ALL ALONG GUILTY AND NEVER INNOCENT: JAMES HANRATTY (4 OCTOBER 1936 TO 4 APRIL 1962)

            On this date, 4 April 1962, James Hanratty was executed by hanging in Bedford Prison, Bedford, Bedfordshire, England for the A6 murders. Anti-Death Penalty campaigners claim that he was innocent but a DNA testing forty years later prove them all wrong. If James Hanratty had lived, he will kill again for sure. I will post the information from Wikipedia and two other news sources. Let us also hear from homicide Survivor, Valerie Storie who was satisfied after 40 years later. 

James Hanratty

James Francis Hanratty (4 October 1936 – 4 April 1962) was one of the last people in the UK to be sentenced to death for murder. He was hanged at Bedford Gaol on 4th April 1962, after being convicted of the murder of scientist Michael Gregsten, who was shot dead in his car near Clophill, Bedfordshire in August 1961. Gregsten's mistress Valerie Storie, was raped, shot and left paralysed in the same incident.

According to Storie, the couple were abducted at gunpoint in their car at Dorney Reach, Buckinghamshire, by a man with a cockney accent and mannerisms matching Hanratty's. The gunman ordered Gregsten to drive in several directions, before stopping beside the A6 at Deadman's Hill, where the offences took place. The prime suspects were Hanratty, a petty criminal, and Peter Louis Alphon, an eccentric drifter. Both these men changed their version of events several times, meanwhile Storie picked-out an innocent man at the first identity parade.

The 'Guilty' verdict was questioned by many who felt the evidence was simply too weak to justify conviction. However, a DNA test in 2002 was to prove Hanratty's guilt "beyond doubt".

Born	Sunday, 4 October 1936 Bromley, Kent, England
Died	Wednesday, 4 April 1962 (aged 25) Bedford Prison, Bedford, Bedfordshire, England
Cause of death	Execution (hanging)
Nationality	British
Known for	"A6 murder"

Childhood and adolescence

James Hanratty was one of four sons born to James and Mary Hanratty, in Farnborough, Kent; the family later moved to Wembley. Hanratty's early years were much troubled; long before his trial for the A6 murder, he had already been described as a retard, a psychopath, and a pathological liar. By the age of 11 he had been declared ineducable at St James Catholic School, Burnt Oak, although his parents steadfastly refused to accept he was in any way mentally deficient and successfully resisted attempts to have him placed in a school for the educationally sub-normal. After leaving Kingsbury High in 1951 aged 15, and still illiterate, Hanratty joined the Public Cleansing Department of Wembley Borough Council as a refuse sorter. In July the following year he fell from his bicycle, injuring his head and remaining unconscious for 10 hours; he was admitted to Wembley Hospital for nine days.

Shortly after his discharge, Hanratty left home for Brighton, where he was to find casual work with a road haulier. Eight weeks later he was found semi-conscious in the street, having apparently collapsed from either hunger or exposure. Initially admitted to the Royal Sussex Hospital, Brighton, he was transferred to St Francis’ Hospital, Haywards Heath, where he underwent a craniotomy following the erroneous diagnosis of a brain haemorrhage. The report made there acknowledged his unhappy home background (he claimed he was frightened of his mother and had no filial feelings towards his father) and his mental deficiency. No precise diagnoses were offered, and it has since been suggested that he suffered from either epilepsy or post concussional syndrome, which would have had a marked effect on his personality.

Criminal record

By the time of his arrest for the murder of Michael Gregsten, Hanratty had already accumulated four convictions for motoring offences and housebreaking. On 7 September 1954, aged 17, he was placed on probation for taking a motor vehicle without consent, and for driving without a licence or insurance. Shortly afterwards, he began psychiatric treatment as an outpatient at the Portman Clinic. In October 1955 Hanratty appeared at the County of Middlesex Sessions, where he was sentenced to two terms of two years’ imprisonment, to run concurrently, for housebreaking and stealing property. Despatched to the boys’ wing of Wormwood Scrubs, he slashed his wrists; placed in the prison hospital, he was declared a ‘potential psychopath'. After his release, his father resigned his job as dustman with Wembley council to start a window cleaning business with his son in a futile attempt to keep him away from crime. By July 1957, only five months after his release from the Scrubs, Hanratty was sentenced at Brighton Magistrates Court to six months' imprisonment for a variety of motoring offences, including theft of a motor vehicle and driving without a licence. He was sent to Durham Prison, where again he was identified as a psychopath. In March the following year, at the County of London Sessions, Hanratty was again convicted of car theft, and of driving while disqualified, and sentenced to three years’ corrective training at Maidstone Prison, where conditions were considered among the best in the UK. While at Maidstone, Hanratty came to the attention of a researcher, a ‘participant observer’ who lived and worked alongside the inmates; he was later to remark upon Hanratty’s ‘gross social and emotional immaturity’. After a failed escape attempt, Hanratty was transferred to Camp Hill Prison, Isle of Wight, and thence, following another bid for freedom, to Strangeways Prison, Manchester. Transferred briefly to Durham Prison, he was returned to Strangeways where, having served his full term, he was released in March 1961, five months before the A6 murder.

None of Hanratty’s mental history was given during his trial for the murder.

