The A6 Murder: Was Hanratty Guilty?

 

One August evening in 1961, a married man called Michael Gregsten drove his girlfriend Valerie Storie out into the country for sex. They worked together at the Road Research Laboratory near Slough in the south of England. Gregsten’s wife knew about the affair. Gregsten drove his Morris Minor, as he had driven many times before, to the chosen spot and parked on the roadside next to Taplow Meadow, just outside Maidenhead. As they embraced and kissed in the front of the car, there was a sharp tap at the window behind Valerie. Michael could see the man, but Valerie couldn’t. The man threatened Michael with a gun, said, ‘I am a desperate man’, and climbed into the back seat of the car. Then he ordered Gregsten to drive off, insisting that they keep looking ahead; they were not to turn round and look at him. They set off through the outskirts of Slough, then onto the open road. After a tense two-hour drive, the stranger ordered Michael to stop in a lay-by on the A6. It was fairly sheltered, surrounded by bushes and known as Deadman’s Hill. It was a favourite spot for courting couples.

The menacing stranger asked Michael Gregsten to hand him a duffel bag, and either Gregsten saw this as an opportunity to take a look at him or tackle him and disarm him, or the stranger interpreted his movement as a threat. Maybe the gunman had realized that Gregsten had already taken a good look at his face through the passenger window and would be able to identify him; he had had time during the drive to decide that Gregsten could not be trusted to leave the scene alive. Whatever the reason, as Michael Gregsten passed the bag, the stranger fired twice and Gregsten was killed outright instantly.

By now it was dark, and the terrified Valerie found herself alone with a homicidal maniac. The stranger savagely raped her, shot her in the back several times at close range and left her for dead in the lay-by. She in fact survived, but remained disabled for the rest of her life. In spite of spending as much as six hours at close quarters with the gunman, Valerie only really saw his face clearly once, for a few seconds, as it was lit up by the headlights of a passing car. She was able to supply police with a description, but it remains uncertain whether that description is at all reliable. By the time she caught the single glimpse of the gunman’s face, she had already been traumatized by the shooting of her lover and terror at her own impending death. The police circulated a picture of the wanted man, based on her description.

Recognition by voice played a key part in the prosecution case at the trial. Just before the man raped her, he said, ‘Shut up, will you? I’m thinking’. He spoke with an accent that was very distinct but Valerie could not identify it geographically. It wasn’t London. It wasn’t Glasgow. But a distinct way of speaking just the same. He pronounced the word ‘thinking’ as ‘finking’.

As soon as Michael’s body and the scarcely living Valerie were found in the A6 lay-by, a massive murder hunt was launched. It was a very peculiar case. The man had appeared from nowhere, disappeared into nowhere, seemed to have no connection with Michael or Valerie, and seemed to have no motive whatever. There was really nothing at all to go on, except the knowledge that there was a violent madman on the loose, a man who said ‘finking’.

The police had a suspect, a man called Peter Louis Alphon. His face fitted the identikit picture, and he could not give any account of his movements on the night of the murder. The police even got as far as arresting him, and they were probably right.

At this point, bizarre things began to happen in the development of the case. Michael Gregsten’s widow happened to be in Blackpool on holiday, after the murder of her husband, when she spotted a man, a total stranger, about whom she had an intuition. She got in touch with the police. The man was James Hanratty. It says something about the strange and desperate mindset of the police involved in this case that they acted on this absurd contact. Mrs Gregsten had not been at the scene of the murder, had no reason to think she had ever seen the murderer, and so could not have expected to recognize him. She only had the identikit picture. The police picked Hanratty up and questioned him. Initially he could not account for his whereabouts on that fateful evening – but how many of us could do that? – and they started investigating his recent movements.

The police discovered two .38 cartridge cases from bullets fired from the murder weapon in the Vienna Hotel; one of the rooms had been occupied by a Mr James Ryan, which was an alias used by James Hanrattty. The police decided they need look no further. There was nevertheless no forensic evidence from the car to connect Hanratty to the murder.

Hanratty was lined up in an identification parade. Valerie was unable to pick anyone out that she recognized. ‘I’m sorry. I only saw him for a few seconds. It’s very difficult.’ She knew and freely admitted that she had been badly traumatized during and after her ordeal and that this had blocked and distorted her memory. The police ran a second identification parade. This time the police asked the men to repeat the line, ‘Be quiet will you? I’m thinking’. Valerie felt sure Hanratty was saying ‘finking’. The police thought they had got their man.

