A6 Rebooted

[Sherlock Houses]

William N Ewer was not, I believe, related in any way to his namesake, our own very enigmatic William Alfred Ewer, ex-lover of Janet Gregsten for several years after the A6 murder. William N Ewer, reporter for the Daily Herald until it folded in 1964, was the author of that paper's front page main article of August 25th 1961, "KENNEDY GIVES MR. K A 'SOLEMN WARNING' ". A few inches to the left of that main article was a report about the very recently committed A6 murder entitled "Murder squad is told 'Find these 3 men' " Spooky or what ???? Of all the names in the whole wide world.....What astronomical odds on that ? Talk about 'signs' and pointing you in the right direction as to who the prime mover behind the murder could have been.

At Jean Justice's funeral in 1990 Paul Foot took William Ewer over to meet two people, complete strangers to Ewer. Foot introduced the couple to Ewer, whose startled face was a picture, and Ewer made a very swift departure without uttering a word. Those two people ??? None other than Michael and Maureen Hanratty.

[Derrick]

William N Ewer was not, I believe, related in any way to his namesake, our own very enigmatic William Alfred Ewer, ex-lover of Janet Gregsten for several years after the A6 murder. William N Ewer, reporter for the Daily Herald until it folded in 1964, was the author of that paper's front page main article of August 25th 1961, "KENNEDY GIVES MR. K A 'SOLEMN WARNING' ". A few inches to the left of that main article was a report about the very recently committed A6 murder entitled "Murder squad is told 'Find these 3 men' " Spooky or what ???? Of all the names in the whole wide world.....What astronomical odds on that ? Talk about 'signs' and pointing you in the right direction as to who the prime mover behind the murder could have been.

At Jean Justice's funeral in 1990 Paul Foot took William Ewer over to meet two people, complete strangers to Ewer. Foot introduced the couple to Ewer, whose startled face was a picture, and Ewer made a very swift departure without uttering a word. Those two people ??? None other than Michael and Maureen Hanratty.

Houses dear chap,
Can you regale these boards once more about what Michael and Maureen Hanratty said about James Hanratty's sun induced freckles?
Del Boy

[cobalt]

SH,
Terrific research there. I would be more than interested to know who the ‘three men’ were that the police wanted to find. Maybe Matthews knew who they were, which is why he mentioned that in his report.

Moste,
As I said earlier I love a political thriller as much as the next man, including Shakespeare who wrote one of the classics of its kind when he penned ‘Hamlet.’ However I can see no connection between Valerie Storie, Michael Gregsten and the politics of the day. They were an entire social sphere away from the Cliveden Estate where Profumo and Ivanov encountered Mandy Rice Davis and Christine Keeler. Had they stumbled, in their walks together, upon Dr. Stephen Ward’'s hired cottage within the Cliveden grounds I suspect they would have been asked to go to the tradesmen’'s entrance. The idea of Gregsten driving a Morris Minor through the gates of the Cliveden Estate is frankly risible, as is the idea of Valerie Storie cavorting naked in a swimming pool along with two aspiring models.

The early 1960s were admittedly a hotpoint in what is lazily referred to as The Cold War. The shenanigans at Cliveden were July 1961, the Portland Spy Ring was convicted a few months before, George Blake was sentenced to 40 years for spying in May 1961, and Vassall was on borrowed time as naval attaché in Moscow. So a very febrile time to be sure. However none of this can in any way be related to the rather humdrum affair of Valerie Storie and Michael Gregsten, whose political affiliations have never been deemed worthy of comment. I assume they had none of any exceptional note.

Regarding Alphon'’s father, even if he were a senior administrator I doubt he would have been privy to information about ‘diplomats’ such as Ivanov. Ivanov was a naval attaché, which is pretty much an admission of being a spy in any embassy, and he would have been watched over by MI5 rather than Special Branch. What Alphon senior may well have known, and could have leaked to the press, was the shabby practice of offering residency and sometimes citizenship to Nazi war criminals and their Soviet counterparts when such persons were considered helpful to the national interest. It’s an ugly and uncomfortable story that very few UK citizens wish to acknowledge, particularly those who in the 1960s still had first hand experience of fighting Nazism. So Alphon senior, Records Clerk for the Aliens Department, may have had a few cards up his sleeve.

That’s before we consider the enigmatic Ewer whose war record is so far unknown.

[Yossel]

Cobalt - To take up your points above, approximately in the order you made them.....

Both Lestor and Jenkins seemed quite interested in the A6 case for a while but Jenkins' interest waned when he became Home Secretary. Not sure being MP for Slough would have made much difference to Lestor. Again, she seemed to cool off quite suddenly. It's as if Civil Service advice had caused them to ease back. What such advice may have been we can only guess at.

