Little Hulton rape suspect said he had 'sex with 2,700 women'

Paul Quinn, 51, is accused of an attack on a woman at an isolated embankment off the M61 motorway bridge between Little Hulton and Farnworth in 2003.

A trial at Manchester Crown Court this week heard how Quinn, 51, was finally interviewed in connection with the crime in 2022.

It was heard this was after security guard Andrew Malkinson, now 58, had been wrongly arrested, convicted and jailed for 17 years for the attack.

John Price KC, prosecuting, said Quinn “repeatedly and strongly” denied that he was the assailant after being arrested in Exeter, where he was living by then, in 2022.

But Mr Price told the jury of seven women and five men that Quinn had “incorrectly assumed his DNA had been found in a place inexplicable only by a sexual act.”

Andrew Malkinson was wrongly jailed for 17 years, prosecutors say (Image: GMP)

Quinn, dressed in a black jumper and white shirt, looked on in silence from the dock as Mr Price set out what he had told police officers during his interview.

Mr Price told the court Quinn told police that in 2003 he had been “highly promiscuous, prolifically so”, claiming to have slept with 100s of women from the local area.

Quinn told the officers: “We’d end up all over the place, going out to different places. experiencing a different night life.

“We always made friends, we always ended up in parties, we always ended up copping off with girls.

“We was at that age and yeah, I did, I admit I have cheated on my wife hundreds of times with girls that we’ve met on nights out.”

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

Mr Price said that Quinn accepted what police put to him, that this would have meant he had slept with an average of around 150 women over a weekend.  

The prosecutor said: “He said that on all of these occasions, when he had sex, he never, ever wore a condom, not once.

“If true, this would mean that between 1992 and 2010, he will have had casual sex with about 2,700 local women, not one of whom had ever insisted that he should wear a condom.

“Later on in the interview he moderated the numbers a little to only two sexual partners a weekend, meaning a mere 100 a year, a lesser grand total of only 1,800.”

Mr Price told the jury that this story of “rampant, sexual profligacy” may have been an attempt to claim that his victim was one of these many local women, which was why his DNA was on her.

But towards the end of the police interview, Quinn was told that his DNA had been found from a bite mark on the woman’s vest and not inside her.

An officer told him: “You’ve tried to explain away the DNA by making out as if you’ve slept with the majority of Manchester over a 16-year period”.

Earlier in the trial, Mr Price told the jury that the DNA evidence had also helped to prove Mr Malkinson’s innocence.

He said: “It is the opinion of scientists who have done the work in this case that, there is no support for the view that Andrew Malkinson has contributed DNA to any of the results obtained in this case.”

The woman reported being horrifically raped on the morning of Saturday July 19, 2003 after a man dragged her to an isolated embankment off Cleggs Lane.

Mr Malkinson, a security guard at Ellesmere Shopping Centre in Little Hulton was arrested after he appeared to match the “olive skinned, darked haired” description the victim gave.

He was convicted after a trial in 2004 after being identified by the victim and two other witnesses and was not a free man again until December 2024.

But Mr Price told the jury that DNA technology is now “highly proficient, sophisticated, and sensitive”, having been first used in criminal cases back in 1987.

He said scientific testing of Mr Malkinson’s case used “all the most up to date techniques”.

Mr Price said this was “certainly one of the most comprehensive and exhaustive processes of DNA testing which can ever have been done in a criminal investigation in this country”.

The findings, he told the jury, showed there was nothing to support the idea that Mr Malkinson had contributed DNA evidence to the attack on the woman off Cleggs Lane.

Mr Price told the jury that “secondary transfer” also meant it was possible for people’s DNA to have ended up in places they have never been or touched.

He said that the absence of DNA did not prove there had been no contact, given that “some of us are better shedders of DNA than others”.

But Mr Price said it was “nigh impossible” that the “prolonged, forceful and extensive” contact between the victim and her rapist could have happened without DNA being transferred.

He said: “That is why the absence of any finding supporting the view that Andrew Malkinson contributed DNA to any of the very many results is so important.”

He added: “If he was the person who had done to her what happened, it is we submit to all practical purposes impossible that his DNA was not found on her or on her body.”

The prosecutor said a result that “ought to have set alarm bells ringing” about the case happened back in 2007, 13 years before Mr Malkinson was released from prison.

He said Mr Malkinson’s case was retested that year after concerns were raised in scientific circles about that kind of tests that had been used on him back in 2003.

The result of selective DNA testing back in 2003 had either been inconclusive or negative.

Mr Price said: “When Mr Malkinson went on trial in 2004 there was no DNA evidence which could assist with the question whether the witness identifications were correct or not.”

He said the 2007 retest found male DNA on the victim’s vest that could not have come from her partner or from Mr Malkinson.

But many years later in November 2022, Greater Manchester Police were then able to connect this evidence to Quinn.

Mr Price said it was estimated that mixed profile findings from the DNA would be “at least one billion times more likely if he was a contributor than if he was not”.

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.