Hanratty made himself doubly vulnerable at this point by producing an alibi. He had not mentioned Rhyl before, but now he claimed that on the night in question he had been in Rhyl, 250 miles from the murder scene. It looked like an improvised smoke screen, and the police saw no reason to make no more than a cursory check on his alibi.

James Hanratty was arrested in Blackpool on 9 October in 1961, identified by Valerie at an identity parade, and sent for trial at Bedford Assizes. Much of the trial proceedings turned on Hanratty’s alibi, that he had been at Rhyl in north Wales on the day in question.

The jury took a long time – nearly ten hours – to come to the decision that Hanratty was guilty. The use of a gun in the murder was crucial. As the law stood at that time, if Hanratty had strangled or poisoned Michael Gregsten he would have been sentenced to life imprisonment; using a gun meant death. He was sentenced to death and, in spite of a petition for clemency bearing 28,000 signatures, he was hanged in Bedford Prison on 4 April 1962.

The conviction and execution of James Hanratty were extremely controversial. Britain was phasing out capital punishment at the time, and Hanratty’s was one of only three executions that took place between 1961 and 1965, at which time hanging ceased altogether. Had the suspect been correctly identified? Had enough enquiries been made into the validity of Hanratty’s alibi? Had any motive been established for the murder? Had sufficient evidence altogether be gathered to justify a conviction, let alone an execution? Had alternative suspects like Alphon really been investigated properly? Hanratty himself stoutly denied that he was involved in any way with the murder, and went to the gallows protesting his innocence and pleading with his family to clear his name. Many people have campaigned to have the case reopened and get some of these questions answered.

By the time the police check got round to checking Hanratty’s alibi they had already decided that he was the killer. They ran only a cursory check which confirmed that they were right. But shortly after the hanging, no fewer than fourteen people came forward to say that they had seen or spoken to Hanratty in Rhyl, and that the police had interviewed none of them. The police enquiries had led them to the Vienna Hotel, where Hanratty had certainly stayed. In the Vienna Hotel, the police found cartridge cases that connected the place to the murder scene. But Hanratty was not the only person who had stayed at the Vienna Hotel. As it turned out, it was for him an unlucky choice. It was a very unlucky coincidence that he chose to stay at the same hotel as the murderer. Also staying at the Vienna Hotel was Peter Louis Alphon, who up to that moment had been the police’s main suspect. Alphon was not identified by Valerie at an identification parade, but then neither really was Hanratty. But once the police had decided that Hanratty was the killer, further enquiries into Alphon were dropped.

Unlike Hanratty, Alphon had no alibi at all for the night of the murder. He was a friend of Michael Gregsten’s wife and therefore had a previous connection with Michael and Valerie that Hanratty did not. Alphon later claimed that Mrs Gregsten had paid him £5000 to frighten the lovers into separating so that she could get her husband back. Here – at last – was a possible motive. Alphon pronounced the word ‘thinking’ as ‘finking’. He looked remarkably like the identikit picture.

There was also the manner in which the Morris Minor was being driven as the murderer left the murder scene. Many witnesses saw the car as it drove away from the scene; they noticed it because it drew their attention. It was being driven very erratically. This is very peculiar if the murderer was Hanratty, because Hanratty was an experienced driver. Alphon, on the other hand, had not even passed his driving test, and is therefore far more likely to have been the driver that night.

In a similar way, the personality of Alphon fits the events of the night better. Hanratty was a city character, sociable and well liked by the people he worked with; he had never shown any sign of psychological hang-ups. He does not seem very likely to have behaved in the neurotic and irrational way that the A6 killer behaved that night. Alphon on the other hand was neurotic, psychologically fragile, a petty criminal, a loner, roaming about with no proper job. Even the most rudimentary psychological profiling would have identified Alphon as far likelier to have committed the A6 murder than Hanratty. He also had an odd, distinctive way of speaking. His voice was recorded by investigators years later as he spoke about the A6 shootings – I have heard the tape – and the neurotic peculiarity of his speech fits Valerie’s observations.

