Great Unsolved Crimes

by Rodney Castleden

  The jury took a long time – nearly ten hours – to come to the decision that Hanratty was guilty. The use of a gun in the murder was crucial. As the law stood at that time, if Hanratty had strangled or poisoned Michael Gregsten he would have been sentenced to life imprisonment; using a gun meant death. He was sentenced to death and, in spite of a petition for clemency bearing 28,000 signatures, he was hanged in Bedford Prison on 4 April 1962.

  The conviction and execution of James Hanratty were extremely controversial. Britain was phasing out capital punishment at the time, and Hanratty’s was one of only three executions that took place between 1961 and 1965, at which time hanging ceased altogether. Had the suspect been correctly identified? Had enough enquiries been made into the validity of Hanratty’s alibi? Had any motive been established for the murder? Had sufficient evidence altogether be gathered to justify a conviction, let alone an execution? Had alternative suspects like Alphon really been investigated properly? Hanratty himself stoutly denied that he was involved in any way with the murder, and went to the gallows protesting his innocence and pleading with his family to clear his name. Many people have campaigned to have the case reopened and get some of these questions answered.

  By the time the police check got round to checking Hanratty’s alibi they had already decided that he was the killer. They ran only a cursory check which confirmed that they were right. But shortly after the hanging, no fewer than fourteen people came forward to say that they had seen or spoken to Hanratty in Rhyl, and that the police had interviewed none of them. The police enquiries had led them to the Vienna Hotel, where Hanratty had certainly stayed. In the Vienna Hotel, the police found cartridge cases that connected the place to the murder scene. But Hanratty was not the only person who had stayed at the Vienna Hotel. As it turned out, it was for him an unlucky choice. It was a very unlucky coincidence that he chose to stay at the same hotel as the murderer. Also staying at the Vienna Hotel was Peter Louis Alphon, who up to that moment had been the police’s main suspect. Alphon was not identified by Valerie at an identification parade, but then neither really was Hanratty. But once the police had decided that Hanratty was the killer, further enquiries into Alphon were dropped.

  Unlike Hanratty, Alphon had no alibi at all for the night of the murder. He was a friend of Michael Gregsten’s wife and therefore had a previous connection with Michael and Valerie that Hanratty did not. Alphon later claimed that Mrs Gregsten had paid him £5000 to frighten the lovers into separating so that she could get her husband back. Here – at last – was a possible motive. Alphon pronounced the word ‘thinking’ as ‘finking’. He looked remarkably like the identikit picture.

  There was also the manner in which the Morris Minor was being driven as the murderer left the murder scene. Many witnesses saw the car as it drove away from the scene; they noticed it because it drew their attention. It was being driven very erratically. This is very peculiar if the murderer was Hanratty, because Hanratty was an experienced driver. Alphon, on the other hand, had not even passed his driving test, and is therefore far more likely to have been the driver that night.

  In a similar way, the personality of Alphon fits the events of the night better. Hanratty was a city character, sociable and well liked by the people he worked with; he had never shown any sign of psychological hang-ups. He does not seem very likely to have behaved in the neurotic and irrational way that the A6 killer behaved that night. Alphon on the other hand was neurotic, psychologically fragile, a petty criminal, a loner, roaming about with no proper job. Even the most rudimentary psychological profiling would have identified Alphon as far likelier to have committed the A6 murder than Hanratty. He also had an odd, distinctive way of speaking. His voice was recorded by investigators years later as he spoke about the A6 shootings – I have heard the tape – and the neurotic peculiarity of his speech fits Valerie’s observations.

  All this could have been established by the police in 1961. All this could have been presented in court to ensure that the right man went to the gallows. What was not available at the time was Alphon’s confession. It was not until many years later, when the events of that summer had preyed on his mind to such an extent that he wanted other people to know what had happened. He claimed in his confession that he was paid a large sum to ‘damage’ Valerie and Michael. What appears to have happened is that family friends seeking to help Mrs Gregsten by ending Michael’s affair with Valerie hired Alphon to surprise and frighten the lovers at Taplow Meadow, where there were known to meet. Maybe Alphon took the gun as a prop, to wave at Gregsten, knowing that it would thoroughly frighten him. Alphon’s fundamental instability as a person meant that he got carried away with his gangster role and the situation ran away with him. Maybe he didn’t know how to bring the frightening episode to a satisfactory close and panicked. The apparent lack of purpose to the attack is certainly consistent with this scenario. The story is unfortunately muddied by Alphon’s retraction later on. By the time Paul Foot interviewed him for his book Who killed Hanratty? He had thought better of his confession, perhaps fearing he would be put on trial.

