Hanratty deserved to die

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 resumé. 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 £25,000, 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 Storie’s 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.

I immediately routed out my copy of The A6 Murder, by Louis Blom-Cooper. (Penguin Books 1963). The author, a prominent lawyer was as much an activist as was Silverman MP, in ending the death penalty.

Even Blom-Cooper cannot justify insulting his own undoubted intellegence, by dogmatically claiming Hanratty was innocent. He merely claims the chances given to the defendant,were so poor, justice was not done.

Always have I laughed at the silly elderly woman from Rhyll, who kept a bed and breakfast. She claimed a redheaded youth slept in her establishment the very night, the murders were committed.

I know the laws there. Every single such place I lodged in, demanded an entry in the guest book. If Hanratty had made such an entry- whoa, watch out. He didnt of course, because he was never there at that time. Hanratty first claimed he was in Liverpool that very night to see crooks(fences) about stolen goods. Ok said the police, let us confirm with them and we will see. Oh no says Hanratty, if they ever got me for "telling" on them, they would kill me. Smart move?

One quick shot at Lennon, the lousy drug ridden hypocrite, left his wife a quarter of a billion dollars- sang about abolishing private property. Goodbye Lennon, goodbye Hanratty.

Court dismisses Hanratty appeal
Three judges at the Court of Appeal have dismissed the appeal on behalf of James Hanratty, who was hanged for the A6 murder in Bedfordshire 40 years ago.
The court ruled that 25-year-old Hanratty was not wrongly convicted in 1962 of murdering scientist Michael Gregsten.
The victims were shot in a lay-by on the A6
Hanratty, one of the last people to be executed before the abolition of capital punishment in the UK, had always claimed he was 250 miles away from the scene - in Rhyl, north Wales.
But on Friday, the three judges ruled that DNA evidence had established his guilt "beyond doubt".
Lord Woolf, the Lord Chief Justice, said: "In our judgment ...the DNA evidence establishes beyond doubt that James Hanratty was the murderer."
He added that the DNA evidence "made what was a strong case even stronger".
Notorious case
James Hanratty was convicted of murdering scientist Michael Gregsten on the A6 in Bedfordshire by shooting him twice in the head.
Mr Gregsten's girlfriend Valerie Storie was raped, shot five times and left for dead - she survived but was paralysed from the waist down.
Hanratty's family insisted he was the victim of a "distorted and fatally flawed trial" and claimed that recent DNA evidence linking him to the crime may have been contaminated.
In April, Lord Chief Justice Woolf, Lord Justice Mantell and Mr Justice Leveson began to re-examine the safety of the 1962 conviction.
At the Appeal Court, barrister Michael Mansfield QC for Hanratty said the "distortion" of the original trial process was "in large measure" due to the actions of the senior police officer, who has since died, in covering-up evidence in several key areas.
Paralysed
It was alleged at the time that Hanratty came across the 36-year-old victim, Mr Gregsten and his 22-year-old girlfriend, Valerie Storie, inside a parked Morris Minor in August 1961.
They were confronted by a man with a gun who ordered them to drive to a remote lay-by, where Mr Gregsten was shot dead and Ms Storey was raped.
Hanratty was arrested, tried and convicted for murder.
The jury did not believe his story that he was in Rhyl at the time of the attack - despite the landlady of a B&B backing his claim.
In the years after his execution, numerous witnesses have come forward to support that story.
His conviction was based largely on Miss Storie's recollection of the voice of her attacker.
Mr Mansfield, however, argued over the course of the appeal that she saw him for only a few seconds during the six-hour ordeal, and failed to pick him out of the first police identity parade.
In 1999, the case was referred to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), the independent watchdog set up to investigate alleged miscarriages of justice.
After carrying out its own investigation, it sent the case to the Court of Appeal.
But the case took another twist when DNA samples were taken from members of Hanratty's family.
DNA issue
They were checked against samples found on Miss Storie's underwear and a handkerchief wrapped around the murder weapon.
The results showed there was a 2.5 million to one chance that the samples came from someone other than Hanratty.
In March 2001, DNA sample extracted from Hanratty's exhumed body was matched by forensic experts to two samples from the crime scene.
The family believed that the DNA sample could have been contaminated.
Hanratty protested his innocence until his death. On the eve of his execution, he told his family: "I'm dying tomorrow but I'm innocent. Clear my name."

If the DNA tests prove Hanratty was the killer, the Committee argues, the DNA must have become ‘contaminated’...

Stange thing, DNA is only significant if it exonerates the accused (or convicted). If it confirms the sentence, clearly - there's something wrong with it!

This has been going on for a long time, regardless of technology. Some 25 years ago, I was on a jury in San Francisco, where we heard a case involving a man who had been snagged going the wrong way on a freeway at some 100 mph - and he had several thousand dollars in cash fluttering about in his car, as well as a number of empty tequila bottles rolling about here and there. The only things they were able to charge him with, however, were a couple of traffic violations and drunk driving. His blood alcohol was twice the legal limit, but unfortunately, he had obviously already sold the drugs he had been carrying (hence the cash) and there was no evidence.

But -guess what - his attorney came forward and claimed that his blood sample had been "contaminated" in the lab by somebody who hated the guy and had "injected" alcohol into the test tube in which the blood sample was kept. The judge had to order us to stop laughing.

After this, the attorney announced that it was probably not malicious, and that a passing technician had accidentally dropped a bit of rubbing alcohol (the type used for swabbing off wounds) into the blood sample....

The judge once again ordered us to stop laughing, and it took us about 10 minutes to find the guy guilty.

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