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

[Natalie Severn]

correction : last sentence in post 536 should read Fleet St became alerted to inconsistencies in the case ...etc

[Graham]

Hi SH,

I can't ever recall reading that Hanratty sat next to the "clerky gent" for 5 hours Graham

Shadows Of Deadman's Hill by Leonard Miller, Page 48

Hanratty described in some detail the people he claimed sat near to him in his carriage. Among them he particularly remember a "clerky gent" who was very smartly dressed, smoked a black pipe and had initialled gold cuff-links marked with the letter "E"

Despite being in Hanratty's company for five hours neither this man nor any of the other passengers ever emerged to confirm this aspect of his alibi. By a remarkable coincidence on 12 August 1961 Hanratty carried out a burglary in the Harrow area; among the loot were "six sets of gold cuff-links with the initial 'E' on them"

Miller credits Woffinden with the information regarding the Harrow burglary.

Hanratty's defence must have thought the "clerky gent" story impressive, as they put out a request for him to contact either themselves or the police. Which, of course, he never did, as he was a figment of Hanratty's imagination.
Note how precise Hanratty could be on minor details ("smartly dressed"; "black pipe"; "initialled cuff-links") but was never able to quite 'remember' more important information, including descriptions of people. He likewise made half-correct guesses at what was inside Ingledene, but failed accurately to describe Mrs Jones.

If Michael da Costa claims he saw Hanratty only at the buffet and the snack-bar, then how was he able to know that Hanratty was actually on his train to Liverpool? And again, as Hanratty was totally confused regarding the time of the train he claimed he took to Liverpool, how did da Costa know he was on the same train? I don't think that Hanratty's defence acted on da Costa contacting them, other than to speak to him - correct me if I'm wrong here. Maybe he saw Hanratty somewhere else, and confused the location, to give him some benefit of the doubt.

Graham

[Graham]

Hi Nats,

Graham I was actually asking my question about Taplow Railway Station very seriously since the shocking gun' hold up' and murder of 22/23 August had only just happened and according to Valerie's statement had begun its course quite near Taplow Station with the event fresh in everybody's minds as a nation wide hunt began immediately.I would have thought therefore that one of the very first things the police should have done was interview the station master, the ticket collectors at both Paddington and Taplow -particularly Taplow being so much quieter and passengers that day on those trains to Taplow being relatively few on 22nd August ? Yet we don't know whether they did or didn't follow such a line of inquiry which seems extraordinary if they did not.

The police investigation into the A6 murder was probably the largest of its kind in British history, and we will never know the full extent of it - the police tend only to release major aspects of such an investigation. I would be incredibly surprised if the staff at Taplow, Slough, Maidenhead and other nearby stations were not interviewed, even if only superficially. Same goes for bus conductors, garage employees, local residents, etc., etc. If every aspect of the police investigation were located and written about by a later investigator it would need a lorry to transport the resulting book.

As an illustration of what I mean, I believe it was Paul Foot who said that the police interviewed a suspect for 16 hours prior to Alphon's interrogation; this suspect's identity has never been released, and quite rightly too if, as it evidently turned out, he had nothing to do with the case. In a case like this, the police would have had a list of persons who, in their view, might commit such a crime, and doubtless they interviewed all of them.

It was only speculation (naughty of me, I know) that Hanratty did indeed take a train from Paddington to the Slough area; perhaps he did, perhaps he didn't. But I rather think he did, but what he got up to when he reached his destination, prior to his arrival in the cornfield, no-one will ever know.

Graham

[Natalie Severn]

Request for info re Merseyside closed file on Hanratty sightings

Can I ask the gentleman who contacted me some 18 months ago about a closed file kept with Mersey side police concerning sightings of Hanratty in Liverpool and importantly being seen by the conductor on the Liverpool>Rhyl bus 22.08.1961 -details of which are in this said closed file .I appear to have lost your email-Thankyou Norma Buddle.

[Natalie Severn]

Hi Nats,



The police investigation into the A6 murder was probably the largest of its kind in British history, and we will never know the full extent of it - the police tend only to release major aspects of such an investigation. I would be incredibly surprised if the staff at Taplow, Slough, Maidenhead and other nearby stations were not interviewed, even if only superficially. Same goes for bus conductors, garage employees, local residents, etc., etc. If every aspect of the police investigation were located and written about by a later investigator it would need a lorry to transport the resulting book.

As an illustration of what I mean, I believe it was Paul Foot who said that the police interviewed a suspect for 16 hours prior to Alphon's interrogation; this suspect's identity has never been released, and quite rightly too if, as it evidently turned out, he had nothing to do with the case. In a case like this, the police would have had a list of persons who, in their view, might commit such a crime, and doubtless they interviewed all of them.

