a6 murder

[larue]

As for the frailties of the 'eye witness', these are well known and don't really help the case for anyone genuinely remembering that they saw Hanratty in Rhyl on a specific date. How could they be sure, from what they had seen of him since in the media?

This hardly seems remotely comparable to the rape victim herself, who spent hours in a (very) confined space with her attacker, hearing his voice and experiencing his behaviour and body language and manner of speaking, all up close and personal - and who was then presented with the suspect in the flesh, enabling her to make comparisons. If her witness testimony was fraught with frailties, Hanratty was always on a hiding to nothing with his Rhyl witnesses.

hi Caz

eye witness reports ain't worth the paper they are not written on.

am i misunderstanding you here, or are you applying a double standard? like, jh's rhyl witnesses are worthless but vs is unimpeachable?? i hope i am mistaken.

personally i think vh's description is at best shaky, for the following reasons:

the only 'glimpse' as she called it, was during a moonless pitch black night, when one could hardly be expected to see the proverbial hand in front of one's face. with vs in the front seat, and jh in the rear, she turned to look at him [in pitch darkness, what was she expecting to see??] just at that precise moment, [what a co-incidence] as luck would have it, a car passed on the main road, and in the headlight's gleam [and don't forget, the headlights would not have shone directly into the car] she took in enough details of the man's face to give a detailed description, including hair color, details of eyes, and pale facial features. not bad for someone sitting next to the corpse of her lover, and all in just a few seconds.

compare this with questions aksed by mr sherrard during his cross examination re her failure during the first id parade:

Q. On that first parade you surveyed the men paraded before you for some time, as long as five minutes, before saying something or doing something?
A. Yes.
Q. And you then identified a man as being, in your view, the assailant?
A. Yes.
Q. Can you tell us now what that man looked like?
A. No.

so she can id a man well enough in a car in pitch darkness after a few seconds, but after staring at a man full in the face in optimum conditions, she can give no description at all.

that does not inspire my confidence

later in the cross examination:

Q. And when it appeared that you had identified some other person on that parade did you not afterwards say that there was a fair resemblance between Alphon and the man who attacked you?
A. When am I supposed to have said that?
Q. Some time after that parade?
A. Some time afterwards, yes.
MR. JUSTICE GORMAN. What did you say?
MR. SHERRARD. There was a fair resemblance between Alphon and the man who attacked you?
A. Yes.
MR. JUSTICE GORMAN. Are you putting it to this lady that the man whom she identified was Peter Alphon?
MR. SHERRARD. No, my Lord. (To the witness): It was not the man whom you identified?
A. No.
Q. Can you tell us to whom you made that observa*tion?
A. In the first instance I believe it was a doctor at Stoke Mandeville Hospital.
Q. And later?
A. I am not sure whether it was Superintendent Acott or not.
Q. May it have been Superintendent Acott?
A. It may have been, but I do not remember.

The most significant point in the evidence set out above is that in answer to the question, "Can you tell us now what the man looked like," she answered, "No".
Furthermore, when Dr. Rennie was asked the same question he answered, "Not clearly, as far as I remember he had rather fairish hair and bluish eyes, but I cannot say more than that".

so now, she is agreeing there is a fair resemblance between her attacker and alphon. and yet, when you look at photos of alphon and jh side by side... sorry people, but with all due respect to vs, i could not hang a man on the strength of that

[caz]

...i still maintain the alibi was irrelevant and immaterial...

What you say here is all well and good, and might have applied if the jury had no other evidence to consider but an alibi that came across as phoney but just may have been true. As it was, the alibi was obviously nowhere near strong enough to shift the balance from guilty in the minds of the jury to a case of reasonable doubt.

"As I told you on the phone I have a perfect alibi for the murder. I'm not worried about the murder, but as I promised you last week I'd tell you the whole story when you caught me, fire away and ask me any questions you like. I'll answer them and you'll see I had nothing to do with it."

