A6 Rebooted

[caz]

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.

Might Hanratty not have wanted to avoid any areas where he had 'form' for housebreaking and car theft, since this time he had a gun to experiment with, and didn't want to be connected with any crime he committed due to his record and the location?

When he saw the car, he would have had an opportunity to use his weapon to deprive the couple inside of their belongings, before forcing them out of the vehicle and using it to drive himself wherever he wanted to go. But when he finally did the latter, he had to ask Valerie how to work the gears, which might suggest he guessed this would be a problem for him from the start.

What has never really been explained is how Hanratty's mucus-stained hankie ended up with the gun, if Peter Alphon had been the killer. Apart from Alphon's word, has there ever been any actual evidence connecting the two men before they both happened to stay at the Vienna Hotel? Presumably there would need to have been a third party with connections to both men, which Hanratty was unaware of, because if he was innocent and had known Alphon even slightly, he would surely have joined the dots and realised he was being set up and by whom. How would he not have shouted it from the rooftops if he knew someone else had hidden the murder weapon on the bus and planted the cartridges in his hotel room?

Love,

Caz
X

[djw]

Among the matters not in the public domain since the Matthews report (or the Stickler book) include;

• the forensics in the car, who the fingerprints matched etc.
• There may be more of Valeries statement about the conversation of the gunman
• The final letters of charles france

[cobalt]

A few other possibilities might include:

A statement made by Mrs. Lanz, landlady of the Taplow Inn, to the effect that she recognised Peter Alphon as being a regular customer prior to the murder. She later claimed to have told the police this - once even claiming Alphon was there on the evening preceding the crime- but I don’t think any statement of this sort has surfaced.

A police record of why detectives visited a Swiss Cottage shopping arcade to make enquiries at a photographer’s, a dry cleaner’s and a florist’s.

Any possible statement made by Mr. William Ewer.

Any police enquiries into the sums of money paid into Peter Alphon’s bank account.

[moste]

Yes there are quite a number of them One of my favorites is, as woffinden reveals ' The census point devised ironically by the road research scientists at Deadmans hill, was manned by John Kerr. That person as we know started shift at 6 am. John Smith and Michael Black should have been numerating traffic at this location from midnight on. "For some extraordinary reason,which no one could now recall, the census taking point was moved to a location 1/2 a mile south of Silsoe, back down the A6. A car was spotted by Smith at this location though at about 4am. accelerating away from the vicinity, and told Black' he thought it was a Morris Minor" .

The business of the car in the field and Hanratty being in the area checking out pastures new. Having done the necessary reconnoitering and now, since the time had got away from him ,and being now armed with his new gun ,he spots a lonely car in a field , and rather than bullying the people out of the vehicle, so that he now has wheels back to London, he goes on this fantastic 5 hour bla bla bla .I mean lets dream up some much more likely conspiracy theory.

[ansonman]

"If the Matthews Report were published it might clarify the reasons for his confidence, even if it was misplaced."

Hear hear,

[moste]

I've always been interested in the information about the two turn offs after Silsoe a mile or two before Deadmans Hill, as provided by Valerie.Checking back on the ongoing upgrading of the A6 trunk road , it appears that the highway didn't bypass Silsoe until 1981 so the high street would have been the A6, After the village there are in fact two turn offs, Newbury lane with just a few houses ,and about a hundred yards past a lane which seems to be a farm access.there doesn't appear to be any left turns until Clophill. I got to considering Valerie's statement regarding the carjackers silly idea about needing to kip,and the preposterous notion that he will need to tie them both up. I think it more than likely that the intruder was in fact searching for the location which he finally found on Deadmans hill . remember Valerie said Mike was told to turn in where the RAC box was and he drove past, at which the assailant became irate and demanded that Mike should turn around.Regardless , the series of events prior to arriving at the final destination leads me to believe that something previously planned was in the offing. Valerie made very few remarks with regard to what she read into what was going on,(apart from 'I don't think Jim was his real name.)If I'm right about some kind of plan being involved, I think its just one more incident that exonerates Hanratty.

[cobalt]

We still have a problem though Moste. We can discredit the random meeting in the cornfield with an armed robber as stretching credulity. That much is easy enough to do. But if there was a planned rendez-vous at Deadman’s Hill, then we have to ask why it took about 5 hours to get there. And for what purpose? What made this place so significant? It makes little more sense at face value than the deranged gunmen who appeared in a cornfield, unseen by anyone until that moment.

