a6 murder

[Natalie Severn]

So what we are looking for is a woman who had sex with James Hanratty and who frequented the Rehersal Club Soho so France could have 'witness her being exploited' by Hanratty. Does Mary Meaden fit this criteria? Nope, I don't think so.

So is there anyone else who would... I have a thought going round my head about a black stripper or prostitute that used the Rehersal Club and had sex with Hanratty, and I seem to remember her name was Mary Pryor, but I'm not certain about this (hence the "I think her name was")

Now I don't have my books with me here as I am at work, and my books are at home - a fact that I've posted a few times on this thread - so I can't check that detail - can anyone else verify that for me?
KR,
Vic.

Hi Vic,
First ,I really think you are over reacting above in your post to James.He hasn"t said anything that is so offensive or villainous as you have interpreted --- for goodness sake,Vic! He merely had a quip about the "Mary Prior" name.And btw,I have been reminded quickly enough by various posters from your camp when I blunder about names---and its no big deal.It happens.People make mistakes
Anyway,you are referring to Anne Price.She was a good friend of Hanratty"s.He used to talk to her at the Rehearsal Club and she was old enough to be his Mum being about 45 ,
Regards
Norma
Post script: A young teenager with only the slightest knowledge of cars and how they work could have worked out the gear system of a Morris Minor.It doesnt wash at all regarding Hanratty.In anycase Valerie made no reference to the gears being in the habit of sticking.

[RonIpstone]

Ann Pryce, a Jamaican, dob 5 April 1918, could be about whom you are thinking Vic. She seems to have gone to the flicks a couple of times with our Jim. It is not clear whether she had sex with Jim, or what she did to earn a crust.

Hope this helps with your revision for Mastermind. When is the show to be aired?

[Natalie Severn]

All of which is irrelevant as he was ID'd as the culprit.

If you are referring here to Valerie, then we have dicussed this many times .If Valerie"s identification is faultless or not subject to error or even questioning ,how on earth did she come to ID Michael Clark as her rapist and the killer of Gregsten?.You can try to diminish her mistake as much as you like but imagine if Michael Clark had ,as a consequence of her wrong identification,been suspected of being the gunman.
Two others remain:The Redbridge witnesses, Edward Blackhall and John Skillett.
Blackhall said the driver of the MM looked nothing like Hanratty.Skillett identified Hanratty.They cancel each other out.They both saw the same man.And do you know what Skillett said about that? He simply suggested the police "must" have had good reason to suspect Hanratty!
THe other Redbridge witness called was Trower---whose evidence was overturned by street measurement and angles by Sherrard.It was also a complete nonsense according to Paddy Hogan.Trower wasnt there at the time he thought he saw him.He was much too late.
There are other Redbridge witnesses,never called,who corroborate each other---unlike the others.Their evidence indicates the Morris Minor wasnt there at the time stated---it wasnt there until after 5.30 pm.So why wasn"t their evidence called?
And did you know there was nothing whatever--no fibres ,blood or fingerprints to link Hanratty with that car.Nothing .

[Victor]

I really think you are over reacting above in your post to James.He hasn"t said anything that is so offensive or villainous as you have interpreted --- for goodness sake,Vic! He merely had a quip about the "Mary Prior" name.

Hi Norma,

I'm happy to agree to disagree over that, a quip to me is light-hearted and jovial, that post was not.

Anyway,you are referring to Anne Price.She was a good friend of Hanratty"s.He used to talk to her at the Rehearsal Club and she was old enough to be his Mum being about 45

Ann Pryce, a Jamaican, dob 5 April 1918, could be about whom you are thinking Vic. She seems to have gone to the flicks a couple of times with our Jim. It is not clear whether she had sex with Jim, or what she did to earn a crust.

Pryor, Prior, Pryce or Price - one of those. Thank you both for the update.

It seems that Jim had no problem with sleeping with any woman - from 16 year old Carole to 45 year old Ann(e) Pryce to Louise Anderson - his "girlfriend". He's seems to be a sufferer of hypersexuality.

