A6 Rebooted

[moste]

Thanks for the link DJW. I watched about 23 minutes of this youtube video and discovered about 15 innaccuracies aside from all the assumptions the female presenter makes.
This unnecessary carelessness misleads people not familiar with the case. I don't know how many further mistakes she makes in the remaining 55 minutes
as I didn't have the patience or inclination to watch any further.

Ditto.. I sent her a comment ,since she asked for opinions, I stated ‘not guilty’ and my reasons why. Then I asked if she could attempt to have Chief Superintendent Roger Mathews’s full report released into the public domain . She was negative about this and suggested I do it. (LOL) Doesn’t look like she is particularly interested in the Hanratty case, just rolling the blogs off the assembly line !

[Sherlock Houses]

A youtube video uploaded ten days ago by Eryberrie goes into at least the sort of depth the Eccleston documentary should be aiming at https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o9BqwBDUfPI

Thanks for the link DJW. I watched about 23 minutes of this youtube video and discovered about 15 innaccuracies aside from all the assumptions the female presenter makes.
This unnecessary carelessness misleads people not familiar with the case. I don't know how many further mistakes she makes in the remaining 55 minutes
as I didn't have the patience or inclination to watch any further.

[djw]

The Guilty Innocent starts Tuesday 14 May https://www.history.co.uk/shows/the-...pher-eccleston

[djw]

A youtube video uploaded ten days ago by Eryberrie goes into at least the sort of depth the Eccleston documentary should be aiming at https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o9BqwBDUfPI

[Sherlock Houses]

Roger Matthews obituary In the Guardian from . April 2020 .
Wonder if this is our guy?

As far as I'm led to believe Moste, Roger Matthews passed away sometime between 2022 and 2023. I could be mistaken of course.

[Sherlock Houses]

The pages of the Hawser Report missing from the above images (thanks SH) have been obtained and placed (in order) in a PDF you can access at https://archive.org/details/hawser-report

Christopher Eccleston's documentary will be titled 'The Guilty Innocent' according to https://www.televisual.com/news/chri...ocent-for-sky/

I don't know how many copies of the report were printed DJW but it's remarkable that the copy which I bought [about 9 years ago] should happen to be the exact same copy that was uploaded [by whoever] onto the Internet Archive website.

[djw]

The pages of the Hawser Report missing from the above images (thanks SH) have been obtained and placed (in order) in a PDF you can access at https://archive.org/details/hawser-report

Christopher Eccleston's documentary will be titled 'The Guilty Innocent' according to https://www.televisual.com/news/chri...ocent-for-sky/

[moste]

If it is him, he was a very busy man to all accounts ,with his involvement in post career criminology. Writing books and so forth. Since it was a death from corvid and therefor not sudden, I wonder if it crossed his mind to have someone release his report into public domain.

[moste]

Roger Matthews obituary In the Guardian from . April 2020 .
Wonder if this is our guy?

[cobalt]

It certainly would be helpful to read Mrs. Lanz's second statement, from March 1962, in full. DCS Matthews would have been able to do so as part of his investigation and it may be he reached a different conclusion after reading it than did Lewis Hawser, QC. For Hawser's synopsis of this statement seems at odds with itself.

At [376] in his report, Hawser states that Mrs. Lanz's police statement was 'along the same lines' as what she stated to Paul Foot in an interview which was published in July 1971. In that article Mrs. Lanz claimed that Peter Alphon (obviously unknown to her at that time) had been in her premises, The Station Inn, on the evening of the murder in the company of a blond woman. Mrs. Lanz further claimed that she had voluntarily gone to Slough Police Station to inform the authorities of this fact.

However Hawser states at [376 (c)] that Mrs. Lanz said no such thing in her statement: that she never mentioned Alphon being there at that specific time nor did she mention a blond haired woman. Indeed he quotes selectively from her statement to suggest that Mrs. Lanz was uncertain about both Alphon and the times he had visited her premises.