We have to abide by our own logic. We have long pointed out that an armed robber could have simply forced the couple out of the car at gunpoint in Taplow and driven home, presumably to London. But if he was carrying a weapon and was prepared to use it, why not just carry out the terrible crime in the Taplow cornfield ?

Regarding the ‘kip’ it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and it is a part of the Valerie Storie narrative that surely had police detectives at the time scratching their heads. They must have asked her, as she presumably had asked the murderer, what on earth his intentions were after he awoke with daylight starting to break through. Gregsten and Ms Storie must have pointed out the sheer folly of this to their kidnapper although he could hardly have been blind to that himself.

[caz]

The business of the car in the field and Hanratty being in the area checking out pastures new. Having done the necessary reconnoitering and now, since the time had got away from him ,and being now armed with his new gun ,he spots a lonely car in a field , and rather than bullying the people out of the vehicle, so that he now has wheels back to London, he goes on this fantastic 5 hour bla bla bla .I mean lets dream up some much more likely conspiracy theory.

How would 'this fantastic 5 hour bla bla bla' make more sense with Alphon or A.N.Other?

Yes, the stick-up man had wheels if he had wanted to drive himself away, after scaring the couple and leaving them in the field with no transport and no money. But if you recall, he had to ask Valerie how the gears worked, after having watched Michael driving all that way, so it may not have been as simple as you suggest.

I also don't think the man was very bright. Either that, or he didn't have a specific plan in mind when he spotted the car in the field, and just saw some vague opportunity opening up ahead, due to his criminal instincts and car stealing experience, plus the gun he could use to his advantage - whatever that advantage might turn out to be. It was short-lived in the end, because his lack of experience with live victims and a lethal weapon led to his failure to finish off the only witness with it.

Love,

Caz
X

[moste]

Cobalt. It only makes no sense if we accept the time frames offered up by Valerie.For instance,let us imagine for a moment that Gregsten had arranged a meeting with someone.,The whole thing may have been over by midnight, Gregsten may have been up to something sinister and was lured away to his death.Why Deadmans Hill,? because the man lived in Bedford Why 5 hrs. ? Because it had to look like a deranged crack pot was taking them on an excursion all over Gods creation. (If they had sped up to Bedford in two hours it would look too purposeful )Why the lies? Because she was protecting a secret which would go with her to her grave. What secret? Well Acott knew it well enough, and so did the Home Office Therefore ,we will all be enlightened one day but will have to wait 75 years or some such time to find out,by which time no one on this planet will give a hoot in hell! Anyhow, this is all a 'for instance'
Caz. Even a passing consideration of how Hanratty moved around tells us that he is a very poor candidate for the accepted story of a 5 hr. jaunt. Ants in his pants,has to be on the go, is my impression. I'm not convinced by the 'Alphon did it crew' , but he would be much more the type than Jim.

[cobalt]

OK Moste, but we are creating more problems than we solve. What was the great secret that Valerie Storie nearly died for and took to her grave when in a wheelchair? At no time in her reasonably long life did the political fog clear so that she could voice the greater truth? I think you are looking for a high level political motivation that does not seem to exist.

Maybe there was protection for Alphon and Ewer due to their assumed right wing political affiliations. Ewer’s war record is a matter of assumption since nothing has ever surfaced. Maybe Alphon’s father, modestly described as a clerk at Scotland Yard, was stamping visas for ex-Nazis fleeing the Berlin Wall, a guilty secret that no one in the UK government wanted to admit. Bu that, even if valid, could only explain the cover up: it does not explain the crime itself.

Caz is still pushing her cornfield narrative but it is barely worth reply. A villain from Shakespearean tragedy, armed and extremely dangerous, makes an appearance in a cornfield to steal a car. It’s like a character from Macbeth has wandered on to the set of a Terry and June sitcom. It’s not far off satire. Be careful we don’t go down the same route.