A young teenager with only the slightest knowledge of cars and how they work could have worked out the gear system of a Morris Minor.It doesnt wash at all regarding Hanratty.In anycase Valerie made no reference to the gears being in the habit of sticking.

Worked them out - probably. Operate them smoothly without stalling - maybe not.

Where is the gear stick on a Moggie, on the steering wheel or by the left knee?

In the case of Hanratty, he was used to Jaguars and other powerful vehicles so the "crunchy" gears on a Moggie could easily have foxed him.

Valerie made no reference to them sticking, but it wasn't her car, it was Gregsten's aunt's, so why should she? Also if we take the lack of comment to mean that it was a typical Moggie, then it would take a knack to operate them smoothly - especially post-murder and rape, that would be a very anxious time for the killer.

KR,
Vic.

[Graham]

Hi All!

Been away on biz, just got back to relative civilisation. Only looked at the past few postings, so not really up to date.

Couple of quick points:

1] His comments to Vic serve to confirm my own view of Mr Jimarilyn. Vic isn't over-reacting at all, Norma. Perhaps you now understand why I lose my rag. When Jimarilyn condescends to contribute something concrete to this post, rather than insult other posters, then perhaps I'll alter my view of him.

2] Re: Moggie Minors. I had a 1953 side-valve one (and so I think did Larue), flat-out it did about 65 m.p.h. and for a 995cc engine it guzzled gas (about 35 to the gallon - my 2 litre Passat does about 53!) It was the first car I ever had, and I have to say that it was not difficult to crunch the gears with that great long pudding-stirrer gear-stick it had. There was nothing positive about it - it was bang-bang rev-rev. The clutch was either in or out. The cable brakes were a joke. Anyone used to driving better cars would very likely have had difficulties with a Moggie. The later ones were better, but not much. I learned to drive on my old man's Ford Cortina, a world away from a Moggie Minor. I think the car Gregsten drove was a 1958 model with a bigger engine than mine.

3] Re: Valerie's i.d., the main point is that she did identify Hanratty, and didn't identify Alphon, whose sigh of relief must have been audible.

4] Re: the Redbridge witnesses, to be honest I've never placed a huge amount of credibility in them, but as one of them thought he had seen Hanratty and so the prosecution was more or less obliged to use him.

5] Re: forensics in the car. There was nothing to link Alphon with the car, either, as has been pointed out about a million times on this thread. I'll say again, that I'm astounded that nothing was found to link anyone to the car other than the people who had legitimately travelled in it.

6] While I was away I took my Sherlock Holmes books with me, and turned up this passage in The Adventure Of Silver Blaze, which I think is very appropriate with regard to the debate about the A6 Case:

The tragedy has been so uncommon, so complete, and of such personal importance to so many people that we are suffering from a plethora of surmise, conjecture, and hypothesis. The difficulty is to detach the framework of fact - of absolute, undeniable fact - from the embellishments of theorists and reporters.

Sez it all, or wot?

Graham

[Graham]

Hi Vic,

our posts crossed - agreed ref: your Morris Minor comments.

Re: Hanratty's sexuality, was it Stewart Evans who referred to the material the police took from Hanratty's bedroom? Although he didn't say so in so many words, it seems very likely that that material was of a pornographic nature. Yet like a lot of other 'paperwork' concerning the A6 Case - most of France's last letters, for example - it seems to have disappeared for good.

Graham

[Victor]

Hi Graham,

Yup - very similar comments from the two of us!

Re: Hanratty's sexuality, was it Stewart Evans who referred to the material the police took from Hanratty's bedroom? Although he didn't say so in so many words, it seems very likely that that material was of a pornographic nature. Yet like a lot of other 'paperwork' concerning the A6 Case - most of France's last letters, for example - it seems to have disappeared for good.

Yes it was, and I understood it to be pornographic material too, although it wasn't explicitly stated.

KR,
Vic.