It was only speculation (naughty of me, I know) that Hanratty did indeed take a train from Paddington to the Slough area; perhaps he did, perhaps he didn't. But I rather think he did, but what he got up to when he reached his destination, prior to his arrival in the cornfield, no-one will ever know.

Graham

Thanks Graham I take your points about the size of the trial etc but quite honestly I think this lack of any recorded sighting whatever of Hanratty strongly suggests that Hanratty was never seen anywhere near Taplow Station ,Marsh Lane or Slough or even in London except when he left the Vienna Hotel on the morning of 22nd August and possibly at Euston station later that morning by Mr Da Costa because I believe we would have heard about it immediately and at the trial had he been seen near Taplow .It would have been very strong reinforcement of the prosecution evidence and when sifting through all the mass of 'evidence' -sightings etc that had been accrued such a sighting as this would have been extremely significant-if not conclusive! So I believe it safe to conclude Hanratty was not seen anywhere near that cornfield .
In fact it appears to me to be one of the reasons the Scotland Yard chief, Roger Matthews, believed that the gunman had an accomplice who drove him ,his gun and his 25 rounds of ammunition to the Dorney Reach cornfield .Now I agree Valerie recalled the sequence of events as accurately as she possibly could but post traumatic trauma can,as is now widely accepted, distort the sequence and memory of the original trauma .
I also refuse to believe Graham, that Alphon can be dismissed so lightly what ever Mansfield said in 2002 the very opposite was said by the judge, Mr Justice Weir ,the judge in the Omagh bombing ,only 5 years later ,about the very same method used in the LCN DNA tests in the Sean Hoey trial in 2007 which made Peter Gill ,one of the inventors of the LCN technique ,admit in court that the results put forward by the prosecution were 'valueless' and that LCN was a complex area in which there were 'shades of grey' prompting the judge ,Mr Justice Weir to throw the case out against Sean Hoey saying the LCN testing was unreliable .Sean Hoey who now be serving life for the notorious Omagh bombing .In 1961 he would have been hanged for the crime had he been proven guilty on such unreliable evidence .

[Graham]

Nats,

on the morning of 22 August 1961 James Hanratty was a complete unknown. Why should anyone who encountered him by chance that day remember him out of all the people who must have been milling around Taplow, Taplow Station and its environs, Slough, Maidenhead, or wherever, that day? Only when his photo was published did some people - including Mr da Costa, Mr Fogarty-Waul, Mrs Dinwoodie, and the good people of Rhyl. One or two residents of Marsh Lane claimed that they'd seen Alphon or someone who resembled Alphon. Hanratty's defence couldn't rely on any of this sighting evidence, because there was no proof that the man any of the witnesses claimed to have seen was James Hanratty (or Peter Alphon). It's heresay evidence at best. I know in advance that you'll strongly disagree with all this, but once again I would ask for any concrete evidence that Hanratty was sighted anywhere that might constitute an acceptable alibi.

I do recall the mentioning of the withheld Liverpool file and the claimed sighting of Hanratty on the bus to Rhyl, but don't recall the details. I think I asked if anyone knew for sure if the Liverpool - Rhyl buses actually had conductors, but can't recall if anyone responded.

It is of course possible that someone did drive Hanratty to the cornfield, or that general area.

Graham

[caz]

And the jury didn't believe Mrs.Dinwoodie or her granddaughter either. So the jury guessed that because Hanratty only wanted to come clean about his later adventures after lets say 5.00 pm on the Tuesday 22nd of Aug. then Mrs.Dinwoodie and the little girl were mistaken. I don't get it!(That jury! eh? after hours of deliberating, "what does 'beyond reasonably doubt mean?) To steal a line from the famous Dickens character "I'll retire to bedlam!"

Hi moste,

But what was there for Hanratty to 'come clean' about, if his later adventures consisted of an innocent two-night stay in a Rhyl guest house?

Look at it from the jury's point of view, wondering what Hanratty had wanted to hide about his activities in Rhyl, that could possibly have been worse than committing rape and murder.

Mrs D clearly didn't help matters by being certain she saw the man who looked like Hanratty's photo on the Monday and saying he sounded Scottish or (?) Welsh.

Caz
X

[Natalie Severn]

Did anyone on the bus from Liverpool to Rhyl on the evening of 22 August, as JH claimed, come forward to identify him? Not a passenger, not a conductor, not a driver? Nobody? How odd.