We're all aware of cover-ups that have been disproportionate to the importance of what was being covered, Watergate is a good example. I'm still puzzled by the lengths gone to in this case. To protect whom, a bunch of nonentities?

I retain an open mind on Ward and Kelly. Marconi I have a little personal knowledge of, and am assured that where there was smoke there was definitely fire. None of these cases have much in common with the A6 murder. None of the A6 characters were remotely comparable in stature to W & K, and unless I am very much mistaken, Gregston's scientific status didn't begin to approach that of the Marconi mob, nor was his workplace one of special significance to Governments here and abroad. It is true there was a lot of lolly being made from the road-building biz at the time but it's hard to envisage Gregston having much influence on contracts and the like, and as others have pointed out, there are better ways of dealing with an awkward scientist than organising a clumsy stick-up.

I agree with you about the personal relations behind the crime. The most convincing explanation I have yet to hear deals with precisely that, amongst other things. I refer to Alphon's Paris confession. Yes, I am aware of its flaws, but these can explained away in much the way Foot does in his book. The narrative hangs together though, and it answers all the major puzzles that so many have pondered over the years. There's a motive, a modus operandi, a detailed account of movements and dialogue, times and places match up, and there's a real sense of things somehow not going according to plan, and fate playing a hand. It would be flawless except that it could have been pieced together by anybody equipped with the publicly available evidence and a bit of imagination. Alphon never mentions anything that only the murderer could have known. It is for that reason, if no other, that you have to keep an open mind as to whether he did it. My own assessment is that he was always a stronger suspect than Hanratty, and remains so to this day, but that's as far as I would go.

Like you, I have heard it said that Alphon's father was a senior Scotland Yard official but I have also heard that he was a humble clerk. Judging from his residence, I should say he didn't get paid much, although I am intrigued that he sent his son to a private school (Mercers.)

In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I think it has to be assumed that there is no connection between the two Ewers.

OK, back to re-reading Foot now. Nearly finished. I leave you with another small query though. According to Alphon's highly plausible Paris confession, he left the Morris Minor in Redbridge and then walked to Ilford where he took the overground to Stratford and there he switched onto the tube going west. That would have been a Central Line tube. Why didn't he get on the tube at Redbridge? Ilford overground is a tidy walk from Redbridge and he must have seen Redbridge tube station, either from the car or as he walked towards Eastern Avenue. Doesn't make a lot of sense, but then nor do a lot of things that Alphon did and said.

He was definitely very weird.

All the best

Yossel

[Sherlock Houses]

Houses dear chap,
Can you regale these boards once more about what Michael and Maureen Hanratty said about James Hanratty's sun induced freckles?
Del Boy

Only to emphasise Derrick that both Mick and Maureen considered it a very important facial feature of Jimmy's. Maureen was particularly struck by just how very freckled his face was. She was 16 or 17 years old during the summer of 1961 and her parent's house was on Jimmy and his father's window cleaning round. He washed their windows regularly during the 3 months [mid April to mid July] he assisted his dad.
Those frecklish posts are from 2015 and 2016 and they [and their responses] are easily accessible by typing 'freckles' in the search box located in the top right corner of this page.

[Alfie]

Some questions of you establishmentarians border on the ridiculous and are thus unanswerable. There will always be tons more questions than answers in any sphere of life. Why for instance did Valerie Storie pick out a dark-eyed, heavily built man with short cropped hair [the complete opposite to Hanratty] in the first ID parade when according to her the gunman had icy-blue, saucer like eyes and greased back hair ???

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDTvLldOgZs

Dr Rennie recalled the man's eyes as "bluish". But whatever was the case, I think it's a fair assumption that Valerie felt compelled to pick out somebody because she'd been assured by Acott that Gregsten's killer was on that parade. And she'd had only a momentary glimpse of the gunman, remember.

On the second parade she asked the men to speak and, as she said at trial: "I was absolutely certain as soon as I heard him speak."

[Alfie]

From 2016

I find the following, something of an anomaly, (which I have added to my long list) M G was told to pass up the duffel bag from the front foot well. As we know, according to V S, he turned about 90 deg. leaning to his left at the same time, immediately the gun was fired. Now I have been reading about a thing called 'caderveric spasm'. Its a phenomena, known to the medical world as rare, and only occurs in people dying suddenly in a shock/trauma situation. The result, is a rigor mortise like muscle tensing, and almost always affects the arms, wrists, and hands of the victim. This phenomena according to Valerie's testimony, certainly had M G in its grip, since she state's according to Lord Russell, ' Mikes hands were gripping the steering wheel. When I touched them they were stone cold'. ... I would suggest the most likely effect of Gregstens double shot to the head would be for him to slump across Valerie's side of the car winding up on her lap. As it was, M G is supposedly sat upright gripping the wheel (I imagine, head forward against the steering). This position I would attribute to, a gun being thrust through the passenger window, and MG dispatched tout suite, This scenario would satisfy why there was zero forensic evidence of a third person in the car, THERE WASN'T ONE.