For me, this throws up two issues. Why did Hawser claim that Mrs. Lanz's statement was 'along the same lines' as her interview with Paul Foot when it seriously diverges on the matter of identification and time, never mind any blond companion. This is not my understanding of the phrase 'along the same lines.' Secondly, Mrs. Lanz took the trouble to approach the police with what she must have believed was important information yet according to Hawser she offered nothing concrete whatsoever. There must be more in her statement than what Hawser considered relevant to be divulged.

[moste]

We have no way of knowing if all of Mary Lanz’s statement to the police was released.and since she wasn’t a witness in court…I would go with her 1971 statement myself.

[moste]

Hawser maintained’ In fact the murder weapon had no safety catch’. Interesting that Storie maintained,’ I asked the assailant what the clicking noise was, and he answered it’s the safety catch I’m switching on and off’. So many ambiguities.

[ansonman]

Woffinden P383:

"With the publication of Paul Foot's book, (1971) Patrick Gordon Walker, the former Foreign Secretary, put down an early day motion calling for an enquiry into the case."

P384:

"As irritation grew with the Home Office's all-to-familiar ploy of procrastination, The Sunday Times ran another front-page story, bringing to public attention the fresh evidence of Mary Lanz, landlady of the Old Station Inn, Taplow. According to this, she maintained that Peter Alphon was in the bar on the night of the murder. He was accompanied by "a blond woman in her early thirties"; and that about thirty minutes after Gregsten and Storie departed, "Alphon left with the blond lady by the back exit".
Unfortunately, this couldn't have been true, because it wasn't what Mary Lanz told police straight after the crime, on 24 August 1961, when her memory would have been at its freshest. Although she had said then that "there were quite a number of people in the bar, many of them strangers" she had singled out for mention, "two strange men in the saloon bar, who left shortly before or shortly after [Gregsten and Storie]"

[cobalt]

Did anyone apart from Miller draw the inference that the blond woman was Mrs. Gregsten? It sounds like a strawman argument to me. The idea that Mrs. Gregsten could put on a blond wig and sit in the same bar as her husband yet not be recognised is preposterous.

Mrs. Lanz was an important witness since she was effectively the last witness known to have seen Gregsten and Storie together. Since she was aware of the crime when interviewed on 24th August I can see that an unknown couple in her premises would not have seemed significant at that time, whereas two 'strange men' might have been worth mentioning. Alphon was of course not a person of interest to anyone at that early date.

Mrs. Lanz, once she became aware of Peter Alphon's involvement in the case, was consistent in her belief that she had seen him in the Station Inn previously. It should have been a matter of great importance to try and establish whether Mrs. Lanz had seen Peter Alphon in her premises at any time prior to the crime. Neither the police nor Hawser seem to have exerted themselves to do so.

[ansonman]

In his book "Hanratty's Guilt", Leonard Miller writes the following:

"On i July 1971 Hanratty's parents received a phone call from Mary Lanz, who ran The Old Station Inn at Taplow. Mrs Lanz told them that she felt disturbed by all the publicity surrounding the case and wanted to make a statement about something which had been troubling her for a long time.
This was communicated to Foot (Paul Foot) who went off with a fellow reporter to interview her. On the night that Gregsten and Storie were at the Inn, she said, there was also present "a man who I now know to be Peter Louis Alphon". Alphon had been there on several previous occasions but on the night of 22 August 1961 he was accompanied by "a blond woman who was, I would say, in her early thirties". Half an hour after Michael Gregsten and Valerie Storie left, Alphon also left. He was accompanied by a blond woman.
The inference was clear. The mysterious blond was Janet Gregsten, wearing a wig.
The problem with Mary Lanz's sensational story is that she said no such thing at the time of the crime. Why wait ten years to come up with evidence of a conspiracy? When she made a statement to the police on 24 August 1961 she was keen to help. On that occasion she said she remembered "two strange men" who left her establishment around the same time that Gregsten and Storie did".

I'm no fan of Miller but it's hard to dismiss what he says about the credibility of Mrs Lanz as a witness.