  Whether there would have been a watertight case against Alphon is impossible to tell now, since the forensic trail has gone cold, but if all these facts had been made known to the jury at Hanratty’s trial it would have been clear that there was more than ‘reasonable doubt’ about Hanratty’s guilt. It was not a safe conviction.

  Immediately after the execution, many began to wonder whether justice really had been done. Even Mrs Gregsten, who had pointed the finger at Hanratty in the first place, began to have doubts. The gathering uncertainty led the British government further towards the abolition of hanging. At least if a man is given a life sentence for murder there remains the possibility of release and restitution; the mistake can be put right. There is no possibility of putting right a hanging.

  Over the years since the murder, Hanratty has increasingly looked like the wrong suspect, Alphon the right suspect. But very recently the situation has become startlingly more complicated with the emergence of some DNA evidence. In 1999, the Hanratty family, which has remained steadfastly convinced of Hanratty’s innocence throughout, won their fight to have his case reviewed.

  Thirty-seven years after Hanratty was hanged, it emerged that vital evidence that could have saved him from the gallows was deliberately suppressed by senior police officers at the time of his trial, presumably in order to secure a conviction. Hanratty’s brother Michael and his sister-in-law Maureen were shocked at the misconduct of the authorities. Because of this and the flaws in the identification process, the case was referred back to the Court of Appeal. Geoffrey Bindman, the Hanratty family’s solicitor at the time, commented that the amount of information not disclosed at the trial was substantial, enough to have saved Hanratty from conviction. The identification procedure was seriously flawed, because there was heavy dependence on voice identification and Hanratty was the only person with a London accent asked to speak in front of Valerie Storey. The Rhyl alibi was swept aside by the police, when there were fourteen people who had seen Hanratty or spoken to him in Rhyl at the time of the murder – fourteen potential witnesses for the defence who were studiously ignored by the police.

  Several books have been written about the A6 murder, starting with Who Killed Hanratty? by Paul Foot in 1971; the most recent exploration of the case is Bob Woffinden’s 1997 book Hanratty: the Final Verdict. The general view is that there was such intense revulsion at the crime that the authorities felt pushed to get a conviction at any price. When Roy Jenkins was Home Secretary in 1974, he thought there was sufficient justification to review the case and asked the lawyer Lewis Hawser to look into it. Hawser’s 1975 report said that there had been access to all the relevant evidence and that therefore the conviction had been safe. In other words, regardless of whether Hanratty was guilty or not, there had been no procedural errors in arriving at the verdict.

  Campaigners working for Hanratty’s exoneration made new representati
ons to the British Home Office in the 1990s. The case against Hanratty rested partly on the fact that he had been identified on the morning after the murder in the supposedly stolen Morris Minor by two men in Redbridge in East London. But what now emerged was that the stolen car had been spotted a very long way away, in Derbyshire, by as many as eleven people at the same time. The presence of the stolen Morris Minor in Derbyshire had even been formally reported to the police. The police elected not to pass this key information to the defence; it might, after all, have helped to get Hanratty off. This was part of the newly emerging suppressed evidence. Geoffrey Bindman, Paul Foot and Bob Woffinden were astonished to find that a significant amount of material had existed all along which could have helped Hanratty’s defence significantly but which had been deliberately withheld from his defence lawyers. Some of it was not shown to the prosecution team either, presumably for fear that the defence might gain access to it.

  The former Assistant Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police, Baden Skitt, led the enquiry and he too was shocked at the suppression of evidence. The Hanratty family were outraged. They now knew that key evidence had been deliberately concealed. Michael Hanratty said, ‘All this evidence has been locked away in Scotland Yard. They told us to come back for it in a hundred years. It is a disgrace. We’re worse than South Africa.’

