The attack on Swedish housewife Mrs Meike Dalal on Thursday, September 7th 1961

[cobalt]

Hi Graham,

I may be a relative newcomer to the site, but I have following the case since I first read about it in the newspapers as a boy in 1962. I have read most of the postings on this site over the years. I also read Paul Foot's book when it came out.

My background is not the judicial/legal one many of this site seem to have, and I acknowledge their experience and judgment in that regard. However I am a engaged citizen of the UK, and having attended grammar school ((or its Scottish equivalent) am well versed in condescending put downs from those in authority. Later, as a trade unionist, I became familiar with such tactics.

Your own background may be less clear (you assured me you were not a policeman), but never deviates far from confidence in the authorities getting things right. Now they may have done this in the case of Hanratty. The fact that Ewer was steering the police towards Hanratty, as any sensible interpretation of the events of early September 1961 would suggest, does not of itself make Hanratty innocent. Ewer may have been acting on information available to him and steering the police towards the guilty party. Perhaps things turned out for the best. But if you are trying to suggest Ewer's story was fabricated by the newspapers you are fighting a losing battle I fear.

You said my second paragraph was 'utter crap.' Well, most of it was just putting in context the death of a husband, the paralysation of a young woman and the widowing of a mother with two children. Not much to contend there I think. You might not like the idea that UK justice hanged an innocent man, which finished the paragraph, but we know this has been acknowledged by the state on at least three occasions.

But it is little wonder the Prosecution Case on this forum wants to break any link between Ewer and the police activity in North London in early September 1961. For if they cannot do this- and it seems very likely that the Matthews report was able to establish such a link- then it is clear, whatever the rights and wrongs of Hanratty's guilt, that Hanratty was being presented to the authorities. That is anyone’s definition of a conspiracy.

Getting Gregsten's first name wrong was careless on my behalf, but if you believe that is the measure of a person's grasp of the case then you are probably confined to pedantry. You are angry, I think, because I have brought up the matter of your repeated strawman argument regarding the £5,000 'hit' on Gregsten. No one has ever seriously claimed this on the site, yet you continue to refer to it. So every time you refer to it, I will remind the forum it is baloney

[Natalie Severn]

Ewer had absolutely nothing to do with Gregsten's murder.
Graham

So Graham how do you account for the billion to one chance of William Ewer picking out the right man-a man who happened to be drinking in his coffee shop on September 1st 1961, as being the A6 murderer -identified 'because of his big blue staring eyes-like a carbuncle on his head' the man being James Hanratty , who would hang for the A6 murder?

[Natalie Severn]

[I][I]
Secondly, according to Natalie, these were plain clothes police assigned to the A6 murder making enquires at the Florists' Shop. ........

Hi Cobalt-Dorothy Morrell said they were plain clothes detectives but I have always understood they came from Highbury Police Station and that the name J.Ryan meant nothing to them.Best Nats

[Graham]

Cobalt,

you are a relative newcomer to this forum, and therefore I am quite prepared to accept that you don't have too strong a grasp of what's been debated here in the past. Believe me, there are, and have been (and you don't have to look too far back into the past) those who appear to seriously believe that Ewer coughed up five grand to have Gregsten sorted out. I do NOT as you say 'cling to this as the basis of my argument'; I use it merely to point out how, to my mind (which I think is rather more practical than yours, no offence meant) that Ewer had absolutely nothing to do with Gregsten's murder. Incidentally, Gregsten's first name was 'Michael', not 'Malcolm' as you posted which, I dare to suggest, highlights the somewhat tenuous grasp you have of this incredibly complicated case.

The second paragraph of your post is, I am afraid to say, utter crap. I would like to hear your views on precisely who the money came from, if it didn't come from Ewer. Or are you, as I suspect, just making it up as you go along?

Graham

[cobalt]

Graham,

Is it not time to stop this strawman argument that Alphon or AN OTHER was paid the ludicrous sum (by 1961 standards) of £5,000 to kill Malcolm Gregsten. No one on this site, so far as I aware, has ever suggested this. Indeed a number of contributors sympathetic to Hanratty have pointed out that it is ridiculous. Yet you continue to cling to this as some basis of your argument. It demeans you.

The claim is not that Ewer paid this money to have Gregsten 'seen to.' (Which would be much more likely than his being killed.) But rather that Ewer, or people known to him, were themselves in grave danger following the events of 1961.
These events were monumental: a high profile killing of a family man; the widowhood of an innocent woman. the orphaning of two children; the paralysation of a woman in the springtime of her life; the judicial murder of a man innocent of the crime.
Add to that horrific list this possibility: that seemingly respectable parties had been involved and were desperate to continue to elude the law, and then I think £5,000 was cheap, even by 1961 values. And I do not think that money came solely from Ewer.