The parts in bold above worry me a bit. Do they not worry you? If I was nowhere near the scene of such a horrific crime, I don't think it would occur to me to talk about having "a perfect alibi" or not being "worried" about the murder, or being "caught". I'm not a psychologist but I reckon one could have a field day with this passage alone.

And surely, the Rhyl alibi didn't need to involve any of Hanratty's 'criminal friends', if all he had to do was describe something distinctive from his overnight stay on the crucial date.

If this man was innocent, he played right into the hands of the prosecution.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

hi Caz

eye witness reports ain't worth the paper they are not written on.

am i misunderstanding you here, or are you applying a double standard? like, jh's rhyl witnesses are worthless but vs is unimpeachable?? i hope i am mistaken.

You are indeed mistaken, larue.

Read my post again.

You are saying here that both Liverpool and Rhyl eye witness reports 'ain't worth the paper they are not written on'. You are applying a double standard if you accept a single one of them, while rejecting all others in every other instance as 'worthless'.

I was talking about the victim's physical experience of being with her rapist in that car for hours, not what she managed to make out in the darkness of his facial features and so on. I was concentrating on manner of speech, voice, behaviour and body language.

In that first line-up, the victim wasn't given the chance to pick out Hanratty because he wasn't there. She didn't know at that time that there would be another chance if she failed to pick the right man first time, and the pressure on her to find the prime suspect would have been considerable. If she failed to pick anyone out, she would feel responsible if the vicious killer had been among them. If she picked out the prime suspect, she could assume the police had other evidence to make a case against him. If the man she picked was only there to make up the numbers he at least had nothing to fear.

As it turned out, she wasn't able to pick out the prime suspect, which is just as well as Alphon could have hanged without a trace of his DNA on the hanky or knickers. But there was something about Hanratty in that second line-up (which would have been a whole different ball game for her with the experience of the first behind her) that convinced the victim that this was the man she had spent those awful hours with in the darkness, hoping he would leave her alive to tell the tale.

At the end of the day, she was only ever given the two prime suspects to consider, in separate line-ups, and the one she picked was the one whose DNA was left on the hanky and knickers.

Without the DNA, but with everything else, it was good enough for the jury. So my opinions about eye witness testimony in general could be said to be irrelevant and immaterial.

Love,

Caz
X

[P.L.A]

As you are aware, my books aren’t too handy for me at the moment, so I am having to rely on memory – which seems to be failing me quite often these days.

Somebody, and I think it was Hawser, picked up on the part of the alibi where Hanratty was describing the snooker hall encounter in Liverpool. Hanratty said something along the lines of “the snooker hall manager was at the bottom of the stairs, where he always is”

The point is, how did Hanratty know the manager was always there? Hawser (I think this is where it initially came from) suggested this showed Hanratty had been coached and forgot to leave the last little bit out.

Unfortunately, Hanratty didn’t have the opportunity to defend the accusation and offer his explanation.

Peter.

[P.L.A]

Hi

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UlScGo6piU)

On the link, Michael Hanratty says Sherrard told his brother that he wanted him to go into the witness box. James’s response was that if that was the case, he would tell the truth – and this is when the Rhyl alibi emerged.

I think Sherrard wanted the jury to see what type of person the defendant was, and that this would be in his favour.

Peter

[RonIpstone]

Hello All,

I think that the account given by Mr Michael Hanratty about his brother's conversation with Mr Sherrard gives a false impression. Hanratty had long conferences with his counsel on 8th & 17th January 1962 at which Hanratty persisted with his exclusively Liverpool alibi.

That JH had been told that he was expected to give evidence is evident by the note taken by his solicitor on 17 Jan where Sherrard advises that if the judge directs JH be taken to Liverpool to locate the flat and the three men, and should JH fail to do so, then he will be lost. The judge could only do this if Hanratty had gone into the witness box to give his evidence.

