N FEBRUARY 17th, 1962, James Hanratty sat anxiously biting his fingers as the jury filed back into the courtroom at Bedford Assizes. It was a tense moment the
jurors were returning for a second time since beginning their deliberations as to whether the baby-faced 25-year-old was the notorious A6 killer. Guilt would send him to the gallows. Hanratty s agonising wait, however, was not over. The foreman of the jury asked that they be given some supper, incensing the judge who begrudgingly agreed to another recess. The jurors were served plates of sandwiches, while Hanratty waited in torment in the cells beneath the court.
Finally, at 9.10pm, a gruelling ten hours after they had been sent out, they returned to pronounce Hanratty guilty on all counts. There were cries from the public gallery and then quiet. The judge asked him if he had anything to say and after a false start and a pause he replied clearly: I am innocent my Lord and I shall appeal. The black cloth was perched on the judge s wig and he condemned Hanratty to death. Weeks later his appeal was turned down and Britain s greatest miscarriage of justice was complete.
James Hanratty protested his innocence right up to the last and in letters written from his cell he begged his family to clear his name. Now, 25 years after Hanratty was hanged, his wish looks set to be granted. An 18-month Scotland Yard inquiry into the A6 murder has concluded that he was innocent and Detective Chief Superintendent Roger Matthews, who headed up the investigation, is said to have recanted his support of capital punishment. The British Home Secretary Michael Howard is poised to send the case to the Court of Appeal.
Hanratty s Drogheda-born father, James senior, who relentlessly proclaimed his son s innocence from the pavement outside the House of Commons, died in 1978. But his brother Michael is now confident that his father s years of campaigning will not have been in vain. My dad did all the hard work, he says. He was out there when people were just telling him to go home. It makes me sad to think that all he got was whitewashes. He would have been delighted by this.
The A6 murder began on a summer night in 1961. Research scientist Michael Gregston (36) and his work colleague and mistress Valerie Storie (22) enjoyed a regular rendezvous at a cornfield in Taplow, near Maidenhead, Berkshire. They had stopped in their usual spot in his grey Morris Minor when there was a tap on the driver s window and Gregston looked up to see the barrel of a gun. After about two hours of negotiation, the couple were forced to drive about 60 miles to a secluded lay-by off the A6 road near Bedford, ominously referred to locally as Deadman s Hill.
A few minutes after pulling off the road, their abductor asked Gregston to hand him a bag from the front of the car and, as he did so, he was shot in the head. Gregson s hysterical partner was forced into the back seat and raped, before being dragged out of the car and shot repeatedly as she lay on the ground. The killer then drove off, leaving her for dead. Her ordeal had lasted six hours.
Miraculously, she survived the attack and gave police a description of the murderer. However, because of the darkness of the lay-by, she only got a brief glimpse of his face when it was illuminated by a car s passing headlights. She also recalled how the killer referred to himself as Jim, although in a statement which has only recently come to light, she said it was clear that this was not his real name. The recent Scotland Yard investigation has revealed a description of a man seen standing at Deadman s Hill on the night of the murder. The suspicious figure was spotted by a passing couple, who reported the sighting to police the following day. This man bore no resemblance to Hanratty, but this seemingly significant piece in the A6 jigsaw was never made known to his defence.
Within five days of the murder, the police had a suspect a jobless drifter named Peter Louis Alphon. He was brought in for questioning after guests at a London hotel reported his suspicious behaviour there two days after the murder. The identikit picture produced by police bore a striking resemblance to Alphon. During questioning, he told police that on the night of the murder he had visited his mother in Streatham and then travelled by tube to the Vienna Hotel in Sutherland Avenue, Maida Vale, arriving at 11pm. He had checked in under a false name earlier that day. The police rang the hotel and were told by the manager that he thought Alphon had been there all that night. Satisfied with Alphon s story, they released him.
On September 11th, 1961, the Vienna Hotel gained a far greater significance in the A6 murder case. During a general check of the hotel, the manager went into a basement room number 24. There on the bedside chair were two spent cartridge cases. Remembering the call he had received from the police following Alphon s arrest, he immediately contacted the police again. It did not take long for forensic experts to match the .38 cartridge cases with the Enfield revolver used by the killer. (It would later emerge that the last time the room had been slept in was the night before the A6 murder. Its occupant had been a J. Ryan alias James Hanratty.) But it was on the night of the murder that Peter Alphon had slept in the hotel under the name Frank Durrant. The police were delighted with this breakthrough.
A hotel employee, William Nudds a one-time fraudster and police informer initially confirmed Alphon s story that he had arrived before midnight. But Alphon s mother could not be sure which night he had visited and a second visit to Nudds revealed an entirely different version of events and punctured Alphon s alibi. Now he recalled that Alphon had originally been shown to Room 24 in the basement and had been given the key. Alphon said he would prefer an upstairs room and Nudds had promised to transfer him later if another room became vacant. But Alphon had still not returned when Nudds and his wife went to bed at 2am and he had left a note for Alphon, directing him to Room 6, the booking for which had been cancelled. The police moved quickly and took the unprecedented step of naming Alphon in the newspapers as the man wanted for questioning about the murder. Later that night he walked into Scotland Yard.
Valerie Storie, who was confined to a wheelchair, went before an identity parade the following day. But she picked out an entirely innocent RAF corporal, not Alphon. She was left in tears and Alphon was released, proclaiming his innocence to reporters. It was a moment which was to prove fatal for another man J. Ryan, and James Hanratty.
