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The A6 Murder

1 July

A Morris Minor similar to the one Michael had borrowed from his aunt.
James Hanratty

The case discussed is The A6 Murder, a.k.a the murder of Michael Gregsten and the attempted murder of Valerie Storie. Joe (the lackey sitting in the corner) explains the DNA evidence and Sandra talks about why her mum thinks she has brain damage. Sandra got her information from The Telegraphs obituary on Valerie Storie, a documentary called "Horizon the A6 murder" and wikipedia. Joe got his information from wikipedia (the morris minor photo and the photo of James Hanratty is also from there, you can find it here) as well as a BBC News article written by Peter Gould.

Audio transcript

Midweek Murders contains graphic and explicit content, listener discretion is advised.

Okay should we do this shit?

Probably should, otherwise you're gonna have like three hours of bullshit.

Yeah.

And by bullshit I mean conversation, lovely catching up.

It's wednesday my dudes and you're listening to midweek murders, which means that it's time to talk about crime. I'm your host Sandra and....

Oh shit was that me?

Yeah.

I'm Joe. I don't know what I was meant to say, you left me, you bashed me into a corner on that one.

I am your host Sandra and, I said and really passive aggressively.

Okay, here we go. We're your hosts Sandra and Joe.

No I'm your host Sandra, and I'm the lackey that sits in the corner. Herdigurr.

Okay, let's do it again. It's wednesday my dudes and you're listening to midweek murders. Murdersh.

Murdersh, with Sean Connery. [Laughter] Also, every time you say it's wednesday my dudes, I'm really struggling. My dudes! Okay, from the top! All right everyone take a break, get some coffee, we'll be back in five. [Laughter] It's wednesday my dudes and you're listening to midweek murders, it's time to talk about crime with your hosts Sandra and Joe [Music]

I had much more technical know-how than...

Yeah, let's just ease into that insult shall we. Okay. Good way to start. One minute in, and you've already slandered your co-host, it's gonna be a good one listeners!

The case we're going to discuss today is the A6 murder, which I found particularly interesting. Do you want me to do the introduction?

Sure, take it away.

So I got my information from the telegraph and their obituary on Valerie Storie when she died, because there was not a lot of information from the victims, which I found weird. And also horizon the A6 murder documentary.

And I also got my information from wikipedia, I also got my information from the wiki wah, wikipedia. A BBC news article written in 2010 by a Mr Peter Gould.

Knows how to write an article, I'll tell you that. So Valerie Storie was an assistant at the road research laboratory where she met mike's, mike, michael.

Really? Michael very, very common name Michael. Shouldn't really be struggling with that one.

No, I read, I wrote Mike and then I said Mike, Michael. Where she met Mike Gregston, who was a scientist at the road research laboratory and they had their first date on december 1957. And what it said was that they had shared interests such as cars, concerts, the theater, and serious music. Which i still don't know what that means.

Oh yeah, you don't want any of this relaxed music.

What the fuck is serious music?

Uh people that don't do it for a hobby. [Laughter] If you're to make music you've got to do it one hundred percent. I don't know if that's like... Yeah like if our jingle is anything to go by that's a 100 % proven statement of fact.

I actually really like our jingle, I think that's the best part. Gregsten left his wife in 1959, she was pregnant. In march 1961 he sold his car because of financial troubles and borrowed his aunts morris minor classic, and in august 20..

20 tooth.

Is that a word 20 tooth?

No.

22nd. [Laughter]

Him and valerie was in the car, they had gone to a pub before, and then they went into the car, and then they drove off to a place where they felt was kind of secluded and had sex. And then after dressing a gunman knocked on their window and he said "this is a hold up, I'm a desperate man". They drove around after that for hours, some say like almost six hours or more than six hours. And he chatted insistently, no insisted...

Incessantly.

He was chattering all the time, and he had a very distinctive cockney accent. During this discussion, which like mostly consists of him lamenting about things, and like giving them directions and then changing his mind, and then changing his mind again, and was like: "yeah we're gonna go this way, that way".

I think it's quite important to mention also that in almost every single documented explanation of this case people make note of his accent, and how he would pronounce specific words. So "think", words like "think" he would pronounce with an f. Fink. I think that's quite important to note at this stage of the story.

Yeah, he did have a cockney accent which, I couldn't find a video or a audio recording of his accent.

It's a bit like: "how you doing, what we're doing today mate. You're going down the docks, no, I'm not going down the docks, I'm going down the apples and pears. I've got a monkey to spend".

Did I tell you about the the one time where I had a problem with the flat? I don't remember what it was but there was something wrong that I had to email...