All this could have been established by the police in 1961. All this could have been presented in court to ensure that the right man went to the gallows. What was not available at the time was Alphon’s confession. It was not until many years later, when the events of that summer had preyed on his mind to such an extent that he wanted other people to know what had happened. He claimed in his confession that he was paid a large sum to ‘damage’ Valerie and Michael. What appears to have happened is that family friends seeking to help Mrs Gregsten by ending Michael’s affair with Valerie hired Alphon to surprise and frighten the lovers at Taplow Meadow, where there were known to meet. Maybe Alphon took the gun as a prop, to wave at Gregsten, knowing that it would thoroughly frighten him. Alphon’s fundamental instability as a person meant that he got carried away with his gangster role and the situation ran away with him. Maybe he didn’t know how to bring the frightening episode to a satisfactory close and panicked. The apparent lack of purpose to the attack is certainly consistent with this scenario. The story is unfortunately muddied by Alphon’s retraction later on. By the time Paul Foot interviewed him for his book Who killed Hanratty? He had thought better of his confession, perhaps fearing he would be put on trial.

Whether there would have been a watertight case against Alphon is impossible to tell now, since the forensic trail has gone cold, but if all these facts had been made known to the jury at Hanratty’s trial it would have been clear that there was more than ‘reasonable doubt’ about Hanratty’s guilt. It was not a safe conviction.

Immediately after the execution, many began to wonder whether justice really had been done. Even Mrs Gregsten, who had pointed the finger at Hanratty in the first place, began to have doubts. The gathering uncertainty led the British government further towards the abolition of hanging. At least if a man is given a life sentence for murder there remains the possibility of release and restitution; the mistake can be put right. There is no possibility of putting right a hanging.

Over the years since the murder, Hanratty has increasingly looked like the wrong suspect, Alphon the right suspect. But very recently the situation has become startlingly more complicated with the emergence of some DNA evidence. In 1999, the Hanratty family, which has remained steadfastly convinced of Hanratty’s innocence throughout, won their fight to have his case reviewed.

Thirty-seven years after Hanratty was hanged, it emerged that vital evidence that could have saved him from the gallows was deliberately suppressed by senior police officers at the time of his trial, presumably in order to secure a conviction. Hanratty’s brother Michael and his sister-in-law Maureen were shocked at the misconduct of the authorities. Because of this and the flaws in the identification process, the case was referred back to the Court of Appeal. Geoffrey Bindman, the Hanratty family’s solicitor at the time, commented that the amount of information not disclosed at the trial was substantial, enough to have saved Hanratty from conviction. The identification procedure was seriously flawed, because there was heavy dependence on voice identification and Hanratty was the only person with a London accent asked to speak in front of Valerie Storey. The Rhyl alibi was swept aside by the police, when there were fourteen people who had seen Hanratty or spoken to him in Rhyl at the time of the murder – fourteen potential witnesses for the defence who were studiously ignored by the police.

Several books have been written about the A6 murder, starting with Who Killed Hanratty? by Paul Foot in 1971; the most recent exploration of the case is Bob Woffinden’s 1997 book Hanratty: the Final Verdict. The general view is that there was such intense revulsion at the crime that the authorities felt pushed to get a conviction at any price. When Roy Jenkins was Home Secretary in 1974, he thought there was sufficient justification to review the case and asked the lawyer Lewis Hawser to look into it. Hawser’s 1975 report said that there had been access to all the relevant evidence and that therefore the conviction had been safe. In other words, regardless of whether Hanratty was guilty or not, there had been no procedural errors in arriving at the verdict.

Campaigners working for Hanratty’s exoneration made new representations to the British Home Office in the 1990s. The case against Hanratty rested partly on the fact that he had been identified on the morning after the murder in the supposedly stolen Morris Minor by two men in Redbridge in East London. But what now emerged was that the stolen car had been spotted a very long way away, in Derbyshire, by as many as eleven people at the same time. The presence of the stolen Morris Minor in Derbyshire had even been formally reported to the police. The police elected not to pass this key information to the defence; it might, after all, have helped to get Hanratty off. This was part of the newly emerging suppressed evidence. Geoffrey Bindman, Paul Foot and Bob Woffinden were astonished to find that a significant amount of material had existed all along which could have helped Hanratty’s defence significantly but which had been deliberately withheld from his defence lawyers. Some of it was not shown to the prosecution team either, presumably for fear that the defence might gain access to it.

