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DAILY MAIL ARTICLE PUBLISHED UNDER THE TITLE "THEY HANGED
THE WRONG MAN" (May 1999) . .written by Roger Matthews on the report he produced in 1996 after a year's research during which he led a team of 20 as Detective Chief Superintendent Roger Matthews of Scotland Yard.
James Hanratty, aged 24, an inadequate petty criminal, was executed on a grey April morning in 1962 for a cruel, cold-blooded - and apparently random - sex crime. Initially, few outside his immediate family mourned his passing.
These days, sadly, we are used to horrific killings by gunmen and the appalling litany of brutal sexual assaults. However, in that more innocent age, the bizarre evil of this attack shocked the entire nation. As a callow sixth former with a burning ambition to join the Metropolitan Police, I remember reading about the crime with incredulity. I certainly felt no sympathy for a man whom I knew nothing about.
Little could I know that more than thirty years later in 1995, it would fall to me, by now an experienced Detective Superintendent at Scotland Yard, to conduct a review of the case at the request of the Home Office. The Home Secretary was considering an application from the family's lawyers to refer the case to the Court of Appeal.
Normally, of course, it is the function of police officers to search out evidence of guilt. Here, though, I was being asked to consider whether someone whom had been hanged as a murderer while I was still a schoolboy had in fact gone to the gallows an innocent man.
It took me a year of painstaking research before I reached the somewhat unpalatable conclusion that a grievous miscarriage of justice had almost certainly taken place. On the available evidence, James Hanratty ought not to have been found guilty; and certainly not have been “hanged by the neck until dead” in Bedford jail.
Now, as the case awaits hearing in the Appeal Court, I feel I have to speak out, because I am so concerned about the entire episode. Gradually, during the investigation, my opposition to the death penalty strengthened. Such a measure is so appallingly irreversible.
As I burrowed through sixteen boxes of evidence and yellowing files and documents, I found a copy of the last letter dictated by Hanratty (he could barely write) shortly before his execution. It took on poignancy for me.
The letter was to his brother Michael- a man whose tenacity I have come to admire - and it contained a final, and unexpectedly moving and dignified appeal to clear his name. At the time, it had sparked a campaign led by his father, backed by John Lennon and including investigative writers such as Paul Foot. The campaign is still running.
"Well, Mick", said Hanratty in that letter, "I am going to do my best to face the morning with courage and strength and I am sure God will give me the courage to do so...I am going to ask you to do me a small favour, that is I would like you to clear my name of this crime.
Someone, somewhere is responsible for this crime and one day they will venture out again and then the truth will come out, and then that will be the chance for you to step in. Well the time is drawing near, it is almost daylight, so please look after Mum and Dad for me. . .. I only wish I could have the chance over again. But never mind, Mick, as I don't know what I have done to deserve this. But Mick, that's fate for you. . . your loving brother Jim".
Hanratty died an hour or so later, still protesting his innocence to the Roman Catholic priest who gave him the last rites.
Of course, I didn’t base my professional assessment of Hanratty's guilt upon the hanged man's last words, no matter how impressive. Yet I couldn’t but wonder why this 25year-old had gone to his grave protesting his innocence with such quiet determination and dignity. Unless, of course, he really was innocent.
So, what exactly had James Hanratty been accused of? Well, the basic story has never been in dispute. At around 9.30 on the evening of 22nd August 1961, lovers Michael Gregsten, 36, and Valerie Storie, 22, were enjoying an illicit tryst in a grey Morris Minor owned by his aunt.
They had to be discreet because he was married with two small sons; and because they both worked at the Slough Road Research Laboratory in Borehamwood. Michael was a scientist and Valerie a research assistant.
They were parked in a remote cornfield at Dorney Reach, itself somewhat remote, near Taplow in Buckinghamshire. It was a location they had used before. Suddenly they were interrupted by a tap on the window. Gregsten wound it down and was forced out of the car at gunpoint.
The gunman climbed into the rear and ordered Gregsten to get back in and drive off. The trio spent several hours driving around the suburbs of North-West London and beyond, whilst the gunman claimed he was a desperate fugitive bent on armed robbery. Bizarrely, he took items from them, including a valuable watch, which he returned prior to the brutal and callous shootings which were to follow.
