a6 murder

[Alfie]

...why on earth would he have wanted to wrap the gun in anything?. Did he wrap his other 'disposables' before putting them under various back seats?

Hi all

Still wading my way through past posts - up to about page 150 I think - and came across this from Graham.

I've never lifted the back seat of a double-decker bus to check what's there, but it occurs to me that I'd wrap a gun in something if I was putting it under a seat so as to stop it making a noise if the movement of the bus was likely to make it slide around, or if I was wanting to wedge it somewhere and not have it make a clunking sound everytime the bus went round a corner or over a bump.

Everybody seems agreed that something hidden there would soon be discovered, but would that necessarily be the case? I know the cleaner who found the gun made a habit of checking under the back seat, but do we know if that was general practice or just a foible of this particular bloke?

And anyway, isn't the crucial issue whether Hanratty believed this was a place where the gun would be safely hidden? His conversation with France would suggest he did.

I don't know why he didn't dump it before returning to London, but having kept it till then, some posters have suggested that he could have more securely disposed of it by dropping it into the Thames. But unless he wanted to risk keeping it till after dark he would have had to do this in broad daylight in a busy city, difficult to do without somebody witnessing it.

Regards

Alan

[Alfie]

The handkerchief

Further to my post above: it follows that if Hanratty wrapped the hanky around the gun to help conceal it, then anyone planting it in the hope of it being found would probably have not done this. He or she would have been anticipating that the gun, not a hanky with no identifying marks on it, would lead the police to H.

Alan

[larue]

I know the cleaner who found the gun made a habit of checking under the back seat, but do we know if that was general practice or just a foible of this particular bloke?

hi Alfie

welcome to the thread.

my take on this is simply that the cleaner was looking for loose change. where i grew up, in the fifties and sixties, the back seat of the top deck was always worth looking under. trouble was, everybody knew about it!...

[Alfie]

The handkerchief

The perils of posting as you read old posts - having read further posts I now learn that the gun and bullets were discovered on the evening of the 24th, not the 23rd as I thought, meaning they must have been planted on the Thursday not the Wednesday.

It's hard to understand why, if it was Hanratty who secreted them there, it took him till the Wednesday to do so, but a conspiracy involving, say, France being asked to ditch the gun for him doesn't make any more sense to me.

The best time to get rid of the murder weapon was shortly after driving away from Deadman's Hill, in the early hours when it was still dark. If it was me it would have gone into the first river I came across. The fact that it didn't suggests the gunman either forgot about the risks involved in keeping it in his possession, or was intending to hang on to it till somebody (Dixie France perhaps?) pointed these risks out to him. That, perhaps, is when he hopped on the handy No 36A bus.

Regards

Alan

[larue]

hi Tony

As you say VS could really have said anything there was nobody to contradict her.

true. and there was little to corroborate her, either.

If the gunman did catch them having a leg-over in the back of the car she might have decided it was not in her best interests to say anything about that.

i would have thought this would be critical. what would the jury have thought of a single girl having unprotected sex in the back of a car with a married man? oops!! one besmirched reputation. would she have been so readily believed in court?

Funny stuff this semen. I could say it gets everywhere but I won’t.

we don't even know when it got there, do we? [assuming it was gregsten's] might have been that evening, or the previous day. who can say?

So just why did Valerie say under oath that she said she did not want to draw anybody’s attention to them?
Why did she insist the gunman take them back from where they might be discovered to the A6?

good questions. sadly i cannot provide good answers

They eventually arrived at Deadman’s Hill. Is it possible that this is where MG’s semen arrived on VS’s knickers?

could easily have been there as anywhere else.

[larue]

by the way, can someone kindly refresh my memory, or educate me regarding the tale of 'planning a rally'? was there any support for this tale, like maps, a compass, notebooks with potential routes sketched out etc etc, being found in the car, or in the cornfield. or anywhere else for that matter. i personally would have thought that planning a rally would be better done at a desk or table with the map spread out, rather than the cramped interior of a moggie minor in the gathering dusk. all i can recall of the car's interior content is vs's basket and a duffel bag containing laundry. who's laundry, i wonder? before or after cleaning?

