My DNA could be from casual sex, says rape accused

A defendant accused of a brutal rape for which another man spent 17 years in jail suggested his promiscuous lifestyle could explain why his DNA had been found on the victim.

Paul Quinn, 51, was confronted with the new DNA evidence by police in 2022. It had only been found years after Andrew Malkinson was wrongly picked out at an identity parade before being convicted and jailed for raping a woman in Little Hulton, Salford, in 2003.

After scientific advances, Greater Manchester Police were able to retest a sample from the victim's vest top which came back as a billion to one match of Quinn's DNA profile.

Quinn denies offences including two counts of rape. His trial will resume next week.

Warning: This court report contains details of the injuries suffered by the woman

Audio of detectives questioning Quinn after his arrest in 2022 was played to jurors at Manchester Crown Court.

A detective can be heard asking Quinn: "So how has your DNA, which is one in one billion, ended up on her top?"

"I don't know. I did not do this offence," replied Quinn.

Jurors were told that Quinn claimed to have had a highly promiscuous lifestyle in his youth, and that he had had casual sex with up to 2,700 local women.

The officer continued: "You are trying to explain away the DNA, by making out you have slept with the majority of Manchester, over a 16-year period?"

Quinn replies: "It could've been from contact with her.

"I have not beat her, I have not raped her. If I had done it, I would've told you because I would've been ashamed, but I haven't done it."

Quinn, aged 29 at the time of the attack, was only linked to the crime years later, after advances in DNA testing.

He told police that, for about 16 years from the age of 18, he had a party lifestyle and would go out with friends and family, take ecstasy pills and other drugs and sleep with two or three women each weekend.

Quinn said he was married in 1996 and had two children living at home

He told detectives: "I admit, I have cheated on my wife hundreds of times.

"We have met girls everywhere, it was just the lifestyle we were leading at the time."

He also said he met some women through his job working for a landscape fence building company.

Quinn said he would never use protection while having sex with random women.

The detective said that at a rate of two women per weekend, this equated to eight a month, 96 a year, over a period of 16 years, and he never once used a condom.

"Ever caught an STD?" the officer asked.

"No," replied Quinn. "Call me bloody lucky."

The trial has previously heard that Quinn's ex-wife, Catherine Quinn, divorced from him in 2016.

She said her then-husband came home without his shirt on 19 July 2003, the night a woman had been raped.

She told the jury she had said to him she hoped the shirt would not be found near the crime scene, less than a mile away from where they lived.

The rape victim, a woman in her 30s, was dragged from the street beside a motorway embankment before being brutally beaten.

The court has been told that one of her nipples was almost severed and her cheekbone fractured in the attack.

She was also strangled unconscious before being raped twice, the jury heard.

Days after the rape, local shopping centre security guard Andrew Malkinson was wrongly picked out by two witnesses at an identity parade.

He became "the victim of a most terrible miscarriage of justice", jurors heard, before the new DNA evidence linked father-of-five Quinn to the attack.

Malkinson, now aged 60, and originally from Grimsby in Lincolnshire, made multiple appeals for authorities to review his case before his final attempt led to his appeal against his conviction being granted by the Court of Appeal.

This resulted in him being freed in 2020.

Quinn, who moved to Exeter in Devon in 2017, also denies causing grievous bodily harm and attempting to choke or strangle his victim to render her unconscious while he attacked her.

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