Eventually, Gregsten was ordered to park in a lay-by at the grotesquely named Deadman's Hill on the A6 in Bedfordshire. The journey had been bad enough, but what followed was truly horrific. Gregsten was shot twice through the head and died instantly. Valerie was
forced to help remove the body of her murdered lover from the car.
Then she was savagely raped and shot at least four times. She was left for dead alongside Gregsten's body. In fact she was - and remains - paralysed from the waist down but her brain was undamaged. She was able to give the police an account of her ordeal as soon as she was rescued.
The Morris Minor car was found dumped the next day in Redbridge, East London; and the gun used in the crimes was discovered a day later beneath the back seat of a London bus.
Suddenly, there came the breakthrough. Two cartridge cases from the murder weapon were found in the basement of a cheap hotel in Maida Vale, North-West London. A check of the hotel register revealed the name of Peter Louis Alphon, a travelling sales representative who specialised in selling "Old Moore's Almanac". He had booked into this hotel for an overnight stay on the day of the murder; and had been questioned over strange behaviour in another, nearby hotel in Finsbury Park. The background to this was that he had apparently locked himself in his room in the Finsbury Park hotel for the five days immediately following the murder.
Staff at the Maida Vale hotel said they had not seen Alphon on the crucial night; and his mother did not confirm his alibi - wherein he had mentioned visiting her at around the time the murder took place. .
Alphon's name was therefore released to the press, and it has to be said in his favour that he gave himself up. At an identification parade, however, held at her hospital bedside, Valerie Storie selected someone else and Alphon was released.
Police attention turned to Hanratty, who by common consent had stayed at the hotel on the night before the murder. He refused to give himself up because he was - and perhaps more importantly knew that he was - wanted for two offences of burglary on fingerprint evidence. On the telephone to police, he vehemently denied being responsible for the. crimes. No fingerprints or indeed any other forensic evidence had been discovered in the car. He was alleged to have told the interviewing officer that he was a "really clever" criminal who never left fingerprints. This was more than a little odd. All of his convictions had resulted from his leaving his prints at crime scenes.
He never wavered in his denial. On 11th October he was arrested in a cafe in Blackpool and charged after Valerie had selected him on an identification parade. Intriguingly, he bore not the remotest resemblance to the man she had identified (wrongly, of course) at the Alphon parade.
Miss Storie insisted, however, that this time, she was "positive" that Hanratty was the killer. It was a rather unusual “parade”. She was unable to visually identify any one; and asked that each participant uttered the words she said had been used repeatedly by the gunman. They were “Keep quiet: I’m Finking” – in a cockney accent. Hanratty was the only man on the parade born within a hundred miles of London!! Nowadays, this would be totally discredited.
The trial was the longest in English legal history and Valerie was obviously the chief prosecution witness. Hanratty initially refused to disclose where he had been on the night in question, and this weighed heavily against him.
Then he claimed that he had been in Liverpool. He was not able to substantiate this alibi and changed it during the trial, saying that in fact he had been staying in a guesthouse in the North Wales resort of Rhyl.
There was insufficient time to confirm this story - though his graphic description of the room he had occupied was quite extraordinarily accurate - and the landlady was uncertain
as to the dates upon which he had stayed. Therefore, this somewhat belated alibi collapsed, and Hanratty was convicted.
Following the failure of his appeal and the rejection of a petition signed by 90,000 people, he was hanged.
Soon afterwards, Alphon claimed to a writer that he was responsible for the outrage, whilst acting as a "hitman" whose task it had been to separate Michael and Valerie and frighten the former into returning to his wife and children.
Alphon supposedly made an identical admission to journalist Paul Foot.He has certainly been making it down the decades to anyone prepared to listen. Foot also discovered, incidentally, fourteen witnesses who supported Hanratty's claim to have been in Rhyl at the time of the atrocity.
Having got these basic facts straight, I began to worry about such matters as motive and opportunity. Why on earth would Hanratty, a petty if fairly determined urban burglar, suddenly take a gun and loiter in a very rural cornfield in Buckinghamshire?