  In 1991, the Bedfordshire Police allowed Bob Woffinden to see previously undisclosed files on the A6 murder. Baden Skitt’s report in addition revealed a significant fact about the Morris Minor. The recorded mileage shown on the clock was too low for Skillett’s sighting in Brentwood and Trower’s sighting in Redbridge Lane to have been sightings of the Morris Minor in which Gregsten died. There is no evidence that Skillet and Trower even saw the same Morris Minor as each other. The evidence against Hanratty had, in short, been ‘cooked’.

  The re-emerging evidence was the basis for a formal hearing in the Court of Appeal. A handkerchief Hanratty used to wrap up the gun was subjected to DNA testing. The DNA profile was compared with DNA samples from the Hanratty family. The apparent fit between the handkerchief and Hanratty seriously dented the claim that Hanratty was innocent, but the Hannratty family’s solicitor pointed out that the exhibits from the case had not been stored properly. At the time of the trial there had been no question of DNA testing – the technique had yet to be invented – and the exhibits had been stored together, unsealed. Clearly, there was a distinct possibility that Hanratty DNA from other exhibits had been transferred to the handkerchief. Over a period of thirty-nine years, the items had been handled over and over again. The evidence was, once again, but in a very different way, contaminated.

  The match between the handkerchief and Hanratty was in any case possible, not definite. As a result, it was decided that an exhumation of Hanratty’s body was necessary to resolve the question. If Hanratty’s guilt or innocence could be established by modern forensic means, then it should be.

  In March 2001, James Hanratty’s body was exhumed from Carpenter’s Park Cemetery near Bushey in Hertfordshire. DNA from his teeth was found to match two samples found at the scene of the crime (trial exhibits 26 and 35); one was on Valerie Storie’s underwear and the other was the handkerchief wrapped round the murder weapon, a .38 revolver. As a result of the DNA matching, the Court of Criminal Appeal ruled that Hanratty’s conviction was safe and that there were no grounds for a posthumous pardon. In other words, even though serious errors may have been made in the process of bringing Hanratty to justice, he was nevertheless the man who committed the crime, so justice was done.

  The Hanratty family remain unconvinced, though, for the same reasons as before. At the appeal hearing, the barrister acting for the Hanratty family, Michael Mansfield, argued that the exhibits were from the beginning never handled in a forensically sterile environment, and could easily have become cross-contaminated. During the trial at Bedford Assizes, the exhibits were regularly taken to and from court in the same boxes; the samples repeatedly came in contact with one another, including the samples of Valerie Storie’s and James Hanratty’s clothing. In that context, it would not be at all surprising if some of Hanratty’s DNA found its way onto the other trial exhibits, especially in the minute quantities that were actually present. Officers and witnesses took the exhibits and handled them freely; people were not to know at that time about the possibility of damaging the evidence, simply because no one knew about DNA. Michael Mansfield claimed that the exhibits had been handled in a lax way that frustrated modern scientific analysis. The contamination of the exhibits could be accounted for by the broken vial found among the exhibits.

  The forensic scientists who carried out the tests counter-argue that if Hanratty was not the killer, the killer’s DNA is unaccountably missing from the exhibits; no other man’s DNA was found. The Appeal judge, Lord Woolf, took the view of the forensic scientists: ‘In our judgement . . . the DNA evidence establishes beyond doubt that James Hanratty was the murderer.’

  But, if Hanratty did it, why on earth did he do it? And how did Mrs Gregsten identify him in a crowd at Blackpool? The A6 murder remains one of the greatest murder mysteries of modern times. The DNA breakthrough has opened a new phase in the controversy. Maybe further new techniques, not yet invented, will solve the mystery in the future. Let us hope so, for the sake of justice. Even if Hanratty was guilty of the crime, his trial was not a fair one. Significant evidence that he was in Rhyl at the time was deliberately suppressed by the police, and on that basis alone his trial must be regarded as a mistrial. Even if guilty, James Hanratty did not get justice. If innocent, he was the victim of a gross miscarriage of justice.

  The Murdered Sussex Schoolboy: Keith Lyon

  The still-unsolved murder of a Sussex schoolboy in 1967 is a classic cold case. After a few years, the trail evaporates and even the most conscientious detectives sense that the file has to be closed. The murder of Keith Lyon was one of those cases.