[Graham]

Hi Vic,

and now I think about it, he also apparently handed over a quantity of 'personal papers and photos' to Donald Slack a.k.a. Fisher. For safe-keeping, or what? We wonders what was in that file....maybe totally innocent stuff, maybe not. What happened to it?

Graham

[RonIpstone]

Apropos Jim's problem with the Moggie Minor and its gears, I do not think that the Moggie's gear change presented any problem to the driver. It was no more difficult to change gear on the Morris than it was on the Jag. In any event Jim had identified the problem of changing gears before he started back for Redbridge.

My theory is that Jim had not driven a Moggie Minor and the gear stick on 847 BHN was the long type coming out of the floor of the car near the driver's left foot.

Here is photo of the interior of a Mark 1 Jaguar 1962 (LHD) which would be the type of vehicle which Jim would want to nick. The gear stick is stubby and comes out of the transmission tunnel.

And here is a photo of the interior of a RHD 1954 Moggie Minor similar to 847BHN.

If Hanratty had never had proper driving lessons and had never driven a Morris Minor with the long gear stick, then it is quite probable that he thought that there was a difference in operation of the latter compared to the former. In fact the principles are the same and no special skill ought to be required when one has mastered one type in order to master the other but Jim did not know this.

[NickB]

In fact the principles are the same and no special skill ought to be required when one has mastered one type in order to master the other but Jim did not know this.

And I read earlier on the thread that there was no diagram on the gearstick.

[Graham]

Anybody here ever driven a Ford Popular with a 3-speed box? You almost had to kick the bloody gear-stick to get it to shift. Like the Moggie (but worse) it was very difficult to 'feel' the gears.

Graham

[Black Rabbit]

Even someone as monumentally stupid as Jim Hanratty must have known that with a loaded gun someone was liable to be hurt or killed and in the event of the latter there was a possibility that Jim would hang. This would have provided an additional reason for the adoption of the wearing of gloves.

So why did the jury find Jim guilty? We should not forget that the jury was empanelled from the voters of Bedford. I have spent a good deal of time writing about the football club, Luton Town, more popularly known as the Hatters and have come to know the club's fans reasonably well. Luton, a Bedfordshire town, is 20 miles or so further south than its county town, Bedford, and many Hatters hail from Bedford, which does not have a League team of its own. My assumption is that the 1962 jury members, in intellectual capacity and thought processes, were not too dissimilar from the Hatters that I have encountered recently. There were one or two bright ones, but overall I would have to say that most were somewhere between dim and stupid.

I would therefore hazard a guess that notwithstanding the lack of mental facilities available to it, the jury rightly concluded that Hanratty had not stayed in Mrs Jones's B&B, and from this it deduced that Jim had not stayed in anyone's B&B in Rhyl. It seemed to me that when they had found the hapless Mrs Jones the defence investigators stopped looking for other B&B proprietors who might have accommodated Jim.

If Hanratty had not been in Rhyl, then, as everyone has to be somewhere, in the mind of the jury, he would have to have been the abductor at Dorney Reach.

If the jury had approached the question from the other direction and asked whether beyond reasonable doubt the prosecution had proved that he had been the Dorney Reach abductor? Then with Acott's fiddling with the evidence and VS first and wrong identification, it is difficult to see how it could have given a positive answer to that question.

Jim Hanratty charged his father with clearing his (Jim's) name. Paul Foot set out to show not only that Jim did not do it, but Alphon did it. The Criminal Court of Appeal would have let Jim off even if Jim had done it but there had been a fatal flaw in his trial. Some on this forum argue that Jim did not do it and he did not have a fair trial. I do not know if anyone subscribes to the view that Jim did it, but did not have a fair trial and so should be let off. In my opinion, and this is the only one that counts, we should leave the legal technicalities to my learned friends in the Strand and just argue whether Jim did it or did not do it. In other words Jim should not be acquitted on a legal technicality, but as he would have wanted it, he should be acquitted on all the evidence and have his name cleared. Unfortunately for Jim and his supporters the DNA evidence means Jim did it.

