a6 murder

[jimarilyn]

Hi

Here is a photo of an Enfield .38 revolver (1936 model) for which the current asking price is £299.

[jimarilyn]

Hi

Here's another Enfield .38 revolver. Enfield No.2. Mk1

[jimarilyn]

Hi


This was a big revolver and quite heavy. 10.25 inches long and weighing 1.7 pounds unloaded. A cumbersome weapon to be carrying around on one's person.

[Limehouse]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for clarifying the relevance of the bus in relation to the case. Also the pictures are brilliant.

Further to the gun, as you've out Jimarilyn, it was heavy and cumbersome, which brings me to another point concerning the gun and the bus. Found along with the gun were five boxes of ammunition. Sixty rounds in all. Are we to believe Hanratty crept around in the dead of night with a gun and five boxes of bullets concealed about him? Isn't that a little unlikely?

[jimarilyn]

Hi Limehouse,

Extremely unlikely in my opinion for anyone to be creeping around in the dead of night with 5 boxes of ammunition and a big revolver. Maybe the gunman was expecting another OK Corral.

[Graham]

Gun-ownership really was more wide-spread in those days than now. The Enfield .38 was a service-issue revolver and there must have been literally thousands of them in private hands in the years after the WW2. My dad was heavily into guns, and I can remember his owning a little .22 calibre revolver (in working order) and a huge Colt Navy .44 (not in working-order) which he picked up for a few quid in second-hand shops. (The Colt I think would be worth a mint today). I had air-rifles and pistols from a very early age, and still do.

The thing about the Enfield .38 was, as Jimarilyn points out, was its size and weight which would suggest it was not an easy weapon to conceal in a suit-jacket. However, it was designed as a powerful weapon to inflict major damage at a relative short range - a perfect bank-robber's gun, really. But of course even in those days I'd suspect that most bank-robbers didn't go on a job wearing a sharp suit such as Hanratty wore when he arrived at the cornfield. I rather suspect that JH put out 'the word' to his underworld associates that he wanted a shooter, and he took the first one offered to him. Chances are it wore a hole in his jacket pocket in short order.

Like Steve, I don't believe that JH himself dumped the gun under the seat of the 36A bus. I suspect he gave the gun to someone else to get rid of, and if it was Charles France then one can only speculate as to why he, France, should dump it in the very place that JH had previously described. My own guess is that France, quite early on, had his suspicions about JH and the A6 Murder, and assuming that JH had given him the gun to dispose of, deliberately chose a place that would incriminate Hanratty - who never denied that he had told France about the back seats of buses. All very weird and mysterious, though, because had I been JH, that gun would have gone into The Thames.....which kind of makes me wonder if the gun was owned by France who actually lent it to Hanratty, who dutifully gave it back to him.
Worth considering, I'd say.

Cheers,

Graham

[Steve]

We speculated on the old thread about Hanratty totting such a big gun and so much ammunition around with him. We will never know the truth about this, except that if he was the killer, and all the known information is 100% correct, then that must have been the case.

Hanratty himself said that if he had wanted to get a gun it would not have been a problem, they were easily available at the Rehearsal Club. He also had made a contact with Fisher/Slack in Ealing, quite probably through France. (Remember that France committed suicide in Acton, next door to Ealing.) So it is almost certain there was some connection there, but again it is unlikely we will ever know what that connection was.

Yes, I believe that France was involved after the fact, but what I don’t understand is why he was never charged with anything.

And, yes, Graham, well worth considering.

[larue]

hi all


it's good to see this thread is as lively and entertaining as ever...

aboot that gun pictured above. aksing price 300 quid??? i thought, in britain, that after the last schoolyard massacre, ownership of all handguns was outlawed in a kneejerk reaction by that lovely mr major. whoever he was. so how come that 'uns for sale????

my guess is that there has always been loads of handguns floating around in britain, from two world wars and sundry other conflicts, plus in days past one could legally buy and keep handguns here.

the thing being, not the aquisition of a gun but having the bottle to use it, as carring one in furtherance to crime [ even if it were not fired ] put the gunman in a whole different position re the law, hence the large amounts that were handed in at police stations or 'found' discarded on rubbish dumps and riverbanks etc etc.

i reckon there's still untold thousands about today...


atb

larue

[Steve]

The Gun

One further point of note:

In his 'confessions' Alphon talked about being shown how to use the safety catch. The murder weapon did not have a safety catch!

[Steve]

the thing being, not the aquisition of a gun but having the bottle to use it, as carring one in furtherance to crime [ even if it were not fired ] put the gunman in a whole different position re the law, hence the large amounts that were handed in at police stations or 'found' discarded on rubbish dumps and riverbanks etc etc.

Hi Larue

This is quite right, mere possession of a gun in the UK makes a criminal a legitimate target for armed police. This thread is not the place for the debate about whether or not we should arm ALL our police, but safe to say that for whatever reason armed attacks on members of the public, like the A6 case, are comparatively rare in this country.

