The A6 murder is a crime which many believe led to a major United Kingdom.

In August 1961 Michael Gregsten and his lover Valerie Storie were kidnapped and driven over 50 miles to Deadman's Hill, a layby off the A6 road between Luton and Bedford. There Gregsten was shot twice and killed instantly. Storie was raped, shot 5 times, left for dead but survived, paralysed from the waist down. The killer escaped by driving away erratically in Gregsten's borrowed car.

The first suspect was Peter Alphon, a travelling salesman, who had behaved strangely in the period following the crime. He had no alibi for the time in question. However, at an identity parade, Storie picked out another man known to be innocent.

The next suspect was a 25_year old petty criminal, James Hanratty. Storie picked him from an identity parade from her hospital bed, having heard the parade members speak a particular phrase. Mostly on the basis of this identification, Hanratty was charged with the killing. Other witnesses identified Hanratty as the erratic driver of the getaway car. Gun cartridges from the murder weapon were found in a room which had been stayed in by a known alias of Hanratty.

There was no other evidence to link Hanratty with the crime. Though a career criminal, he had no record for violence, let alone for firearms. Valerie Storie testified that the kidnapper had problems driving an unknown car and navigating across north-west London, yet Hanratty was a top-class driver who was born and raised in that area of the city. At his trial he panicked over an alibi and changed his story. Even so the jury were out for a record time before convicting Hanratty, to the clear surprise of the trial judge, Mr Justice Gorman.

Hanratty was executed at Bedford on April 4, 1962, but the controversy over the case never went away. Peter Alphon confessed on more than one occasion to have killed Gregsten and claimed that it was part of a conspiracy to frame Hanratty.

Several investigators, including Jean Justice, Lord Russell of Liverpool and journalist Paul Foot, concluded that Hanratty was innocent. It turned out that on 24 occasions, police had concealed material evidence from Hanratty's defence team. In 1992, on the 30th anniversary of Hanratty's execution, Foot claimed that Alphon, then living in a run-down hotel in the King's Cross area of London, was still confessing to the crime.

Successive governments refused to hold a public inquiry into the affair and the campaign to clear Hanratty's name continued. On March 22, 2001 his body was exhumed for DNA analysis, against the wishes of his family. In 2002, the Court of Appeal found that "... the DNA evidence establishes beyond doubt that James Hanratty was the murderer". However, critics continue to dispute the verdict, claiming that the samples of Valerie Storie's clothing used for analysis were old and had been stored in unsatisfactory conditions.

References

Pre_2002

• Lord Russell of Liverpool Deadman's Hill _ was Hanratty guilty? (1962)
• Louis Blom_Cooper The A6 Murder (1963)
• Jean Justice Murder Vs Murder _ the English legal system and the A6 case (1964)
• Paul Foot Who Killed Hanratty? (1972)
• Bob Woffinden Hanratty: The Final Verdict (1999) ISBN 0330353012.
• Leonard Miller Shadows of Deadman's Hill (2001) ISBN 1902878221.

External links

Post_2002

• BBC news report from 2002 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/2093650.stm)
• Judgment of the Court of Appeal, 2002 (http://www.bailii.org/cgi_bin/markup.cgi?doc=/ew/cases/EWCA/Crim/2002/1141.html&query=hanratty&method=all)