James Hanratty - UK Executed Innocent Man? 1962

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James Hanratty
Nickname: The A6 Killer

Date of Crime: 22nd August 1961

Motive: Unknown

Crimes: Murder of Michael Gregsten and sexual assault and shooting of Gregsten's lover, Valerie Storie

Method: Shot twice in the head with a .38 Enfield gun.

Sentence: Hanratty received the death penalty and was hanged on 4th April 1962

Interesting facts: Gregsten and Storie were sitting in a car in a lonely field near Slough when the killer found them. He spent several hours talking to them, and finally ordered them to drive him where he wanted to go. They eventually drove up the A6 towards Bedford. The journey ended in a layby on the aptly named Deadman's Hill.

The murder weapon was found several days later under the back seat of the 36A bus in London. Spent cartridges from the gun were also found in a guest house room where Hanratty had stayed the night before the murder.

There has always been great controversy over whether Hanratty was, in fact, the A6 Killer. One of the main reasons for this was the description given by Storie to the police. It is alleged that her very first description, given to the man who first contacted the police, was of a man with light fairish hair and staring eyes. Her first description to the police was of a man aged about 30, 5 foot 6, medium build, pale faced, with dark hair and deep-set brown eyes. An Identikit picture was based on this description. Another composite Identikit picture was based on the evidence of three witnesses who saw the killer driving the car after the murder - it also had dark staring eyes and dark brushed back hair. On 31st August Storie gave another description of the man saying that he had "large, icy-blue, saucer-like eyes". This final description matched Hanratty.

The first suspect in the enquiry was Peter Alphon, who matched the Identikit descriptions. He had allegedly been seen near the field on the evening of the murder, and was noted to have been acting strangely in the period after it. After Hanratty's death, he also admitted to the crime several times.

In March 2001, after years of arguing about the identity of the A6 Killer, Hanratty's body was exhumd, and forensic samples from the crime scene received DNA testing. These tests concluded that there was a 2.5 million to one chance that the samples did not come from Hanratty. In May 2002, the Court of Appeal ruled that Hanratty's conviction was not unsound. A posthumous pardon was therefore not granted.

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James Hanratty: Close to a final verdict?
The scene of the crime
The A6 lay-by where the murders took place in 1962
By the BBC's Peter Gould

James Hanratty went to the gallows protesting his innocence, and asking his family to clear his name.

He was hanged on April 4, 1962 and was one of the last people to die before the abolition of capital punishment.

It all began one night the previous August in a cornfield at Dorney Reach, in Berkshire.

Inside a parked Morris Minor was a 36-year-old scientist, Michael Gregsten, and his 22-year-old girlfriend, Valerie Storie.

James Hanratty
James Hanratty asked his family to clear his name
They were confronted by a man with a gun. He ordered them to drive to Deadman's Hill, on the A6 near Bedford.

With the car parked in a lay-by, Michael Gregsten was shot dead. Valerie Storie was raped, shot five times and left for dead.

She survived, but was paralysed from the waist down.

Hanratty was arrested, tried and convicted of murder. The jury did not believe his story that he was two hundred miles away at the time of the attack.

But the case has become a cause celebre, with politicians and pop stars, legal experts and writers joining the campaign to prove he was the victim of a miscarriage of justice.

After a lengthy campaign, the family of James Hanratty finally made a breakthrough last year when the Criminal Cases Review Commission agreed to send the case to the Court of Appeal.

But what has happened during recent months has re-opened the controversy.

Beyond doubt

The Crown has taken advantage of recent breakthroughs in DNA profiling to carry out new tests on the exhibits in the case.

The mother and brother of James Hanratty both provided samples of DNA to enable a comparison to be made with traces of DNA found on Valerie Storie's underwear and a handkerchief wrapped around the murder weapon.

The comparison showed a match. Lawyers for the Crown told the Court of Appeal that this was strong evidence - the DNA was two and a half million times more likely to belong to Hanratty than anyone else.

But to put the matter beyond doubt, they needed to extract a sample of DNA from his remains, buried in a Hertfordshire cemetery.

The Court of Appeal does not have the power to order an exhumation.

But the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, said it would be desirable "in the interests of justice".


It is not appropriate to apply these tests to exhibits which have been kept unsealed with or near exhibits taken from James Hanratty

Hanratty family lawyer Tamsin Allen
And he said every step should to be taken to establish whether the trial jury was correct when they found Hanratty guilty.

The DNA evidence has already been seized on by those who believe that Hanratty was the A6 killer.

And the Crown's lawyers will use it to try to convince the Court of Appeal that the conviction is safe, and should not be quashed.

In a statement issued through the police, Valerie Storie said the new evidence supported her "total and absolute" belief in Hanratty's guilt.

And within the police, there are hopes that it will finally draw a line under a case that has been argued about for almost 40 years.

But despite what appears to be a setback for their campaign, the family of James Hanratty say they are still confident that the appeal will prove he was wrongly convicted.

Their lawyers will argue that the DNA tests prove nothing, because of a real possibility that evidence gathered in 1961 has been contaminated.

'Flawed evidence'

They say the latest techniques are so sensitive that they require police exhibits to be handled according to strict procedures.

"It is not appropriate to apply these tests to exhibits which have been kept unsealed with or near exhibits taken from James Hanratty and handled by many people over the past 39 years," said the family's lawyer, Tamsin Allen.

"For these and other reasons the Hanratty family will contend that the DNA results are unreliable and should be disregarded."