The murder

The facts

At about 06:45 on 23 August 1961, the body of Michael J. Gregsten (b. 28 December 1924) was discovered in a lay-by on the A6 at Deadman's Hill, near the Bedfordshire village of Clophill, by Sydney Burton, a farm labourer. Lying next to Gregsten, semi-conscious, was his mistress Valerie Storie (b. 24 November 1938). Gregsten had been shot twice in the head with a .38 revolver at point blank range; Storie had been raped, and then shot with the same weapon, four times in the left shoulder and once in the neck, leaving her paralysed below the shoulders. Burton ran down the road and alerted John Kerr, a student taking a road census; Kerr flagged down two cars and asked the drivers to call an ambulance.

The evening after the murder, the car Gregsten and Storie had been in at the time, a grey four-door 1956 Morris Minor registration 847 BHN, was found abandoned behind Redbridge tube station in Essex. The car had been jointly owned by Gregsten's mother and aunt, and lent to the couple who, according to Storie, were 'planning a car rally'.

Gregsten was a scientist at the Road Research Laboratory at Slough. Storie was an assistant at the same laboratory and had been having an affair with Gregsten, although this did not become public knowledge until much later. Gregsten lived with his wife Janet (d. 1995) and two children at Abbots Langley, whither he had returned in December 1960 after living with Storie for an unspecified period.

Testimony of Valerie Storie

Late in the evening of Tuesday, 22 August 1961, Valerie Storie was sitting alongside Gregsten in his car in a cornfield at Dorney Reach, Buckinghamshire. A man tapped on the driver's door window; when Gregsten wound it down, a large black revolver was thrust into his face, and a cockney voice said, "This is a hold-up, I am a desperate man, I have been on the run for four months. If you do as I tell you, you will be all right." The man got into the back of the car and told Gregsten to drive further into the field, then stop. The man then kept them there for two hours, chattering to them incessantly. At 23:30, the man said he wanted food, and told Gregsten to start driving. They drove around the suburbs of North London, apparently aimlessly. The gunman knew the Bear Hotel, Maidenhead. Gregsten was ordered to stop at a milk vending machine and sent into a shop to buy cigarettes, and then to stop at a petrol station for more fuel. Although Gregsten and Storie offered to give him all their money and the car, the man appeared to have no plan and seemed to want them to stay with him.

The journey continued along the A5 through St Albans, which the gunman mistakenly insisted was Watford, before joining the A6. At about 01:30, the car was on the A6, travelling south, when the man said he wanted a 'kip' (sleep). Twice he told Gregsten to turn off the road and then changed his mind, and the car returned to the A6. At Deadman's Hill the man ordered Gregsten to pull into a lay-by. Gregsten at first refused, but the man became aggressive and threatened them with the gun. The man then said he wanted to sleep, and that he would have to tie them up. Storie and Gregsten pleaded with him not to shoot them. The man tied Storie's hands behind her back with Gregsten's tie and then saw a bag in the rear of the car with some rope. He told Gregsten to pass the bag but, as Gregsten moved, there were two shots. Gregsten had been hit twice in the head and died instantly. Storie screamed, "You bastard! You shot him. Why did you shoot him?" The gunman replied that Gregsten had frightened him by turning too quickly.

After ignoring her pleas to shoot her as well, or let her get help for Gregsten, the gunman told her to kiss him. She refused and, having managed to free her hands, tried to disarm him but was overpowered; after he threatened to shoot her, she relented. He then retrieved a cloth from the duffle bag, covered Gregsten's bloodied head with it, and ordered Storie to clamber into the back of the car, over Gregsten's body. When she refused, the man got out and forced her out of the car at gunpoint, pushing her on to the back seat, where he ordered her to undo her brassiere and remove her knickers before raping her. He then ordered Storie to drag Gregsten's body out of the car to the edge of the lay-by 2 or 3 metres away, before ordering her back into the car to start it for him and demonstrate the operation of the gears and switches. It was clear he either had not driven before, or was unfamiliar with a Morris Minor.

Storie then left the car and returned to sit beside Gregsten's body. The gunman got out of the car and approached her; pleading for her life, she took a pound note from her pocket, screaming, "Here, take this, take the car and go." He took several steps back to the car before turning and firing four bullets at her, then reloaded and fired again. Of approximately seven bullets fired, five hit Storie; she fell to the ground next to Gregsten and pretended to be dead. Evidently satisfied he had killed her, the gunman drove off southward with much crashing of gears, in the direction of Luton. It was now approximately 3  am, six hours after the ordeal had started at Dorney Reach. After vainly screaming and waving her petticoat to attract the attention of passing motorists, Storie lost consciousness.

The investigation

The first policeman on the scene was handed a census form on which Kerr had written down Storie's gasped account of what she recalled at that moment; the document was never seen again. Storie gave another statement to the police later that morning, just before she underwent surgery in Bedford Hospital. Almost at once, the evidence began to throw up anomalies. Storie recalled what the man had said about being on the run for four months, yet he was immaculately dressed in a dark three-piece suit and with well-shone shoes. Moreover, there appeared to be a complete lack of motive.

The gun was discovered on the evening of 24 August, under the back seat of a 36A London bus, fully loaded and wiped clean of fingerprints. With the gun was a handkerchief which was to provide DNA evidence many years later. The police issued an appeal to boarding-house keepers to report any unusual or suspicious guests. The manager of the Alexandra Court Hotel reported a man who had locked himself in his room for five days after the murder, and the police picked him up. The suspect falsely identified himself as Frederick Durrant; he was actually Peter Louis Alphon, a drifter surviving on an inheritance and the proceeds of gambling. He claimed he had spent the evening of 22 August with his mother, and the following night at the Vienna Hotel, Maida Vale; the police quickly confirmed this and Alphon was released.

