a6 murder

[Graham]

What frightens the establishment so much about this case?

OK Steve, I give up. What does frighten the establishment about this case?

Graham

[caz]

I think what would frighten me, if I were part of the establishment, is how close Alphon may have come to being hanged by mistake, and how some apparently intelligent people today still believe that he should have been, while Hanratty should have been free to offend again.

I can't help it, but everything I have read on these boards indicates to me that if Alphon's DNA had shown up and not Hanratty's, nobody would now be declaring the result unreliable or invalid. And then the establishment might have had reason to be worried.

Love,

Caz
X

[RonIpstone]

I think what would frighten me, if I were part of the establishment, is how close Alphon may have come to being hanged by mistake, and how some apparently intelligent people today still believe that he should have been, while Hanratty should have been free to offend again.

Hello Caz,

The point is that evidence had been carefully manufactured to place Alphon in room 24 of the Vienna Hotel in such a way that it was possible to show that he could have committed the murder. If VS had identified Alphon then there was a fair chance he would have been charged, tried, convicted and hanged. That an innocent man (Alphon) should have been put in such peril by questionable Police practices would send a shiver down the collective spine of the 'Establishment', whoever they might be.

This was realised by various Home Secretaries and coupled with a their belief that the right man (Hanratty) had been rightly convicted, provided the reason why no public inquiry was ever opened.

Ron

[SteveS]

...how close Alphon may have come to being hanged by mistake, and how some apparently intelligent people today still believe that he should have been...

I was born after the crime happened and do not agree with Capital Punishment under any circumstances so you can cross me off of your list pet.

[Graham]

Perhaps had not Alphon existed, then the police would have manufactured him, or someone like him. They were under terrific official and media pressure to show some progress in what was one of the ghastliest murder cases of the 20th century, and Alphon's appearance must have been like manna from Heaven to them. I've long thought that the true face of police corruption in the A6 Case is the way that Acott put the arm on Nudds to play ball as far as Alphon was concerned. Alphon himself admitted to being absolutely terrified of being wrongly fingered as the A6 killer - once he was exonerrated, however, a totally different Peter Alphon emerged.

Graham

[SteveS]

Hello Victor

Obviously they were subjected to SGM+ techniques before it was determined that there wasn't enough DNA on the sample and they needed to be investigated by
LCN to obtain a meaningful result. Tests which obviously take time to run.

Your first use of the word "Obviously" when revealing a previously unknown fact, (viz SGM+ testing being used) is interesting.

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary gives the following definition:
Main Entry: ob·vi·ous·ly
Pronunciation: \-lē\
Function: adverb
Date: 1638
1 : in an obvious manner <showed his anger obviously>
2 : as is plainly evident <obviously, something is wrong>
(my bold)

Seeing that the second meaning is "as is plainly evident", and yet no plainly evident information exists to back up your statement then it appears that what you actually mean is that; you think SGM+ was used but that you don't really know that this is true at all.

If I am wrong I am sure that you will post up a link to where we can obviously find out this plainly evident piece of information and check it for ourselves.

We all have our opinions but posting material which is obviously not true, just to try to undermine another's argument, is the action of a very sad person indeed.

[RonIpstone]

Hello Steve,

I think that instead of engaging in semantics, your considerable energies could be better directed at answering the question that if Hanratty had not been the murderer/rapist then what has happened to the murderer/rapist's DNA? The results of the examination of the knickers' fragment show, as you obviously know, that the only possible contender for murderer/rapist was and is James Hanratty. No explanation has been forthcoming as to how the sensitive DNA profiling could miss the DNA profile of the rapist, yet the primitive science of the early 1960's could detect the blood group of the rapist from the knickers' fragment.

As to Victor's statement that SGM+ was obviously used before LCN, I should be inclined to read this as a simple and obvious truth that before embarking on the more elaborated and advanced DNA techniques the forensic science lab would have used the standard technique first.

From the appellate court's judgement, it seems that the first DNA profile was attempted in 1995 and was unsuccessful. Re-testing began again in 1997 and continued until 2000 when Hanratty's body was exhumed. The standard profiling technique used until 1999 was SGM and from 1999 onwards SGM+ was introduced.

I am not a scientist and I have no knowledge of the procedures employed by the lab in the Hanratty case but, like Victor, I would have thought that it was obvious that before one embarked upon the more advanced procedures one tried the standard procedures first. This view is reinforced by this statement of practice of LGC Forensics which I have found on the CPS website here:
http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/assets/u...20analysis.pdf

The test and the flow chart shows that SGM+ testing is used first, which would accord with the intelligent layman's understanding of the procedure. If this was obvious to Victor then I do not see why he should not have said it was obvious.

Ron

[SteveS]

...As to Victor's statement that SGM+ was obviously used before LCN, I should be inclined to read this as a simple and obvious truth that before embarking on the more elaborated and advanced DNA techniques the forensic science lab would have used the standard technique first...

It has nothing to do with semantics. It has to do with rock solid evidence. So you show me the evidence that this was done in Hanratty. The fragment of knicker has been all used up, evidence wise, by both the testing done in the mid 1990's and again in 1999.

It would seem more obvious that the 1999 test was a one hit attempt using just LCN because of the small amount of fragment left over from the original tests. Plus the transcript of the BBC Horizon programme in 2002 mentions only the LCN testing and nothing else. The appeal judgement is no help at all on the procedure used.

