A6 Rebooted

[caz]

Valerie�s picture of the killer looked like Alphon is all I�m saying.(despite her spending all that time with the man) dont you see the problem here? This is the same man that Valerie lit ciggies for, and tried to dissuade from being seen by homeowners in Clophill by parking their car in an observable location. The mind boggles.

I don't know what's wrong with your font, moste, but it's quite distracting.

The problem I see is that if Alphon had been the gunman and Valerie had seen enough of his face to produce a reasonable likeness of him after the event, it makes no sense that she would then not recognise him again when he stood there in plain sight at the first id parade.

Valerie's picture may have looked like Alphon to others, but what good was it if it didn't look like Alphon to her?

I thought the usual objection to her not recognising Alphon, but going on to pick out Hanratty at the second id parade, was that she hadn't seen the gunman's face clearly enough to know him again, and had to rely on voice recognition. Not sure you can have it both ways.

Love,

Caz
X

[moste]

Third man in the picture that sounds more like it. In the vein of D CS Mathews you mean? B.in Law henchman ,very possible.( far from being a toss up of the two)

[moste]

Hi moste,

Would you say justice would have been done if Alphon had hanged instead, despite the total lack of forensic evidence to suggest a connection between him and the rape or the murder weapon?

If Valerie got it wrong when identifying Hanratty as her rapist, despite having spent so long in the car with the man who attacked her, how unlucky was it that Hanratty's blood group, his DNA, even including the snot on his hankie, all conspired to support her identification, while nothing of the sort attached itself to Alphon?

I'd have more doubts if there was a third man in the picture who would have made a stronger suspect than Alphon, but as it's a toss up between the two we have, the case against Hanratty from where I'm sitting is not nearly as weak as that against Alphon.

Love,

Caz
X

Valerie’s picture of the killer looked like Alphon is all I’m saying.(despite her spending all that time with the man) dont you see the problem here? This is the same man that Valerie lit ciggies for, and tried to dissuade from being seen by homeowners in Clophill by parking their car in an observable location. The mind boggles.

[moste]

Somehow managed to delete Caz’s heading there. Sorry.

[moste]

[QUOTE=caz;n774136]

Hi cobalt,

This is an important point. As Valerie was lying on the ground with those bullets in her, hoping she might survive to tell the tale, her motivation for remembering her attacker would have been extremely strong. More than anything, she'd have wanted to see this trigger happy bastard caught and convicted for her lover's senseless murder. And she knew she could make that happen, but only if her memory remained sharp enough to know the man again.

What more powerful motivator could there be, assuming Valerie did indeed come face to face with her attacker again, during one of the id parades?

Love,

Caz
X

It’s a pity that at a point some weeks after the event ,she was heard and documented as saying’ my memory of the assailant is fading ,
Also, how indicative of a total scam is it, for Acott (in the words of Storie in her articles in the magazine some months later,) to voice his satisfaction after her identification of Hanratty , “Well done”, I knew I had settled my score with Hanratty.
Woffinden goes on to explain.: There was nothing wrong with Acott’s behaviour as the rules stood at the time.(They have been thoroughly revised since). Officers were allowed to be present,
albeit as mere observers.Providing that Acott made no comment until it was all finished,and he appeared not to have done so,then no rules of procedure would have been breached.However in the light of Valerie Stories account, it seemed that her belief that she picked out the right man could only have been reinforced by Acotts instantaneous reaction. She said at the trial that she ‘had no doubt whatsoever’ that Hanratty was the gunman.But to what extent was her certainty due to her own identification alone? Or to what extent was it buttressed by Acotts confirmation?
Fiercely contested identification lay at the heart of this conviction. If it was beset by doubts before, in the wake of the ‘Today’ article it looked even more dubious. (Bob Woffinden.page 324)

[cobalt]

If you don’t mind Ed, I’ll take up your earlier point about what Hanratty was doing in Taplow in the first place. He was a burglar by ‘trade’ but has voiced the intention to become a robber. The confusion for me has always been that he did not seem to know which of these he was on the night in question.

The prosecution suggested, I think, that Hanratty was casing houses in the area with a view to burglary. That’s perfectly believable and I think Taplow has always been a village with a fair smattering of wealthy properties, so would provide rich pickings. But burglary is surely about slipping through doors and windows silently so it makes no sense for Hanratty to have been carrying a fully loaded revolver and, bizarrely, extra ammunition in his suit pocket. Why would a burglar go out equipped like James Cagney for a shoot out with the cops? If the gun was for some sort of insurance if spotted, then again surely the point of the weapon was to get people to back off: not to start an execution. And the penalty if apprehended by the law would have been far more severe than for mere burglary. The whole concept makes no sense to me.

