A former soldier who raped and killed a 15-year-old girl in 1976 has been jailed after an innocent man served six years for the same crime.
Stephen Hough, 58, was sentenced today to 12 years for the manslaughter of Janet Commins in Flint, north Wales, after DNA evidence proved he was the real killer.
Noel Jones, who was originally convicted of killing Janet, is now expected to be formally cleared. Mr Jones, then an illiterate 18-year-old scrap dealer, told Mold crown court in north Wales that he had been browbeaten into signing a confession.
Mr Justice Clive Lewis told Hough: “You have shown no remorse whatsoever for what you did to that young girl. You must have thought you had avoided responsibility for your crimes.
“This offence involved a particularly vulnerable victim, a 15-year-old girl, forcibly raped. You held her face down, she was unable to breathe and she died.”
Advertisement
Hough was arrested after North Wales police carried out a cold case review expecting to find DNA from another man alleged to have been Mr Jones’s accomplice. Instead they found no evidence that Mr Jones or anyone else had been involved in Janet’s death.
Hough denied knowing Janet or Mr Jones and said he had no idea how his DNA had been in the sample taken from her body. He was cleared of an alternative charge of murder.
Relatives of the dead girl watched from the public gallery during the sentencing hearing, although Janet’s mother Eileen, her only surviving parent, was too upset to attend court.
Janet’s uncle, Derek Ierston, who identified her body, said in a victim impact statement that the lives of Janet’s parents had been “torn apart and changed forever” by her death.
Her father, Ted, died prematurely having “lost interest in life” due to the “unspeakable grief” he suffered, Mr Ierston said.
Advertisement
He added: “I recall vividly going out that cold, miserable, January winter’s night searching for Janet.
“The worst experience of my life was seeing Janet lying there so vulnerable and lifeless. I couldn’t sleep for weeks after.
“The police investigation in 1976 seemed to me to be shoddy. After police arrested Noel Jones they showed no interest in dealing with anything else. Anything else as a family we put forward was dismissed.”
North Wales Police are under investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) over how they handled the investigation.
Janet, described as timid and shy, vanished on her way home from seeing friends at a local swimming pool. Her body was found in a thicket four days later by children playing hide and seek.
Advertisement
Hough, then 16, was among dozens of young men questioned by police. He told police that he had been siphoning petrol on the night that Janet vanished and was fined £5.
He later joined the army but was dismissed after being convicted of assaulting a hotel receptionist. He was strangling the woman in a toilet cubicle when he was disturbed. He was jailed for five years when forensic evidence linked him to the crime.