The following day, 18 Jan 1962, Kleinman received a note from Gillbanks, the inquiry agent to the effect that McNally had refused to alibi JH. Moreover Gillbanks could not find a family and/or the flat which matched JH's description.

Why JH was not immediately confronted by these developments before the trial started on 22 January is not apparent, but at some stage he must have been told that Gillbanks could not find the flat nor the family, and bearing in mind Sherrard's warning that he might be taken to Liverpool to find them, he decided to chance his arm with the Rhyl alibi. It was bound to be better than his Liverpool alibi, there must be a guesthouse in Rhyl with a middle-aged landlady and a green bath in the attic or the top part of the house, or maybe he even knew of such an establishment from another visit to the seaside town.

Ron

[caz]

Somebody, and I think it was Hawser, picked up on the part of the alibi where Hanratty was describing the snooker hall encounter in Liverpool. Hanratty said something along the lines of “the snooker hall manager was at the bottom of the stairs, where he always is”

The point is, how did Hanratty know the manager was always there? Hawser (I think this is where it initially came from) suggested this showed Hanratty had been coached and forgot to leave the last little bit out.

The other point is that regardless of how Hanratty knew this, it couldn't put him there on a specific date if the manager was "always there" anyway.

Just like a green bath in a fixed position could not, by itself, show that Hanratty had seen it on the crucial date.

Love,

Caz
X

[larue]

"As I told you on the phone I have a perfect alibi for the murder. I'm not worried about the murder, but as I promised you last week I'd tell you the whole story when you caught me, fire away and ask me any questions you like. I'll answer them and you'll see I had nothing to do with it."

hi Caz [this argument is getting good ]

what i am aksing is, if jh had a perfect alibi, as he told acott, then why did he not use it?? unless the liverpool alibi was it?, and if he gave acott the liverpool alibi, which was unproveable, acott would have demolished it before the comittal. so why persist with it, then add the frills of the rhyl alibi. i can see no sense in it.

if the alibi, liverpool or rhyl or whatever else he could have come up with was proveable then he would have been safe. elsewise he was flogging a dead horse

The parts in bold above worry me a bit. Do they not worry you? If I was nowhere near the scene of such a horrific crime, I don't think it would occur to me to talk about having "a perfect alibi" or not being "worried" about the murder, or being "caught". I'm not a psychologist but I reckon one could have a field day with this passage alone.

i'm not a psychologist either, but nope. they don't worry me a bit. i have been nowhere near hundreds of serious crimes in my life, and have had nowt to do with any of them, [being a law abiding citizen] therefore i don't need an alibi.

however, if i had been picked up by the police as a suspect in one of those crimes, [by for instance, an innacurate eye witness description] even though i were perfectly innocent, i think a perfect alibi would be the first thing on my mind as in 'it wern't me and i can bl**dy well prove it' now get my ass out of this cell...

And surely, the Rhyl alibi didn't need to involve any of Hanratty's 'criminal friends', if all he had to do was describe something distinctive from his overnight stay on the crucial date.

true, he did not need his 'friends', but i think he needed to do more than descibe something. he had to prove his whereabouts on that date. a bus ticket from liverpool to rhyl for example.

If this man was innocent, he played right into the hands of the prosecution.

now there i do agree with you, but i would go one stage further and say that innocent or guilty he played right into the prosecution's hands

[larue]

[QUOTE=caz;132230]You are indeed mistaken, larue.

Read my post again.

You are saying here that both Liverpool and Rhyl eye witness reports 'ain't worth the paper they are not written on'. You are applying a double standard if you accept a single one of them, while rejecting all others in every other instance as 'worthless'.

who says that i do that? if fact, i accept none of the witness testimony as completely true, unless is is supported by proveable fact. and that includes hanratty's testimony. don't forget he was a witness too. a man cannot be in two places at the same time, so somebody has to be wrong.