[cobalt]

I think it likely the police would have visited the florist after visiting the Hanratty family on 27-Aug-61, and extremely unlikely they would have visited the florist after Ewer had phoned them with a strange story

I think the opposite. The police who visited the Hanratty household were investigating a robbery. No one knows if they saw any flowers at all, or whether they saw a card which identified the particular shop that had sent them. This has all been supposition from the Prosecution Case on this site; as far as I am aware there is no corroboration of this assumption. The likelihood is they saw no flowers and no card. Whatever information were they going to glean from a Florist's Shop?

Secondly, according to Natalie, these were plain clothes police assigned to the A6 murder making enquires at the Florists' Shop. That, if verifiable, indicates the enquiry was not about a potential robber but about a potential murderer. That means Hanratty/Ryan was in the frame. But on what basis? Well only what you call the 'strange story' given down the telephone by Ewer. At the time the police gave it little credence.

But interesting that Ewer did not try to contact a local bobbie, or even by telephone the local police. He was, I am pretty sure, an inside man who knew which number to call, at Scotland Yard. His business was to all intents and purposes a 'front' and his contacts with police integral to who he was. His alleged right wing affiliations are much more likely to have been a result of him infiltrating and reporting on the activities of any neo fascists oddballs like Alphon. Ewer is reeking of MI5.

Interestingly, Ewer knew Valerie Storie, Michael Gregsten. Janet Gregsten, Louise Anderson and Dixie France. That is a wide range of people to know from one murder case. He also, possibly, had met James Hanratty and Peter Alphon. If ever anyone deserved more scrutiny in the SA6 Murder case it was William Ewer.

And no one has yet dealt with my question: why, if Ewer had prior knowledge, did he divulge this to the newspapers. He was at risk by doing so, unless he thought he was (MI5) fireproof.

[Graham]

I can't accept for one moment the picture of William Ewer as the wealthy, right-wing, up-market antiques dealer he has at times been portrayed as being.
There is precious little information about him - Google his name and you get directed to another William Ewer who was a British journalist accused of spying for the USSR. Otherwise, you'll be directed to Casebook and other true-crime and news sites that have run articles on the A6 Case.

'Our' Ewer was married to Janet Gregsten's (nee Phillips) half-sister Valerie. Janet's parents split up, and her mother moved in with another man who had a house in Hampstead. She lived there with her elder sister Toni, her younger brother John, and for a short time her half-sister Valerie lived with Ewer in one room. According to Woffinden, Ewer started up a small antiques business in Swiss Cottage, and combined it with the umbrella-repair business he already had. Now, who on earth ever made a fortune out of repairing umbrellas? Janet described the Swiss Cottage shop as "antiques-cum-pictures-cum-umbrellas-cum-all-sorts-of-junk". In other words, a glorified junk shop. Later, he also had a stall in an antiques market somewhere near Oxford Street (and I can add from personal experience of such that no-one ever made real money from such an enterprise). After the murder, Janet and her boys lived with Mr and Mrs Ewer in Golders Green.

It is known that on at least one occasion Ewer acted as proxy for a buyer interested in a particular painting at a fine-arts auction. Whether this was the Wilson Steer that Janet helped him to hang in his shop, I don't know. (I quite like Wilson Steer as an Impressionist - I think fairly recently one of his paintings, that of yachts at Cowes, went for over £300000).

Now regarding Ewer and Janet. Janet never made much of an attempt to hide her 'affair' with Ewer. This started when Janet was living in Hertfordshire at a time when she was, naturally, at a very low ebb. She admitted she was extremely lonely. Her sister Valerie along with Ewer came to stay with her, then Valerie went back to London on her own. Ewer stayed. Janet said that her affair with him was totally spontaneous and later she regretted it. Frankly, I see nothing here of any long-term 'lusting' after his sister-in-law by Ewer, no carefully-laid plans to replace Michael as the man in her life. As Janet said, it was essentially spontaneous on both their sides. They stayed together until 1969 when Janet moved to Cornwall with her boys. What became of Ewer's wife Valerie I don't think is recorded.

I don't see Ewer as a bad man. Possibly somewhat self-important and possibly not 100% honest, but no big deal. Seems to me that if he had been lusting after Janet long-term, he'd have figured out a non-murderous way of getting close to her. But I do NOT see him as a man prepared to murder, and pay a ridiculous sum of money for that murder to be carried out, in order to possess the woman he lusted after. Maybe he didn't particularly like Michael, but so what? I never got on with my sister-in-law's husband.