Kind regards,
Steve

[P.L.A]

Francis

Greetings one and all.

The person held responsible by our glorious establishment for the foul deeds committed on the A6 in 1961 didn’t have a middle name. His father did.

A minor error by Woffinden on just one page, plus the index, created James Francis Hanratty Junior.

The mistake has spread through the literature like a cancer and even found it’s way into the Cambridge Biographical Encyclopaedia.

All rather inconsequential do I hear you say?

Not quite.

It shows how falsehoods emanating from the quill of Woffinden can oh so very easily become “fact”.

Get my drift?

It’s frightening.

Peter.

[Steve]

Let me guess ...

... Peter Lance Andrews?

[jimarilyn]

Hi

"P, PHONE LATER"


Too many phonecalls, your bill's gonna be sky high.

[jimarilyn]

Hi All,

I could imagine the real PLA might come out with something like that. I suppose it's just a one off crank poster.

Hi Larue,

I pinched that photo of the Enfield .38 from the website below. Don't know who in their right mind would want to buy this gun for £299. I believe possessing any deadly weapon puts one in a very vulnerable position, it's almost as if one is inviting trouble on themselves.

I've tried to picture in my mind someone walking along Marsh Lane (if that's the correct road) after 9.30pm armed with a heavy, cumbersome revolver and 5 boxes of ammunition. I can't see this person just walking around aimlessly, he must have had some plan of action and destination in mind. I can't help feeling that he had a particular agenda in mind. So very, very strange that the murder victim should be the brother-in-law of a man whose Antiques shop was so near to where Charles France lived, and whose line of business was the same as James Hanratty's female friend Louise Anderson. William Ewer, I have read, was a business acquaintance of Louise's. I wonder if he too received stolen goods ?

Louise paid Hanratty hundreds of pounds over a short period of time for looty
obtained from his house burgling activities. Hanratty himself said that he only chose very well to do homes where there was a strong likelihood of rich pickings. It seems as if Louise was very well off financially if she was able to pay James Hanratty so handsomely for these stolen goods. Or was she acting on behalf of someone else to whom money seemed no object ?

http://www.deactivated-guns.co.uk/detail/enrev.htm

[Steve]

From the Old Thread

Hi jimailyn

You raise some good points. Here is the text of a post I made on the old thread which you might find interesting:

Some commentators on the Hanratty case have been surprised that Dixie France knew where to find Bill Ewer when he went to Ewer’s shop to apologise for the death of Michael Gregsten.

The truth was probably that Dixie was well aware of Bill Ewer’s shop, if not Ewer himself, long before the murder. The France family home was half a mile away from Ewer’s shop, so it was one of their local shops. Even if they didn’t buy anything they would have known about it and probably knew the shop’s owner by sight.

What is surprising is this:

□ London villain James Hanratty stays the night at a hotel he hadn’t intended staying at and as a result goes to the wrong railway station the following morning
□ Finding himself on a train heading for Bristol, Cardiff, Swansea, etc. he decides to get off near Slough
□ That evening he commits a crime totally out of his normal modus operandi, quite randomly picking a young couple he came across sitting in a Morris Minor in the middle of nowhere

It subsequently turns out that:

□ The murdered man’s brother-in-law is in the same line of business as Hanratty’s friend Louise Anderson, with whom Hanratty occasionally spent the night
□ Another friend of Hanratty with whom he also occasionally spent the night, Charles France, lives 600 yards away from where the murdered man’s brother-in-law has his business

The scale of these coincidences is staggering, and when you think about that, the ‘She Saw Him at The Cleaners’ story doesn’t seem quite so far fetched.

Louise Anderson’s part in this is intriguing. She started out saying that she liked Hanratty and found him easy to talk to. She ended up insisting that he was a monster and had admitted to her that he had killed a man. Almost certainly, 99.9% certain, Louise bought stolen items from Hanratty; she gave him money, allowed him to spend the night at her flat. Hanratty testified to all of this at the trial. There is every indication that their relationship was a positive one; Hanratty even proposed marriage to her. It’s likely that he wasn’t 100% serious, Louise was old enough to be his mother, and for this reason it’s unlikely their relationship was anything other than platonic. If Louise Anderson’s assessment of Hanratty’s character was as negative as it later became there is no doubt that he would not have been allowed to get so close to her. Louise would not have given Hanratty her home address. If Hanratty hadn’t trusted Louise he wouldn’t have left his suitcase with her.

They did business together and they were also friends. So what changed? Louise’s disgust at Hanratty turning out to be a murderer and a rapist? If just that why tell lies, why make up a confession, which was patently untrue. If it had been true she would have told the court about Hanratty’s confession. So it wasn’t that. Was it that Louise needed to distance herself from her association with Hanratty? Very probably. She was never prosecuted for handling stolen goods.

It is also likely that Dixie France and Louise Anderson knew one another. Her shop was just around the corner from The Rehearsal Club, France knew Soho intimately, and if Louise was a fence she would have been known to people like France.

Kind regards,
Steve