On 29 August, Valerie Storie and another witness, Edward Blackall, who had seen the driver of the Morris Minor, compiled an Identikit picture which was then released. However, only two days later, Storie gave a different description of her assailant to the police.

On 7 September, Meike Dalal was attacked in her home in Richmond, Surrey, by a man claiming to be the A6 murderer, whom she later identified as Alphon in an identity parade on 23 September. The investigation then stalled until 11 September, when two cartridge cases were found in the guest basement bedroom of the Vienna Hotel, which were matched with the bullets that killed Gregsten and to the ones in the gun found on the bus. The hotel manager, William Nudds, made a statement to police naming the last occupant of the room as 'James Ryan'. At the trial Nudds also stated that the man, upon leaving, had asked the way to a bus stop for a 36A bus, though his statement to police had merely mentioned the 36 bus. Nudds' statement also said that Alphon had stayed in the hotel as he claimed, and had remained in his room, Room 6, all night. The police raided the hotel, and questioned Nudds again, who then changed his story, claiming that Alphon had in fact been in the basement and Ryan in Room 6 but, for reasons unknown, had swapped rooms during the night. Nudds also now added that Alphon had left the hotel 'calm and composed'.

The police then took the unusual step of publicly naming Alphon as the murder suspect. Alphon subsequently surrendered himself, and was subjected to an intense interrogation. However, Valerie Storie failed to pick him out in an identity parade, and he was released four days later after being detained on a charge of assaulting Meike Dalal. Alphon was recorded by PC Ian Thomson as saying "there can't have been any fingerprints in the car otherwise mine would have given me away". Police went back to Nudds, the hotel manager, (himself the owner of a criminal record for fraud), who now said that his second statement was a lie, and his first statement, implicating Ryan, was in fact true. His reason for lying was that he had seen that Alphon was the police's prime suspect, and had wanted to assist their case. After some investigation, 'Ryan' turned out to be James Hanratty, a 25-year old petty criminal with four convictions for car theft, larceny and burglary.

Hanratty telephoned Scotland Yard, saying he had fled because he had no credible alibi for the date in question, but repeated several times that he had nothing to do with the A6 murder. He was eventually arrested in Blackpool at the Stevonia cafe on 11 October, and on 14 October Valerie Storie picked him out in an identity parade, after each of the men in the parade had repeated the phrase used by the murderer, "Be quiet, will you? I'm thinking." Hanratty, with his cockney accent, pronounced 'thinking' as 'finking', as had the murderer. Hanratty was then charged with the murder of Michael Gregsten.

The trial

The trial started at Bedfordshire Assizes on 22 January 1962; it was originally to have been heard at the Old Bailey, as requested by Hanratty's defence counsel, Michael Sherrard QC, later CBE. It is not known why the trial was moved to Bedford, just nine miles from the murder scene, and where there was, unsurprisingly, strong local feeling against the defendant. Among the prosecution team at the trial was Geoffrey Lane, who was subsequently appointed Lord Chief Justice. The trial was to last 21 days, the longest in English legal history up to that time.

Hanratty's initial defence was that he had been in Liverpool on the day of the murder, but then, halfway through the trial, he changed part of his story, claiming that he had in fact been in Rhyl, North Wales. At that time there was no conclusive forensic evidence to connect Hanratty with the car or the murder scene. Although Hanratty's blood group was the same as the murderer's, it was a common blood type shared by half the UK population, and there was no evidence that Hanratty had ever been in the Maidenhead area. Whilst he was a professional thief, he had no convictions for violence, and apparently had never possessed a gun, although he later admitted to the police that he had attempted to obtain one after his last release from prison in March 1961. Moreover, the murderer drove badly, whereas Hanratty was an experienced car thief. Hanratty did not know either of the two victims, and did not appear to have any plausible motive to commit the murder.

First defence – The Liverpool alibi

Hanratty claimed that he was staying with friends in Liverpool at the time of the murder, where he had also gone to see one of his criminal friends and former cell mate Terry McNally from the Dingle to sell some jewellery through. The best evidence was that he was there at least on the afternoon of the 22nd. Hanratty claimed that his suitcase had been handed in to Lime Street Station by a 'man with a withered or turned hand'. At the trial the prosecution called Peter Stringer, who had an artificial arm, but who denied ever having seen the suitcase or Hanratty. However, there was another person called William Usher, who did have two fingers missing from one hand, which looked withered. Usher admitted remembering Hanratty and the suitcase, and partly remembered the name of the man as 'Ratty'; he was located by private detectives working for the defence, but was never called as a witness.

Hanratty said he had called into a sweetshop in Scotland Road and asked directions to 'Carleton' or 'Tarleton' Road. The Police tracked down a Mrs Dinwoodie, who did indeed run a sweetshop in Scotland Road, and who recalled a man like Hanratty asking for directions. However, she was unsure whether it was Monday 21st or Tuesday 22nd. On the other hand, there was plenty of evidence that Hanratty had been in London all day on Monday 21st: in the morning he had collected a suit from a dry cleaners' in Swiss Cottage; he had been to his friend Charles France's house on the Monday afternoon, and visited the Vienna Hotel in the evening. Hanratty's defence therefore claimed that he could not have travelled to Liverpool to the sweetshop and then returned in time to commit the murder at 9 pm on Tuesday. However, there was still doubt where Hanratty spent the evening of Tuesday 22nd. Just before the defence opened its case, Hanratty changed part of his alibi.