[Alfie]

hi Alfie

welcome to the thread.

my take on this is simply that the cleaner was looking for loose change. where i grew up, in the fifties and sixties, the back seat of the top deck was always worth looking under. trouble was, everybody knew about it!...

Hi larue

Have just seen your post after posting the above.

So the choices seem to be Hanratty was stupid or naive in choosing that hiding place, or the gun was planted there to lead the police to him.

Call me thick, but the penny has dropped for me yet as to why somebody would want Hanratty picked up. What's your theory on that?

Regards

Alan

[Alfie]

The handkerchief

The above should have read the penny HASN'T dropped for me yet.

Alan

[larue]

Hi Alfie

i am one of a small number of people who sit on the fence as far as Hanratty's guilt or innocence of the a6 murder is concerned. so...

So the choices seem to be Hanratty was stupid or naive in choosing that hiding place, or the gun was planted there to lead the police to him.

i would have to say, that i consider hiding a murder weapon under the back seat of a bus was a pretty dumbass thing to do. as Graham said, better the Thames...

Call me thick, but the penny has dropped for me yet as to why somebody would want Hanratty picked up. What's your theory on that?

hehehehehehehehe! just keep reading the posts. you'll get to the conspiracy theories eventually. personally i have no definate theory as to who might have wanted Hanratty picked up, unless perhaps, someone knew what the gunman had done, and wanted to distance themselves from any fallout?

[Alfie]

The handkerchief

Hi all

Thinking about it some more, was it really stupid of Hanratty, if indeed it was him, to hide the gun under the seat? If he'd only recently acquired it, perhaps in a successful burglary, he may have believed that by wiping it clean of prints there was nothing to tie him to it, even if it was later discovered and proven to be the murder weapon.

It was only the spent cartridges found at the Vienna that linked him to it, wasn't it?

Regards

Alan

[Alfie]

Conspiracy theories

personally i have no definate theory as to who might have wanted Hanratty picked up, unless perhaps, someone knew what the gunman had done, and wanted to distance themselves from any fallout?

Hi larue

Our posts keep crossing.

I too am trying to keep an open mind on this, although I must say the DNA evidence makes it hard to believe Hanratty is innocent.

Unlike a lot of other posters I came cold to this board, having barely heard of the A6 case until a week or so ago, so while I'm fumbling along trying to establish the 'facts' of the case, I guess I have the advantage of not being weighed down by the preconceptions that I gather some posters carry from their earlier readings of authors that were partisans of one side or the other.

That's not to say I won't develop some prejudices of my own before I'm finished, mind!

Your comment about someone knowing what the gunman had done chimes with a nagging thought in the back of my mind.

I need to read a lot further yet but I think the answer to some of the riddles in this case lie in the Hanratty -- France-family relationship.

If Hanratty did do the deed and needed help evading capture, they (along perhaps with his dyed-hair alibi providing cousin) were likely to be the ones he'd turn to to help establish an alibi.

My hunch at this stage is that he may have conned them into covering for him - eg, dying his hair, confusing the dates this was done, disposing of the weapon (perhaps), confirming that he was off to Liverpool on the day before the murder, etc - on some other pretext - that the police were on to him for a burglary, for instance. Then they discovered they'd been protecting a murderer and a rapist, leading perhaps to Dixie turning informant and ultimately to him committing suicide.

Like I say, it's only a hunch that couldn't even be dignified with the description 'theory' yet.

I'll keep reading.

Cheers

Alan

[Victor]

My hunch at this stage is that he may have conned them into covering for him - eg, dying his hair, confusing the dates this was done, disposing of the weapon (perhaps), confirming that he was off to Liverpool on the day before the murder, etc - on some other pretext - that the police were on to him for a burglary, for instance. Then they discovered they'd been protecting a murderer and a rapist, leading perhaps to Dixie turning informant and ultimately to him committing suicide.

Hi Alan,

I certainly think it's plausible... If Hanratty went straight to Dixie after dumping the car, he doesn't need to have told him that he'd killed and raped, just that he needed help.

KR,
Vic.

[Graham]

What's it all about, Alfie?

I haven't posted here for quite some time, but as I pop in from time to time, and as you quoted one of my posts, I thought I'd make a contribution.

