Little Hulton rape victim ‘unsure it was the right man’

Paul Quinn, 51, in on trial at Manchester Crown Court accused of raping the woman, then in her 30s, off an isolated motorway embankment between Little Hulton and Farnworth in 2003.

The jury were told how innocent security guard Andrew Malkinson was arrested, convicted and jailed for 17 years for a crime the prosecution say he had no part in, while Quinn went undetected for years.

Giving evidence as the trial returned this week the alleged victim, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said that at the trial back in 2004 she was unsure she had the right man.

But she said an authority figure she described as “higher than a policeman” told her that this was “trial nerves”.

The woman said: “I said that I wasn’t sure it was the right man and they said it was trial nerves, a lot of people think this.”

The prosecution say Andrew Malkinson was wrongly jailed for 17 years (Image: GMP)

Quinn looked on from the dock as the woman said that during the trial that convicted Mr Malkinson back in 2004 she had been “naïve” and “scared”.

Pressed by Lisa Wilding KC who had told her that her doubts about having the right man were “nerves” and if he had been a police officer, the woman said he was “higher than a policeman”

But she said she could not remember who it was who had told her this.

The woman said: “At one of the trials I said I wasn’t too sure that I’d got the right man and they said don’t worry it’s just trial nerves.”

She added that before the trial she had not seen the “gentleman in the glasses on and I think that threw me a bit”.

Ms Wilding suggested that the woman had in fact been sure that this was the man who attacker her.

The trial opened at Manchester Crown Court (Image: Anthony Moss)

She said: “I suggest that you did say this because you were 100 per cent sure that the man you had picked out of the line up was the man who attacked you.”

Ms Wilding said that at no stage did the woman go to the police to say she was concerned she had got the wrong man, instead they eventually came to her.

The trial heard how after the horrifying attack near Cleggs Lane, the man had described her attacker as “looking like a Gipsy” with dark, wavy hair, olive skin and a muscular body.

Cross examined by Ms Wilding, the woman said the man’s skin was “more like sunburned than olive”.

She said the man’s accent had sounded local to Bolton but with “something else there that wasn’t, I don’t know how to describe it”.

The woman said she believed that the man had brown eyes but that she could not see properly because it had been dark after the attack happened.

She said during the attack she had scratched the left side of her assailants face which she “hoped” would have left a mark”.

Quinn, of Whipton Barton Road, Exeter, denies two counts of rape, one count of attempt to strangle, and one count of assault, intending to cause grievous bodily harm.

The trial, before Mr Justice Robert Bright, continues.