James Hanratty

Valerie Storie died on 26 March 2016 aged 77 in the Cippenham house where she had been born.

Peter Alphon died in January 2009 after a fall at his home. The following month Richard Ingrams, a close friend and colleague of Paul Foot, wrote a brief article about Alphon's part in the case in The Independent. Ingrams said that Alphon, in conversations with Foot and others, had spoken "obsessively about the case, frequently incriminating himself". Ingrams said that Foot continued until his own death in 2004 to believe in Hanratty's alibi, despite the DNA tests of 2002.

The decision by the Court of Appeal included a discussion of the handling of the various items of evidence involved. The argument for contamination was dismissed as "fanciful" by the judges, who concluded that the "DNA evidence, standing alone, is certain proof of guilt". Modern testing of DNA from Hanratty's exhumed corpse and members of his family convinced Court of Appeal judges in 2002 that Hanratty's guilt was proved "beyond doubt". However, they further went on to note, in the summary of their judgement:

At the appeal hearing in 2002, Michael Mansfield QC, the barrister acting for the Hanratty family, said that a vial, among surviving evidential items, had been broken which could account for contamination. However, he admitted that, if contamination could be excluded, the DNA evidence demonstrated that James Hanratty had committed the murder and rape. He argued that the evidence may have been contaminated because of lax handling procedures.

Following the DNA evidence in 2002, Storie earned over £40,000 for her participation in various TV and newspaper documentaries. All of this money was anonymously donated to Slough Mobility Transport for the purchase of two new vehicles, one of which was named 'Valerie'.

James Hanratty's body was exhumed in 2001 to extract his DNA. His DNA was compared with other DNA extracted from, firstly, mucus preserved in the handkerchief within which the murder weapon had been found wrapped and, secondly, semen preserved in the underwear worn by Storie when she was raped. DNA samples from both sources exactly matched James Hanratty's DNA. No DNA other than Hanratty's was found on the handkerchief in which the murder weapon had been found wrapped. The other piece of evidence tested, a sample from Valerie Storie's underwear, provided two different sets of male DNA - one that corresponded to Hanratty; and one which the Court of Appeal interpreted as coming from Gregsten.

Her testimony was critical in securing a guilty verdict, but this was questioned by many who felt the supporting evidence too weak to justify conviction, and Hanratty's brother fought for decades to have the verdict overturned. In 1997, a police inquiry concluded he was wrongfully convicted and the case was sent to the Court of Appeal, which ruled in 2002 that a DNA test conclusively proved Hanratty's guilt beyond any doubt.

On 19 March 1997, the Home Office referred the case to the new Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) where Baden Skitt chaired the investigation.

While some of the original items of physical evidence were destroyed, the sample from Miss Storie's underwear had been discovered in 1991 and, in late-1997, the handkerchief was subsequently found in the possession of the Berkshire police. DNA was donated by Hanratty's mother and brother, which they expected to exonerate him when compared with DNA extracted from surviving evidence. Results from testing in June 1999 were said to be strong evidence of a familial match - the evidential DNA was "two and a half million times more likely" to belong to James Hanratty than to anyone else. The Court of Appeal did not have the power to order an exhumation of Hanratty's body, but Lord Chief Justice Harry Woolf decided that this was desirable "in the interests of justice".

During the 1990s, increasingly advanced DNA analysis techniques became widely available.

A BBC Panorama episode in 1966 included extracts from the Jean Justice tapes. Alphon stuck to his confession and continued to repeat it until about 1971, when he withdrew his claims. However, Bob Woffinden wrote that there was only one occasion when Justice and Jeremy Fox supported Alphon financially, when Fox paid a hotel bill for him. Fox split from Jean Justice in the 1970s, but continued the fight to clear Hanratty until his death in 1999, three years before the Court of Appeal upheld the conviction on the basis of the DNA evidence retrieved from Hanratty's corpse.