Probably the Swedish immigrants living in it.

Me. That I had to tell the landlord about, so it was probably something big. And then there was a person coming around and there was... This was maybe in the first year that I lived here, and he talked to me. He came knocking on my door, I had no preparation for it, I didn't know that he was gonna come. And he talked to me and I couldn't understand a word that he was saying. And I think he had a cockney accent as well, and I was...

Did he have his tools in his sky rocket?

Well, I understand you when you say those words, but I didn't...

Didn't even know what a sky rocket is.

No, what is it?

Exactly. It's cockney rhyming slang init.

Sky rocket for...

Pocket.

Oh okay.

Apples and pears, stairs. James Blunt, cunt. [Laughter]

But james blunt is very funny on twitter.

Yeah, opinions may vary.

No, he is, he's really funny...

Other musicians are available. [Laughter] He did once make someone... No wait, that's not true. He took... He served in the military and took his guitar with him, and strapped it to the side of his tank while he was driving through a war zone.

Why?

It's a fun little James Blunt fact for you. I was going to say that he made someone get out of the tank so that he would have room inside the tank for the guitar, but that's just pure fabrication.

That's not at all what we deal with. Hehe. We do.

So they drove around for hours and he directed them into Bedfordshire on the A6, and they stopped on his direction at a lay by at deadman's hill. At 3 am he shoots Michael Gregsten twice in the head and...

Yes sir, he does.

And then he forces Valerie Storie to show him how the car's gears work, and then he rapes Valerie Storie, and then he pretends that he's walking away but then he gets back and shoots her five times in the chest area and the neck.

So he shoots at her seven times but only five of them hit.

Yeah.

For the pedants out there who are cross-referencing.

At the first shot or the second, I don't remember, she does pretend to be dead, and then he comes back and shoots her five more times.

And she becomes paralyzed from the neck down.

Yes, and the thing that I would like to note here is that I found her particularly inspiring because she did like try to fight him. And also when he knocked on the window and said: "I'm a desperate man, this is a hold up" she said to michael like: "drive off", but he didn't. But I do feel like she did really, really fight. Which is not like...

Sorry, go on.

No I mean like, it's not like a... A trauma response is different every time, and you can't count on it being like productive. But she was extremely smart during that whole time.

Yeah so she she was also instructed to remove Michael Gregsten from the car, which is why she was outside when she was shot herself. And before she was shot, she again attempted to negotiate with Hanratty in terms of money and secrecy, and he could take the car and he could have all of the cash that they had on them, it wouldn't be a problem, she wouldn't report him. But it obviously wasn't enough to change his mind.

And she also fought him before being raped, and got his handgun out of his hand, and then he took it back. She was much more in her own self, or did much more than I think anybody would do.

So the Scotland Yard got on the case, and on the documentary... Did you watch the documentary?

I did not.

I don't want to be a dick, but their choices of music was extremely weird.

Did they play Hey Ya?

They had like...

[Sings Hey Ya!]

They had like a sequence, they were searching around the car with like, you know, metal detectors and whatever. And they played like this really upbeat music, and I was like: "this is weird". But he forced Valerie Storie to show him the gears and the lights and everything, how the car worked. He drove off and then they found the car, the police officers found the car. They searched inside the car, they didn't find prints, they didn't find blood, they didn't find hairs, nothing that would like point to the killer...

Can I just read the paragraph on the wikipedia?

Mhm.

Okay, so it says in the evening of thursday the 24th of august the murder weapon a 0.38 revolver was discovered under the backseat of a 36A london bus, fully loaded and wiped clean of fingerprints. With the gun was a handkerchief, which provided DNA evidence many years later. The policsh. The policsh? Sean Connery is back. The police issued an appeal to boarding housekeepers to report any unusual or suspicious guests. The manager of the Alexandra Court Hotel reported a man who had locked himself in his room for five days after the murder, and the police picked him up. The suspect falsely identified himself as Frederick Durrant, he was actually Peter Alphon, a drifter surviving on an inheritance. Alphon claimed he had spent the evening of the 22nd of august with his mother, and the following night at the Vienna Hotel Maida Vale, the police quickly confirmed this and Alphon was released.

The problem with that was that they had zeroed in on the suspect, and then they noticed that he probably wasn't the guy. So they tried to find another suspect, but I think he was.... He had given his name as something else than James Hanratty.

Yeah, Ryan. It was like James Ryan.

Yeah, so at the first stage they did provide an identity parade. Which is weird for me as a Swedish person, I'm like: "what is an identity parade?". And they had provided that for Valerie Storie, and she had picked out an entirely different person than Peter Alphon and then they were like: "well probably this isn't the person". So they looked at the other people staying at the hotel and they picked up James Hanratty, which was under pseudonym. And she picked him out, after like 15 to 20 minutes, after hearing their voices.

