A6 Rebooted

[OneRound]

Hi all,

This is a rather basic question and I feel I should already know the answer. However, I don't and my apologies if I've forgotten or overlooked something.

When Mansfield led Hanratty's posthumous appeal, did he have access to the Matthews report?

Many thanks,
OneRound

[moste]

The following is part of a private exchange that I had with a member of the forum more than eight years ago. I have recently tried to contact this person but to no avail. It is worth a look:

"Had very interesting chat with childhood friend who was in flying squad-now retired.He bellowed at me about Hanratty and the DNA proving his guilt.I mentioned the findings of Roger Matthews the senior detective at Scotland Yard who ,leading a team of 20 detectives said he not only believed Hanratty had nothing whatever to do with it ,through having poured through documents,seeing files never made public etc etc but that he should never even have been charged.So my friend rang him as he was a very dear colleague of his.Matthews who was educated at cambridge University, said he still maintained that Hanratty had nothing to do with the A6 murder.That three people were involved-and he named two of them to him ,but my friend has not told me who they were ."

What I find strange is that nothing of what Matthews reported has ever entered the public domain. Even if he signed the OSA surely he could have passed some information to someone who hadn't and thereby allow the key findings of the report to see daylight. If the poor man is now on his deathbed what's he got to lose by giving the whole report to the likes of the Daily Mail? It's a bloody outrage that this cover up has been allowed to continue for so long.

Hi Ansonman. Of the number of various confusions in the A6 murder saga which stitch together a quilt of squares ,each with its own question, like’ why did they do that’ ‘what was going on here ‘doesn’t this sound really fishy’ and so on, the Mathews itch that can’t be scratched must put the old tin lid on it all.

[ansonman]

The following is part of a private exchange that I had with a member of the forum more than eight years ago. I have recently tried to contact this person but to no avail. It is worth a look:

"Had very interesting chat with childhood friend who was in flying squad-now retired.He bellowed at me about Hanratty and the DNA proving his guilt.I mentioned the findings of Roger Matthews the senior detective at Scotland Yard who ,leading a team of 20 detectives said he not only believed Hanratty had nothing whatever to do with it ,through having poured through documents,seeing files never made public etc etc but that he should never even have been charged.So my friend rang him as he was a very dear colleague of his.Matthews who was educated at cambridge University, said he still maintained that Hanratty had nothing to do with the A6 murder.That three people were involved-and he named two of them to him ,but my friend has not told me who they were ."

What I find strange is that nothing of what Matthews reported has ever entered the public domain. Even if he signed the OSA surely he could have passed some information to someone who hadn't and thereby allow the key findings of the report to see daylight. If the poor man is now on his deathbed what's he got to lose by giving the whole report to the likes of the Daily Mail? It's a bloody outrage that this cover up has been allowed to continue for so long.

[cobalt]

Regarding Valerie Storie’s original accounts I think the police must have smelled a rat from day one. This was not a random crime but more what was later described as a ‘gas meter job.’ The Matthews report, still unpublished today, probably starts to undermine the official verdict if the daily logs can be found.

Any police informers must have been in line for a big police bonus for information received in such a high level crime, a crime which neither the police nor the criminal fraternity relished. And who is served up first by them, allegedly on his odd behaviour in a hotel, but Alphon? More likely he had been fingered as a man who had been talking about about certain ‘work’ that might come his, or others’, way. He was not a random pull. He was a damn good suspect on the basis of information received. The police were not stupid as some here seem to think. They had their reliable snouts. I assume all that is somewhere in the Matthews Report.

After the failed ID parade, Hanratty became the fallback and paid the price. That cost the police little.