I was talking about the victim's physical experience of being with her rapist in that car for hours, not what she managed to make out in the darkness of his facial features and so on. I was concentrating on manner of speech, voice, behaviour and body language.

those last items, apart from his speech, though relevant were not part of her description, or am i missing some important information here?

In that first line-up, the victim wasn't given the chance to pick out Hanratty because he wasn't there. She didn't know at that time that there would be another chance if she failed to pick the right man first time, and the pressure on her to find the prime suspect would have been considerable. If she failed to pick anyone out, she would feel responsible if the vicious killer had been among them. If she picked out the prime suspect, she could assume the police had other evidence to make a case against him. If the man she picked was only there to make up the numbers he at least had nothing to fear.


As it turned out, she wasn't able to pick out the prime suspect, which is just as well as Alphon could have hanged without a trace of his DNA on the hanky or knickers. But there was something about Hanratty in that second line-up (which would have been a whole different ball game for her with the experience of the first behind her) that convinced the victim that this was the man she had spent those awful hours with in the darkness, hoping he would leave her alive to tell the tale.

At the end of the day, she was only ever given the two prime suspects to consider, in separate line-ups, and the one she picked was the one whose DNA was left on the hanky and knickers.

Without the DNA, but with everything else, it was good enough for the jury. So my opinions about eye witness testimony in general could be said to be irrelevant and immaterial.

Love,

Caz
X

hanratty was not at the first parade because he was not a suspect at that time.

there was no pressure on her at all to pick out the prime suspect. that is not the way an id parade works. she would have been aksed if she saw her attacker in the lineup, not the man the police suspected was her attacker. she picked out someone else as her attacker and was totally wrong. she should have said, 'i do not see the man who attacked me in this lineup'. her id of another man is tantamount to an accusation of murder, and as she herself said on tv later, 'hanratty was not on that parade. i couldn't identify him, erm, i just tried to pick out somebody i suppose, er, i thought looked like him. i made a mistake. the man had nothing to do with the case. just one of those things'

just as well the man had a good alibi...

[caz]

what i am aksing is, if jh had a perfect alibi, as he told acott, then why did he not use it?? unless the liverpool alibi was it?, and if he gave acott the liverpool alibi, which was unproveable, acott would have demolished it before the comittal. so why persist with it, then add the frills of the rhyl alibi. i can see no sense in it.

if the alibi, liverpool or rhyl or whatever else he could have come up with was proveable then he would have been safe. elsewise he was flogging a dead horse

Agreed, larue.

who says that i do that? if fact, i accept none of the witness testimony as completely true, unless is is supported by proveable fact.

Not me. I said if you accept any of the Liverpool or Rhyl eye witness accounts you'd be applying a double standard for this case alone. I'm very glad to hear you accept none of them, since there is nothing to prove Hanratty was in either place at the crucial time, and no way that any of the witnesses could have been certain that they had seen him and not someone else. The evidence indicates, beyond all reasonable doubt, that his DNA was being deposited an awful long way away at the time. He couldn't have talked his way out of that one and no eye witness on earth could have helped him do it.

those last items, apart from his speech, though relevant were not part of her description, or am i missing some important information here?

No, it's just that I wasn't comparing the victim's description of her attacker, as an eye witness, with those given by the Liverpool/Rhyl eye witnesses.

I was comparing the victim's lengthy personal experience - the whole ordeal - at the hands of her attacker with the recollections of mere eye witnesses who thought they had seen the suspect, Hanratty - in circumstances where they had no reason to pay him particular attention or to think they would ever need to remember what he looked like or to recognise him again. As far as I am aware they were not asked to pick out the man they saw from any line-up, so when they first claimed to have seen Hanratty, all they had to go on was what they had seen and read about him in the media.