The order of events is the murder, they then go and speak to the hoteliers around the local area and ask if there are any suspicious suspects. The hotelier says that Hanratty was staying in the basement, but Alphon was in a room, and he was in there for five days completely locked up after the murder. That's when Alphon becomes primary suspect. Then they do the identity parade, the police state publicly that Alphon is the primary target, he's the person they think is responsible for the murder. The identity parade doesn't match Alphon, she picks Hanratty. Then the hotelier changes his story and says: "no actually, it was Hanratty that was staying in the basement room. The only reason I told you it was Alphon was because I wanted to help your case".

Well no, that's not entirely true. Because the first identity parade Valerie Storie picks out a person that was a volunteer for the identity parade. She doesn't...

So it's after the identity parade, and where they get Hanratty to say "be quiet, I'm thinking" in his accent. So whatever identity parade that is, whether it's 1, 2, 25 or 30.

It's the second one.

My point was, it doesn't matter which identity parade is, the point is the identity parades make the hotelier change his story.

Yeah, and after hearing the voices, and after like 15 to 20 minutes of deliberating, she said Hanratty is the culprit. So after that, the police zero in on James Hanratty, and they singled him out as the perpetrator. So James Hanratty and his family says that he had nothing to do with it, but before this James Hanratty had been a petty criminal. He also had been diagnosed as a psychopath twice in his life.

In his prison stints, yeah.

Yeah, at his school the nuns said that he was not intelligent enough to learn anything. I also read statements from his former classmates and such that said that he was not dumb, he was illiterate, he never learned how to read and such. But they also said that he was mostly lazy, and also popular because he would buy his classmates like candy and such. And I'm like, well that's relatable, I also buy my friendships, but it's not like it says much...

Not quite as a disguise for your psychopathy.

No I feel like it's not like a thing that can say that "well he was a really good guy". No he wasn't, he just bought his friendships. Which again, relatable.

I'd still suspect you of murder if you were a suspect.

Which is also funny, because on the wikipedia it said that James Hanratty had brain damage. He was in a coma for 10 hours following a bicycle accident, and this is very common for serial killers. I'm not saying that he has to be a serial killer obviously, because I've had like seven to nine concussions. And my mom is like that's why you can't remember anything. But also I remember when we went... When I went to visit you in munich, we went to the egyptian museum and I was like "uh yeah and this happened to that ruler, and that happened to that ruler, and the pharaoh of this period was blah blah blah blah blah". I just think my mom says that I have brain damage because I don't remember much of my childhood. But I think I just remember other things. I don't remember why people would visit Salisbury, but I remember like facts about ancient civilizations, and I remember Harry Potter trivia, I just don't remember much of my childhood. Well a lot of serial killers do have brain damage, so maybe that's like a thing.

Maybe that's something to look forward to.

I mean like, maybe he had brain damage from his bicycle accident but...

Remember kids, always wear a helmet.

I mean that it's a link between him and others, killers, that they do have recorded brain damage, like hospitalized brain damage. He might have changed, and their insistence that he was not a criminal is a bit weird. He was a criminal, he had been when he got into that car. Which we assume is true at this point. He said "I have been on the run for five months". James Hanratty at that time had been out of jail for four months. It does kind of make sense. He also got in the car wearing a three-piece suit and a handkerchief over his face, so she could see his eyes, his eyebrows and part of his nose, but she couldn't see anything else.

I did watch a clip on youtube where they interviewed Peter Alphon and he said that "well I did it", and the interviewer keeps like pressing him on the statement from the victim, Valerie Storie, that was like: "well she said that he had blue eyes". He was like "well nobody has blue eyes, I've never met anyone with blue eyes, big blue eyes".

FYI for the readers, I have blue eyes.

And also the interviewer had blue eyes at the time, and he was like "well I have blue eyes". And he was like "well I did it", and he keeps pressing him on the key points, being like: "Valerie said that the perpetrator had a cockney accent". He was like hmm...

"Nobody's got a cockney accent". Apologies to any cockney listeners.

He kept claiming that he had done it years and years after James Hanratty was hanged for this.

He kept claiming that until the 70s, didn't he? Something like that, in 1976 he was still insisting that it was him that did it.