[moste]

I Emailed this to my MP for Manchester Withington . I’m writing from west Canada so that may be an issue Dear Jeff Smith,
I have corresponded with you on another matter in the past ,I wondered if you could be of help with a completely different issue. I have been involved with a forum called’ A6 rebooted ‘since 2013. One of our members have been trying to get some information from the Home Office. It involves what we believe to be a serious miscarriage of Justice back in 1961. At this time James Hanratty was hanged for the murder of Michael Gregsten, you may well have heard of the case. We on the forum are at a stumbling block which requires information concerning one Chief Superintendent Roger Mathews who back in the early 1990s carried out at the request of the home office an in depth investigation which spanned over a 12 month plus period and involved also 20 detectives to be available for C.S. Mathews.The results of this investigation prompted C.S. Mathews to announce that James Hanratty had nothing to do with the murder that he was subsequently hanged for , and further the actual crime was committed by possibly the involvement of at least three persons. Can the report of the police officer be released into the public domain under the freedom of information act , and if not why not? Â
Some of our forum members have tried to contact C.Sup. Mathews and have some kind of statement from the man himself, but to no avail. The last heard was that he was in hospital quite seriously IllÂ
Any help at all in this matter would be greatly appreciated. And thank you for considering our endeavours.

ps. The letter I sent didn’t have the weird hieroglyphics.

[moste]

I have it on good authority Ansonman that Roger Matthews was very ill in hospital several weeks ago, I know nothing more than that at present.

Anything new here SH ?

[moste]

copied..In that case Moste, we’d have to explore the reasons why Valerie Stories version of events was doctored and why she was prepared to go along with it…

which ultimately means a conspiracy existed.

[moste]

Quite right, and that someone was at the Dolphin racetrack that evening which by coincidence was on the route the car took , vis -a -vis the A4, Bath road.How much more of a coincidence is it though that this person in question shared the one in a million hotel only 24 hrs. apart with the man ultimately charged with the murder ?

[cobalt]

In that case Moste, we’d have to explore the reasons why Valerie Storie’s version of events was doctored and why she was prepared to go along with it.

I agree the random stranger in the cornfield is hard to make any sense of. If Hanratty was going to be ‘a stick up man’ I can’t see why he couldn’t find richer pickings in the London area instead of coming to Taplow, a place he scarcely knew. Unlike burglary, where you can slip in and out without being noticed, armed robbery needs a sudden threat followed by a fast set of wheels. If Hanratty was casing possible targets in the area then he needed the option of a fast getaway, yet he seems to have been wandering around on foot instead of cruising the area in a car. It’s a bit late to nick one after you’ve done the deed.

If the victims actually picked up by arrangement the person who later tried to murder them both, that would explain why there was no sighting of him in Taplow. The hitch hiker theory and the ‘man from near Slough’ both featured in early news reports but their accuracy is questionable. However we do know of one man who, by his own account, was in Slough that evening.

[moste]

It would explain a great deal if we consider a prearranged meeting ,rendezvous,with someone known to Gregsten. Where some kind of ongoing arrangement was coming to a head, I would add quite possibly involving a financial agreement, which obviously went tragically awry.
All of this would mean that there was a conspiracy involved, and as we all know the honesty and outstanding policing of the Met. In the early 60s, was beyond reproach.

[moste]

I don’t believe the car was approached in a field, I’m not sure they were in that field on that particular night ,I do think closer to the truth was Stories original explanation, we picked a man up in Slough. This is just one of a number of issues I have .Things became more emphatic , and clarified once Acott spent time with the only witness.

[moste]

All of above discussions lead me to the old question, ‘was Stories explanation of events accurately portrayed?’

[cobalt]

Hi Caz,

I think the murderer would have guessed it was a courting couple before he peered through the windows, given the location of the car and it being late evening. He may have glimpsed a flash of female flesh that stirred his baser instincts but if it did, he took a long time to act on them. According to Valerie Storie, the murderer’s first desire was to blab out some kind of self-pitying autobiography. At that point she seemed to view him as an oddball rather a potential rapist.

If sex was a motive then removing Gregsten from the car would have seemed the obvious move and that might have been possible in the cornfield. It’s true the killer did at one point consider putting him in the boot but there were other times Gregsten left the car and was allowed to return without the car being driven off. The sexual attack on Valerie Storie seems to have been more a reaction to the murder rather than an original motive.

We still have the problem of how and why such a dangerous man, be he peeping tom, burglar or car thief, arrived undetected in a field carrying a gun and spare ammunition.

[caz]

Hi OR,

I think we occupy similar territory on the A6 Case: I’m not convinced of James Hanratty’s innocence but I’m less convinced of his guilt.