You seem to be assuming that Gregsten died instantly, but it would appear that he didn't. As Dr Simpson, who conducted the postmortem, testified: "Gregsten died by asphyxia due to the inhalation of a 'considerable quantity' of blood due to the shattering of bone and tissue in the throat."

Death by drowning could take some little time - a minute or two perhaps? Long enough for the posture of Gregsten's body to alter, at any rate.

[Sherlock Houses]

Dr Rennie recalled the man's eyes as "bluish". But whatever was the case, I think it's a fair assumption that Valerie felt compelled to pick out somebody because she'd been assured by Acott that Gregsten's killer was on that parade. "

NO. Absolutely not the case. By her own admission to Michael Sherrard at the Bedford Trial she knew it was her duty not to pick anybody out unless she was sure in her mind that he was the gunman.
When asked by John Morgan in the 1966 Panorama documentary why she picked out the wrong man she just shrugged it off and said... "I suppose I picked out someone who I thought resembled Hanratty. Errm....Hanratty wasn't on that parade, I couldn't identify him, ermm....I just tried to pick out somebody I suppose who I thought looked like him. I made a mistake, the man had nothing to do with the case, it was just one of those things." .

[Alfie]

NO. Absolutely not the case. By her own admission to Michael Sherrard at the Bedford Trial she knew it was her duty not to pick anybody out unless she was sure in her mind that he was the gunman.
When asked by John Morgan in the 1966 Panorama documentary why she picked out the wrong man she just shrugged it off and said... "I suppose I picked out someone who I thought resembled Hanratty. Errm....Hanratty wasn't on that parade, I couldn't identify him, ermm....I just tried to pick out somebody I suppose who I thought looked like him. I made a mistake, the man had nothing to do with the case, it was just one of those things." .

Which is exactly what I'd expect her to say if she'd been assured beforehand that Gregsten's murderer would be standing on that lineup.

ps - there's no need to shout, I'm not deaf.

[moste]

[QUOTE=Sherlock Houses;n707720]

NO. Absolutely not the case. By her own admission to Michael Sherrard at the Bedford Trial she knew it was her duty not to pick anybody out unless she was sure in her mind that he was the gunman.
When asked by John Morgan in the 1966 Panorama documentary why she picked out the wrong man she just shrugged it off and said... "I suppose I picked out someone who I thought resembled Hanratty. Errm....Hanratty wasn't on that parade, I couldn't identify him, ermm....I just tried to pick out somebody I suppose who I thought looked like him. I made a mistake, the man had nothing to do with the case, it was just one of those things." .

Absolutely S H.

And when you reread that circumstance in the cold light of day . It's unbelievable, scary even!
Hi Alfie.
Doctor Rennie's recollections of the colour of the man's eyes are redundant, by virtue of the fact that Storie had carefully interpreted the persons identification , with the use of 'photofit 'that she had collaborated with an expert visual profiler,in order to come up with as close a likeness as humanly possible, as a means to give the police and public at large the advantage of her, Valerie ,actually being there ,'I was there , I know ' she tells us, ( or words to that effect) unfortunately ,
her mental picture of the assailant looked very like Peter Alphon and nothing like Hanratty at all!
It's no use trying to sweep these facts under the carpet, Storie had not a clue what the killer looked like . Hanratty was hanged because she recognised his Cockney voice.

[Alfie]

Storie had not a clue what the killer looked like . Hanratty was hanged because she recognised his Cockney voice.

She saw he had large staring eyes, which was one of Hanratty's most distinctive features. You may dispute whether she said they were blue or brown (although imo there is strong evidence that she said they were blue from the get-go) but large staring eyes is one of the things Kerr recalled her telling him not long after he found her lying paralyzed beside the A6.

Nor was it just his Cockney accent that sunk Hanratty. There was also the distinctive soft tone to his voice that others besides Valerie commented on (Louise Anderson described his voice as effeminate).

It's no use trying to sweep these facts under the carpet.

[moste]

Of

You seem to be assuming that Gregsten died instantly, but it would appear that he didn't. As Dr Simpson, who conducted the postmortem, testified: "Gregsten died by asphyxia due to the inhalation of a 'considerable quantity' of blood due to the shattering of bone and tissue in the throat."