Victor is trying to show, without foundation in fact, that the DNA in Hanratty had been quantified before LCN testing was done via the use of SGM+. He cannot prove this as no such fact has been made publicly available, so it is not at all obvious as you say it is when you try to back him up on this point, when one also considers the small amount of material available for testing.

[RonIpstone]

I do not hold myself out as an expert in DNA profile, but what I have read on the subject, including the link given in my previous post, indicates that the LCN procedure is followed once the standard procedure has failed to produce a profile.

[SteveS]

I do not hold myself out as an expert in DNA profile, but what I have read on the subject, including the link given in my previous post, indicates that the LCN procedure is followed once the standard procedure has failed to produce a profile.

Not by the FSS it ain't mate.

SGM+ wasn't used first in Hoey and it was used second in Reed, a couple of years after initial LCN tests and only on the advice of the defence experts. The FSS did the wrong test (LCN) in the first place in Reed.

I wouldn't trust the FSS as far as I could throw 'em!

[Victor]

Your first use of the word "Obviously" when revealing a previously unknown fact, (viz SGM+ testing being used) is interesting.

Hi Steve,

So waht tests did they use in the first inconclusive round of testing then?

KR,
Vic.

[RonIpstone]

Hi Steve,

So waht tests did they use in the first inconclusive round of testing then?

KR,
Vic.

Hi Vic,

The trouble with this debate is that to a lesser or greater extent we are all in the dark here. None of us have seen the forensic lab's DNA report, and even if we had, none (very few) would have the expert knowledge to understand the report, let alone subject it to detailed criticism.

My acceptance of the DNA evidence is based on the fact that the appellate court accepted it, and, in truth, no real attack was made upon it by the Hanratty family's counsel or the expert instructed on their behalf. A suggestion was made that Hanratty's DNA, admittedly present, could have got there by contamination. This was not discounted by the prosecution, but the question remained, if Hanratty's DNA were present as a contaminant, where was the rapist's DNA?

Just to recap, the exhibit in question is a fragment of VS's knickers which had become stained with seminal fluid when she was raped. This revealed the rapist to be blood group O, a very common group, but not one to which Michael Gregsten had belonged. This was determined in August 1961, well before Hanratty came on the scene. The rapist/murderer's DNA must have been present in 1961.

The exhibit was rediscovered in 1991 and seems to have been subjected to inclusive tests in March 1995 (presumably/obviously SGM procedure) and again in November 1997 using DNA amplification techniques. The latter producing profiles of (1) VS (2) MG and (3) JH. If JH had not been the rapist then where is the rapist's DNA? How has it disappeared when VS and MG's DNA have remained in tact and survived contamination by JH?

I am not saying that these questions are unanswerable, but they have not yet been answered by the Hanratty lawyers or experts, or by anyone else who has seen the DNA evidence and who has the appropriate expertise to comment thereon.

Hanratty's supporters say that he could not have been the murderer/rapist as he was in Rhyl at the time of the murder/rape because Mrs Jones says so. But VS and other eye witnesses say he was the murderer/rapist or/and the driver of 847 BHN on the morning of 23 August 1961. The DNA evidence supports Miss Storie.


Ron

[Victor]

The exhibit was rediscovered in 1991 and seems to have been subjected to inclusive tests in March 1995 (presumably/obviously SGM procedure) and again in November 1997 using DNA amplification techniques. The latter producing profiles of (1) VS (2) MG and (3) JH. If JH had not been the rapist then where is the rapist's DNA? How has it disappeared when VS and MG's DNA have remained in tact and survived contamination by JH?

Hi Ron,

The highlighted bit is what I was getting at, Steve went off on a big rant about how I was making things up, when in reality all I did was mistakenly say SGM+ for the 1995 tests when it should have been SGM. Basically they are the same test anyway, SGM+ is a refined version of SGM.

Obviously SGM was used in 1995 and those results were inconclusive so on the next attempt (Nov 97) they used the more sensitive LCN technique.

KR,
Vic.

[caz]

I was born after the crime happened and do not agree with Capital Punishment under any circumstances so you can cross me off of your list pet.

Glad to hear it, Steve.

So you would presumably put yourself on my alternative list of apparently intelligent people who'd have been happy to see Alphon serve a life sentence - for a murder that the police initially tried, but utterly failed, to pin on him.

Do you not find that at all ironic in the circumstances?

If Alphon had swung, due to the pressure on the same police force to get a case up against someone - anyone, would it not now give you a single sleepless night to know that his DNA was conspicuously absent from the knickers and hanky, while someone else's was still clinging to both incriminating items, forty years after the crime?

Love,

Caz
X

[Victor]

Identikit Images

I've just seen this article http://www.straightdope.com/columns/...cted-criminals concerning the accuracy of Identikit images and was somewhat surprised to see the images of known offenders and the lack of similarity to the photographs http://chicago.straightdope.com/mugs...comparison.htm

If the images are that innaccurate then it's unsurprising that the Identikit pictures VS et al made differ from Hanratty's photographs.

This quote from the first link strongly reminded me of VS experience...

Some anecdata: My assistant Una went through the composite-making process when she was robbed at gunpoint. Although she tried her best, the result didn't look much like the suspect when he was caught. (She did identify him in a lineup, however.)

KR,
Vic.