The family's lawyers will argue that the prosecution case has been undermined by revelations that crucial documents were witheld from the defence.

The documents they say show that evidence used to identify Hanratty as the killer was flawed.

There will now have to be a delay in the court proceedings to allow his body to be exhumed, and further DNA tests to take place.

It will be next year before the appeal actually begins, almost 40 years after James Hanratty found himself accused of murder.

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Hanratty: Verdict Incomprehensible
By Simon Regan
27 May 1997

Good, honest, painstaking police work - and much of it is - should be a jigsaw puzzle. Sometimes it has very large pieces, for children, and you can almost see the finished picture before you put it all together. Others are far larger, more intricate and therefore more complicated. With all jigsaws, however, all the pieces should be there for you to discover before you on the table. Muddled up, of course, but it is up to a good policeman, doing his job, to sort them out and fit them in. He should build from the borders - the framework, the skeleton - and gradually work towards the middle until the picture is complete. That is called creating a cast-iron case. When he goes to court he should be fully satisfied that every little bit gels with its neighbours.

Even with jigsaws, however, it is possible for the unscrupulous to cheat. Sometimes he is only cheating himself, but the complete ethos of a good cheat is to fool everyone else as well. He may cheat, either by leaving out pieces altogether, and guessing at the finished picture, or by actually manipulating the pieces to fit in places where they shouldn't.

It is very difficult not to come to the conclusion that in the case of James Hanratty, they had hardly fitted the borders, let alone the main picture, before they got bored with the game, created their own vision of what it should look like, and promptly threw the other pieces away.

Few cases in the history of modern justice could be more seemingly incomprehensible than the hanging of James Hanratty in 1962. Any random, even amateur analysis of the murder, the police investigation, the prosecution and the decision of judge and jury, leave one almost spellbound with incredulity. Especially as Hanratty's execution was one of only three before capital punishment was abandoned in 1965. Public opinion at the time was fast approaching the thumbs down on hanging. Hanratty's execution is now considered to be one of the factors of the abolition three years later. Many people at the time, including a handful of high-ranking investigating officers, had grave doubts as to his guilt. Yet, on the flimsiest of evidence, he was fatefully convicted.

In fact, so incredible were these events that the only hard evidence which was discovered, was evidence to show quite clearly that Hanratty could not possibly have murdered anyone on the fateful night. All the real evidence points like a golden lottery arrow towards another petty criminal, Peter Alphon, who years later even confessed to the murder.

Before giving chapter and verse on the two sets of circumstances, it is relevant to ask three questions: (1) If, as now seems manifestly evident, the police created a singularly flawed case, jam-packed with doubts and inconclusive innuendoes, did they or did they not do a competent job during their investigation? (2) Especially regarding the high-profile public interest in the court case, why did the defence not pick holes in the seriously inadequate prosecution and create a defence of reasonable doubt in the minds of the court? (3) How could a judge allow a prosecution to continue when, to him at least, the evidence against Hanratty must have appeared so flimsy? It appears that, so convinced was he of Hanratty's guilt, he had no qualms at all in putting on the black hat at Bedford Crown Court in February 1962 and ordering that James Hanratty should be hanged from the neck until dead.
The Murder

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On the night of August 22nd 1961 Michael Gregsten and his lover Valerie Storie, left the Road Research Laboratory near Slough where they both worked together as lab assistants. Gregsten was married to Janet who knew of the affair. It was by no means the first time her husband had been unfaithful to her. They drove off in Gregsten's Morris Minor car and headed, as they often did in warm weather, to Taplow Meadow, outside Maidenhead in Berkshire. They were kissing in the front seat when there was a sharp tap at the window. Michael could see who it was but at that time, Valerie could not. The man held a gun at Michael and said, "I am a desperate man." He then got into the back of the car, demanding that the couple keep their eyes ahead and on the road. With the gun figuratively at least at his head, Michael was ordered to drive off, first through the outskirts of Slough, and then out to the open road where he was ordered to stop in a lay-by on the A6. This area was fairly sheltered and surrounded by bushes. Locally, it was known as Deadman's Hill, a favourite for courting couples. The journey had taken more than two hours and when they stopped, the gunman asked Michael to hand him a duffel bag. Without seeming warning or reason, as Michael passed the bag, he was shot twice with the revolver. They were lethal shots. It was now dark and a terrified Valerie was then savagely raped before herself being shot several times at close range. Miraculously, she survived, although she remained seriously crippled for life. Also strangely for a series of incidences which covered an estimated six-hour time span, she only properly caught sight of the gunman's face for a few seconds as the headlights of a passing car lit up the whole scene. Before he raped her, the murderer had said six fateful words which would be the nub of the prosecution case. He said: "Shut up will you? I'm thinking." He spoke with a sort of non-accent - that is he did not speak with a Glaswegian or Cockney accent, for instance, but one which was distinguishable yet could not be properly geographically placed. Crucially, he pronounced the word "thinking" as "finking."

After ravishing Valerie, he then, callously, threw her out of the car, leaving her sprawled and in agony on the roadside, and drove off.
The Investigation
Naturally a massive murder inquiry got underway within hours, but the police were hunting almost blind as it appeared to be a random killing by a man who had appeared and disappeared from and into nowhere. They put out an identikit picture; they were looking for the murder weapon; and they were hunting for a man who pronounced 'thinking' as 'finking'. Basically, that was all they had. They had one suspect, Alphon, who not only fitted the identikit picture, but could not account for his movements on the night of the murder. They had even got as far as arresting him as a suspect.