Second defence – The Rhyl alibi

Hanratty confessed to his defence barrister that he had invented part of the Liverpool story as he was unsure he could prove where he was. He then stated that he had in fact been in the Welsh coastal town of Rhyl. Within a few days, the defence had checked and assembled a new alibi for Hanratty. According to this, Hanratty had gone to Rhyl to sell a stolen watch to a 'fence'. He had arrived there late in the evening of Tuesday 22nd and had stayed in a boarding house near the railway station, in the attic room, which had a green bath. Private detectives tracked down a Mrs Grace Jones, a landlady with a guest house whose layout exactly matched the description given by Hanratty, including the green bath in the attic. She remembered a man resembling Hanratty, and was sure it was during the week of 19–26 August.

Following the prosecution's dropping of the book's leaves in the court, her hotel registers and accounts were in chaos, and little information could be extracted from them. Worse still, the prosecution produced a string of witnesses attesting that all the rooms were already occupied at the time. The prosecution accused Mrs Jones of lying simply to gain publicity for her guest house, leaving her almost in tears. However, counsel for the defence managed to salvage something, showing in fact that the attic was empty on the night of the 22nd, and a bedroom exactly as described by Hanratty was free on the 23rd, demonstrating that he could have stayed there as claimed. Eventually, the jury retired, and after six hours returned to ask the judge for the definition of 'reasonable doubt'. They returned to the court and entered a unanimous verdict of guilty, after nine hours. Hanratty's appeal was dismissed on 13 March, and despite a petition signed by more than 90,000 people, Hanratty was hanged by executioner Harry Allen at Bedford on 4 April 1962, still protesting his innocence.

Evidence

Prosecution evidence anomalies

• In the first identification line up, Valerie Storie picked out with total certainty an innocent airman, instead of the police suspect Alphon.
• In the second line up, in which Hanratty was included, Hanratty stood out as his hair was bright orange; the police were so concerned about this they considered acquiring skullcaps.
• In this line up, Valerie Storie picked out Hanratty, although she admitted she only ever saw the face of her attacker for a second or two when it was illuminated by a passing car's headlights while he raped her.
• In her original statement, Valerie Storie states the man who abducted and raped her was in his 30s, whereas in her second statement she changed this to 'mid 20s'. James Hanratty was 25 but Peter Alphon was 31.
• John Skillet picked out Hanratty as the driver of the Morris Minor as it sped down Eastern Avenue, but his companion, Edward Blackall, who had a closer view of the man, did not.
• James Trower identified Hanratty as driving the Morris as it turned into Redbridge Lane, but Trower's companion was adamant that Trower couldn't have seen him from where they were standing.
• Another prosecution witness was Roy Langdale, who was serving time in prison with Hanratty, and claimed that Hanratty confessed to him, but two others Hanratty exercised with said he consistently denied any involvement.
• Charlie France, Hanratty's erstwhile friend, testified that Hanratty had once said to him that 'the back seat of a bus was a good place to hide something'.

Defence response

• No witnesses, with the exception of Valerie Storie, were able to place Hanratty in the vicinity of Dorney Reach.
• Elsie Cobb, who lived near the cornfield at Dorney Reach, stated that around 14:30 on 21 August she saw a man passing her house whom she described as aged 27 to 30, 5 foot 6 with dark hair brushed back and a thin nose. Her neighbour Frederick Newell added that the man had a sallow complexion.
• The gunman said "I've been in institutions since I was eight": Hanratty is unlikely to have used words like "institutions".
• Mary Lanz, proprietor of the Old Station Inn, Taplow, where Gregsten and Storie had last been before driving to the cornfield, was later able to identify Alphon as having also been there.
• Even if the Rhyl alibi is disregarded, Hanratty's meeting with Olive Dinwoodie would make his presence in Dorney Reach by 9 p.m. extremely implausible.
• On Thursday 24 August at 20:40 Hanratty sent a telegram from Lime Street, Liverpool, in which he purported to be in London.
• Although the cartridge cases were found in the Hotel Vienna, no one ever adequately explained how they came to be there on the day before the murder.
• Hanratty disposed of his suit jacket six weeks after the crime; Alphon disposed of his raincoat straight away.
• Unlike the gunman's description of himself, Hanratty had never lived in a house with a cellar (let alone been locked in one and given only bread and water), was not coming up for PD, had not served five years for housebreaking, and had already been in prison on the Isle of Wight.
• Valerie Storie had said that Jim was obviously not the gunman's real name despite what the gunman claimed.
• Juliana Galves said she saw Alphon with a pair of black gloves on his suitcase during his stay in the Vienna.
• Peter Alphon wrote to the Daily Express in 1962 saying he believed Hanratty was innocent and he supported a reprieve.
• Alphon wrote to the Home Secretary in 1962 saying "I killed Gregsten".

A6 Defence Committee

The 'A6 Defence Committee', a self-appointed group of people including Paul Foot and Joan Lestor, attempted to assist Hanratty in his defence, and later to try and disprove his conviction. It was instrumental in uncovering new allegations of evidence, albeit too late. Twelve years after the execution, the Committee discovered the original statement made by Valerie Storie, which was neither referred to nor available at the trial or the appeal.

By 1968, the A6 Committee had found six witnesses to testify that Hanratty had been to Rhyl. They had also found a fairground worker called Terry Evans who admitted to letting Hanratty stay at his house early in 1961, and to fencing a stolen watch for him. Another man, Trevor Dutton, had just made a payment into his bank account, and consequently his bank book was stamped with the correct date, 23 August, when minutes later he was approached by a man with a cockney accent in a smart suit, trying to sell a gold watch.