Yeah which I feel a bit like... The interviewer said that he was sick exhibitionist, that he just wanted the credit for it. The fact that they stayed at the same hotel is weird, the fact that he was at the pub where Valerie and Michael went before getting into the car is weird. But I don't think that the cockney accent, that was the main identifier of her perpetrator. And like, also the fact that a friend to James Hanratty said that James said that the best way to hide stolen goods is beneath a seat on the 36 bus, or any bus, I don't know. But they did find the murder weapon and handkerchief underneath a seat in the bus.

Yes they do did.

After watching the documentary and reading about it, I feel like, why did they check the bus garage and the 36A bus?

They checked the bus because the hotelier gave specific evidence that said a strange acting person had specifically requested the bus route of a 36 bus. So his statement to the police was only about the 36 bus, but the actual request was about a 36A, so I assume they checked all of that line of buses. Probably. On that proviso of evidence.

James Hanratty was one of the last people to be hanged or put to death by the british government. And he said "I'm innocent, you need to prove my innocence" to his dad. And his dad and his brother and his mom tried to do that, but I also feel like... I totally relate with Valerie Storie, she said in her obituary, she said that she didn't hold any ill will to the Hanratty family. But she did find it very untasteful that they kept trying to prove his innocence, which I feel like is the most british statement of all time. Like "I'm pissed, but I'm gonna say that this is very untasteful".

So I think it's quite key to know that Hanratty was actually prosecuted on very limited evidence, that wouldn't pass in a judiciary system in today's world. So the gun that they found was completely wiped clean of DNA and fingerprints, so there was no link there to Hanratty at all. The only link between the murder weapon and Hanratty was the evidence of the hotelier, who said that Hanratty had stayed in the room where they found the shell casings, but he'd also changed his story multiple times which would make him an incredible witness. And then also the identity parade which, as you mentioned, came down to the fact of a verbal statement where she correlated his accent to what she remembered. In today's society an identity parade is not admissible in a court of law, you can't use that as evidence. But this was enough in the 1960s to sentence a man to death. Just on his accent.

Which is like, really good that they don't have the death sentence anymore. But also his parents they had this extreme...

Incredulity.

They just didn't believe anything that the doctor said, the nuns said. And then when he got into his criminal career they were like "well he's not a psychopath" because they just didn't believe it. His dad quit his job to start a window cleaning business to keep him out of his criminal life. It feels like they just didn't believe what society was telling them about their own son. He was diagnosed as a psychopath twice before this happened and...

In separate institutions as well. It wasn't the same person diagnosing him either.

No, I do agree with you on the fact that he shouldn't have been put the death under the law at the time, because they didn't have enough evidence. But also 40 years later they did say that like, the evidence on the handkerchief and the evidence on Valerie Storie's knickers was the same person. And it was the only male DNA profile that they found.

Yeah, so the DNA evidence is quite interesting. So because the Hanratty estate didn't let this drop, and they kept on protesting, and they took it to the court of appeal or some kind of international court, I don't know, and they had massive following John Lennon and Yoko Ono all joined in on this "Hanratty is innocent, let's get his name cleared etc etc". Hanratty's mother and brother actually provided the police with DNA samples, in the expectation that this would aid his exoneration. What they actually found was the DNA of the mother and the brother showed an incredibly strong familial link with the DNA that was recovered at the crime scene, which is the DNA that was recovered from the handkerchief and from Valerie Storie's knickers. Now DNA evidence even back then... So the case happened in the 50s and elongated through the 60s, and DNA profiling really come into its prime in the 1980s in the UK, so it wasn't until the 1980s that this was possible to review. So like twenty, thirty years after the case they were still fighting to say "no, Hanratty is innocent". The DNA that the mother and the brother provided was two and a half million times more likely to come from James Hanratty than it was from any other person. Now that in itself would usually be enough to implicate a crime in modern day society, but it was also enough for them to exhume Hanratty's body in 2001. So the legal system takes an absolute age to act on anything, so they recovered mucus on the handkerchief and they recovered the semen from the underwear of Valerie Storie, and they both proved an exact match for Hanratty's exhumed DNA, which is basically guilty. There's almost no way to refute this evidence, and yet they still manage to find a way to protest it and say this evidence isn't reliable.

Yeah, I think the solicitors from the Hanratty family said that the DNA evidence has to be contamination from the fact that James Hanratty's stuff was in the same box that they kept the knickers and the handkerchief. But also the scientists in 1997 or like 2000's said that there can be cross contamination because of the lax transports blah blah blah. But also, there can't actually be a question about who's guilty, seeing as the only male DNA profile that they found on the handkerchief and on the knickers was from a single male. They couldn't find any other male DNA.