Cornfields are hardly the most lucrative locations for armed robberies. Nor is it immediately obvious that the surrounding area would have been a source of rich pickings for a robber, particularly one with no apparent means of transport
It was common knowledge that Hanratty was a skilled car thief and that when arrested, he had in his pocket the keys for a Jaguar which he had stolen and driven around England for some weeks. Why did he not have a getaway car on the night in question? In addition, why did he need Valerie' s assistance to help start the very basic Morris Minor?
According to her, he did not even know how to change gear until she taught him. It just did not make any sense.
Then I turned to the prosecution case. The first thing to strike me was how thin it was. It would most certainly not have been sufficient to secure a conviction today.
There was, for instance, no forensic material. Instead, the prosecution relied upon identification evidence: from Valerie and two witnesses who claimed to have seen Hanratty driving the Morris Minor erratically in East London soon after the shootings. Their evidence was totally unreliable – and was in fact rejected at the trial.
Then there was the convenient discovery, three weeks later, of bullet cases, which had been fired from the murder weapon, in the hotel room used by Hanratty on the eve of the shooting. An odd event. The room had been occupied on at least two occasions in the intervening period. It had also been cleaned. Why had the cases not been discovered?
Next emerged the fact that the murder weapon had been discovered beneath the back seat of a 36A Bus - where a witness, Charles France, who later committed suicide, said that
Hanratty claimed to have got rid of, as a matter of course, valueless proceeds of his burglaries. The suicide in itself was a matter of some concern, since it coincided with the date of Hanratty's unsuccessful appeal. I found it strange that a killer would dispose of the murder weapon in such a fashion, when the Thames was available! Additionally, the route of the bus concerned passed France’s address. I couldn’t interview him, though!
Finally, there was an alleged confession to a fellow prison inmate. This, as far as I was able to establish, had been totally discredited at the trial.
It is very difficult to judge old cases by modern standards. Before the Police and Criminal Evidence Act for instance, the prosecution was able to be selective about just what evidence it disclosed.
. Today, it is under an obligation to present all relevant material. Had everything been disclosed in this case - in particular, but by no means only, details of the various identifications - the jury would have been given at least the chance to arrive at a different conclusion.
Other legislation and the impact of case law have had a marked effect on the way in which investigations and criminal trials are conducted. Indeed, the very first step in my investigation was a DNA analysis of a semen stain on Valerie's underwear - Hanratty's lawyers had hoped this would settle the matter once and for all.
The result was unfortunately inconclusive because the science was still insufficiently advanced.
Finally, as I dug still deeper, I came across matters that concerned me profoundly about the conduct of the investigation. It would be wholly improper for me to reveal details before the appeal hearing. Mention of “KIP”. Original notes of phone calls. The hotel register (copy). Disparity between evidence of SIO and Oxford. The manner in which a “J Ryan” was traced – smelled of informant. Postcard utterly impossible
Eventually, I acquainted my senior officers with my conclusion: a quite breathtaking miscarriage of justice had seemed to have taken place; just as Hanratty's family, friends and several distinguished writers had always maintained.
My views were endorsed by my then Commander, Roy Ramm, head of the Yard's International and Organized Crime Group. In May 1996, we reported jointly and formally that the Metropolitan Police would not oppose a Home Office recommendation to the Home Secretary advising him to refer the case to the Court of Appeal. I was assured that a decision would be arrived at ''within weeks".
This did not happen. Politicians had dodged the issue for over thirty years. The incumbent at the Home Office obviously saw no reason to depart from tradition. . .
In April 1997 - perhaps appropriately on the 1st - a new body called the Criminal Cases Review Commission was set up. The matter was placed in their hands.
Please Note:
Those familiar with the Hanratty case will know Roger Matthews was, at the time of the 1996 report,a Detective Chief Superintendent at Scotland Yard.A graduate of Cambridge University he was given a team of 20 police detectives to plough through 16 boxes of files and other matters relating to the case after the Home Office had instructed Scotland Yard to write an updated report on the Hanratty case. It is my understanding that on the evidence Matthews had at his disposal in 1996 he believed Hanratty was completely innocent and should never have been charged.His report has never been published and he is said to retain his belief that Hanratty had nothing to do with the A6 murder.