[djw]

The biggest change to the fabric of British society from the 1960s to today is arguably car dependency - perhaps it was in the interests of Big Oil/British motoring to usher in this era. Their man Ernest Marples operated at the very top, cabinet-level, and a couple of dedicated independent-minded civil servants in the Road Research Laboratory in Slough were not going to get in their way. An unfavourable report could have undermined plans for vast amounts of motorway construction, and ‘upgrading’ of roads (including the A6). The affairs of Gregsten were an open secret at work, and a perfect opportunity to threaten, blackmail or discredit him. A petty crook would be hired from the seedy London underworld to scare the couple. Any fallout could be portrayed as a romantic entanglement gone wrong. At midnight, the hired man would report back at the Regent Oil garage near London airport. Things didn’t go to plan, the gunman, in his stupidity, arrived with the couple still hostage, only shooting them much later, at a quiet low-traffic layby of the A6. It was a traffic surveyor who rescued Valerie (and later lied about with false manufactured evidence in court) and a false witness provided from another petrol station. The picture was subsequently painted (in a press reliant on motoring advertising) of a car-less hitchhiker or car-thief boy-racer who could not use manual gearboxes, travelling on foot/train, to kidnap and murder responsible motorists and road scientists planning a motor rally followed by a long joyride. The Home Office subsequent enquiries were leant on by the compromised Ministry of Transport protecting the cover up, road building proceeded unimpeded and sustainable transport was kept out of Britain for decades since.
This isn’t a serious theory of mine for the A6 murder, but I hope as a conspiracy theory it is creative and consistent.

[caz]

Caz is still pushing her cornfield narrative but it is barely worth reply. A villain from Shakespearean tragedy, armed and extremely dangerous, makes an appearance in a cornfield to steal a car. It’s like a character from Macbeth has wandered on to the set of a Terry and June sitcom. It’s not far off satire. Be careful we don’t go down the same route.

I thought it was more Valerie's narrative than mine, cobalt.

But what did she know? She was only there. We were not.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

The biggest change to the fabric of British society from the 1960s to today is arguably car dependency - perhaps it was in the interests of Big Oil/British motoring to usher in this era. Their man Ernest Marples operated at the very top, cabinet-level, and a couple of dedicated independent-minded civil servants in the Road Research Laboratory in Slough were not going to get in their way. An unfavourable report could have undermined plans for vast amounts of motorway construction, and ‘upgrading’ of roads (including the A6). The affairs of Gregsten were an open secret at work, and a perfect opportunity to threaten, blackmail or discredit him. A petty crook would be hired from the seedy London underworld to scare the couple. Any fallout could be portrayed as a romantic entanglement gone wrong. At midnight, the hired man would report back at the Regent Oil garage near London airport. Things didn’t go to plan, the gunman, in his stupidity, arrived with the couple still hostage, only shooting them much later, at a quiet low-traffic layby of the A6. It was a traffic surveyor who rescued Valerie (and later lied about with false manufactured evidence in court) and a false witness provided from another petrol station. The picture was subsequently painted (in a press reliant on motoring advertising) of a car-less hitchhiker or car-thief boy-racer who could not use manual gearboxes, travelling on foot/train, to kidnap and murder responsible motorists and road scientists planning a motor rally followed by a long joyride. The Home Office subsequent enquiries were leant on by the compromised Ministry of Transport protecting the cover up, road building proceeded unimpeded and sustainable transport was kept out of Britain for decades since.
This isn’t a serious theory of mine for the A6 murder, but I hope as a conspiracy theory it is creative and consistent.

Thank Christ it wasn't a serious theory, djw! It was certainly creative, and I was going to say something about it all being in the small print.

Love,

Caz
X

[moste]

Quote::. What was the great secret that Valerie Storie nearly died for and took to her grave when in a wheelchair? At no time in her reasonably long life did the political fog clear so that she could voice the greater truth? I think you are looking for a high level political motivation that does not seem to exist.

If not a high level political motivation ,then lets have the Mathews report! We'll never get it because it wouldn't be in any party's interest. All of the years of dragging feet and procrastination's by both main party's home secretary's, until some bright bugger could come up with some phony scientific way of proving it was Hanratty after all.
The utter anguish that Mr.Hanratty and his family were put through all those years was pure politics. Its very possible there is a strong link between the will of the politicians in this regard, and Stories secret

[cobalt]

djw,

The politics of road building was raised a few years back as a possible motive in the A6 Case. Rather than being honest civil servants about to blow the lid on dodgy contracts or dubious safety certificates, the theory was that Mr. Gregsten and Ms, Storie were attempting a bit of blackmail to help fund their setting up house together.

It remains no more than that: just a theory. There is nothing I have been able to find that would support that line of thinking. Nothing as suspicious as what are known as the ‘Marconi Murders’ which many believe might be linked to industrial espionage.

From what little can gather, Matthews seems to have concluded that the motive in the A6 Case was domestic rather than political.