It is here at which the whole sorry saga becomes somewhat bizarre and incredible. Mrs. Gregsten and Hanratty were both coincidentally in Blackpool on the same day. She on pleasure, he on business. She caught sight of Hanratty and called the police. Even though she had not been at the scene of the murder, she told them she had an "intuition" that Hanratty was the murderer. It is not clear why the police should have acted so decisively on a whim of fancy, but they brought Hanratty in for questioning and his alibi did not at first stand up. After this, while investigating him and his recent movements, they found the cartridge shells of two bullets from the murder weapon in a room at the Vienna Hotel in London. It was soon ascertained that Hanratty had indeed stayed there under the false name of James Ryan. From then onwards the police looked no further. James Hanratty had been walking casually down Blackpool's seafront, seemingly without a care in the world, then suddenly he was in a police cell, facing a charge of the first degree murder of a person he had never met. I just hate to think of his state of mind at that point. But it got a lot worse.

The fact that a chance intuition in Blackpool had identified a man directly connected to the murder seems like a chance in a million. And indeed, it was a very incredible coincidence. Enough for the police to completely rule it out as a coincidence. Still, however there was no forensic evidence against Hanratty, even after the closest of examinations of the car.

Hanratty was lined up for an identification parade. At first Valerie was unable to pick him out. She apologised: "I'm sorry. I only saw him for a few seconds. It's very difficult." She admitted also that during and after the event, she had been severely traumatised and this had played around with her memory. However, at a second ID parade she made the whole line-up repeat, over and over, the words: "Be quiet will you? I'm thinking." She was sure Hanratty said "finking" and eventually picked him out as the killer. At this stage it appears the police were convinced they had got their man, and any checking of a contrary account got the most rudimentary of attention.

At this point Hanratty changed the circumstances of his alibi, and swore, that in his original, he had been protecting friends. He had in fact been in Rhyl, North Wales, 250 miles away from the murder scene on the night in question. Probably believing that Hanratty was just trying to throw up a further smoke screen, it appears the police made only a routine check in Rhyl and quickly abandoned that line of investigation. Here is a definite and identifiable police flaw because, immediately after he was hanged, no less than 14 people came forward to say they had seen and spoken to Hanratty on the night of the murder. The police had not interviewed a single one of them.

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The Court Case
In effect, the police went to court simply and solely on the identification by Valerie Storie, and the coincidence that Hanratty had once stayed at the Vienna Hotel. No man in the dock has ever protested his innocence more firmly and emotionally than James Hanratty. He did so right to the gallows.

There were several unfortunate additional factors, and they are by no means new to the law courts. Valerie Storie was in a wheelchair, still badly crippled and emotionally traumatised. The defence believed that it would harm their client if they cross examined her too fiercely, even though they saw quite clearly that she had gained the entire sympathy of the court and that her evidence was so vital. The cross examination was therefore weak and inconclusive. A harder examination may well have revealed some doubts and inconsistencies which would have at least sewn some suspicions. As her testimony - a positive identification - was left completely unchallenged by the defence, it became the crucial factor, even though a man was to lose his life over the simple mispronunciation of a single word.

It took the jury only nine and a half hours to put the noose around Hanratty's neck.
The Alternatives
What if the police had followed up the other option, one they had quickly abandoned as soon as they were convinced Hanratty was guilty? At this point Peter Alphon was dropped as a suspect. With complete tunnel vision, they dropped any further inquiries into Alphon and concentrated solely on Hanratty. Had they pursued their original inquiries, they would have found that (i) Alphon had also stayed in the Vienna hotel at the time in question. (ii) He could not supply a single alibi, let alone a credible one. (iii) He was a friend of Michael's wife and later claimed she had put up £5,000 to "frighten" the unfaithful couple. (iii) He also pronounced 'thinking' as 'finking'. (iv) Many witnesses spotted the car as it drove away from the murder scene and beyond. They all attested it was being driven erratically. Hanratty was a very experienced driver. Alphon had not even passed his test. (v) Alphon bore a striking resemblance to the identikit picture. Hanratty did not. (vi) Alphon was clearly identified by customers at a village pub which the couple had visited at the same time the night before the murder. (vii) Hanratty was a city man, well liked by his colleagues. He was 'social' and had never shown the slightest sign of neurosis. He came from a loving and secure family who for thirty years have relentlessly campaigned for his pardon. He just didn't fit the picture of a random killer and rapist. Alphon was a petty criminal, a loner, and would-be salesman roaming the country without a proper job. A psychological analysis would have pin-pointedhim to the crime far more closely than Hanratty.

All this could have been available to any investigation which was being properly conducted. What was not available at the time was Alphon's 'confession' many years later in Paris where he claimed he was paid a large sum to "damage" Storie and Gregsten, although he retracted this mysteriously when Paul Foot interviewed him for the book Who Killed Hanratty. Also not available was any kind of DNA testing, which would have proved irrefutable. But there were enough other factors to sew the seeds of doubt.

But, even if all the above did not create a situation of "beyond reasonable doubt" in the case of Alphon, surely it did (had it been properly presented by the defence) in the case of Hanratty. Here, clearly, was an alternative to the prosecution's case which would have given the court serious thought.