1] Jimarylin hints that he's read somewhere that Gregsten was concerned that something horrible was going to happen to him re: his affair with Valerie.
James, can you please tell me where you read this?

2] I've never thought that Gregsten and Valerie were caught at it in the field that night - however, I wasn't there so don't know for sure. Never forget that the A6 Case happened nearly 50 years ago, in an age of 'proper' morals; as far as I'm aware it was never mentioned in open court during the trial that Gregsten and Valerie were actually lovers. Reputations were respected in those days. Perhaps they'd made love before they got to the field, maybe in Gregsten's flat. Pure conjecture, though.

3] Alphon never said himself that he'd caught them at it, during any of his spurious 'confessions'. However, dear old Jean Justice wrote, almost certainly with absolutely no factual basis, that Alphon had forced the couple at gun-point to have sex.

4] For a long time I've thought that Dixie France may well have been the supplier of the gun to JH. Again, no proof of this. After the murder, I wonder if JH went straight back to France, forced him to take the gun back, and gave France some reason to believe that he, JH, was the A6 killer. France, seeing the possibility of being viewed by the law as an accessory to murder (and a very long stretch in clink in the offing) decided there and then to deflect all and any blame onto JH by disposing of the gun in a place that JH had once told him about, i.e., under the seat of a bus. Perhaps to ensure that there was no mistake as to the ownership of the gun, he wrapped it in one of JH's hankies that he, JH, had left with Mrs France to launder. JH never denied that he'd told France about the back seat of a bus as a good place to dump things, and he also identified the hankie as his - how? Was it monogrammed, or was there something unique about it, a pattern maybe, that identified the hankie as his? I've long had the impression that the finding of the gun on the bus genuinely took JH by surprise, and he hadn't the nous to deny it, thinking in somewhat childish trust that France would've got rid of it elsewhere, for example by dropping it into the Thames. Again, total supposition with no factual basis. I would suggest that if any of this was true, then France saw his own personal Domesday approaching, hence his suicide.

5] The lack of forensics in the car has always been a puzzle, but as was recently said, perhaps the police really meant a lack of 'useable' forensics. As the car belonged to Gregsten's aunt, her prints must have been found, along with those of Gregsten, Valerie and anyone else who'd innocently rode in the car. 11 sets of prints, was it? None of them JH's or Alphon's?

6] I've never thought that the cartridge-cases at The Vienna were left there by anyone other than JH, but again you can't quite rule out that they'd been planted there by someone keen to point the finger at JH.

7] I've felt for a long time that JH accidentally pulled the trigger to fire the shots that killed Gregsten. Don't know much about guns, so don't know if that particular gun had a hair-trigger or whatever, but seems to me that JH's protestations of innocence should perhaps be read as 'I didn't mean to do it'.

8] Finally, Stewart Evans posted that he'd heard down the grapevine that some dubious stuff had been found by the police in JH's room at his parents' house. Presumably porn, which was much less common in 1961 than today. Also, it seems (according to Woffinden) that JH had left with Donald Slack a file of papers and photos - what were these? No mention at all of that they could be - more porn? Or what?

What happened to Dupplin Muir and his promise of new facts, one asks???

Cheers,

Graham

[Stephen Thomas]

Quick question and not a trick question

Why would a spivvy, mohair suited London crook be wandering around a field in the middle of nowhere with a gun in his pocket?

[Graham]

Quick question and not a trick question

Why would a spivvy, mohair suited London crook be wandering around a field in the middle of nowhere with a gun in his pocket?

Looking for some up-market property to burgle - that was his speciality. As it happens, Dorney Reach isn't exactly in the middle of nowhere. It's a short distance from a trunk road, and within easy walking-distance of 'the' field are a number of potential targets for a spivvy, mohair-suited London burglar, who in his fairly brief career 'did' up-market houses in and around Harrow and Stanmore, semi-rural outskirts of London to the northeast of Dorney. I've done the walk from Taplow down to 'the' field, Stephen, and there are some very nice properties thereabouts.

On the other hand, he may well have been genuinely looking for a courting-couple to get his weird kicks - who knows?

Cheers,

Graham