I was just saying that out of a bad bunch, the victim in this case was perhaps more qualified than anyone else to know when she was finally once again in the presence of the man who had put her through the whole ordeal and left her for dead. It was possibly even her reason to go on and get through this. What had she survived for, if she couldn't use the fact to identify the man who had destroyed one life and wrecked another?

there was no pressure on her at all to pick out the prime suspect. that is not the way an id parade works. she would have been aksed if she saw her attacker in the lineup, not the man the police suspected was her attacker. she picked out someone else as her attacker and was totally wrong. she should have said, 'i do not see the man who attacked me in this lineup'. her id of another man is tantamount to an accusation of murder, and as she herself said on tv later, 'hanratty was not on that parade. i couldn't identify him, erm, i just tried to pick out somebody i suppose, er, i thought looked like him. i made a mistake. the man had nothing to do with the case. just one of those things'

just as well the man had a good alibi...

I respectfully disagree that there was no pressure on her. That may not be how an id parade works, but it wouldn't have stopped her putting all the pressure in the world on herself during the first one [see my previous paragraph], especially if she got the impression that the police had strong supporting evidence against their suspect. Of course she should not have picked anyone out when she obviously wasn't sure. But like any witness in any situation she's only human, and unlike any other witness in this case she had just been to hell and back.

The man she picked out first time round was not a suspect and needed no alibi. I very much doubt he'd have been asked for one. I don't know where this myth comes from (unless you were being tongue-in-cheek here) but they'd never get anyone to make up the numbers if a mistaken identification could lead to a volunteer getting the third degree.

Have a good weekend!

Love,

Caz
X

[Alfie]

The identikit picture

Regarding what Valerie may or may not have said about the gunman's eye colour, I've read numerous posts asserting that when helping make up the Identi-Kit picture she picked E49 for the eyes, and that this signified dark eyes.

But is this in fact the case?

I found an article on line, written five years after the new Identi-Kit apparatus was introduced in the US in the 1950s; here's what it had to say about making up a picture from its component parts:

“The [Identi-Kit] breaks a full-face image up into component parts – hair, brows, eyes, nose, lips, chin-line with ears, and age lines, plus beard, hat, and glasses, if any. It contains several dozen transparent slides picturing each of these components with different types of contours, 500 slides in all, with five notches on the slide for different placements of each feature. Each slide is coded with a letter for the facial component illustrated and a figure for the particular configuration. The witness is given a catalog showing all these slides and asked to pick out the brows, nose, chin-line, etc, which most nearly suit the person he saw.”

As we know, the early kits produced black and white pictures. There is nothing in the article about hair, eye or skin colour, or how to represent it. I stand to be corrected, but going by the above quote a code such as E49 seems more likely to have represented some 'configuration' of the suspect's eyes - "wide and staring", perhaps, as opposed to hooded, or slit, or bulging, or squinting, or wide or narrow spaced, or whatever - rather than an eye colour.

Cheers

Alan

[larue]

hi Caz

No, it's just that I wasn't comparing the victim's description of her attacker, as an eye witness, with those given by the Liverpool/Rhyl eye witnesses.

I was comparing the victim's lengthy personal experience - the whole ordeal - at the hands of her attacker with the recollections of mere eye witnesses who thought they had seen the suspect, Hanratty - in circumstances where they had no reason to pay him particular attention or to think they would ever need to remember what he looked like or to recognise him again. As far as I am aware they were not asked to pick out the man they saw from any line-up, so when they first claimed to have seen Hanratty, all they had to go on was what they had seen and read about him in the media.