Sloppy police work, closely followed by a lacklustre defence, clearly put the noose around Hanratty's head. At the very end there was a culpable miscarriage of justice in which no one was prepared to do their job properly.
The Conclusion
Within a few weeks of the execution doubts began to creep into various people's minds, including Mrs. Gregsten's, the investigating police, and the judiciary. It was almost certainly these persistent doubts that led the government to the abolition of hanging. (Hanratty, and perhaps the case of Ruth Ellis - the last woman to be hanged).

The establishment, however, always hate to admit they may have got it wrong, especially if a man has died because of it. But over thirty years, the evidence against Hanratty being guilty has mounted ferociously. Alphon has since admitted it. Witnesses came forward from Wales. And finally a DNA test showed conclusively that he was entirely innocent. Hanratty's family have campaigned for all that time, and justice has been agonisingly slow.

Like many of the other cases we have investigated, this is just another one to show the vulnerability of our legal system, especially when a whole set of people make their minds up about a theory. It is more than simple human error, the Hanratty case was the police and judiciary brazenly deciding to fit the facts to their own conjecture.

In the light of the new and irrefutable evidence, law reform is obviously long overdue - and if Hanratty did not die completely in vain, then this is the only aspect of the case which had a meaning. That, and the fact that it would now be virtually impossible to re-introduce capital punishment.

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Appeal Court to review Hanratty murder case

Nearly 37 years after the hanging, new evidence reveals that vital details were kept from lawyers, reports Duncan Campbell

Vital evidence which could have led to the acquittal of James Hanratty, executed for the A6 murder in 1962, was suppressed at the time of his trial, it emerged yesterday.

One of the most celebrated alleged miscarriage of justice cases was yesterday referred back to the Court of Appeal as the dead man's lawyers, family and campaign supporters expressed astonishment at the extent of evidence which has only now been disclosed.

The dead man's brother, Michael Hanratty, described as disgraceful the suppression of material which would have saved his brother's life. His wife, Maureen Hanratty, said the family had been 'put through hell' because of the behaviour of the authorities.

The Criminal Cases Review Commission announced yesterday that the case of Hanratty, who was hanged for the murder of Michael Gregsten, has been referred back to the Court of Appeal.

The suppression of vital information by senior police officers, a lack of disclosure of information to the defence and a flawed process of identification were given as the reasons for the decision.

'The amount of information not disclosed by the prosecution at the trial is very substantial,' said Geoffrey Bindman, solicitor for the family since 1974. 'If that material had been disclosed, James Hanratty would not have been convicted.'

Michael Gregsten and Valerie Storie, two civil servants employed at the Road Research Laboratory in Slough, Berkshire, were confronted by a gunman while sitting in their Morris Minor in a cornfield in Dorney Reach, Buckinghamshire, on the night of August 22, 1961. They were forced at gunpoint to drive along the A6 to a lay-by on Deadman's HIll in Bedfordshire, where Gregsten was fatally shot and his lover was raped and left for dead.

Hanratty, a 25-year-old petty criminal who had spent most of the previous seven years in prison, was arrested in Blackpool in October. His appearance was similar to that of an identikit portrait produced at the time of the killing and he was identified by Valerie Storie although she had also previously identified another man. She also made a voice identification of him. But it later emerged that Hanratty was the only person with a London accent asked to speak in front of her.

Alibi evidence which placed Hanratty in Rhyl in north Wales at the time of the murder was discounted. He was convicted at Bedford Assizes on February 17, 1962. His appeal was dismissed on March 13, and, despite a petition signed by 28,000, he was hanged at Bedford prison on April 4.

A campaign to clear Hanratty's name was immediately started by his late father. A series of books, from Paul Foot's "Who Killed Hanratty?" in 1971 to Bob Woffinden's "Hanratty: The Final Verdict" in 1997, have cast doubts on the conviction and suggested that public horror at the nature of the crime drove the authorities to seek a conviction at any cost.

Few cases have generated such public debate and the execution has often been used as an example of the dangers of capital punishment. In 1974, the then Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, asked Lewis Hawser QC to review the case. His report in April 1975 concluded that the convictions were safe and it was said at the time that access to all the relevant paperwork had been made available.

Further representations were made to the Home Office in the early 1990s and when the CCRC was formed in 1997, the case was passed to them. Leaks have suggested that the case would be referred back but campaigners were cautious as to whether or when it would finally happen.

Part of the case against Hanratty was that he had been identified by two men in the supposedly stolen Morris Minor in Redbridge, east London, on the morning after the murder. What has only now emerged through undisclosed material examined by the CCRC is that the stolen car had been sighted far away in Derbyshire by up to 11 different people at the same time. The existence of the car in that area had even been reported to a police station. This information was never passed to the defence.

Yesterday, Mr Bindman and journalists Paul Foot and Bob Woffinden said they were astonished at the new material which had now been made available.

The CCRC inquiry, led by the former assistant chief constable of the Metropolitan police, Baden Skitt, had been allowed access to material stored by the Metropolitan police but not released to the defence team. Some of the information was not even shown to the prosecution.

'It's quite clear that the CCRC is shocked by the non-disclosure,' said Mr Foot. He said that even people who had been working on the case for more that a quarter of century were amazed at the depth of material suppressed.

'The commission has expressed very serious concerns that vital evidence has been suppressed,' said Mr Bindman. 'There was information which, had it been disclosed, would have led to the acquittal of James Hanratty.'

Mr Bindman said DNA testing had also been carried out using recently improved techniques but he said that the tests were inconclusive and that there was always a risk with such old DNA material that the evidence would be contaminated.