The events leading to Hanratty s arrest were both bizarre and sinister. Just a week after the killing, Michael Gregston s widow Janet had spotted a man in a dry cleaners in London s Swiss Cottage and intuitively identified him as the man police were looking for. Her brother-in-law William Ewer went into the dry cleaners and asked who the man was. The proprietor identified him as J. Ryan of St John s Wood. In another coincidence, William Ewer was sitting in a cafe the following morning when he saw the mystery man again, this time in a florists. He immediately called the police who discovered the customer to be a James Hanratty of Kingsbury, who was sending flowers to his mother. To this day, no one has explained how Janet Gregston linked him to the A6 murder, long before he was ever suspected.
Far more incriminating however was the evidence of the bullet cases in Room 24 where James Hanratty had slept. Nudds, when questioned about this guest, remembered him asking the following day where he could catch the 36A London bus. The killer s .38 Enfield Revolver had turned up with 60 rounds of ammunition under a seat on a 36A London bus just days after the murder. The red-haired petty crook was now the most wanted man in Britain.
The police called to the Hanratty family home but James was not there. When his father next saw him he advised his son to talk to the authorities. But James, panicking, instead went on the run in a stolen Jaguar. He was finally arrested in a Blackpool cafe seven weeks after the murder. He was then driven to London and put in a line up before Valerie Storie. On the day of the parade, Hanratty stood out with his red hair. At first, Storie failed to pick him out, having also asked each to speak. But on a second attempt she pointed her finger at Hanratty. It was the moment the police had dreamed of. Finally, they could bring charges against the A6 killer. Hanratty was also charged with the rape and attempted murder of Valerie Storie.
But one obvious question remained how had the petty car thief from London happened on two lovers in a remote field near Maidenhead and what could have been the motive behind the cold-blooded crime which followed? A satisfactory answer has never emerged. Incredibly, the jury was never told anything about the three-year love affair between Gregston and Storie the only obvious motive for someone to have been on their trail.
Michael Hanratty, then 25, accompanied his mother and father to court every day for the trial, held under the full gaze of the media. He painfully recalled: There was a group of police officers who came in with Valerie Storie. When she was in the witness box giving her evidence, she was just looking up at the corner of the court. Then she took her eyes away from the corner and looked straight at Jimmy and said You bastard, you ve shot him, and he didn t even flinch. It was a put up job.
The only day we didn t go to the trial was when Jimmy was giving evidence. Michael Sherrard, his barrister, said Jimmy would be able to concentrate better, because he was always smiling and winking at us and telling us not to worry. He [Jimmy] must have been in a dream. The Daily Express had offered him #45,000 for an interview and said he would walk. He was saying he would use the money to go straight. This was right up to the end.
Hanratty, sometimes known as Ginger , was brought up in north London in an Irish Catholic family. He was always poor at school and by his teens was semi-literate. Attracted by the bright lights of the West End, he fell into bad company and slid into a life of petty crime. He spent his early twenties in and out of prison, mainly for stealing cars and house-breaking. At the time of the A6 murder, his regular haunt was the Rehearsal Club in Soho, a sleazy den of gambling and prostitution, inhabited by an assortment of villains, some of whom were subsequently to give evidence against him.
Paradoxically, his penchant for stealing cars should have helped tell the jury that he could not have been the A6 killer. For the chilling picture Valerie Storie painted of the killer included one telling clue: he couldn t drive. Twice he asked his victim to help him start the car and work the gears on Gregston s Morris Minor. The car spluttered as he made his escape. Hanratty was an expert at starting cars and taught his older brother Michael to drive. Alphon meanwhile couldn t drive. In one of her police statements, Storie estimated the murderer s age as 30. Hanratty was 25, while Alphon was exactly 30. Perversely, Supt Bob Acott told the jury that Alphon had been eliminated because of his age. This statement was never seen by the defence.
Hanratty s attempts to substantiate his alibi which he had altered early in the investigation were also doomed. His initial claim that he had driven to Liverpool was supported by a lady from a sweet shop who remembered serving him at 4pm, but the murder had been committed that night. He later told police that he travelled on to Rhyl, in north Wales, and recalled a B&B near a railway line. The landlady of a guest-house fitting the description remembered Hanratty, but none of her guests said they had seen him. This was because the house had been full and Hanratty had slept in an attic room and had eaten his meals in the family room, not the dining room. Clearly the jury was not convinced.
Although the killer had spent more than six hours in the car, no fingerprints or hair samples were found. Hanratty had volunteered samples and had handed in items of clothing to the police, but forensic evidence played no part in the A6 murder case.
The outlandish figure of Peter Louis Alphon from the time of the murder to the present day has cast a pall over the case. He has made numerous confessions to the murder and in 1966 called a press conference to announce his guilt. In a BBC interview at the time, he described his actions as a crusade against indecency and immorality . He has also claimed that he was asked to frighten Gregston and Storie, in an attempt to force him to return to his wife and that he received #5,000 following the murder. In more recent interviews, he has denied any involvement in the A6 murder. Janet Gregston always denied suggestions that someone was asked to trail her husband and his mistress, but before she died, she too expressed doubt over Hanratty s guilt.
Following the recent dramatic freeing of the Bridgewater Three and the acceptance after 19 years of their innocence, the clearing of Hanratty s name is now set to follow. It will close a shameful travesty of justice which has been allowed to stand for a quarter of a century. But it will not compensate for the death of Hanratty the 25-year old who strode stoically to the gallows and wrote of his innocence in heart-rending letters.
One prophetic message to his parents read: I feel that one day my name will be cleared without any doubt. With that knowledge, there is no need for you and dad to be ashamed by any remarks or any gossip at all. When eventually the truth does come to light, people will regret the remarks they have made against me. People today seem to have no conscience at all. n