Conspiracy theories about the A6 began almost immediately after the crime; I'm not totally sure who first put Ewer in the frame as Mr X (or the Central Figure, put it as you will), but if it was Paul Foot, as I suspect it was, then he as first and foremost a journalist would be the kind of man who looked for a reason, rational or not, for everything. Foot, like others, seemed unable to see the A6 Crime as a purely spontaneous act of wickedness and violence, without any motive at all. It is also likely that he saw in Ewer the kind of person that he, as a member of the silly Socialist Workers Party, detested. I don't think Ewer ever made much of a secret of his political leanings. I suppose it's a measure of Ewer's personality that he and Jean Justice appeared to get on quite well, yet I have a sneaking suspicion that Ewer saw right through Justice.

Sorry to go on a bit, but I do sometimes feel that the whole A6 'thing' needs to be brought back to earth from time to time. And if that sounds pompous, sorry for that, too.

Graham

[NickB]

NickB,

You are suggesting that the phone call by Ewer (which he is on record as admitting he made) and the police making enquiries at the florist shop are unconnected.

First of all, how often did Hanratty pop in to the florist’s? I assume his mother only had one birthday a year, so the phone call by Ewer and the police making enquiries at the florist’s shop must have been contemporaneous.

Secondly, would police seeking a man in connection with robbery really feel they could get some sort of lead by tracing back flowers to the shop from where he had sent them? That is if they ever saw the flowers, or the card with which they arrived.

Thirdly, why send plain clothes police to make such a tenuous enquiry, some of whom Natalie has stated were connected to the A6 murder enquiry?

The florist said that Hanratty had been in recently wanting to send roses to his mother but could not afford them and sent some other flowers to her instead. Then he returned and sent roses.

I think it likely the police would have visited the florist after visiting the Hanratty family on 27-Aug-61, and extremely unlikely they would have visited the florist after Ewer had phoned them with a strange story.

[Natalie Severn]

Ican only find one reference to Mrs Dorothy Morrell in Foot's book (1988 ed) at page 51. This merely relies on the Daily Sketch 'story' of 19 February 1962.

Foot wrote several articles at the time aside from his book which have very specific information in .These articles are in London not with me at present .But anyway I would draw your attention to Graham's last post above .Surely that is sufficient to reveal the utter absurdity and dishonesty of William Ewer's claims about not knowing who it was he had been following or why he was following him or when exactly he had been following him......especially when it was James Hanratty on the 1st September 1961 who Ewer was clearly of the impression this man with blue eyes like carbuncles was the murderer of his dearly beloved brother-in -law Michael Gregsten whose wife Janet, William Ewer loved beyond measure and was destined to set up house with as her lusty lover just a few months after the murder! No motive for William Ewer in all this ? No Mr Ewer as Mr X.....oh I really do think so!

[Spitfire]

There is a lot of obfuscation being attempted by William Ewer in his statements and this nonsense about not being able to confirm whether it was Hanratty he had seen is part and parcel of that.
What is crystal clear however ,from the recorded notes by Paul Foot is :
a] Foot thoroughly investigated those Sketch and Mail Journalist's claims and is adamant that their dates not only tie up with statements and receipts from Mrs Morrell of Cater's the florists of September 1st of a visit by a J. Ryan i.e. by James Hanratty but was able to show Foot her receipt book entry in August 1970 that she had kept with the information about the Hanratty purchases of flowers [he had also been in ordering flowers for his mother earlier that August]that she gave to the police in early September 1961 but also
b] that her statements tie up with statements made by the man in the photographers shop about the William Ewer's visit there which he found annoying as Ewer on finding that the man with eyes like carbuncles [Ewer's description of the man he was following ] was not in his shop had insisted on going into the back of the shop to see if the man had gone there and was hiding-.Once again the photographer shop man remembered the event clearly and remembered being questioned by police afterwards .

So you are not now relying on Ewer's statement of 16 May 1971 as you previously said you were?

Hi Spitfire ,
Please refer to the Sunday Times article of 16th May 1971 which contains a full statement by William Ewer himself and which confirms every salient point made in my post.

I can only find one reference to Mrs Dorothy Morrell in Foot's book (1988 ed) at page 51. This merely relies on the Daily Sketch 'story' of 19 February 1962.

[Natalie Severn]

Spitfire,

It defies belief that he could not confirm whether this was Hanratty or not after attending the trial. It would render his initial phone call meaningless.

There is a lot of obfuscation being attempted by William Ewer in his statements and this nonsense about not being able to confirm whether it was Hanratty he had seen is part and parcel of that.
What is crystal clear however ,from the recorded notes by Paul Foot is :
a] Foot thoroughly investigated those Sketch and Mail Journalist's claims and is adamant that their dates not only tie up with statements and receipts from Mrs Morrell of Cater's the florists of September 1st of a visit by a J. Ryan i.e. by James Hanratty but was able to show Foot her receipt book entry in August 1970 that she had kept with the information about the Hanratty purchases of flowers [he had also been in ordering flowers for his mother earlier that August]that she gave to the police in early September 1961 but also
b] that her statements tie up with statements made by the man in the photographers shop about the William Ewer's visit there which he found annoying as Ewer on finding that the man with eyes like carbuncles [Ewer's description of the man he was following ] was not in his shop had insisted on going into the back of the shop to see if the man had gone there and was hiding-.Once again the photographer shop man remembered the event clearly and remembered being questioned by police afterwards .