The problem here for the conviction was that there were now six witnesses who could allege they had seen or spoken to Hanratty on the 23rd, and what is more, that the day in question was the only day that all six were in Rhyl at the same time.

Who killed Gregsten?

During 1962, the case caught the interest of London businessman Jean Justice, the son of a Belgian diplomat and partner of barrister Jeremy Fox. Justice encouraged the initially reluctant Fox to help him expose what he believed to be the fabrication of the case against Hanratty. The pair tracked down Peter Alphon in February 1962, and began a long friendship with him for the purposes of establishing the truth. Justice attended the trial every day, being driven there by his chauffeur, and Alphon accompanied him from time to time. Slowly, over the months, Alphon began to confess, drawing diagrams of the murder scene and demonstrating precise knowledge of details of the events on Deadman's Hill. Justice took the precaution of making thorough notes, and recording all telephone conversations with Alphon. When Alphon found out, he flew into a rage. As it got closer to Hanratty's execution date, Alphon's behaviour became more and more bizarre. He started to bombard his own solicitor with threatening phone calls and letters; Charles France was also targetted with phone calls, warning him "If Hanratty dies, you die." France, who had suffered from bouts of severe depression for many years, committed suicide by gassing himself (his third attempt) about two weeks before the execution. He wrote a suicide letter to Hanratty; it was full of spite and venom, but at no point actually accused him of committing the murder. France left behind several letters for his family, the contents of which have never been made public.

Alphon's account

Alphon's continued confessions formed a picture. According to him, a man had paid him a sum of £5,000 to end the affair between Gregsten and Storie. Another man obtained a gun for Alphon, and Alphon had set off and hijacked the pair. According to Alphon, he gave Gregsten two chances to get away but "each time the bloody man kept coming back". He claimed the gun went off by accident. There was a plan for this eventuality: Alphon says he travelled to Southend and gave the gun to Charles France, who was to dispose of it. France had a grudge against Hanratty, who had had an affair with France's daughter, so he planted the gun under the bus seat and the two cartridges in the hotel.

On 22 August 1962 Alphon visited the Hanratty family and offered to compensate them for their son's death. They threw him out of their house and in a fracas the following day, Alphon assaulted Mary Hanratty. A BBC Panorama programme in 1966 included extracts from the Jean Justice tapes. In May 1967 there was a bizarre press conference, in which Alphon confessed to the world media and related the full story of the gun, the £5,000 and France's involvement. Alphon stuck to his confession and continued to repeat it until about 1971, when he withdrew his claims. Sceptics noted that Alphon had apparently been paid considerable sums of money by Justice, and had recanted after he had secured his payments. However, Bob Woffinden writes that there was only one occasion when Justice and Jeremy Fox supported Alphon financially, when Fox paid a hotel bill for him. Alphon was also to decline money and publicity when invited to be interviewed on national TV by David Frost on 16 November 1967. Fox split with Jean Justice in the 1970s, but continued the fight to clear Hanratty until his death in 1999, three years before the Court of Appeal upheld the conviction on the basis of the DNA evidence retrieved from Hanratty's corpse.

The A6 Committee made a list of facts which, they contended, indicated that Alphon was the murderer:

• Alphon resembled the Identikit pictures more than Hanratty did;
• When stressed, Alphon lapsed into Cockney;
• Alphon never produced a convincing alibi;
• He provided a more credible motive than Hanratty could;
• He was a poor driver;
• Paul Foot obtained a copy of his bank account, showing that Alphon received payments in cash totalling £7,569 between October 1961 and June 1962. Alphon was unable to account for £5,000 of these payments.

The A6 Committee have claimed that the police refused to investigate Alphon's confessions and credibility in the light of this material. In the London Review of Books, 11 December 1997 (p. 37), Paul Foot warned "against jumping to hasty conclusions, in particular about Peter Alphon... he really didn't know as much as he pretended. He certainly didn't know what he alleged – that Mrs Gregsten was the prime mover in commissioning the murder."

Official Inquiries

Three Home Office inquiries have been set up. Detective Superintendent Douglas Nimmo reported on 22 March 1967, Lewis Hawser QC reported on 10 April 1975 and Detective Chief Superintendent Roger Matthews reported on 29 May 1996. The Home Secretary Roy Jenkins received the first two and Michael Howard received the third. On 19 March 1997, the Home Office referred the case to the new Criminal Cases Review Commission where Baden Skitt chaired the investigation. The Hanratty family acting through their solicitor, Sir Geoffrey Bindman, repeatedly called for further inquiries into the case.

DNA evidence and appeal in 2002

The case for Hanratty's innocence was pursued by his family as well as by some of the opponents of capital punishment in the United Kingdom, who maintained that Hanratty was innocent and sought to draw attention to evidence that would cast doubt on the validity of his conviction. However, following an appeal by his family, modern testing of DNA from his exhumed corpse and members of his family convinced Court of Appeal judges in 2002 that his guilt was proved "beyond doubt". Paul Foot and some other campaigners continued to believe in Hanratty's innocence and argued that the DNA evidence could have been contaminated, noting that the small DNA samples from items of clothing, kept in a police laboratory for over 40 years "in conditions that do not satisfy modern evidential standards", had had to be subjected to very new amplification techniques in order to yield any genetic profile. However, no DNA other than Hanratty's was found on the evidence tested, contrary to what would have been expected had the evidence indeed been contaminated.

Hanratty's family continue to press for a review of his conviction.