Death by drowning could take some little time - a minute or two perhaps? Long enough for the posture of Gregsten's body to alter, at any rate.

I'm not assuming anything, Im simply trying to make some sense of the various testimonies of Storie, hands gripping the wheel tight and so forth. Your quite right to question Gregsten dying instantly, since the tragectory of the two bullets do not pass through the brain, however I would think if one or both of the bullets tore through a main vein or artery connecting blood flow to the brain , unconsciousness would come in a very few seconds. There was dialogue between Storie and the killer as to the seriousness of Gregstens wounds , she wanted to get him to a doctor, I suppose this could be an attempt to move the dreadful situation forward, but as we know the man was having none of it ,because he was more concerned in learning the rudiments of driving a Morris car.
If it wasn't so sad it would be laughable.
Incidentally , Keith Simpson also wrote that the weapon used was a .32 calibre, and that the first person Storie identified in a line up was a Spanish sailor. In his book ' 40 years of murder'.

[Yossel]

Hi Sherlock

I saw that interview with VS for the first time quite recently and it was one reason why I grew rather sceptical about her as a witness. She shrugged off the error at the first identification parade as '...just one of those things' yet insisted she was completely certain when she identified Hanratty at the second parade. If she got it so badly wrong first time, you would think she would have entertained at least a modicum of doubt second time round.

From the same interview, I was struck by the way she referred to the opinions of the police, the judge, the lawyers and the jury. 'All those people couldn't be wrong' , she said, or words to that effect. It smacked of a shirking of responsibility, and a reluctance to accept that her identification of the killer was by far and away the most important element in the prosecution case. There is no hiding the fact that without a clear, unequivocal identification from her, Hanratty's chances of going free would have been greatly increased, and yet there she was drawing reassurance from the judgement of others who were far less well placed than her to give an opinion.

Her stoicism in the face of a personal catastrophe has been widely commented upon. I wouldn't dispute her courage but I'd be dishonest if I didn't add that I also found her rather dull, and lacking in empathy and imagination. I don't think she would have lied to the court, but I can imagine her being susceptible to suggestions from those she trusted, and her almost naive trust in the police and the legal system to deliver the right result makes me personally somewhat cautious about the quality of her judgement, and the accuracy and integrity of her testimony.

Cheers

Yossel

[Yossel]

OK, so I finished the Foot book and find that my conclusion on the main issue is not a lot different to what it was when I first read it more than forty years ago.

It is very unlikely Hanratty was the murderer, but you cannot quite prove it beyond all reasonable doubt. Of course he shouldn't have hung, not even on the evidence presented to the jury, but feelings were running high, the trial took place locally to the crime, and all the publicity didn't help. Events in the years after his death rather confirmed that a miscarriage of justice took place, and it was therefore a bit of a shock when the DNA results indicated otherwise. For some they will be definitive but personally I'm inclined to discount them because of the elapse of time, and the possibility of contamination and/or fabrication. I wouldn't buy the DNA proof unless there were strong supporting evidence, and here the overwhelming balance of evidence contradicts it, and so I set the DNA results aside.

Alphon remains to this day the more likely suspect, but we will never know for sure if he did it, because he dropped out of the picture once VS had failed to identify him, and as a result even after his confession he was not subjected to the kind of scrutiny which might have settled the matter one way or the other. We just have to go on what we have, and that indicates no more than that he may well have done it, but we can't be sure. I doubt that picture will change even after the release years hence from now of the case papers and other embargoed documents but if it does, I won't be around to find out.

The re-reading left me less interested than before in the question of who did it, and rather more in the question of why the cover-up?

My conclusion here is that it was a poorly conducted inquiry. Acott was an experienced detective, but was he a good one? Believe it or not, the Police had recruitment problems in those days, and the Met more so than most forces. I don't think you needed to be that good to rise to the top, and on the evidence of Acott's performance you'd have to say it showed in this case. He had tremendous resources available to him yet he made so little progress in the early days of the inquiry that he resorted to an ill-advised public appeal, which generated huge amounts of police overtime but precious little real evidence, and muddied the waters for later investigations once his main suspect, Alphon, had slipped away from him. He was trusting to providence when he asked Storie to pick out the suspect at the first identity parade, because if she didn't get it right, his case against Alphon was bound to collapse. He must have known that identifications are notoriously difficult, even in the most favorable of circumstances. Here they were anything but favorable, so it was hardly a surprise that she failed to identify the assailant. The trouble then was that the rest of his case against against Alphon was so weak that it would not only have been very difficult to proceed against him but it is hard to envisage he would ever have been able to gather enough admissible evidence to convict the man. By going public on Alphon, Acott had virtually guaranteed that his suspect could not be successfully prosecuted if he survived Storie's attempt to pick him out of the line-up. I am sure this is what Acott was told by the Director of Public Prosecutions in the lengthy meeting that followed the first identification attempt. Not only was a successful prosecution of Alphon unlikely now, it was unlikely ever to be possible because of the way Acott had gone about things.