THE WRONG MAN" (May 1999) . .written by Roger Matthews on the report he produced in 1996 after a year's research during which he led a team of 20 as Detective Chief Superintendent Roger Matthews of Scotland Yard.
James Hanratty, aged 24, an inadequate petty criminal, was executed on a grey April morning in 1962 for a cruel, cold-blooded - and apparently random - sex crime. Initially, few outside his immediate family mourned his passing.
These days, sadly, we are used to horrific killings by gunmen and the appalling litany of brutal sexual assaults. However, in that more innocent age, the bizarre evil of this attack shocked the entire nation. As a callow sixth former with a burning ambition to join the Metropolitan Police, I remember reading about the crime with incredulity. I certainly felt no sympathy for a man whom I knew nothing about.
Little could I know that more than thirty years later in 1995, it would fall to me, by now an experienced Detective Superintendent at Scotland Yard, to conduct a review of the case at the request of the Home Office. The Home Secretary was considering an application from the family's lawyers to refer the case to the Court of Appeal.
Normally, of course, it is the function of police officers to search out evidence of guilt. Here, though, I was being asked to consider whether someone whom had been hanged as a murderer while I was still a schoolboy had in fact gone to the gallows an innocent man.
It took me a year of painstaking research before I reached the somewhat unpalatable conclusion that a grievous miscarriage of justice had almost certainly taken place. On the available evidence, James Hanratty ought not to have been found guilty; and certainly not have been “hanged by the neck until dead” in Bedford jail.
Now, as the case awaits hearing in the Appeal Court, I feel I have to speak out, because I am so concerned about the entire episode. Gradually, during the investigation, my opposition to the death penalty strengthened. Such a measure is so appallingly irreversible.
As I burrowed through sixteen boxes of evidence and yellowing files and documents, I found a copy of the last letter dictated by Hanratty (he could barely write) shortly before his execution. It took on poignancy for me.
The letter was to his brother Michael- a man whose tenacity I have come to admire - and it contained a final, and unexpectedly moving and dignified appeal to clear his name. At the time, it had sparked a campaign led by his father, backed by John Lennon and including investigative writers such as Paul Foot. The campaign is still running.
"Well, Mick", said Hanratty in that letter, "I am going to do my best to face the morning with courage and strength and I am sure God will give me the courage to do so...I am going to ask you to do me a small favour, that is I would like you to clear my name of this crime.
Someone, somewhere is responsible for this crime and one day they will venture out again and then the truth will come out, and then that will be the chance for you to step in. Well the time is drawing near, it is almost daylight, so please look after Mum and Dad for me. . .. I only wish I could have the chance over again. But never mind, Mick, as I don't know what I have done to deserve this. But Mick, that's fate for you. . . your loving brother Jim".
Hanratty died an hour or so later, still protesting his innocence to the Roman Catholic priest who gave him the last rites.
Of course, I didn’t base my professional assessment of Hanratty's guilt upon the hanged man's last words, no matter how impressive. Yet I couldn’t but wonder why this 25year-old had gone to his grave protesting his innocence with such quiet determination and dignity. Unless, of course, he really was innocent.
So, what exactly had James Hanratty been accused of? Well, the basic story has never been in dispute. At around 9.30 on the evening of 22nd August 1961, lovers Michael Gregsten, 36, and Valerie Storie, 22, were enjoying an illicit tryst in a grey Morris Minor owned by his aunt.
They had to be discreet because he was married with two small sons; and because they both worked at the Slough Road Research Laboratory in Borehamwood. Michael was a scientist and Valerie a research assistant.
They were parked in a remote cornfield at Dorney Reach, itself somewhat remote, near Taplow in Buckinghamshire. It was a location they had used before. Suddenly they were interrupted by a tap on the window. Gregsten wound it down and was forced out of the car at gunpoint.
The gunman climbed into the rear and ordered Gregsten to get back in and drive off. The trio spent several hours driving around the suburbs of North-West London and beyond, whilst the gunman claimed he was a desperate fugitive bent on armed robbery. Bizarrely, he took items from them, including a valuable watch, which he returned prior to the brutal and callous shootings which were to follow.