Gregsten was a scientist at the Road Research Laboratory in Slough. Storie was an assistant at the same laboratory and had been having an affair with Gregsten, although this did not become public knowledge until Storie wrote a series of articles for the popular Today magazine in June 1962, five months after the trial. Gregsten had separated from his wife Janet (d. 1995) who lived with their two children at Abbots Langley. Storie, an only child, lived with her parents in Cippenham, a suburb of Slough.

Hanratty's capital murder trial started at Bedfordshire Assizes on 22 January 1962 before Mr Justice Gorman and a jury; it was originally to have been heard at the Old Bailey, as requested by Hanratty's defence counsel, Michael Sherrard QC, later CBE. It is not known why the trial was moved to Bedford, just nine miles from the murder scene, although this afforded easier access for the now-paraplegic Valerie Storie, who had received treatment at nearby Stoke Mandeville Hospital. The prosecution was led by Graham Swanwick QC, later a High Court judge. Among the prosecution team at the trial was Geoffrey Lane, who was subsequently appointed Lord Chief Justice. The trial lasted 21 days, the longest in English legal history up to that time.

Eventually, the jury retired. After six hours they returned to ask the judge for the definition of 'reasonable doubt'. After nine hours, they returned to the court and entered a unanimous verdict of guilty. Hanratty's appeal was dismissed on 13 March, and despite a petition signed by more than 90,000 people, Hanratty was hanged by executioner Harry Allen at Bedford on 4 April 1962, still protesting his innocence. Hanratty was initially buried in the grounds of Bedford Gaol, but, on 22 February 1966, his remains were exhumed and re-interred in a grave at Watford, later shared with his aunt.

During 1962, the case caught the interest of London businessman Jean Justice, the son of a Belgian diplomat and partner of barrister Jeremy Fox. Justice encouraged the initially reluctant Fox to help him expose what he believed to be the fabrication of the case against Hanratty. The pair tracked down Peter Alphon in February 1962, and began a long friendship with him for the purposes of establishing the truth. Justice attended the trial every day, being driven there by his chauffeur, and Alphon accompanied him from time to time. Justice took the precaution of making thorough notes, and recording all telephone conversations with Alphon. When Alphon found out, he flew into a rage. He started to bombard his own solicitor with threatening phone calls and letters.

At about 6:45am on 23 August 1961, the body of Michael John Gregsten (28 December 1924 - 23 August 1961) was discovered in a lay-by on the A6 road at Deadman's Hill, near the Bedfordshire village of Clophill, by John Kerr, an Oxford undergraduate conducting a traffic census. Lying next to Gregsten, semi-conscious, was Gregsten's mistress, Valerie Jean Storie (24 November 1938 – 26 March 2016). Gregsten had been shot twice in the head with a .38 revolver at point blank range; Storie had been raped, and then shot with the same weapon, four times in the left shoulder and once in the neck, leaving her paralysed below the shoulders. Kerr alerted Sydney Burton, a farm labourer, who flagged down two cars and asked the drivers to call an ambulance.

Late in the evening of Tuesday, 22 August 1961, Valerie Storie was sitting alongside Gregsten in his car in a cornfield at Dorney Reach, Buckinghamshire. A man tapped on the driver's door window; when Gregsten wound it down, a large black revolver was thrust into his face, and a cockney voice said, "This is a hold-up, I am a desperate man, I have been on the run for four months. If you do as I tell you, you will be all right." The man got into the back of the car and told Gregsten to drive further into the field, then stop. The man then kept them there for two hours, chattering to them incessantly. Storie recalled that he pronounced "things" as "fings" and "think" as "fink".

Hanratty's initial defence was that he had been in Liverpool on the day of the murder, but then, halfway through the trial, he changed part of his story, claiming that he had in fact been in Rhyl, North Wales. At that time there was no conclusive forensic evidence to connect Hanratty with the car or the murder scene. Although Hanratty's blood group (O) was the same as the murderer's, it was a fairly common blood type shared by 36% of the British population, including Peter Alphon and, apart from Storie's identification, there was no other evidence that Hanratty had ever been in the Maidenhead area. Whilst he was a professional thief, he had no convictions for violence, and apparently had never possessed a gun, although he later admitted to the police that he had attempted to obtain one after his last release from prison in March 1961. Moreover, the murderer drove badly, whereas Hanratty was an experienced car thief.