'All this evidence has been locked away in Scotland Yard,' said Michael Hanratty , aged 60. 'They told us to come back for it in 100 years. We always knew there was something wrong. It is a disgrace, we're worse than South Africa.'

He said that yesterday was both a very happy day for the family as the case was finally going to be heard in the Court of Appeal and very sad as it had taken so long. 'My father couldn't understand why they kept covering it up,' he added.

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DNA "proof" on Hanratty dismissed

By Greg Swift

The family of James Hanratty - controversially hanged for the A6 murder 38 years ago - last night dismissed reports that new DNA evidence proved he was guilty.

Hanratty's brother Michael, 61, said his family were unconcerned about the latest forensic results and added: "The new evidence stinks."

Hanratty, 25, was found guilty in 1962 of shooting dead scientist Michael Gregsten in a layby on the A6 in Bedford.

He was then said to have raped Mr Gregsten's mistress Valerie Storie and shot her five times, leaving her for dead.

She miraculously survived and Hanratty was hanged largely on the basis of her evidence. But his death has become one of Britain's most notorious alleged miscarriages of justice.

Prominent lawyers and writers have campaigned for Hanratty to be given a posthumous pardon after serious doubts were raised about the evidence presented to the jury.

Following a lengthy battle by Hanratty's family to clear the petty crook's name, a hearing at which he may possibly be pardoned will take place in the Appeal Court in October.

As part of its evidence for that appeal, the prosecution took advantage of the latest breakthroughs in DNA profiling to re-test exhibits which have been stored in Home Office vaults since Hanratty's trial.

It was reported yesterday that the DNA profiles obtained earlier this year from fluid samples on a handkerchief wrapped around the murder weapon and on Miss Storie's underwear match a sample taken from Michael Hanratty.

According to one report, a source close to the forensic tests said: "The DNA system narrows it to a one-in-a-billion match. In other words, there is now a one-in-a-billion chance that Hanratty was not the A6 killer."

Similar tests carried out on samples taken from Peter Alphon - another suspect in the inquiry - were said to be negative.

Geoffrey Bindman, the Hanratty family lawyer, said earlier comparisons between DNA samples taken from exhibits used in the trial and samples taken from Hanratty's mother and brother had proved inconclusive.

Michael Hanratty, speaking from his south London home, said he had seen the latest forensic report and believed the exhibits now being used to confirm his brother's guilt had been contaminated.

He said: "When the original tests on the sample were carried out the piece of cloth was dropped on a bench and contaminated, but it was kept as the only sample. This was used for the new tests and the report on the new evidence does acknowledge it is contaminated.

"We are not at all worried by this report. Our case for overturning the conviction is so strong."

Ms Storie, who as a 22-year-old was forced to watch as her attacker shot Mr Gregsten, 36, a married father-of-two, has always insisted Hanratty was the man who raped her and killed her lover. She said yesterday: "I have never once doubted Hanratty was the killer. I was there and know he did it."

The long crusade to clear Hanratty's name was launched by his father James the moment he was sent to the gallows. He handed out leaflets outside the Commons until he died in 1971 and attracted celebrity supporters including Beatle John Lennon.The case has been referred to the Court of Appeal because of concerns about flawed identification procedures in the original investigation and allegations that the defence were denied access to information.

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Hanratty was innocent

By Paul Foot

HANRATTY WAS GUILTY - OFFICIAL trumpeted the Sun newspaper last Wednesday. HANRATTY WAS GUILTY parroted the Daily Mail on Thursday.

The Sunday Telegraph followed up with a long piece by Simon Heffer, the Tory propagandist recently appointed as Jack Straw's adviser on sentencing policy. Heffer sensitively linked the Sun and Mail stories about James Hanratty, who was hanged in 1962 for the A6 murder, to last month's murder of Sarah Payne, and his own yearning for the return of capital punishment. The news about Hanratty, Heffer exulted, has disposed of the argument "that the criminal justice system has proved far too accident-prone to make execution a 'safe' punishment".

Let's start with that word from the Sun headline: OFFICIAL. The news about recent DNA tests in the Hanratty case was not official. It came from a leak to the Sun.

The criminal cases review commission referred the Hanratty case to the court of appeal last year with staggering new evidence that the case against Hanratty had been rigged. The commission was well aware of DNA evidence linking Hanratty to the crime and did not discount it. Nor did it rule out the possibility that exhibits on which the DNA tests were based - fragments of knickers and a handkerchief - could have been stored with material taken from Hanratty, and could have been contaminated. The commission concluded: "It is impossible to draw any firm conclusion as to the current evidential integrity of the exhibits of the cloth examples in this case. The known (and unknown) aspects of the history of those items must be weighed in the balance."

The new evidence brought to us by the Sun - that the DNA odds are a billion to one that Hanratty was guilty - does not alter the basic point, that if the exhibits tested were contaminated with items connected with Hanratty, the results are meaningless. Indeed, the greater the sensitivity of the tests, the greater the likelihood of their picking up a contaminant.

I think I can detect myself in Simon Heffer's diatribe against "liberal campaigners who have spent a generation concocting and establishing 'evidence' of Hanratty's innocence". Thirty-four years ago, when working for, er, the Sunday Telegraph, I became convinced of Hanratty's innocence. The chief reason was the mountain of evidence which emerged after the execution that while the murder was being committed near Bedford, Hanratty was 200 miles away in Rhyl.

