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NickB,
You might have also added the appearance of detectives at the Swiss Cottage shopping arcade shortly before the discovery of bullets at the Vienna Hotel, at a time when James Hanratty did not seem to be anywhere on the police radar as a suspect.
I appreciate you are referring specifically to books regarding the issue of being ‘framed.’ For Paul Foot, whose politics I largely share, the system of justice in the UK was reason enough to ‘frame’ a petty criminal from the underclass. But that’s a very broad brush approach and not of much value on this particular site.
Since published authors have evaded your questions I will give my meagre offerings. Why was Hanratty ‘framed?’ I think he was used as a red herring to drag the police away from the guilty party or parties at a time when the investigation was stalling. There was a danger that a fresh look at the case might bring about a new angle of investigation- perhaps along the lines of a ‘gas meter job’- and Hanratty was an available ‘patsy.’ I cannot believe the plan was ever for Hanratty to actually be convicted and executed and that this caused some trauma to Dixie France and Peter Alphon.
Which kind of answers the question of ‘mechanisms.’ Hanratty did not choose his friends well in so far as most of them were criminals like himself. Even the hotel he booked into was being managed by a crook and police informer. Being pretty low down the feeding chain he was, as Alphon put it, ‘expendable.’ That meant fellow criminals, no doubt in return for money and favours, could help to put Hanratty in the ‘frame’ and take off some of the ‘heat.’ The problem for them was, as I indicated earlier, that once the police began to make a case against Hanratty they found to their alarm that they either had to save themselves from prison or Hanratty from the gallows. Maybe they clung on to the hope that British justice would not hang an innocent man, all would be forgiven and they could all return to their nefarious ways.
You might have also added the appearance of detectives at the Swiss Cottage shopping arcade shortly before the discovery of bullets at the Vienna Hotel, at a time when James Hanratty did not seem to be anywhere on the police radar as a suspect.
I appreciate you are referring specifically to books regarding the issue of being ‘framed.’ For Paul Foot, whose politics I largely share, the system of justice in the UK was reason enough to ‘frame’ a petty criminal from the underclass. But that’s a very broad brush approach and not of much value on this particular site.
Since published authors have evaded your questions I will give my meagre offerings. Why was Hanratty ‘framed?’ I think he was used as a red herring to drag the police away from the guilty party or parties at a time when the investigation was stalling. There was a danger that a fresh look at the case might bring about a new angle of investigation- perhaps along the lines of a ‘gas meter job’- and Hanratty was an available ‘patsy.’ I cannot believe the plan was ever for Hanratty to actually be convicted and executed and that this caused some trauma to Dixie France and Peter Alphon.
Which kind of answers the question of ‘mechanisms.’ Hanratty did not choose his friends well in so far as most of them were criminals like himself. Even the hotel he booked into was being managed by a crook and police informer. Being pretty low down the feeding chain he was, as Alphon put it, ‘expendable.’ That meant fellow criminals, no doubt in return for money and favours, could help to put Hanratty in the ‘frame’ and take off some of the ‘heat.’ The problem for them was, as I indicated earlier, that once the police began to make a case against Hanratty they found to their alarm that they either had to save themselves from prison or Hanratty from the gallows. Maybe they clung on to the hope that British justice would not hang an innocent man, all would be forgiven and they could all return to their nefarious ways.
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