[Graham]

This is what Ewer said in the Daily Sketch article of 19 February 1962 with regard to seeing for the second time the man with the staring blue eyes:

In a cafe he says he saw the same man he claimed to have seen when in his shop with Janet Gregsten. And he mentions specifically the blue eyes. The man walked out of the cafe and Ewer followed him across Finchley Road to a shop in Northways Parade. He thought it was a photographer's, but when he asked there he was told no-one had been in. He used the photographer's phone to call Scotland Yard and a police car arrived. The police made inquiries in all the shops in the Parade and got to Cater's, the florists. Mrs Morrell, the florist, said that the man had placed an order, but had left before Ewer or the police got there. She said that he came in on 1 September and ordered some roses to be sent to his mother, whose name he gave as Mrs Hanratty of kingsbury. He also bought a card and wrote on it, according to Mrs Morrell, "Don't worry - everything's all right" [I thought Hanratty was virtually illiterate - Graham.

Mrs Morrell says she thought there was something strange about the man, and she said to him, "What have you been up to?" He then walked out. She said that when the police arrived she checked her records and found that the same man had sent a bunch of gladioli to his mother during August, before the A6 murder.

The Daily Sketch added that a report was sent to Scotland Yard about the above encounter, but the Murder squad had never heard of J Ryan, or the address in Kingsbury he had given.

In this same article, Ewer says he went to see a 'business associate', Louise Anderson, with whom he chatted about the A6 murder.

(Later, in the Sunday Times of 16 May 1971, he denied ever knowing Louise Anderson, but admitted that as they were both in the antiques trade he may have had 'glancing acquaintance' with her). He did indeed say that having seen Hanratty at the trial he could not swear that he and the man he saw in Finchley Road were one and the same. He also said he phoned the police from his own shop, not the photographer's. And, of course, he denied that Janet Gregsten had ever made an 'intuitive' sighting of Hanratty.)

Graham

[Spitfire]

Spitfire,

I think you are clutching at straws in your reading of Ewer's actions. If I understand you correctly, you are suggesting that the man who aroused Ewer's suspicions and James Hanratty might not have been the same man.

Surely if Ewer was prepared to go to the lengths of phoning the police with his suspicions then the man he saw must have made a powerful impression upon him. It defies belief that he could not confirm whether this was Hanratty or not after attending the trail. It would render his initial phone call meaningless.

That is before we ask the statisticians to calculate the odds of the murdered man's brother-in-law happening, purely by chance, to identify by mistake an innocent member of the public with staring blue eyes going about his lawful business- but one who happened to be visiting the very shops where the actual murderer with staring blue eyes was conducting his own business at the same time.

I am not suggesting anything.

I have merely stated that which Ewer stated in his Sunday Times statement on 16th May 1971. It is Natalie Severn who is relying on that statement. Have a read again of the recent posts on this thread.

[cobalt]

Spitfire,

I think you are clutching at straws in your reading of Ewer's actions. If I understand you correctly, you are suggesting that the man who aroused Ewer's suspicions and James Hanratty might not have been the same man.

Surely if Ewer was prepared to go to the lengths of phoning the police with his suspicions then the man he saw must have made a powerful impression upon him. It defies belief that he could not confirm whether this was Hanratty or not after attending the trail. It would render his initial phone call meaningless.

That is before we ask the statisticians to calculate the odds of the murdered man's brother-in-law happening, purely by chance, to identify by mistake an innocent member of the public with staring blue eyes going about his lawful business- but one who happened to be visiting the very shops where the actual murderer with staring blue eyes was conducting his own business at the same time.

[cobalt]

NickB,

You are suggesting that the phone call by Ewer (which he is on record as admitting he made) and the police making enquiries at the florist shop are unconnected.

First of all, how often did Hanratty pop in to the florist’s? I assume his mother only had one birthday a year, so the phone call by Ewer and the police making enquiries at the florist’s shop must have been contemporaneous.

Secondly, would police seeking a man in connection with robbery really feel they could get some sort of lead by tracing back flowers to the shop from where he had sent them? That is if they ever saw the flowers, or the card with which they arrived.

Thirdly, why send plain clothes police to make such a tenuous enquiry, some of whom Natalie has stated were connected to the A6 murder enquiry?