  Keith Lyon, who was twelve years old, was walking along a bridle way up Happy Valley, a small area of downland between Ovingdean and Woodingdean near Brighton in Sussex, to buy a geometry set for his homework when he was set upon by some youths and killed. His body was found on 6 May 1967 on the bridle path. He had been stabbed eleven times. The murder weapon, a kitchen knife, was found some days later a mile away in the grounds of a school. The knife was forensically tested at the time and it was found to carry traces of blood of Keith’s blood group and also traces of another blood group as well. It was not known who the second blood sample came from.

  The police questioned a number of people, and they had their suspects, but there was no evidence. The case petered out and then the material was boxed up and put into store.

  Recently some workmen were modernizing a sprinkler system in Brighton Police Station when, quite by chance, they uncovered the evidence from the Keith Lyon case locked in a basement. What they stumbled on was several boxes of items relating to the case. The collection had been lost for thirty-five years. When the evidence was re-examined, detectives realized that forensic tests devised since 1967 might reveal rather more than could have been hoped at the time. Among the finds in the boxes was the murder weapon, still stained with both Keith’s blood and the blood of another, unknown, person.

  With the advent of DNA profiling, it may at last be possible to tie the second blood sample to a particular individual, and the police believe that that person was the murderer.

  As Detective Inspector Bill Warner of Brighton and Hove City CID has commented, the murder happened so long ago that it is possible the murderer may be dead by now, but it may still be the case that his profile is on the National DNA Database. The door has opened on the possibility, even after all this time, that the killer of Keith Lyon may yet be brought to justice. It is a distinct possibility that the youth who so casually and brutally stabbed Keith to death went on to commit other crimes, which raises the chances of finding his DNA profile on the UK database. If, on the other hand, the youth was so shaken and a
ppalled by what he did that he never committed another offence, then his DNA will not appear in the records.

  Detective Inspector Warner said, ‘The most disturbing fact was we mislaid the exhibits. The case was reviewed several years after the initial inquiry and again in the mid-1970s. It was always thought that the knife had been mislaid somewhere. The significance of the find is that we have got the evidence now and we have got the chance of forensic retrieval to identify the offender.’

  Sussex detectives are now re-examining the list of original suspects in the case, to see if they can find a DNA match. They already know that one of the suspects has died. But, as DI Warner said, ‘provided we have his DNA, we can find out who did it.’ DNA has opened the door on clearing up this and tens of thousands of other cold cases – murders and other serious crimes that the police had previously lost hope of solving.

  Ten Years in San Francisco: The Zodiac Killings

  Sometimes journalists think up sensational nicknames for serial killers. The practice gives the unidentified killer an identity of sorts, or at least a persona – and it helps to animate the sequence of news stories. It was the press who invented the name ‘The Night Stalker’ for a Californian serial killer. It was the press who gave Peter Sutcliffe the name ‘The Yorkshire Ripper’. The killer who struck again and again in the San Francisco area for a decade beginning in 1968 thought up his own name. He was ‘Zodiac’. In the same way, Jack the Ripper invented his own persona. Zodiac had other points in common with Jack the Ripper, too. He sent the police clues and information in polite letters; he taunted them. He also went undetected, unidentified, uncaught, unconvicted, unpunished.

  For more than ten years Zodiac stalked the San Francisco area. The reign of terror started at Christmas in 1968. A couple of teenagers had drawn their car up in an open space next to a pump house in the Vallejo Hills above San Francisco. It was a favourite spot for lovers. David Faraday and Bettilou Jensen hardly noticed the cold on that chilly, cloudless and moonlit night. They were so involved in each other that they scarcely noticed another car pulling up ten feet away. Suddenly a bullet smashed through their rear window, showering them with broken glass, and then a second slammed into the bodywork. Bettilou instinctively jumped out of the car and started to run away. David put his hand on the door handle, preparing to follow her, when the gunman reached in through the open door window and shot him in the head. Then the gunman ran after Bettilou. She had only run about forty feet when he fired five shots at her. She fell, dead, and the gunman got back into his car and drove away.