This had been his alibi evidence at trial, but it was tainted by the fact that he switched his original story - that he was in Liverpool. He could indeed produce powerful evidence that he gone to Liverpool - but during the trial suddenly asserted that he had gone on to Rhyl and stayed two nights in a boarding house. The late change damaged Hanratty's credibility, and the case became worse for him as the prosecution filled up the boarding house with other guests.

The coincidence remained that Hanratty's detailed description of the boarding house exactly fitted Ingledene, then at 19 Kinmel Street, Rhyl. There was a green bath in the attic, as he alleged, and the landlady confirmed that a young Londoner looking like Hanratty had stayed two nights there. The guests produced by the prosecution did not exclude the possibility that Hanratty stayed one night in the attic with the green bath, another in a regular guest bedroom.

In the late 60s I interviewed 14 witnesses who, with varying degrees of certainty, supported Hanratty's story, including Margaret Walker, a landlady in a neighbouring guest house, who was certain of the date a young man looking like Hanratty came to her house looking for lodgings. It was the night of the A6 murder. The more the inquiries went on, the firmer became Hanratty's alibi.

It was, in the light of all this, impossible to believe that Hanratty had not been to Ingledene. Did he go there at some other time? I went through his known movements for every week after his first visit to Rhyl in July 1961. All the subsequent weeks could be accounted for. None of the various (secret) police inquiries since, nor the (secret) Hawser inquiry in 1974, nor the criminal cases review commission has come up with a single substantial piece of evidence to refute the Rhyl alibi.

Unless I see such evidence, I prefer to stick with the view that if there is DNA to show that a man staying in Rhyl committed a murder 200 miles away, there is something seriously wrong with the DNA. That will be the approach of the Hanratty family lawyers at the court of appeal where the matter will be argued out, I imagine, at a higher level than that reached by the crime reporters of the Sun and the Mail or by Jack Straw's new noose-happy Tory sentencing adviser.

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A flawed conviction or a just verdict?
Finally, the Hanratty case will be laid to rest

By Cahal Milmo

When James Hanratty said his farewells to his family in his cell in Bedford Prison on 3 April 1962, he left them with one last wish: "I'm dying tomorrow, but I'm innocent. Clear my name."

Some 40 years and 12 days later, one of Britain's longest campaigns to right an alleged miscarriage of justice has reached the Court of Appeal in its attempt to clear the man hanged for the notorious A6 murder.

The killing of the scientist Michael Gregsten, 36, along with the rape of his mistress, Valerie Storie, 22, in a Bedfordshire lay-by was one of the most shocking of its era.

Mr Gregsten, a married civil servant, was shot twice at point-blank range in front of his lover. After she was sexually assaulted, she was shot five times and left for dead.

The image of Ms Storie being borne on a stretcher into Bedford Crown Court to give evidence against her "attacker" is often upheld as the epitome of a victim fighting for justice.

But Court 4 of the Royal Courts of Justice in central London heard yesterday that Hanratty, one of the last people to be executed by order of a British court, was himself a victim of an injustice as gross as his alleged crime.

The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, was told that the 25-year-old petty thief from north London was sent to the gallows after a trial that was "fatally flawed" by the failings of British justice and its police.

Michael Mansfield QC, the leading civil rights lawyer, said that the officer who led the murder inquiry, Detective Superintendent Robert Acott, deliberately withheld evidence that would have proved the innocence of the man who said throughout his trial that he was 250 miles away in North Wales at the time of the killing.

In the words of his defence, Hanratty was the victim of a fit-up exposed by the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), the independent watchdog set up to investigate alleged miscarriages of justice, which sent his case back to the Court of Appeal in 1999.

But this is not a straightforward miscarriage of justice that will go uncontested by prosecutors.

If the Crown is given permission, it will present evidence that Hanratty's DNA was found on Ms Storie's undergarments after samples were taken from his grave during the CCRC investigation.

Forensic experts for the prosecution will say that they believe the chances of such findings being the result of contamination, as claimed by Hanratty's supporters, are remote.

On the other side, lawyers for Hanratty's family believe they have uncovered 24 separate examples where police held back statements, concealed information or used faulty procedures during their investigation.

Mr Mansfield told the court: "The material that provided the foundation for the conviction and led to the execution was in fact fatally flawed ... in the sense that there was extensive and inexcusable non-disclosure. What happened was a distortion of the trial process, which was in large measure due to the actions of the senior police officer in the case.

"Detective Superintendent Acott personally failed to disclose highly relevant documentation in key areas and, in addition, he misled the court and jury in his evidence relating to these key areas. Finally ... he fabricated evidence relating to [Hanratty's] interviews."

In August 1961, police were under considerable pressure to track down the A6 killer amid public outcry at the crime.

The couple were surprised by their attacker at about 9.30pm on 22 August in a cornfield near Slough. The gunman ordered them to drive in Mr Gregsten's grey Morris Minor to the layby near Bedford, called Deadman's Hill, where he carried out the attack.

After Hanratty's hanging, the campaign to clear his name, led by his brother, Michael, rapidly became a cause célèbre. John Lennon was among those who offered support.

A petition protesting against the death sentence for murder that was put together in the wake of the case was signed by 90,000 people. The penalty was abolished in 1965.

Yesterday, it was alleged that during Hanratty's trial, Det Supt Acott, who has since died, retained evidence in several areas ranging from the positive identification of the confessed burglar to his movements in the hours before the murder.

Mr Mansfield told the court: "The Crown's principal submission in response to the ground for appeal has been that the case against the appellant was overwhelming.