Eventually, Gregsten was ordered to park in a lay-by at the grotesquely named Deadman's Hill on the A6 in Bedfordshire. The journey had been bad enough, but what followed was truly horrific. Gregsten was shot twice through the head and died instantly. Valerie was
forced to help remove the body of her murdered lover from the car.
Then she was savagely raped and shot at least four times. She was left for dead alongside Gregsten's body. In fact she was - and remains - paralysed from the waist down but her brain was undamaged. She was able to give the police an account of her ordeal as soon as she was rescued.
The Morris Minor car was found dumped the next day in Redbridge, East London; and the gun used in the crimes was discovered a day later beneath the back seat of a London bus.
Suddenly, there came the breakthrough. Two cartridge cases from the murder weapon were found in the basement of a cheap hotel in Maida Vale, North-West London. A check of the hotel register revealed the name of Peter Louis Alphon, a travelling sales representative who specialised in selling "Old Moore's Almanac". He had booked into this hotel for an overnight stay on the day of the murder; and had been questioned over strange behaviour in another, nearby hotel in Finsbury Park. The background to this was that he had apparently locked himself in his room in the Finsbury Park hotel for the five days immediately following the murder.
Staff at the Maida Vale hotel said they had not seen Alphon on the crucial night; and his mother did not confirm his alibi - wherein he had mentioned visiting her at around the time the murder took place. .
Alphon's name was therefore released to the press, and it has to be said in his favour that he gave himself up. At an identification parade, however, held at her hospital bedside, Valerie Storie selected someone else and Alphon was released.
Police attention turned to Hanratty, who by common consent had stayed at the hotel on the night before the murder. He refused to give himself up because he was - and perhaps more importantly knew that he was - wanted for two offences of burglary on fingerprint evidence. On the telephone to police, he vehemently denied being responsible for the. crimes. No fingerprints or indeed any other forensic evidence had been discovered in the car. He was alleged to have told the interviewing officer that he was a "really clever" criminal who never left fingerprints. This was more than a little odd. All of his convictions had resulted from his leaving his prints at crime scenes.
He never wavered in his denial. On 11th October he was arrested in a cafe in Blackpool and charged after Valerie had selected him on an identification parade. Intriguingly, he bore not the remotest resemblance to the man she had identified (wrongly, of course) at the Alphon parade.
Miss Storie insisted, however, that this time, she was "positive" that Hanratty was the killer. It was a rather unusual “parade”. She was unable to visually identify any one; and asked that each participant uttered the words she said had been used repeatedly by the gunman. They were “Keep quiet: I’m Finking” – in a cockney accent. Hanratty was the only man on the parade born within a hundred miles of London!! Nowadays, this would be totally discredited.
The trial was the longest in English legal history and Valerie was obviously the chief prosecution witness. Hanratty initially refused to disclose where he had been on the night in question, and this weighed heavily against him.
Then he claimed that he had been in Liverpool. He was not able to substantiate this alibi and changed it during the trial, saying that in fact he had been staying in a guesthouse in the North Wales resort of Rhyl.
There was insufficient time to confirm this story - though his graphic description of the room he had occupied was quite extraordinarily accurate - and the landlady was uncertain
as to the dates upon which he had stayed. Therefore, this somewhat belated alibi collapsed, and Hanratty was convicted.
Following the failure of his appeal and the rejection of a petition signed by 90,000 people, he was hanged.
Soon afterwards, Alphon claimed to a writer that he was responsible for the outrage, whilst acting as a "hitman" whose task it had been to separate Michael and Valerie and frighten the former into returning to his wife and children.
Alphon supposedly made an identical admission to journalist Paul Foot.He has certainly been making it down the decades to anyone prepared to listen. Foot also discovered, incidentally, fourteen witnesses who supported Hanratty's claim to have been in Rhyl at the time of the atrocity.
Having got these basic facts straight, I began to worry about such matters as motive and opportunity. Why on earth would Hanratty, a petty if fairly determined urban burglar, suddenly take a gun and loiter in a very rural cornfield in Buckinghamshire?