Of course, we are often told Hanratty was not a logical person and paid little attention to the consequences of his actions. There’s truth in that I am sure. However was a fairly experienced petty criminal who would have known the various jail tariffs of the time and calculated the risk/reward ratio. I can see no evidence that Hanratty- if he ever was in Taplow- was set upon committing burglary that evening.

[Ed James]

Hi All

I have been absent for a long time so I hope I may be forgiven for focusing on another area that has been troubling me.

In court the clever but slippery Swanwick sidestepped the vexed issue of the motive of Hanratty or anyone carrying out the shocking and bizarre hijacking . The reality is that the English criminal justice system - as remains the case to a degree today - is not a search for the truth but a deadly game of which of two competing parties can convince the lay jury of guilt or innocence. There was no interest in how the gunman came to be in the field for example.

Pre DNA consideration , I am not certain of Hanratty‘s guilt. But I do believe that if he entered the Morris Minor he did so not as an opportunistic move but as part of a hastily pre planned act involving support of others. To me the intruder was equipped for kidnapping not burglary.

Leaving aside potentially unreliable eyewitness identification on both sides , there is plenty of circumstantial evidence pointing to Hanratty‘s guilt. I think the most telling is the presence of cartridge cases found in Room 24 in the Vienna Hotel where Hanratty stayed the night before the murder. What is a credible explanation for the presence of cartridge cases that would suggest Hanratty's innocence? Had Alphon deposited them carelessly when visiting the room as per Nudds' second statement? Had they been planted at a later stage by France or even Nudds ? Far from being a coincidence that Alphon and Hanratty stayed at the same hotel was the Vienna the venue for the hard- to-reach prospective gunmen to be awaiting a hasty call to action?

I would welcome the thoughts of learned forum members on how the cartridges came to be in Room 24.

[caz]

I can understand that the jury being unconvinced by the eye witness evidence from Liverpool. The witnesses mostly had fleeting glimpses of the man, a person who was unknown to them beforehand, and were being asked to remember events from months before. They were citizens going about their everyday business and had no reason to attach any significance to their meeting at the time. This is in stark contrast to the motivation Valerie Storie had for remembering her attacker.

Hi cobalt,

This is an important point. As Valerie was lying on the ground with those bullets in her, hoping she might survive to tell the tale, her motivation for remembering her attacker would have been extremely strong. More than anything, she'd have wanted to see this trigger happy bastard caught and convicted for her lover's senseless murder. And she knew she could make that happen, but only if her memory remained sharp enough to know the man again.

What more powerful motivator could there be, assuming Valerie did indeed come face to face with her attacker again, during one of the id parades?

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Hi moste,

Would you say justice would have been done if Alphon had hanged instead, despite the total lack of forensic evidence to suggest a connection between him and the rape or the murder weapon?

If Valerie got it wrong when identifying Hanratty as her rapist, despite having spent so long in the car with the man who attacked her, how unlucky was it that Hanratty's blood group, his DNA, even including the snot on his hankie, all conspired to support her identification, while nothing of the sort attached itself to Alphon?

I'd have more doubts if there was a third man in the picture who would have made a stronger suspect than Alphon, but as it's a toss up between the two we have, the case against Hanratty from where I'm sitting is not nearly as weak as that against Alphon.

Love,

Caz
X

[moste]

QUOTE: ‘an additional concern, what would have happened if Valerie had got it wrong on the first parade by picking out Alphon? She might just as easily have done so.
Quite so OR, and especially since her identikit drawing could only have been Alphon ,compared to say ,Hanratty.

[cobalt]

I can understand that the jury being unconvinced by the eye witness evidence from Liverpool. The witnesses mostly had fleeting glimpses of the man, a person who was unknown to them beforehand, and were being asked to remember events from months before. They were citizens going about their everyday business and had no reason to attach any significance to their meeting at the time. This is in stark contrast to the motivation Valerie Storie had for remembering her attacker.

I’ve been more persuaded over the years not by eyewitness evidence in favour of Hanratty but by the absence of it to support the prosecution case. Even allowing for good luck on Hanratty’s part, he was not spotted in a number of locations where you might expect him to have been. No witness was uncovered to his shooting practice prior to the attack, in fact no fellow lag testified having ever seen him with a gun. No witness (bar Valerie Storie obviously) was able to place him in the Taplow area on the day or indeed on any other day. (I’m not sure the prosecution ever presented a timeline of when, where and how Hanratty actually arrived in the area.) He was not seen walking away from the car after it was dumped nor at the nearby underground station. And he was not seen, or at least remembered, on the top deck of the bus where the revolver was later retrieved.