I was just saying that out of a bad bunch, the victim in this case was perhaps more qualified than anyone else to know when she was finally once again in the presence of the man who had put her through the whole ordeal and left her for dead. It was possibly even her reason to go on and get through this. What had she survived for, if she couldn't use the fact to identify the man who had destroyed one life and wrecked another?

good point, well made

I respectfully disagree that there was no pressure on her. That may not be how an id parade works, but it wouldn't have stopped her putting all the pressure in the world on herself during the first one [see my previous paragraph], especially if she got the impression that the police had strong supporting evidence against their suspect. Of course she should not have picked anyone out when she obviously wasn't sure. But like any witness in any situation she's only human, and unlike any other witness in this case she had just been to hell and back.

i said there was no pressure on her to pick out the prime suspect. different thing entirely, indeed she should not even have known which one the prime suspect was. what pressure she put herself under, only she knows.
if she had any ideas about a prime suspect and any supporting evidence the police may have had, then that could only have come from the police themselves, and would, in my opinion, be collusion. very naughty. there must have been a bit of egg on acott's face though...

The man she picked out first time round was not a suspect and needed no alibi. I very much doubt he'd have been asked for one. I don't know where this myth comes from (unless you were being tongue-in-cheek here) but they'd never get anyone to make up the numbers if a mistaken identification could lead to a volunteer getting the third degree.

one would hope the bona fides of all the 'extras' on the id parade would be well established before hand, however, i wasn't being entirely facetious...

Have a good weekend!

you too

[larue]

hi Caz

The evidence indicates, beyond all reasonable doubt, that his DNA was being deposited an awful long way away at the time.

not in larueland it don't. i do not believe that any scientific test, or the people who carry them out are actually omnipotent. there is always room for error.

[larue]

Regarding what Valerie may or may not have said about the gunman's eye colour, I've read numerous posts asserting that when helping make up the Identi-Kit picture she picked E49 for the eyes, and that this signified dark eyes.

But is this in fact the case?

good question. i have no idea how color was depicted, of the eyes or anything else. for instance, vs described hanratt's face as pale, whereas others said it was ruddy and florid...

then, how aboot this snippet?

Mr. Swanwick once again failed to live up to the standard which he had rashly set for himself in a case which bristled with red herrings. This was when he dealt with the evidence of the Identi-Kit, which showed a bushy eyebrow. He cannot be blamed too harshly for this as it must have been very difficult to present some parts of this case without the evidence appearing thin. There were simply not enough facts.
Mr. Swanwick tried to explain how an Identi-Kit was composed. "It is not a method of identifying people," he said, "such as putting them on an identity parade, but it is much more like what was done to Mr. Trower—to show him a series of photographs and see if he can find somebody with similarity to the person they are speaking of. It is done probably at a period when the police are trying to find the identity even of a suspect. They must look to see if they can find something to go on—some sort of description. It takes a trained policeman—a trained observer—to say that the man was so tall, had such a shape of face and had such a colour.[1] As one gathers it, the Identi-Kit process is that somebody takes one transparency after another

[1] Had Mr. Swanwick forgotten, when he said this, that Valerie Storie had done just this? If it can only be done properly by a trained policeman, it follows that no reliance could be placed on her description of the man. It was a strange remark for counsel to make and it must be assumed that he did not, at the time, realize its full implication.

hmmm...

[Dupplin Muir]

Hello All

I haven't posted for a while because, subsequent to my last (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) post, I heard that a friend had committed suicide, so for a while I rather lost interest in debating the details of a long-ago murder.

On the question of the gunman's eye-colour, it seems to me that there can be no serious doubt that VS did initially describe it as brown. If (as she claimed) she had specified that his eyes were blue, why did she not protest when confronted by the (brown-eyed) Alphon? Additionally, if the identity parade was properly conducted, then the other participants must also have had brown eyes.

There is also a more subtle point here. The car was in darkness most of the time, and even when cars passed, their headlights would not have done much to illuminate the interior (they were a fair distance away and the car windows were small). In low-light conditions the human eye can only see in monochrome, so the most she could have said was that the assailant's eyes were light-coloured: they could have just as easily been green or grey as blue. By contrast, dark-coloured eyes are invariably brown.

Of course this does not necessarily exonerate JH, since she could have been mistaken, given her terrible ordeal, but it does suggest that her evidence should not be taken as gospel truth.

DM