In 1991 Bedfordshire Police allowed Bob Woffinden access to their previously undisclosed files on the case. The CCRC report had also revealed the recorded mileage on the Morris Minor which invalidated Skillet's sighting in Brentwood and Trower's in Redbridge Lane. Bob Woffinden writes that there is no evidence that they even saw the same Morris Minor. These anomalies were considered sufficiently significant to justify an appeal against the conviction on behalf of Hanratty's family.

The surviving exhibits from the trial were lost until 1991, when they were found in envelopes in a laboratory drawer. DNA was donated by Hanratty's relatives, which they expected to exonerate him when compared with material on surviving evidence. Results from testing in June 1999 were said to be equivocal.

Hanratty's body was exhumed in 2001 in order to extract DNA. This was compared with mucus preserved in the handkerchief within which the murder weapon had been found wrapped. It was also compared with semen preserved in the underwear worn by Storie when she was raped. No scientific evidence from the crime had previously been linked to Hanratty, yet DNA samples from both sources matched Hanratty's DNA. At the subsequent appeal hearing Michael Mansfield QC, the barrister acting for the Hanratty family, admitted that if contamination could be excluded the DNA evidence demonstrated that Hanratty had committed the murder and rape. He argued that the evidence may have been contaminated because of lax handling procedures. Among the surviving evidential items a vial had been broken which could account for contamination. However, neither sample yielded DNA from any second male source, as would presumably have been expected if another male had committed the crimes and the samples had subsequently been contaminated.

The argument for contamination was dismissed as "fanciful" by the judges, who concluded that the "DNA evidence, standing alone, is certain proof of guilt". Hanratty's family and their supporters have continued to contest this conclusion.

Peter Alphon died in January 2009 following a fall at his home. The following month Richard Ingrams, a close friend and colleague of Paul Foot, wrote a brief article about Alphon's part in the case in The Independent. Ingrams said that Alphon, in conversations with Foot and others, had spoken obsessively about the case, frequently incriminating himself. Ingrams said that Foot continued until his own death to believe in Hanratty's alibi, despite the DNA tests of 2002.

INTERNET SOURCE: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3724/is_200205/ai_n9117652/?tag=content;col1

FindArticles / Reference / Spectator, The / May 11, 2002

Hanratty deserved to die

by Clark, Neil

Neil Clark on the wider agenda of those who claim that the A6 murderer was innocent 

TWENTY years after its inception, Channel 4 finally did last week what it was established to do: it screened a `challenging, alternative' programme. Hanratty: The Whole Truth set out to prove, unfashionably, that the person whom the wicked old British justice system had convicted for a murder had, in fact, committed the murder. After years of dreary `miscarriage of justice' programmes such as the BBC's Rough Justice series, here was a crime documentary that did investigative journalism proud, taking us way beyond the usual 'X was innocent because X's mother says so' level.

The only sad thing about this excellent documentary was that, by having to compete in the television schedules against such programmes as Bad Girls and Stark Naked, it probably did not win the audience it undoubtedly deserved. This is a great pity, and one can only hope that the new Channel 4 supremo, Mark Thompson, decides to repeat it. Hanratty: The Whole Truth deserves to be shown again and again in order to remind people how it was that the British Parliament came to make one of the most foolish decisions of the past 50 years: the abolition of capital punishment. 

For those readers still unfamiliar with the Hanratty case, here's a resume. James Hanratty, a convicted car thief and housebreaker, was accused of being the gunman who had ambushed a 36-year-old government scientist, Michael Gregsten, and his 22-year-old mistress, Valerie Storie, as they sat in their Morris Minor in a cornfield at Dorney Reach, Buckinghamshire, one night in August 1961. The couple were forced to drive for over two hours to Deadman's Hill, just south of Bedford, where in a lay-by off the A6 Gregsten was shot and Storie was raped, shot five times, and left for dead. 

Storie miraculously survived the attack, but her severe injuries left her paralysed and wheelchair-bound. Hanratty was arrested when spent cartridges from the murder weapon were found in the London doss-- house he had been staying in under the alias of 'J. Ryan'. Identified by Valerie Storie as her attacker, Hanratty was duly found guilty of murder and hanged on 4 April 1962. For most people, justice had been done. A crime which had shocked Britain because of its mindlessness and depravity had been solved, and Hanratty had got his just deserts. 

For others, though, doubts about Hanratty's conviction remained. For a start, there was the coincidence that the original suspect for the crime, Peter Alphon, had been staying at the same Maida Vale doss-house as Hanratty. Then there was the question of whether the suspect had been correctly identified. Original newspaper reports state that Valerie Storie had described her assailant's eyes as 'brown', yet by the time of the first identification parade she had apparently changed her description to `saucer-like blue eyes'. We now know that there had been no discrepancy at all; merely that there had been a transcription error in the police bulletin sent to the Press Association. But the damage had been done. The apparent inconsistencies, together with Hanratty's eve-of-execution pleas for his family to clear his name, were enough to get the `Hanratty Was Innocent' bandwagon on the road. 

It is a popular misconception that those behind the 'A6 Committee' were solely driven by the entirely noble motive of trying to clear the name of a wrongly convicted man. While those were indeed the sole concerns of Hanratty's father and brother, they were not in my view the only concerns of the committee. I believe the committee also acted as a Trojan Horse for those who had a wider, more politicised agenda: namely, the discrediting of the English legal system and, in particular, the 'barbaric' punishment it still held as its ultimate deterrent. The anti-rope campaigners were determined to milk the Hanratty case for all it was worth. Hanratty's father, a Wembley dustman, is said to have been the 'inspiration' behind the A6 Committee, but the driving forces (and paymasters) of the campaign came from an altogether more plutocratic background. 

