The Wrong Man review: Chilling account of an innocent man’s 17-year prison nightmare

It distils his 17-year nightmare into a compact hour that will leave anyone who watches it enraged.

“I’m an ordinary citizen,” says Malkinson, straight to camera, in the opening minute, “and ordinary people should be aware you can be taken. And once they’ve got you, they don’t want to let you go.”

In September 2004, a young woman in Salford, Greater Manchester was dragged along a motorway embankment, repeatedly kicked and punched into unconsciousness, raped and left for dead.

Two weeks later, two officers from Greater Manchester Police knocked on the door of Malkinson’s home in Grimsby. He was surprised that they already knew his name. Then they told him he was being arrested on suspicion of rape and attempted murder.

Malkinson, 37 at the time, was handcuffed and taken to a cell. Bewildered as he was, he believed it must be some kind of misunderstanding. Everything would soon be cleared up.

He was arrested for the flimsiest of reasons: he resembled the victim’s description of her attacker. It emerged much later that the arresting officers had met Malkinson before, briefly. He was the pillion passenger on a motorbike they’d stopped a couple of weeks earlier during a routine road check.

He retained his faith in the British justice system. He was convinced the trial would clear him

Malkinson was happy to have a DNA sample taken. He was an innocent man; what did he have to fear? He was also content to be part of an identity parade. “I thought, ‘There’s no way they’ll pick me’,” he says now. But he was picked. At that point, he began to feel he might have something to fear after all, and broke down in tears back in his cell.

Nonetheless, he retained his faith in the British justice system. He was convinced the trial would clear him. Neal Keeling, a reporter who covered the trial for the Manchester Evening News, had deep misgivings about the whole thing.

A man’s DNA was found on the victim’s clothes, which included a vest and underwear, but it wasn’t Malkinson’s DNA. The prosecution’s case rested on the result of the identity parade and the testimony of two witnesses, a man and a woman, who claimed they’d seen Malkinson emerge from the embankment.

The integrity of these witnesses, says Keeling, was never questioned, something which, years later, would emerge as not just a crucial failure by the prosecution, but a possible incidence of corruption and collusion with the couple, who had significant criminal records.

Because Malkinson, who liked to travel, had spent many years abroad, said Keeling, he was presented as a drifter and an oddball — red meat to the red-top newspapers.

Despite the glaring holes in the prosecution’s case, the moment that damned Malkinson was when the victim said in court she was “100pc sure” he was the man who raped her.

The jury found Malkinson guilty of rape by a 10-2 majority, but not guilty of attempted murder. He was sentenced to life with a minimum of seven years.

He ended up serving 17 years and three months, after which the parole board decided in 2020 that he’d done enough time for his “crime”. It took until last year for him to be exonerated in a long overdue appeal, following the years-long efforts of charity law practice Appeal to clear him.

Malkinson could have got out of prison many years earlier, after his first parole hearing, but that would have meant admitting guilt for a crime he didn’t commit — and that’s something he was not prepared to do, no matter how long he had to spend behind bars.

The Wrong Man packs an awful lot into its 60 minutes. It’s a harrowing account of an innocent man struggling to hold onto hope and his sanity in the grip of a nightmare, a catalogue of official bungling, incompetence, indifference and malice.

But it’s also the story of the damage wrought not just on Malkinson, who has flashbacks, nightmares and short-term memory difficulties, but on the family members who doubted his innocence and will always be scarred by guilt and shame. Desperately sad in a multitude of ways.

The Wrong Man is on BBC2 On Thursday June 6 at 9pm