How did the murderer arrive at the scene? Well first of all we would have to establish he was not a local man. If he was local, he wouldn’t really need to arrive at all. I assume the police checked out the small number of suspects in the area and their whereabouts on the night of the crime. Presumably any criminal associates lodging with ex-cons and even the proverbial black sheep of the family who turned up around the time of the crime were traced and eliminated as well. I say ‘presumably’ because there have been claims on this site that the local enquiries were very low key, that the focus swiftly shifted to London on discovery of the car and gun.

If the murderer did arrive in Taplow on the day then I doubt he could have come by either train or bus. In the aftermath of such a crime every local person who had used public transport that afternoon/evening would have been racking their brains to remember any stranger they saw alighting in the Taplow area. Presumably ticket inspectors, bus drivers and conductors were questioned by police who drew a blank. That leaves the murderer arriving by car but not alone, for no stolen or abandoned car turned up in the area after the crime. Unsurprisingly given the turn of events, no one has ever come forward to volunteer that they drove the murderer to the location.

The prosecution case suggested that Hanratty was in the area to do a spot of honest burglary and he could have been dropped by car for that very purpose with a view to a later rendezvous where he could be picked up with his loot. If the rendezvous went wrong, or was never part of the plan, then Hanratty needed a way back to London which for him meant stealing a car. A car park or street would the obvious option but he seems to have spied a car in a field. This meant he could use the firearm- which he had rather puzzlingly lugged along on his burglary mission- to scare the occupants out of the car and head back home. But he did not do this most obvious thing either then or at any point during the next five hours. A car thief who seems reluctant to nick a car.

No one saw the murderer arrive. No one saw a young man in a suit walking a country lane, crossing a field, ‘casing’ a residential property or lurking around a car. No one reported any attempted break in to their property. To me this suggests the murderer was dropped by car near to the field with the intention of confronting the victims.

All this assumes the ‘where’ and ‘when’ as testified by Valerie Storie. We have no corroboration of there being a third person in the car, by petrol attendants or other drivers, until the horrific events at Deadman’s Hill.

Hi cobalt,

Leaving the gunman's identity to one side for a moment, in your opinion do you think it possible that when he first saw the car parked in the field and walked up to it to investigate, he may have found a very obviously courting couple, engaged in kissing, cuddling and foreplay? Could this have turned a young mind to his own sexual gratification, and the possibility of doing a very ungentlemanly gentleman's excuse-me? It's a very powerful instinct, so it may not have been his original intention, and he may have had a lot of "finking" ahead of him, but once aroused...?

Love,

Caz
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[caz]

Hi cobalt,

That's a striking post which powerfully reinforces my long held view that James Hanratty's guilt was not proved beyond reasonable doubt at trial and so a ''not guilty'' verdict should have been delivered by the jury.

Putting my legal take and finding as above aside, we have to accept that someone killed Michael Gregsten and severely wounded Valerie Storie. For me, a lot points towards that person having been Hanratty albeit not, as I say, definitively enough for a ''guilty'' verdict and certainly not at the time of the trial.

A couple of questions for you if I may. They are out of genuine interest and not to challenge you. Hence, I am only asking for your speculative thoughts - anything more would be wholly unfair.

Your post doubts not just Hanratty but any stranger walking along the quiet, country roads of Taplow on the late afternoon / early evening in question. When, where and how do you think the third person got in the car?

And if not Hanratty, who?

Best regards,
OneRound

Hi OneRound,

I was wondering exactly the same!

Similarly, posters have often used the lack of forensic evidence found in the car to argue that Hanratty was never in it. But would that not equally apply to Alphon, or whoever else they suspect was the gunman?

I do think the original jury was swayed by Hanratty's change of alibi, and his failure then to prove he was in either Liverpool or Rhyl when the murder was committed. That was not for the defence to prove, but it certainly helped the prosecution with their own case. Had Hanratty stuck firm with Liverpool, that essential element of reasonable doubt might well have crept in and been enough. But of course an acquittal on those grounds would not have meant he was innocent. Because of Rhyl we know he lied about his whereabouts, and his criminal record tells me he would have gone on to commit more offences had he been acquitted. So who can say, hand on heart, that none would have been of a serious enough nature to cause any great suffering to innocent home and vehicle owners?

Love,

Caz
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