Barrister Jeremy Fox (Eton; King's College, Cambridge) and Jean Justice, the son of a Belgian diplomat, had met in Dorothy's, Knightsbridge's most exclusive gay club of the 1950s. They became lovers and Justice moved into his new boyfriend's Mayfair home. They then bought a cottage together near Gatwick, where an 'unfortunate' incident with a rent boy was reported by the News of the World, which described their country retreat as a `sink of iniquity'. Further embarrassment followed when Fox and Justice were charged with `unruly behaviour' on the train to Victoria after a heavy drinking binge, but our `champions of justice' engaged one of the most expensive solicitors in the country and escaped with a fine. 

Ever since failing his law exams, Jean Justice had made it his life's work to hold up to ridicule the English legal system. Justice saw in the apparent inconsistencies of the Hanratty case a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do some serious damage. To undermine public confidence in the conviction, Justice, as the Channel 4 documentary revealed, was prepared to go to extraordinary lengths. If Hanratty was innocent, then some plausible 'alternative' murderer had to be put forward, and Justice decided upon Peter Alphon, the man the police had originally suspected of the crime, but who had been cleared after three witnesses, including Valerie Storie, failed to identify him as the murderer. Justice and Fox homed in on Alphon, a publicity seeker with an eye for the main chance, and set about giving him a 'makeover' as the A6 murderer. In the end, it cost Justice 25,000 to wring a 'confession' out of Alphon in 1967. The fact that Justice knew that Alphon was not the murderer was neither here nor there. 

By the late 1960s, some fresh faces had joined the campaign to clear Hanratty's name. For John Lennon, Hanratty had been a victim of `class war'. The people who had executed Hanratty were, according to Lennon, `the same people who are running guns to South Africa and killing blacks in the streets.... The same bastards are in control, the same people are running everything, it's the whole bullshit bourgeois scene.' 

In the meantime, unaware of Justice's high jinks, another proletarian joined the campaign: Paul Foot, the Shrewsbury-educated son of Baron Caradon. Foot believed Hanratty had been in Rhyl at the time of the murder and therefore had an alibi. He spent much time in the North Wales town in 1969 talking to people who said they remembered Hanratty being there on the night in question. He found `14 witnesses who, with varying degrees of certainty, supported Hanratty's story'. 

Theories about the Hanratty case continued to be put forward for the next quarter-- century or so. Having pocketed the L25,000, Peter Alphon rather predictably recanted his confession and disappeared from the scene. Despite this, the A6 Committee continued their campaign, incidentally causing great suffering to others. The surviving victim of the crime, Valerie Storie, felt she was treated with a mixture of suspicion and contempt by the Hanratty campaigners. Channel 4's documentary revealed how the severely crippled Storie had been `summoned' to attend a meeting of the Committee in Bedford, receiving the letter just two hours earlier. Janet Gregsten, the widow of Michael, was caused great distress in the 1990s by Bob Woffinden's television documentary, The Mystery of Deadman's Hill, which implied that she had been responsible for her estranged husband's death. Gregsten's son believes it was the stress caused by this programme that brought on the cancer which claimed his mother's life three years later. 

Now, though, after 40 years, DNA tests from Hanratty's exhumed body (exhumed against the wishes of the A6 Committee) have matched positive with traces found on Valerie Stories underwear and a handkerchief wrapped round the murder weapon. Time for our `champions of justice' to admit they have been wrong? Not a bit of it. The Committee's lawyer says that the DNA tests `prove nothing' and are a `pointless exercise'. If the DNA tests prove Hanratty was the killer, the Committee argues, the DNA must have become 'contaminated'. 

Paul Foot is reluctant to concede defeat. `Until someone comes up with something to show that Hanratty was not in Rhyl on the night of the murder, I will go on believing his story,' Foot wrote recently. In other words, Foot prefers to put his trust in 14 witnesses who, almost a decade after the murder, 'may' have seen Hanratty in Rhyl, rather than DNA evidence which has a one-in-a-billion chance of being wrong. In his continued protestations of Hanratty's innocence, Foot reminds one of fellow leftist Christopher Hill, the nonagenarian Oxford professor who to this day maintains that there was no famine in Ukraine under Stalin.

In 1997, the Hanratty campaigner Simon Regan wrote, `The British establishment always hate to admit they might be wrong, even if a man died because of it.' Regan is wrong. What the Hanratty case shows is that it is left-liberal campaigners such as Paul Foot and Bob Woffinden who hate to admit they might be wrong. It was due to the efforts of `campaigners for justice', such as Foot, Woffinden, Jean Justice and Jeremy Fox, that the death penalty was abolished in Britain, even though the vast majority of the British people never wished it to be. All of us who regret the transformation of our country from a `relative oasis in a violent world' to a society where crimes like the A6 murder are almost daily occurrences, are surely entitled to an apology. 

Copyright Spectator May 11, 2002

Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved

INTERNET SOURCE: http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/311689/He-was-the-killer-all-along

He was the killer all along

THE scene at Bedford prison that early April morning was racked with tension. The condemned man was brought forward by a pair of guards to stand beneath the gallows. A bag was placed over his head and a noose around his neck. Then with one swift movement the executioner pulled his lever and the prisoner fell through the trap door, the sudden drop instantly breaking his neck.