Cornfields are hardly the most lucrative locations for armed robberies. Nor is it immediately obvious that the surrounding area would have been a source of rich pickings for a robber, particularly one with no apparent means of transport
It was common knowledge that Hanratty was a skilled car thief and that when arrested, he had in his pocket the keys for a Jaguar which he had stolen and driven around England for some weeks. Why did he not have a getaway car on the night in question? In addition, why did he need Valerie' s assistance to help start the very basic Morris Minor?
According to her, he did not even know how to change gear until she taught him. It just did not make any sense.
Then I turned to the prosecution case. The first thing to strike me was how thin it was. It would most certainly not have been sufficient to secure a conviction today.
There was, for instance, no forensic material. Instead, the prosecution relied upon identification evidence: from Valerie and two witnesses who claimed to have seen Hanratty driving the Morris Minor erratically in East London soon after the shootings. Their evidence was totally unreliable – and was in fact rejected at the trial.
Then there was the convenient discovery, three weeks later, of bullet cases, which had been fired from the murder weapon, in the hotel room used by Hanratty on the eve of the shooting. An odd event. The room had been occupied on at least two occasions in the intervening period. It had also been cleaned. Why had the cases not been discovered?
Next emerged the fact that the murder weapon had been discovered beneath the back seat of a 36A Bus - where a witness, Charles France, who later committed suicide, said that
Hanratty claimed to have got rid of, as a matter of course, valueless proceeds of his burglaries. The suicide in itself was a matter of some concern, since it coincided with the date of Hanratty's unsuccessful appeal. I found it strange that a killer would dispose of the murder weapon in such a fashion, when the Thames was available! Additionally, the route of the bus concerned passed France’s address. I couldn’t interview him, though!
Finally, there was an alleged confession to a fellow prison inmate. This, as far as I was able to establish, had been totally discredited at the trial.
It is very difficult to judge old cases by modern standards. Before the Police and Criminal Evidence Act for instance, the prosecution was able to be selective about just what evidence it disclosed.
. Today, it is under an obligation to present all relevant material. Had everything been disclosed in this case - in particular, but by no means only, details of the various identifications - the jury would have been given at least the chance to arrive at a different conclusion.
Other legislation and the impact of case law have had a marked effect on the way in which investigations and criminal trials are conducted. Indeed, the very first step in my investigation was a DNA analysis of a semen stain on Valerie's underwear - Hanratty's lawyers had hoped this would settle the matter once and for all.
The result was unfortunately inconclusive because the science was still insufficiently advanced.
Finally, as I dug still deeper, I came across matters that concerned me profoundly about the conduct of the investigation. It would be wholly improper for me to reveal details before the appeal hearing. Mention of “KIP”. Original notes of phone calls. The hotel register (copy). Disparity between evidence of SIO and Oxford. The manner in which a “J Ryan” was traced – smelled of informant. Postcard utterly impossible
Eventually, I acquainted my senior officers with my conclusion: a quite breathtaking miscarriage of justice had seemed to have taken place; just as Hanratty's family, friends and several distinguished writers had always maintained.
My views were endorsed by my then Commander, Roy Ramm, head of the Yard's International and Organized Crime Group. In May 1996, we reported jointly and formally that the Metropolitan Police would not oppose a Home Office recommendation to the Home Secretary advising him to refer the case to the Court of Appeal. I was assured that a decision would be arrived at ''within weeks".
This did not happen. Politicians had dodged the issue for over thirty years. The incumbent at the Home Office obviously saw no reason to depart from tradition. . .
In April 1997 - perhaps appropriately on the 1st - a new body called the Criminal Cases Review Commission was set up. The matter was placed in their hands.
Please Note:
Those familiar with the Hanratty case will know Roger Matthews was, at the time of the 1996 report,a Detective Chief Superintendent at Scotland Yard.A graduate of Cambridge University he was given a team of 20 police detectives to plough through 16 boxes of files and other matters relating to the case after the Home Office had instructed Scotland Yard to write an updated report on the Hanratty case. It is my understanding that on the evidence Matthews had at his disposal in 1996 he believed Hanratty was completely innocent and should never have been charged.His report has never been published and he is said to retain his belief that Hanratty had nothing to do with the A6 murder.
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