"It is submitted that the reason for the continuing public anxiety about this case in the 40 years since conviction is that, far from being overwhelming, the evidence against [Hanratty] was fraught with problems."

[CCADP]

The court heard one example was how Det Supt Acott failed to tell the defence how Ms Storie had originally described the gunman as having brown eyes. Ms Storie later switched to a description of "very large, pale blue, staring, icy eyes", which prosecutors said matched Hanratty.

Lord Woolf, sitting with two other judges, was told that Det Supt Acott also failed to disclose remarks made by Ms Storie that her memory of the gunman's face was "fading" less than a fortnight after the attack. Mr Mansfield told the court that this admission, made before she identified Hanratty at an identification parade, deprived his lawyers of vital information.

Campaigners have long alleged that Ms Storie's identification of Hanratty as the gunman, despite only seeing him for a few seconds, was vital in securing his conviction.

It was also alleged that when Ms Storie identified Hanratty, from north London, by asking all participants at the parade to repeat a phrase, "Be quiet, will you – I am just thinking," there were no safeguards to ensure that the process was fair.

The court heard that Det Supt Acott falsely told the trial that he had confiscated the register book from a hotel in west London, where Hanratty stayed before the murder on 23 August.

Prosecutors relied heavily on the fact that two spent cartridge cases from the .38 pistol used to shoot Mr Gregsten and his lover were found in Room 24 at the Vienna Hotel where Hanratty had stayed.

It was also alleged that, along with another officer, Det Supt Acott changed notes from an interview with Hanratty after his arrest to include the word "kip" – a phrase used by the gunman.

The CCRC referred Hanratty's case to the Court of Appeal in 1999 after conducting its own inquiry into the original investigation, including his alibi.

Hanratty, a convicted burglar, maintained at his trial that he had been at a guesthouse in the Welsh resort of Rhyl on the night of the killings – a fact confirmed at his trial by the guesthouse owner.

But he came up with the alibi only after changing his previous story that he had been in nearby Liverpool, which undermined his case.

The CCRC review led to the forensic testing of clothing belonging to Ms Storie, which found Hanratty's DNA on her underwear. Mr Mansfield will claim that the garments could have been contaminated over the years with DNA from Hanratty's clothing.

The court heard that the DNA testing proved once and for all that a second suspect, Peter Alphon, who had also stayed at the Vienna Hotel, was not involved in the murder.

Lord Woolf will be asked later this week to allow the Crown Prosecution Service to use the DNA evidence in its case to uphold the conviction.

The appeal, which is expected to last for 10 days, continues.

The campaigners: pop stars, lawyers and politicians

The campaign to rehear the case against James Hanratty has attracted pop stars, politicians and famous barristers.

For investigative journalists, such as Paul Foot and Bob Woffinden, reputations have been built upon the success in persuading the Criminal Cases Review Commission to refer the evidence to the Court of Appeal in 1999.

Others including John Lennon and Yoko Ono produced a 40-minute documentary and even lent the Hanratty family their Rolls-Royce to visit the scene of the crime.

Since Hanratty went to the gallows on 4 April 1962 for the A6 murder in Bedfordshire, there have been at least two television documentaries, a play and many, many books, re-examining the evidence in fine detail.

Politicians who have become convinced of Hanratty's innocence include Lord Steel of Aikwood and Sir Norman Fowler, who signed an all-party Commons motion for a public inquiry into the evidence.

But Mr Foot, who in 1971 wrote the book Who Killed Hanratty?, believes the impetus and inspiration behind the campaign was sustained by Hanratty's father, also James, a former foreman dustman at Wembley council. He died of cancer in 1978.

In 1971 the Conservative government refused to open a public inquiry despite a petition signed by 100 MPs. Three years later the Labour Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, commissioned a report from Lewis Hawser QC who sat in secret and concluded Hanratty was guilty.

But Mr Foot and Bob Woffinden refused to give up hope. The birth of the Criminal Cases Review Commission in the Nineties represented their best chance. It had been set up after high-profile miscarriages of justice, including the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four. Ironically, the main obstacle blocking a review of the Hanratty case was that he was dead, and there was a backlog of cases involving serving prisoners to be examined.

[CCADP]

Hanratty's appeal is over,
but justice is yet to be done

The hanged man's alibi is still solid, and vital questions remain unanswered

By Paul Foot

Even a lord justice of appeal can work out that if you are in Rhyl, you cannot commit a murder near Bedford. The essence of the case for the innocence of James Hanratty, who was hanged in 1962 for the A6 murder, is that on the day of the murder he travelled to Liverpool, and then on to Rhyl. Soon after his arrest in October 1961, he told his lawyers that in Liverpool he had called at a sweetshop in the Scotland Road to ask the way to Tarleton or Carlton Road. Mrs Olive Dinwoodie gave evidence to say a) that she recalled a man looking like Hanratty calling at her shop and asking the way to Tarleton or Carlton Road and b) that she was only serving in the shop for two days - on August 21 and 22, 1961 - the day of the murder.

Seven prosecution witnesses put him in London on the 21st. So if Hanratty did go to the shop, he must have gone on the 22nd and could not have climbed into Michael Gregsten's car at 9pm that evening and shot him dead five hours later. Stumped by this evidence, the prosecution suggested that Hanratty might have "bought" the alibi - a surprising notion since the man who sold him such an alibi needed to look and speak very like Hanratty.

