Peter Sullivan spent more than 38 years in jail in what is believed to be the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history.
The murder of 21-year-old Diane Sindall in Birkenhead in 1986 sparked the biggest manhunt Merseyside had ever seen.
But Sullivan, now 68, and his defence team long insisted the police had got the wrong man.
The BBC's archives from the mid 1980s and court documents help piece together what happened before Sullivan was jailed for life for a crime someone else committed.
Who was Diane Sindall?
Ms Sindall was well-known in her hometown of Seacombe in Wirral.
Her family ran a well-known floristry business, and she could often be seen driving her blue van around, delivering flowers.
In 1986 Ms Sindall was trying to save money to get married the following year, so worked behind the bar at the Wellington pub in Bebington, five miles south of Seacombe.
She was working at the Wellington on 1 August 1986, the last night she was seen alive.
What happened on the night Diane Sindall was murdered?
Ms Sindall set off from the Wellington to drive home at about 23:45 BST.
After her van ran out of petrol in Birkenhead she started walking along the busy and well-lit main route of Borough Road.
The sequence of events that led to Ms Sindall's death was reconstructed by the BBC's Crimewatch a few weeks later.
A taxi driver told Crimewatch that he saw a man and a woman arguing at about 00:10 on Borough Road.
"The fellow put his hand out towards the girl. They appeared to know each other but they were definitely arguing", he said.
People reported hearing screams between 00:30 and 02:00 – the time when Ms Sindall is thought to have encountered the man who attacked her.
Her half-naked body was found in an alleyway off Borough Road by a dog walker the next morning.
She had a fractured skull, facial lacerations and bruising, mutilated breasts and lacerated genitals, according to court documents seen by the BBC.
It was thought Ms Sindall had remained alive for some time after the attack, but she died from a brain haemorrhage thought to have been caused by multiple blows to the head.
A pathologist who examined Ms Sindall's body later said in court her injuries were "the very worst" he had ever seen on a body "outside of a road traffic accident".
How did police try to catch Diane Sindall's killer?
Merseyside Police spoke to 3,000 people as part of its investigation.
The attack caused shock, revulsion and anxiety, especially among women and girls.
"Girls were afraid to be on the streets alone", said former Liverpool Echo journalist John Thompson, who covered the case at the time.
"Fathers, boyfriends, brothers and husbands would pick women up from work and tell them not to leave the premises until they were right outside the door," he said.
"There was real terror," he added, because Ms Sindall's murder was "different – it was horrific".
"[There was] someone was on the streets of Merseyside who was a real danger to women, who needed to be caught".
The attack led to the area's first Reclaim the Night march across the River Mersey. The movement had been set up in Leeds in 1977, during Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe's killing spree, as a response to police advice that women should stay indoors.
"It was the sheer normality of it that was so scary, because any of us could have just run out of petrol and been walking along the road", said Josephine Wood from RASA Merseyside, a charity that supports victims of rape and sexual assault founded in the aftermath of Miss Sindall's death.
At one point, detectives were said to be considering interviewing every man in Birkenhead.
But for weeks they appeared to have no leads, and no clue about how Ms Sindall had ended up in the alleyway, because nobody saw the attack take place.