This left the Inspector in a pickle. He must have been under a lot of pressure to produce results. Fortunately, he had a second suspect, and even more fortunately, others seemed keen to push that suspect forward. I doubt that France or anybody else particularly wanted to see Hanratty hang, and if the luckless burglar and car-thief had simply told the truth from the outset, or even stuck to the half-decent first alibi, he would probably have gone free. The real culprits were probably as surprised as anybody that JH managed to implicate himself through a mixture of naivete and arrogance. They would have been perfectly happy, I am sure, to see attention drawn away from the right person by Acott's pursuit of the wrong one, and they could hardly be expected to come forward and put the Inspector right. Nevertheless they may well have shared Hanratty's trust that in the end the truth would out and the system would ensure that an innocent man would not hang.

By the standards of the time I should say that Acott was not particularly dishonest. He may have been responsible for substituting John Kerr's notes, and withholding from the defence team matters that would have been of great use to them, but I doubt what he did greatly exceeded what most officers of the day would have done to maximise the chances of a conviction. The problem was that he was having to construct a case against a man who was probably innocent rather than one who was probably guilty, and that presented certain difficulties which he attempted to surmount by means which today we would consider unacceptable. This I think explains the subsequent cover-ups.

Various Home Secretaries rejected the perfectly reasonable requests for review and remission. Why? I should think it was obvious to the Home Office that any independent and public review could not fail to be highly critical of the police investigation - and for what? To exonerate a petty criminal who if he had not hanged would almost certainly have spent the rest of his life going in and out of prison. It wasn't as if the real culprit was still going around shooting courting couples in lay-bys and thereby making it obvious the wrong man had swung for the murder of Gregston. Better to let sleeping dogs lie than risk expensive and damaging legal actions against the police. Nobody in authority held a grudge against the Hanrattys, I'm sure; they were just collateral damage.

Some on here have mentioned the possibility of a political angle to this case. I see none in the the conventional sense. I do however wonder whether it actually helped Mick and Maureen Hanratty's attempts to exonerate their son that the most prominent member of the A6 Committee was a high profile Socialist. At times it seems that the Establshment was on the verge of reopening the matter or offering some form of pardon. Had they done so, it would have been a great victory for a prominent left-wing campaigner and his supporters. It's easy to see why that would have been thought by many to have been best avoided, if possible.

A different aspect of the case which I haven't seen mentioned much here (although I've not read all the posts), or in Foot's book, relates to class. It is most striking in the early press coverage. The image is very much of a decent, young, middle-class couple out together, innocently sitting by a cornfield, doing nobody any harm, when a monster attacks them cruelly, arbitrarily, and senselessly. There is little mention of the fact that the lady is an unmarried woman having an affair with a married man with two children, and despite the certain knowledge of his wife and numerous colleagues at their place of work. Nor is there any suggestion that the appearance of the ruthless assailant might have something to do with this extra-marital liaison. As far as I can make out, the true relationship between Gregston and Storie, and between Janet Gregston and the lovers, never came out in court. What did come out was that Hanratty was an oik - an ignorant, illiterate, petty-criminal from the East End, who pronounced 'think' as if it were spelt 'fink'. In most respects, Hanratty failed to fulfil the image of a crazed, rapacious, heartless killer but in one sense at least he did fit the bill. He was lower class. He was the sort that nice people didn't mix with, and represented a threat to them and their civilised ways.

By contrast, the other suspect in this case, Peter Louis Alphon, did fit the bill in many respects. You might not go so far as to say he was crazed, rapacious and heartless, but he was by common consent distinctly weird. He never appeared before the Court however. Had he done so, he would have distinguished himself in two ways from Hanratty and the stereotypical killer that the press had helped promote in the popular imagination. He'd been to a Public School, and he spoke nicely - well, relatively anyway.

The A6 case is as much about social class as justice.

All the best

Yossel

[Alfie]

Yossel, there were two relatively early official reviews made of the case - by D.C.S. Nimmo (commissioned by Labour's Home Secretary Roy Jenkins in 1967) and by the liberal lawyer Lewis Hawser Q.C. (set up by Jenkins in 1974). I'd recommend acquainting yourself with their findings before conjecturing about conspiracies and cover-ups.