By: Leo McKinstry

Published: Sat, March 31, 2012 

It is 50 years ago this week since James Hanratty, a 25-year-old serial criminal, was executed. His was one of the last hangings in Britain, for within three years capital punishment had been abolished.

Hanratty had been convicted of one of the most notorious crimes of the post-war era, a deed that shook the nation because of both its savagery and apparent lack of motive. The murder involved had taken place more than eight months earlier.

On the night of August 22 1961, Michael Gregsten and his girlfriend Valerie Storie were sitting in a Morris Minor at the edge of a deserted cornfield near Maidenhead, Berkshire. The couple were colleagues in the civil service and had embarked on an affair after Gregsten’s marriage had run into difficulties.

Suddenly as they talked together in the car they were ambushed by a lone fi gure holding a revolver and wearing a handkerchief across his face. Their assailant forced them to drive at gunpoint for the next fi ve hours through the outer London suburbs until ordering them to stop at a lay-by on the A6 near Bedford, known as Deadman’s Hill.

Hanratty had been convicted of one of the most notorious crimes of the post-war era, a deed that shook the nation because of both its savagery and apparent lack of motive 

There he killed Gregsten with shots at point blank range, then raped Storie before fi ring fi ve rounds into her from his .38 weapon. Having left her for dead the killer drove off before abandoning the car in Essex.

However Storie survived, though she was paralysed for the rest of her life. From her hospital bed she was able to give the police a compelling description of the murderer. Her testimony was to be crucial in Hanratty’s conviction. The jury returned a unanimous verdict against him.

Yet after his execution on April 4 1962, doubts were soon voiced about the safety of his conviction – first by Hanratty’s grieving family then by campaigning lawyers and journalists.

Political concern about the case played its part in the abolition of the death penalty in 1965 and, as the pro-Hanratty brigade gained ever greater infl uence, so his execution came to be widely regarded as the worst miscarriages of justice in modern British criminal history.

In Left-wing circles it was part of conventional wisdom that Hanratty was innocent – a mood encapsulated by John Lennon, who claimed that “the people who executed Hanratty are the same people who are running guns to South Africa and killing blacks in the street”.

The Hanratty campaigners tried to create a miasma of distrust in the verdict. Central to their argument was the theory that the man really responsible for the A6 murder was an eccentric loner called Peter Alphon. Initially, the police shared this view.

Alphon was the fi rst suspect in the case after a pair of spent cartridges from the murder weapon were discovered at the downmarket Hotel Vienna in north London, where he had stayed on the night of the A6 killing. But the case against Alphon fell apart once Valerie Storie failed to pick him out in an identity parade. So the police quickly turned their attention to another of the Hotel Vienna’s guests – a man by the name of J Ryan. This turned out to be an alias used by James Hanratty.

ARRESTED by the police in Blackpool, he was recognised by Valerie Storie in another line-up during which the participants had been asked to speak the line: “Be quiet, I’m fi nking” – words the gunman used several times during the fateful journey. Having spent five hours in the car with him Storie could never forget Hanratty’s “icy, staring blue eyes” and his cockney accent. Campaigners maintained the evidence against Hanratty was too flimsy for a conviction but this is completely untrue. The case against him was overwhelming. Apart from Storie’s account, he was identifi ed by two witnesses who saw him driving manically through east London.

Just as damningly he had told a close friend, a fellow petty crook called Charles “Dixie” France, that the best place to hide incriminating material was under the backseat of a London double-decker bus – precisely where the murder weapon was found. France was so appalled by his association with a killer that he went to the police with this information.

Hanratty’s alibi turned out to be bogus. Initially he maintained that he had been staying in Liverpool with friends from the criminal underworld . When they angrily denied his story Hanratty changed his account and said he had gone to Rhyl, North Wales.

But he was remembered by no other guests at the B&B where he claimed to have stayed. The details he provided about the accommodation were vague or wrong while the landlady’s memory of his alleged visit was so faulty that it merely reinforced the case for the prosecution. Even his own defence team privately admitted that despite “extensive and careful enquiries”, “no reliable person” could show that Hanratty was in Rhyl or Liverpool.

Hanratty was always portrayed by campaigners as a simple-minded thief. In truth he was a serious criminal with an appalling record. Equally false is the claim he always protested his innocence. On at least three occasions he seems to have made confessions. One was to a fellow prisoner called Roy Langdale, who testifi ed in court. Another was before the identity parade, when according to former RAF police corporal John Needham, Hanratty cockily said: “I know I did it but I don’t think they can prove it.” The third was just after the verdict was announced.

Asked by the judge if he had anything to say, he stuttered: “I am not innocent… I mean guilty.”

So why did the campaigners cling to the notion of his innocence?

The answer is partly personal, partly political. On one hand, Hanratty’s Irish Catholic family could not bear the thought that they had harboured a brutal killer.

On the other the key campaigners, mostly Left-wingers, warmed to the narrative of the son of Irish immigrants fi tted up by the British state while the killer – self-declared fascist Alphon – walked free.

Then a decade ago came the news that DNA evidence had proved beyond any doubt Hanratty was the killer. There was no chance of contamination since there was only one male source of DNA on Storie’s underwear.

A few true believers however refused to face up to reality. “There must be something wrong with the DNA,” wrote the veteran journalist Paul Foot, one of the most passionate pro-Hanratty campaigners.

Others were more honest. Said Michael Sherrard, who had had been Hanratty’s lawyer at the original Bedford trial: “The wrong man was not hanged.”