Yeah, their entire... So the defense solicitors lawyers, whatever you want to call them, apologies for anyone in the legal profession. Their argument against this DNA evidence was that they were long held pieces of evidence, and anyone with any scientific background knows that DNA degrades over time, so these specimens weren't stored in adequate storage conditions to prolong the life of DNA. And also that it was all transported, like you said, in the same box. However, in order to counter that, and the solicitor said this themselves, if you can eradicate the issue of cross-contamination this evidence is condemning. And that was a statement said by their defense lawyer, so this is the lawyer hired by the Hanratty's to clear Hanratty's name, he said if you can clear the issue of cross-contamination we have no defense. The handkerchief showed one set of DNA, and that DNA was an exact match for James Hanratty. The underwear from Valerie Storie showed two sets of DNA. One DNA set was an exact match for James Hanratty, the second set of DNA was from Michael Gregsten. So you would perfectly expect Michael Gregsten's DNA to be on that underwear given that they were in a relationship.

She did say that they had sex before the gunman came. But the scientists also said that the DNA, the semen, on the underwear weren't a match to Michael.

Was a match to James Hanratty, yeah. So yeah, the way that DNA analysis works is so precise and so specific to your reference sample that it's almost... It's almost impossible to get a false positive result. The only way that you get a false positive result from modern day, and modern day means anything from the 2000s onward, when they developed PCR, polymerase chain reaction DNA analysis, is by identical twins. And as far as we're aware James Hanratty had no identical twin. So there's no way that the DNA match that was found in the semen on the underwear could not have come from James Hanratty.

Looking at the trial from now, I would say that he wouldn't have gotten sentenced because they didn't have enough evidence. But then in 2002 they did, I would say, conclusively prove that he was the perpetrator. And when people say that "well he was just a minor offense kind of guy, like he... he wasn't like a serial killer blah blah blah".

It is quite interesting that all of James Hanratty's minor offenses were to do with vehicle crime. It does pose a question as to if he was a regular carjacker, how he didn't know how to drive what the americans call stick shift or a manual car, that the Morris Minor would have been.

Yeah that's why people say that Peter is the offender, because he couldn't drive.

Yeah he didn't have that carjacking experience. But then with the DNA evidence it's... It's irrefutable. There's no, there's no arguing.

Yeah. But people still argue. But I still feel like, if James was the carjacker, that would have explained why he thought they were in St... Well he thought they were in Watford when they were in St Albans.

Yeah, when they were in St Albans, yeah.

Because he couldn't read the road signs.

Yeah, and if he wasn't local to the area he wouldn't know where he was going anyway.

If he didn't have that kind of experience with that kind of car, or if he didn't know where he was, maybe he was also stressed because he shot...

Had just murdered someone.

Yeah, he shot Michael Gregsten in the head twice, point blank.

From point blank range, yeah.

Yeah. I just want to say in conclusion that Valerie Storie became president of her local women's institute, she helped organize transports for disabled people in her community, and she lived a full life after this. James Hanratty was executed, which is not a thing that we do now in britain. Should we say bye?

Are we done?

Do you want to say anything else about that?

I've got some more notes on palomaris reaction, but I don't really want to go into it, because I fucking hate it.

Do you think there would be any chance that he would be not guilty?

No.

Okay, then that's fair enough.

I think it's irrefutable that Mr Hanratty was guilty of murder, attempted murder, rape, vehicle abduction. That's not the legal term for whatever it is when you hijack someone, hashtag not a lawyer. I, yeah... From my point of view there is no way that anybody could argue that James Hanratty is innocent of the A6 murder.

Not now, no. I feel like we're lucky that he was actually guilty.

We're lucky that he was found guilty on the circumstantial evidence, because on the scientific evidence that was proven at a later date it was supported. But it very much comes down to the question of what kind of evidence should be admissible in court. And I think we're very much in a better place now because there are very strict regulations about what evidence can be admissible... And it's cases like this, where you've got two prime suspects, that modern day policing cannot accept eyewitness reports, and identity parades.

No eyewitness reports and identity parades should definitely 100 percent be not admissible, because of what we know about psychology today.

Yeah and personal bias, and leading questions, and all of these kind of psychological bases. It's really concerning that only 50 years ago a man was hanged to death on circumstantial evidence.

Yeah.

Okay, thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of midweek murders.

Catch you next week!

Bye!

Topics
  • James Hanratty
  • Michael Gregsten
  • Valerie Storie
  • A6 murder
  • true crime comedy podcasts
  • UK podcasts
  • famous british crime cases
  • DNA evidence
  • psychopaths
  • 1960s murders
  • abductions
  • survival stories
  • british executions
  • escalating criminal behaviour
  • identity parades
  • PCR
  • Carjackings
  • brain damage in serial killers
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