TWELVE months after he walked to freedom from a prison cell, media tycoon Owen Oyston has still not been seen in public.

Before Christmas The Citizen speculated that despite widespread public acceptance that he was probably innocent of a rape charge for which he was jailed for six years, he could not face a return to public life and his old flamboyant ways.

Our forecast has been uncannily accurate. His chair in the directors' box at Blackpool Football Club remains empty. Only twice has he been seen at Oyston Mill, the Strand Road offices in Preston of his Lancashire Life and Cheshire Life glossy magazines.

Apart from being glimpsed in talks with MPs at Westminster, "The Man in the Big Hat", who is still on parole, has disappeared from view.

Even when his beloved Blackpool FC were drawn in an FA Cup tie against Arsenal, he stayed away.

Once described by Esquire magazine as having "more front than Blackpool", he seems rarely to venture beyond the vast estate around Claughton Hall, the family's manor house outside Lancaster.

After three and a half years inside, Oyston won a ground-breaking legal battle to be released on parole without admitting his guilt. He was collected by his resourceful wife Vicki as a cold December dawn broke over Wealstun Prison in West Yorkshire and taken straight home.

A few days later, the Citizen speculated that he "may have swapped one prison cell for another."

Since then there have been occasional Oyston sightings in London, in legal and parliamentary offices. But no one has seen him taking a relaxing stroll along the length of Blackpool Prom . . . Labour MP Dale Campbell-Savours is still campaigning to prove that Oyston did not get a fair trial when he was jailed for the rape and indecent assault of a young East Lancashire model. She later brought civil proceedings against him and won undisclosed damages, but without Oyston actually admitting his guilt.

Little is known about Oyston's continued fight to establish what he insists is his innocence and his claims of a "dirty tricks" campaign against him by Conservative politicians except that the British government must reply before Christmas to claims made before the European Court of Human Rights that he did not have a fair trial.

In view of that, The Citizen this week again made a formal request for an interview. It drew a blank.

"Will the tycoon, jailed for six years for the rape of a young fashion model, become the Prisoner of Claughton Hall? Will he have swapped the forbidding wire fences of Wealstun Prison near Wetherby for the thick stone walls of his manor house?" asked The Citizen in December last year. The answer seems to be a firm: "Yes."

Perhaps he has been warned by the Parole Board to keep his nose clean and stay out of the limelight. They had wanted to keep him in jail because he would not admit his guilt and were more than a little miffed when a Judicial Review told them to think again.

Surprisingly, since his release, not one photograph of him has even been "snatched." Farmers in the Lune valley who have seen him walking on the moors near Claughton Hall say he looks fit and well, but he no longer wears his "trademark" wide-brimmed fedoras and heavy sheepskin coats.

Oyston is reckoned to be worth around £100 million and is certainly one of the most famous men in Lancashire. However, friends are worried that a time-consuming fight for what is seen as "justice" is becoming an increasing mental burden on a rich, but sad, old age pensioner.