The absence of corroboration in Taplow is surely the most significant. Poor old Alphon was identified by at least three witnesses as someone seen in that very area, albeit the quality of that evidence has been questioned. They may well have been mistaken. Yet no one, it seems, has ever made the same claim in respect of seeing Hanratty there. It’s remarkable really in such a high profile case. Alphon, who were are told was not there, is apparently seen. Hanratty, who was there, is not seen by any independent witness.
,

[caz]

That's a very fair post as always, OneRound. I especially like your final sentence, and imagine Alphon might not have liked his final sentence in those circumstances!

One wonders what Hanratty would have made of his life if he had been acquitted - or never even suspected. My head would say it was only right to acquit if there was the slightest doubt, but my heart would bleed for the next courting couple if it happened again because a guilty man went free.

The problem I have with those who firmly believe in Hanratty's innocence is that they never really explain the mechanics of how it was that he ended up paying the ultimate price for some other man's guilt - especially if Alphon was equally innocent, as it seems he was. How many disparate people and groups would have to have been involved in twisting the evidence, whether by accident or design, in favour of Hanratty as the rapist and gunman? If there was a conspiracy against him, who were they protecting and why? They couldn't all have been party to it, from Valerie, Alphon, Dixie France and the police - not to mention his Liverpool cronies, who badly betrayed him if they could have given him an alibi - right through to the DNA scientists, whose findings were detailed in the 2002 appeal.

Love,

Caz
X

[OneRound]

The fact that Mrs D claimed to be certain it was the Monday when the man came in asking for directions, and Hanratty was provably in London at the time, means there are only two possible conclusions: she misidentified the man as Hanratty, or she got the day wrong despite her certainty. Her witness testimony was therefore flawed and inherently unreliable. That being so, there can be no guarantee that if the man did come in on the Tuesday, she'd have been able to remember and recognise him from the photo she was shown of Hanratty.

I'm not sure Hanratty defenders can have it both ways. If the rape victim herself is not trusted to have identified the right man when face to face with Hanratty and hearing him speak, because she had picked out the wrong man at the first id parade, when the suspect was Alphon, who was rightly eliminated as a result, then how can Mrs D be trusted to have correctly identified - from a mere photo - a man she was certain had come into her shop on the Monday, a day too early to have been Hanratty? I wonder what her reaction would have been to hearing Hanratty's distinctive London accent?

Love,

Caz
X

Hi Caz - good as always to hear from you.

A couple of points arising for me.

Am I a ''Hanratty defender''? Yes but only from a legal viewpoint. By that, I mean I don't consider he got a fair deal before or at trial. As for his innocence, that's being driven on a different bus and I'm not on it.

As a Hanratty (legal) defender, can I ''have it both ways''? I'm not sure I should actually need to. Mrs D should have have only needed to come into the mix if a sufficient case against Hanratty had been built and was required to be countered. I'm not convinced it was. I fully appreciate Hanratty significantly harmed his own chances by changing his alibi but nonetheless it was Valerie Storie's identification and testimony that most of all built the case and ended up putting a rope around his neck. As we know, Valerie identified the wrong man on the first parade. Whilst still having great personal sympathy for her, that misidentification would have significantly discredited her identification and testimony to me had I been on the original jury. Only one man shot and killed Michael Gregsten. Only that one and the same man raped Valerie. Harsh though it may seem but for me Valerie had to either pick the right man the first time or at the very least acknowledge she was unsure and pick no one. It should not have been a situation of ''keep coming back to a different parade until you pick out the latest suspect and then we'll charge him''.

As an additional concern, what would have happened if Valerie had got it wrong on the first parade by picking out Alphon? She might just as easily have done so.

Best regards,
OneRound

[caz]

The fact that Mrs D claimed to be certain it was the Monday when the man came in asking for directions, and Hanratty was provably in London at the time, means there are only two possible conclusions: she misidentified the man as Hanratty, or she got the day wrong despite her certainty. Her witness testimony was therefore flawed and inherently unreliable. That being so, there can be no guarantee that if the man did come in on the Tuesday, she'd have been able to remember and recognise him from the photo she was shown of Hanratty.

I'm not sure Hanratty defenders can have it both ways. If the rape victim herself is not trusted to have identified the right man when face to face with Hanratty and hearing him speak, because she had picked out the wrong man at the first id parade, when the suspect was Alphon, who was rightly eliminated as a result, then how can Mrs D be trusted to have correctly identified - from a mere photo - a man she was certain had come into her shop on the Monday, a day too early to have been Hanratty? I wonder what her reaction would have been to hearing Hanratty's distinctive London accent?

Love,

Caz
X

[moste]

I've had the same issue several times, it appears to be an exclusive quirk of vBulletin. I particularly enjoy when it generates a lengthy stream of symbols that aren't even in my keypad. Adds character eh?

Yeah, then even when you edit them out ,they come back with a vengeance . Ok ,so not just me, thanks for that. I feared someone was circumventing my thread involvement, because I was closing in on the true A6 killer LOL.