Graham

That is not true Graham.First of all nobody knew about this bus journey having any connection with the Hanratty trial -a bus that left Liverpool for Rhyl at about 6pm on 22nd August 1961-it was a good five months before anything at all came to light about Hanratty's connection with the Crosville Rhyl bus which was first known about on 29th January 1962.
-However as I said ,I heard via email from a man who I suspect was an ex Merseyside policeman or clerk in the police service who was told the conductor of the Rhyl bus himself was interviewed and remembered a young man with dyed hair on that bus and that the information is in a closed file that might be of interest to Hanratty supporters
In the meantime can you explain the contradiction between the complete absence of any witness sighting of James Hanratty -a factor that would have strengthened the case against him immeasurably ,not on one of the trains from Paddington,or by any one of the ticket collectors that day , who saw Hanratty in or near Taplow or Slough and yet there were multiple sightings by witnesses who saw Hanratty that day in Liverpool including Mrs Dunwoody's granddaughter and eleven more who said they saw him in Rhyl and came forward and said so ?

[Natalie Severn]

so sorry Graham,our posts must have crossed-I see you did in fact reply to an earlier post of mine.Out of interest my husband Andy uses that Paddington to Slough and to Reading Line two or three times a week to work and although it can be a bit busy from time to time it is usually nothing like other train lines from London .Only a few get off at any station in between -with the exception of Slough when maybe up to ten people get off any of the earlier or late afternoon trains .Its usually quiet and certainly by the time it got to Taplow very few people would have been getting off it in the morning,afternoon or late evening.nx

[caz]

No Caz,from all accounts the reason most of the journalists believed he would get off was due to the lack of evidence.

So a lack of evidence brought forward during the trial made the journalists following it think Hanratty would get off, but they were later able to see that things had in fact been 'rigged' against him? Sorry, Nats, I am still missing something here. The jury knew they had to be 'sure' before returning their unanimous guilty verdict that they had heard enough evidence that he was the murderer. Blame them for not giving one of Hanratty's alibis the benefit of the doubt, but I don't see how anyone else can be accused of 'rigging' things to make the jury convict, if the evidence wasn't there and they were therefore supposed to acquit.

From what Paul Foot states in the pubs of Fleet St there was also a definite sense that something very fishy was going on regarding the "intuitions" they claimed Janet Gregsten said she had about Hanratty being the murderer . This according the Paul Foor was what Fleet Street believed the dead man's wife , Janet Gregsten had said to two or three of their own Chapel mates .And that she had been claiming to them that she had had them in William Ewer's antiques shop in Swiss Cottage as she was hanging a William Steer painting in the window of the shop when suddenly she spotted the man she intuited was her husband's murderer going into Burtol's dry cleaners just 6 days after the murder that took place 50 miles away. Now both William Ewer and Janet Gregsten flatly denied they had said this to journalists but whatever it was that was they did say was enough for the journalists to begin to smell a rat . In 1971 ,9 years and a love affair with Janet Gregsten later, William Ewer admitted to the Times Newspaper that such an extraordinary intuition did occur 6 days after the murder but that it was not Janet Gregsten's intuition but his own 'intuition' when he spotted a young man with eyes as big as carbuncles in his local fel a fel cafe while he was sipping coffee.Hearing about these excursions into extra sensory perception gave our cynical journalists a lot of concern about the possible motives of Janet Gregsten and/or William Ewer for coming out with such strange statements which when combined with the daily spectacle of an extremely agitated William Ewer turning up and busying himself at the murder trial every day appears to have set their minds towards an innocent verdict rather than a guilty one.nx

You seem to be going off on a tangent. Are you now saying it was the likes of Janet Gregsten and William Ewer who were seen to be 'rigging' things against Hanratty (and somehow fooling the jury), and not the authorities, as I thought you had previously implied?

It's all a bit confusing.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

To summarise, Yes - Hanratty lied, foolishly, but he had reasons for doing so that were not related to the terrible events that August night.

Kind regards,

Julie

Hi Julie,

I know you believe this to be true, but unfortunately the evidence for it being true is lacking.

The law says his reasons for lying about his whereabouts were obvious and entirely bound up with those terrible events. I have yet to see a remotely plausible reason for him to have lied about where he was if he was staying innocently in Rhyl, where he saw and spoke to a number of people.

Love,

Caz
X

[Natalie Severn]

So a lack of evidence brought forward during the trial made the journalists following it think Hanratty would get off, but they were later able to see that things had in fact been 'rigged' against him? Sorry, Nats, I am still missing something here. The jury knew they had to be 'sure' before returning their unanimous guilty verdict that they had heard enough evidence that he was the murderer. Blame them for not giving one of Hanratty's alibis the benefit of the doubt, but I don't see how anyone else can be accused of 'rigging' things to make the jury convict, if the evidence wasn't there and they were therefore supposed to acquit.



You seem to be going off on a tangent. Are you now saying it was the likes of Janet Gregsten and William Ewer who were seen to be 'rigging' things against Hanratty (and somehow fooling the jury), and not the authorities, as I thought you had previously implied?

It's all a bit confusing.

