudy Guede, who was tried and convicted separately.

I am still haunted by a wrongful conviction half a lifetime ago, which involved the murder of 11-year old Lesley Susan Molseed. Just before Christmas 1975, two police inspectors visited me and said they believed the killer was Stefan Ivan Kiszko, a 25-year old Klinefelter's patient I was treating. They asked casually if such a man could produce sperm. Seven months later I was called to Kiszko's trial in Leeds, but was never cross-examined. The Defence lawyers wanted him to plead diminished responsibility from testosterone-induced aggression.

The vital evidence suppressed by the police was that semen stains on Lesley Molseed's clothes contained sperm heads. Kiszko always denied the crime, and fourteen years later the reviewing authorities presented me with the suppressed evidence. As a result Kiszko, now schizophrenic, was eventually released; six months later, aged 41, he died of a heart attack. Meanwhile his defence barrister had become Home Secretary; and the prosecuting barrister Lord Chief Justice. The case was described by one MP as “the worst miscarriage of justice of all time”. The real culprit, taxi driver Ronald Castree (strange coincidence that), was convicted on DNA evidence in November 2007.

I shall present parallels between the two cases. Kiszko was an outsider, deprived of legal representation and sleep, and was coerced into confessing to the crime after two days of intensive questioning. His conviction was supported by false witnesses, exculpatory evidence was ignored, and the tabloid press had a field day. And the cases share willful legal seminal omissions.

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