I have never read such a rude, ignorant, bigoted, conceited, prejudiced, intolerant, opinionated, blinkered, haughty, egotistical, supercilious diatribe on a forum in all my life.

Shame on you!

[Victor]

Anybody here ever driven a Ford Popular with a 3-speed box? You almost had to kick the bloody gear-stick to get it to shift. Like the Moggie (but worse) it was very difficult to 'feel' the gears.

Hi Graham,

I've driven a few older vehicles where you had to double the clutch - which was a challenge for me as I wasn't used to it. Not that I want to spark off the Monty Python Four Yorkshiremen sketch... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo

KR,
Vic.

[Natalie Severn]

Hi All,
Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking to the librarian I met in the Summer who knew the Rhyl witnesses as she lived close to them all near the Kinmel Street and South Kinmel Street area.She went to school with Ivy Vincent"s daughter and knew her very well.So she and her family knew,personally,Margaret Walker, Ivy Vincent,Betty Davies ,and Margaret Davies the mother in law of Betty Davies and she also knew the daughter of Mrs Jones .She was very interesting talking about Terry Evans .She said yesterday that Terry was absolutely adamant to the last days of his life,that Hanratty was in Rhyl,that Tuesday 22nd August.
The problem with the other witnesses is that they had not met Hanratty as Terry had,but once again,the women corroborated each other and the description of Hanratty matches.
So having met this lady,a lady of wholesome integrity,and having seen and heard with my own eyes and ears her conviction that James Hanratty was in Rhyl on the evening of 22nd August 1961, I can understand why Paul Foot never wavered in his view that Hanratty could not possibly have committed the A6 murder.

I notice there is a lot of talk now about 24 year old Hanratty"s supposed "hyper sexuality" and interest in porn.Mary Meadon didnt sleep with him and she went out with him quite a few times.Anne Price neither.
But certainly lots of prisoners are said to be interested in porn ,and since they have no access to heterosexual sex,it isnt really that surprising.
I seem to remember Graham posting two or three months ago about 400 police being disciplined or sacked or both in the sixties for the possession of porn.It was in all the papers apparently.But anyway,this is by the way.An interest in porn does not mean a person would go straight out and repeat what they saw in their porn magazine.even I know that and I am not a psychiatrist.
Best,
Norma

[Limehouse]

Hi Norma,

Pryor, Prior, Pryce or Price - one of those. Thank you both for the update.

It seems that Jim had no problem with sleeping with any woman - from 16 year old Carole to 45 year old Ann(e) Pryce to Louise Anderson - his "girlfriend". He's seems to be a sufferer of hypersexuality.

KR,
Vic.

Vic – you have no evidence at all that Hanratty and Anderson were lovers. Neither do you have evidence that Hanratty suffered from hypersexuality. OK – so it appears he had a few lovers and he slept with prostitutes. So what? They were all consenting adults and by all accounts they all seemed to have enjoyed a warm relationship with Jim. Personally – I do disapprove of his behaviour with Carol France but they were consenting adults.

Gregsten – by his own admission – was a serial adulterer. He even stated that he failed his finals at university partly because of his 'compulsive desire to pick up women' (Woffinden p 12). However – as has been stated before – Gregsten's adultery with Storie and others is irrelevant to the case and in no way justifies the terrible events they experienced.

BY THE SAME TOKEN Hanratty's sexual behaviour does not make him a murderer and rapist. It is not evidence of his capability as a murderer and rapist.

Concerning his alleged engagement with pornography – well that is alleged only and is again not evidence of his capability to murder and rape.

I have said this before and I will repeat myself. Those who believe Hanratty was guilty have a genuine belief that justice was done. On their side is the verdict of the jury – the outcome of several appeals and the DNA evidence. That must give you all a certain amount of clout when arguing your case.

However – those of us who doubt Hanratty's guilt do so out of an equally genuine belief that justice was not done – either for Hanratty and his family or for Mike and Valerie and their families. We don't have the clout that the jury verdict and the appeals and the DNA evidence has – but that does not make us idiots or criminal-worshippers or morally deficient.