Love,

Caz
X

Its not confusing Caz-not at all if you know the case -which of course you do and can stop counterposing one situation against another.The police were proven to have tampered with evidence by forensic handwriting tests about which there is no equivocation.Oxford was on his way to give an explanation for these deletions and insertions and alterations in Hanratty's statement which Oxford took down in Blackpool the night of Hanratty's arrest - witness evidence which showed up clearly in the tests - when he died of a heart attack in the build up to the appeal . There were other shortcomings too.
I really don't know what to make of Janet Gregsten as Mystic Meg -or was it actually William Ewer impersonating Janet's attempts at a strange Mystic Meg sighting? Who knows ? it just caused a lot of raised eyebrows among journalists at the time and the belief that there was a lot more to this than met the eye.More than one smelt a rat -in fact a number of rats tbh and very few thought Hanratty committed that crime.

[Graham]

The Intuition Of Janet Gregsten

Oddly enough I was only this morning refreshing my aged memory with regard to the odd episode when it was claimed Mrs Gregsten spotted a man she felt was her husband's killer.

From what I gather reading Foot and Woffinden, Mrs G had little or nothing to do with this episode - it was all supposed to be Ewer's work, along with some dubious 'journalism' by reporters George Hollingberry and Bernard Jordan. Jordan then went and tipped off his pal Peter Duffy of The Daily Sketch who promptly concocted an article which, not to beat about the bush, is utter bollocks. Read his article in Woffinden, Pages 273 - 276 paperback edition. Foot doesn't reproduce the article - in fact, he doesn't discuss the incident in any great depth - and Miller doesn't mention it at all, which I take as a measure of what he thought about it.

That Ewer went to the police about the 'incident' is true. That the police interviewed the shopkeepers in the Swiss Cottage arcade is true. That Ewer knew Louise Anderson and discussed this incident and the A6 Case at large is true. But the police took no statements from anyone, for the simple reason that the name 'Ryan' meant nothing to them and they weren't prepared to carry out their own inquiries. It is [U]not[U] true, as has been claimed in the past, that it was this incident that alerted the police to the fact that 'Ryan' was actually James Hanratty. Over the years both Ewer and Mrs G vehemently denied the story, describing it as total nonsense coming from the imagination of journalists.

Another strange event in a case which, the more I read, discuss and think about it, becomes yet stranger.......

Graham

[NickB]

Referring to the Swiss Cottage sighting, Paul Foot wrote in The Guardian, Oct 10th 1994:
"Mrs Gregsten assures me, and I believe her utterly, that she never had any 'flash of intuition' about Hanratty. ‘It was all rubbish as far as I was concerned’, she said."

[Natalie Severn]

That Ewer went to the police about the 'incident' is true. That the police interviewed the shopkeepers in the Swiss Cottage arcade is true.

Graham

Thanks for that Graham. however.....
It most certainly is true that William Ewer followed a man about on the Finchley Road-[not far from Charles France's] and in Swiss Cottage just 8 days after the murder and that the man was James Hanratty .The date Mr William Ewer did his sleuthing happened to be the 1st September 1961-the co-incidence being that this was the day immediately after Valerie changed her description from a man with 'dark eyes' [like the man she first wrongly identified as The A6 murderer ]a man named Michael Clark and he had ,like Valerie's identikit-ie the one Valerie had helped to put together on 26th August dark eyes and was not a man with "large icy blue,saucer like eyes'.Be that as it may ,the very next day September 1st ,William Ewer had no sooner sat down in this coffee bar in the Finchley Road which was about 50 yards from his Umbrella / Antiques shop [ and a good 50 miles from where the murder happened ],than, blow me down, he spotted James Hanratty in a smart blue suit but with this extraordinary pair of blue saucer like eyes "that looked like he had a carbunkle on his face" [oh do get off]and without further ado he decided to follow him because he thought [quote]that there might be a possibility that this was the man the police were looking for in connection with the murder and who answered Valerie Storie's [changed] description he had been given[the day before] .It was at this point Mr Ewer made a bit of a pest of himself according to the Man in the photographers shop [an ex policeman himself] whose shop was the next one where Hanratty appeared to go .Anyway Mr Ewer insisted he be shown the back of the shop where he maybe thought Hanratty might have gone and apparently the photography man didn't care for being pushed past either and Mr Ewer became rather 'irritated' [page 380 Woffinden]. Satisfied this was NOT where Hanratty had gone almost at once Mr Ewer popped himself round to the florist shop next door where a startled Mrs Dorothy Morrell spotted his large frame peering through the steamed up windows of her shop as she was serving a young man who gave his name as Ryan-though he wanted flowers sent to his mum who was a Mrs Hanratty---which Mrs Morrell thought a bit odd.
Without further ado Mr William Ewer phoned the police---who came round to check.....but did nothing.
Strange coincidences all round really!