In March 1958, aged 21, at the County of London Sessions, Hanratty was again convicted of car theft, and of driving while disqualified, and sentenced to three years' corrective training at Wandsworth Prison, and then to Maidstone Prison. While at Maidstone, Hanratty came to the attention of a researcher who lived and worked alongside the inmates; he was later to remark upon Hanratty’s "gross social and emotional immaturity". After a failed escape attempt, Hanratty was transferred to Camp Hill Prison, Isle of Wight. He attempted to escape that facility as well, and was sent to Strangeways Prison, Manchester. Transferred briefly to Durham Prison, he was returned to Strangeways where, having served his full term, he was released in March 1961, aged 24.

On 3 July 1957, aged 20, five months after his release from Wormwood Scrubs, Hanratty was sentenced at Brighton Magistrates' Court to six months' imprisonment (he served four) for a variety of motoring offences, including theft of a motor vehicle and driving without a licence. He was sent to Walton Prison, Liverpool, where he was again identified as a psychopath.

The car Gregsten and Storie had been using at the time of the attack, a grey four-door 1956 Morris Minor registration 847 BHN, was found abandoned behind Redbridge tube station in Essex later that evening. The car had been jointly owned by Gregsten's mother and aunt, and lent to the couple who, according to Storie, were planning to attend a car rally.

In October 1955, aged 18, Hanratty appeared at the County of Middlesex Sessions, where he was sentenced to two terms of two years' imprisonment, to run concurrently, for housebreaking and theft. Despatched to the youth wing of Wormwood Scrubs, he slashed his wrists; placed in the prison hospital, he was declared a 'potential psychopath'. After his release, his father resigned his job as dustman with Wembley council to start a window cleaning business with his son in a futile attempt to keep him away from crime.

Hanratty was sent to recuperate at an aunt's home in Bedford, a place he and his brother Michael had visited as children on holiday. Hanratty found a job there driving a mechanical shovel for the company of Green Brothers, which made breeze blocks, and remained with the firm for three years. It was about 1954 that Hanratty became attracted to Soho, where he frequented various clubs and other haunts of the criminal underworld.

On 7 September 1954, aged 17, Hanratty appeared before Harrow Magistrates' where he was placed on probation for taking a motor vehicle without consent, and for driving without a licence or insurance. Shortly afterwards, he began psychiatric treatment as an outpatient at the Portman Clinic.

Hanratty's early years were troubled. Long before his trial for the A6 murder, he had already been described as a retard, a psychopath, and a pathological liar. By the age of 11 he had been declared ineducable at St James Catholic High School, Burnt Oak, Barnet, although his parents steadfastly refused to accept he was in any way mentally deficient and successfully resisted attempts to have him placed in a special school. After leaving the school in 1951 at the age of 15, Hanratty, still illiterate, joined the Public Cleansing Department of Wembley Borough Council as a refuse sorter. In July of the following year he fell from his bicycle, injuring his head and remaining unconscious for 10 hours; he was admitted to Wembley Hospital, where he remained for nine days.

James Hanratty (4 October 1936 – 4 April 1962), also known as the A6 Murderer, was a British criminal who was one of the final eight people in the UK to be executed before capital punishment was effectively abolished. He was hanged at Bedford Jail on 4 April 1962, after being convicted of the murder of scientist Michael Gregsten, aged 36, who was shot dead in a car on the A6 at Deadman's Hill, near Clophill, Bedfordshire in August 1961. Gregsten's girlfriend, Valerie Storie, was raped, shot five times, and left paralysed.

James Hanratty was born on 4 October 1936 in Farnborough, Kent, the eldest of four sons of James Francis Hanratty (1907–1978) and his wife Mary Ann Hanratty (1917–1999). By 1937, the family had moved to Wembley in northwest London.