The former Assistant Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police, Baden Skitt, led the enquiry and he too was shocked at the suppression of evidence. The Hanratty family were outraged. They now knew that key evidence had been deliberately concealed. Michael Hanratty said, ‘All this evidence has been locked away in Scotland Yard. They told us to come back for it in a hundred years. It is a disgrace. We’re worse than South Africa.’

In 1991, the Bedfordshire Police allowed Bob Woffinden to see previously undisclosed files on the A6 murder. Baden Skitt’s report in addition revealed a significant fact about the Morris Minor. The recorded mileage shown on the clock was too low for Skillett’s sighting in Brentwood and Trower’s sighting in Redbridge Lane to have been sightings of the Morris Minor in which Gregsten died. There is no evidence that Skillet and Trower even saw the same Morris Minor as each other. The evidence against Hanratty had, in short, been ‘cooked’.

The re-emerging evidence was the basis for a formal hearing in the Court of Appeal. A handkerchief Hanratty used to wrap up the gun was subjected to DNA testing. The DNA profile was compared with DNA samples from the Hanratty family. The apparent fit between the handkerchief and Hanratty seriously dented the claim that Hanratty was innocent, but the Hannratty family’s solicitor pointed out that the exhibits from the case had not been stored properly. At the time of the trial there had been no question of DNA testing – the technique had yet to be invented – and the exhibits had been stored together, unsealed. Clearly, there was a distinct possibility that Hanratty DNA from other exhibits had been transferred to the handkerchief. Over a period of thirty-nine years, the items had been handled over and over again. The evidence was, once again, but in a very different way, contaminated.

The match between the handkerchief and Hanratty was in any case possible, not definite. As a result, it was decided that an exhumation of Hanratty’s body was necessary to resolve the question. If Hanratty’s guilt or innocence could be established by modern forensic means, then it should be.

In March 2001, James Hanratty’s body was exhumed from Carpenter’s Park Cemetery near Bushey in Hertfordshire. DNA from his teeth was found to match two samples found at the scene of the crime (trial exhibits 26 and 35); one was on Valerie Storie’s underwear and the other was the handkerchief wrapped round the murder weapon, a .38 revolver. As a result of the DNA matching, the Court of Criminal Appeal ruled that Hanratty’s conviction was safe and that there were no grounds for a posthumous pardon. In other words, even though serious errors may have been made in the process of bringing Hanratty to justice, he was nevertheless the man who committed the crime, so justice was done.

The Hanratty family remain unconvinced, though, for the same reasons as before. At the appeal hearing, the barrister acting for the Hanratty family, Michael Mansfield, argued that the exhibits were from the beginning never handled in a forensically sterile environment, and could easily have become cross-contaminated. During the trial at Bedford Assizes, the exhibits were regularly taken to and from court in the same boxes; the samples repeatedly came in contact with one another, including the samples of Valerie Storie’s and James Hanratty’s clothing. In that context, it would not be at all surprising if some of Hanratty’s DNA found its way onto the other trial exhibits, especially in the minute quantities that were actually present. Officers and witnesses took the exhibits and handled them freely; people were not to know at that time about the possibility of damaging the evidence, simply because no one knew about DNA. Michael Mansfield claimed that the exhibits had been handled in a lax way that frustrated modern scientific analysis. The contamination of the exhibits could be accounted for by the broken vial found among the exhibits.

The forensic scientists who carried out the tests counter-argue that if Hanratty was not the killer, the killer’s DNA is unaccountably missing from the exhibits; no other man’s DNA was found. The Appeal judge, Lord Woolf, took the view of the forensic scientists: ‘In our judgement . . . the DNA evidence establishes beyond doubt that James Hanratty was the murderer.’

But, if Hanratty did it, why on earth did he do it? And how did Mrs Gregsten identify him in a crowd at Blackpool? The A6 murder remains one of the greatest murder mysteries of modern times. The DNA breakthrough has opened a new phase in the controversy. Maybe further new techniques, not yet invented, will solve the mystery in the future. Let us hope so, for the sake of justice. Even if Hanratty was guilty of the crime, his trial was not a fair one. Significant evidence that he was in Rhyl at the time was deliberately suppressed by the police, and on that basis alone his trial must be regarded as a mistrial. Even if guilty, James Hanratty did not get justice. If innocent, he was the victim of a gross miscarriage of justice.