At his Bedford trial in January and February 1962 Hanratty changed his original story about what he did next. He said he had gone on to Rhyl, and spent the night there. He described the guest house where he stayed which had a green bath in the attic. The landlady of a Rhyl guest house called Ingledene, which had a green bath in the attic, said a man looking like Hanratty had stayed at Ingledene for two nights in the third week of the previous August. Cross-examined, she admitted that the guesthouse was full for at least one of the nights, and broke down. Her evidence was discounted. Over the years that followed many more witnesses substantiated Hanratty's Rhyl alibi. The most impressive was Mrs Margaret Walker, who lived in the street behind Ingledene. She went to the police during the trial and told them of a young man who had come to her house on the night of August 22 1961, looking for lodgings. Two other women in the street told the same story.

After interviewing all these witnesses in the late 1960s, I was convinced that Hanratty was in Rhyl on the night of the 22nd. I wrote a book about the case. The case was referred to the criminal cases review commission in 1997. Their inquiries were led by Bill Skitt, former chief constable of Hertfordshire. All the initial inquiries pointed to Hanratty's innocence. Right at the end, the commission carried out DNA tests on fragments connected with the murder.

For years, those of us campaigning for Hanratty's innocence had been asking for these DNA tests, but were told that no DNA could be recovered from the exhibits. In November 1997 scientists took a swab from Michael Hanratty, the dead man's brother. To the astonishment of the commission, there was a match with his DNA and a handkerchief wrapped around the murder gun when it was found after the murder, and a small square of knickers worn by Valerie Storie on the night she was raped and she and her lover, Michael Gregsten, shot.

In April 1998, a further swab was taken from Hanratty's mother. Michael Hanratty, Jim's brother, and his wife Maureen remember going to the old lady's bedside with Mr Skitt to take the swab. She remembers Skitt saying: "Your brother was innocent - we just can't explain the DNA." Another match was found, and later confirmed when James Hanratty's body was dug up later that year. In spite of the findings, the case was still referred to the court of appeal, which heard the appeal over the past few weeks. The DNA findings conflicted grotesquely with the alibis. If Hanratty was guilty, as the DNA suggested, he could not have been in Liverpool and Rhyl. If he was in Liverpool and Rhyl, there must be something wrong with the DNA.

All of us who had followed the case over the years hoped that the appeal would solve this contradiction. As it became clear that the DNA evidence was likely to be accepted, I wondered what new evidence would damage the alibi. Had the authorities discovered, for instance, who sold Hanratty his sweetshop alibi, or whether Hanratty had stayed at Rhyl on some other week that summer of 1961?

In the hearing, absolutely nothing was produced to cast any doubt on the alibi witnesses in the Liverpool sweetshop or the Rhyl guesthouse. Apart from a few remarks about the speed of Hanratty's movements if he did go to the sweetshop that evening (based, I believe, on a wrong assumption about the train he got to Liverpool), the judges (Woolf, Mantell and Leveson) passed on the unlikely and unproved prosecution theory that the sweetshop alibi was bought. Neither they nor the prosecution could find anything to discredit the witnesses in Rhyl.

What meanwhile was the case against the DNA on the knickers? The appellants suggested that over 40 years in police custody the fragment of knickers could have been contaminated. No one could explain, for instance, what was in a vial which had been stored among the exhibits and broken. Could it have contained fluid from a wash of Hanratty's trousers, which were also kept as exhibits and which contained some of his semen? No, said the judges. They accepted the DNA evidence wholesale, and then turned to the 24 cases of police failure to disclose vital evidence.

What about the ESDA tests which showed that a crucial part of the police notes of an interview with Hanratty - the part which referred to him using the word "kip" as the murderer had done, and which he denied - had been rewritten after the original notes had been completed? "Of peripheral significance" said the judges. What about the failure to disclose the alibi statements from Rhyl before the trial? That didn't matter because they were disclosed after the conviction and before the original appeal (where they were not used).

What about the sightings on the morning of the murder of the murder car as far away as Matlock, which contradicted the evidence of identification witnesses, and were notified to the police at the time and not passed on to the defence? Though the judges described this as the "high watermark of non-disclosure", they concluded: "We do not consider that on its own it reveals such fatal unfairness as to render the conviction unsafe." Every one of the appellants' complaints about non-disclosure was similarly rejected.

After dismissing the appeal and patronising the Hanratty family, the judges had a warning for the criminal cases review commission. "There have to be exceptional circumstances," they concluded, "to justify incurring the expenditure of resources on this scale on a case of this age." This was an echo of a similar sulk by another lord chief justice, Lord Lane, in the first appeal of the Birmingham six in 1986, which was also dismissed mainly on grounds of scientific evidence. The Birmingham six went back to prison for another five years before their innocence was finally established. James Hanratty can never be released, but as the expertise in DNA grows, perhaps scientists in the future will apply their minds to the DNA evidence in this case and seek to solve the continuing riddle of how it proved that a man who was in Rhyl managed to commit a murder near Bedford.

[Turid]

In March 2001, after years of arguing about the identity of the A6 Killer, Hanratty's body was exhumd, and forensic samples from the crime scene received DNA testing. These tests concluded that there was a 2.5 million to one chance that the samples did not come from Hanratty. In May 2002, the Court of Appeal ruled that Hanratty's conviction was not unsound. A posthumous pardon was therefore not granted.

As some of you may know, I'm doing all I can to look into the cases of David Spence (Texas) and Roger Keith Coleman (Virginia). 2 people I am 100% certain were executed despite of proven innocence.

Has a posthumous pardon EVER been granted - in the history of US?

Love,
Turid