The Ability to Kill (10 page)

She could hear the blood pumping from the wounds in Gregsten’s head. She pleaded with the gunman to get a doctor, or let her go for help. This produced more indecision. He replied: ‘Be quiet, will you, I’m thinking.’

She went on pleading and he repeated the sentence. Then, he took a piece of the laundry in the duffel bag and put it over the dying man’s face. As he did this, he said to Miss Storie: ‘Turn round and face me. I know your hands are free.’

They were indeed free, and she had been trying to conceal the fact from him. Now, she turned and faced him.

He told her to kiss him. She refused.

At that moment, the headlights of a car passing on the road lit up the gunman’s face.

‘This,’ Miss Storie said in her evidence, ‘was the first opportunity of really seeing what he looked like. He had very
large, pale blue, staring icy eyes. He seemed to have a pale face. I should imagine anyone should have, having just shot someone. He had jet brown hair, combed back with no parting. The light was only on his face for a few seconds as the vehicle went past, then we were in complete darkness again.’

Miss Storie admitted that her vision was poor without glasses; but, at that moment, she was wearing her glasses and could see well.

The gunman now forced her to kiss him. She noted that he was clean shaven.

He then ordered her to get into the back of the car with him. When she refused, he threatened to shoot her. ‘I will count five. If you haven’t got in, I will shoot.’

She got in. He threatened her again, made her take some clothing off, and then raped her. Her revulsion seemed to amuse him. ‘You haven’t had much sex, have you?’ he said when it was over.

He now made her help him drag Gregsten’s body out of the front seat, and show him how to start the car. He seemed about to drive off. She went to Gregsten’s body, which was lying on the concrete of the lay-by a few yards away.

The gunman got out of the car and came over to her. He said: ‘I think I had better hit you in the head or something to knock you out, or else you will go for help.’

Miss Storie promised that she would not do so and implored him to go. She gave him one of the pound notes she had previously hidden.

The gunman started to walk away, then suddenly turned and began shooting. He fired four shots at her, then reloaded the gun and fired six more. Of the ten shots, five hit her. One bullet lodged in the spine and paralysed her legs.

When the gunman moved her with his foot, she feigned death. Finally, he drove away.

It would have been understandable if, after the nightmare hours she had already lived through, Miss Storie had lost all ability to think. Yet, wounded and paralysed though she was, she realised that if she died, there would be no witness to what had happened. She tried to write a description of the gunman by forming letters with small stones on the concrete—‘blue eyes and brown hair.’ She failed because there were not enough stones within her reach; she could not move to get more. She called for help, but none came. She lay there with the dead Gregsten for the remainder of the night. At 6.40 in the morning, a labourer on his way to work heard her call and went for help.

The hunt for the gunman began. Detective Superintendent Acott of Scotland Yard took charge of the investigation.

That same day, a man telephoned the police and reported that the missing car was abandoned in Avondale Crescent, Ilford, forty-two miles from the final scene of the crime. The informant gave a name and address which later proved to be false; but the car was where he had said it was, and the seats were still bloodstained.

The following day, a cleaner working in the bus garage at Rye Lane in South London found a loaded .38 Enfield revolver and five boxes of ammunition under the rear seat of a 36A bus. Tests soon established that this was the murder weapon.

Miss Storie was in Bedford General Hospital in a critical condition and several days elapsed before she was able to amplify the first brief statements she had made to the police. On August 29, however, Scotland Yard issued two portraits built up with her help on the Identi-kit system.

Identi-kit is an American device, now widely used in criminal investigation. It consists of hundreds of transparencies each embodying a different facial characteristic. By
means of superimposition, a witness’s description is gradually translated into a visual statement which can be photographed.

After publication of the pictures, a number of men answering the description were questioned by Scotland Yard. Some four weeks later, on September 24, an identification parade was held in a ward at Guy’s Hospital, where Miss Storie was now recuperating after an operation to remove two of the bullets from a lung.

Among those in the parade was a man who bore a marked resemblance to one of the Identi-kit portraits, and who was about to be charged with causing ‘grievous bodily harm’ to another woman.

Miss Storie did not identify that man at the parade, though, in a discussion with a doctor and the police afterwards, she agreed that there might be a resemblance. During the parade, she had picked out another man known to be innocent.

On October 6, a man calling himself Jimmy Ryan telephoned Superintendent Acott at Scotland Yard.

The man’s real name was James Hanratty. He was twenty-five years old and already well known to the police. At school he had been considered unteachable. At fifteen he could neither read nor write. In 1952, an episode of amnesia had ended in his being diagnosed, after psychiatric examination in an institution, as a mental defective. He had become a burglar. At nineteen he had received further psychiatric treatment. The following year, while in prison, he had made a suicide attempt. Prison psychiatrists had described him then as a potential psychopath. During the months preceding the murder, he had burgled a number of houses in the Stanmore-Harrow area.

In his telephone conversation with Superintendent Acott, Hanratty said that he had heard that the police suspected him. He went on: ‘I want to talk to you and clear up this whole
thing, but I cannot come in there. I am very worried and don’t know what to do. I know you are the only one who can help me.… I know I have left my fingerprints at different places, and done different things, and the police want me. But I want to tell you, Mr Acott, that I did not do that A6 murder.’

The Superintendent tried to keep him talking, but Hanratty had had enough.

‘I’m so upset I don’t know what I’m doing and what I’m saying,’ he declared; ‘I’ve got a very bad head and suffer from blackouts and lose my memory. Look I will have to go now and think it over.’

The Superintendent tried again to persuade him to come in and make a statement. Hanratty hesitated.

‘I will phone you tonight between ten and twelve and tell you what I have decided,’ he replied. ‘I must go now. My head’s bad and I’ve got to think.’

He pronounced the word ‘think’ as ‘fink,’ as do a great many other Londoners.

Hanratty, again using the name Ryan, next called a newspaper, explained his problem to an assistant news editor and asked for advice. He said that he had an alibi for the night of the murder, that he had in fact been in Liverpool at the time with business friends, but that he could not involve them. The inference was that the business on which they had been engaged had been criminal. The news editor advised him to go to the police.

Superintendent Acott received a second telephone call. It was as unproductive as the first. Hanratty ended it by saying: ‘Now I must go, Mr Acott. I want to talk to you but you will catch me. I am going, Mr Acott.’

The following day he telephoned yet again, this time from Liverpool.

He said that the three friends who could prove his alibi for
the night of the murder refused to help him. ‘You can’t blame them because they are fences. You know what I mean, they receive jewellery.… I don’t know what to do.…’

The Superintendent said that he would have to have some corroboration from witnesses and asked for the names of the three men. Hanratty refused to give the names.

Five days later he was arrested in Blackpool. Again he refused to give the names of the three men. The Superintendent warned him of the seriousness of his position and told him that two empty cartridge cases had been found in a hotel room he had occupied on the night before the murder.
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Hanratty considered that this last fact completely cleared him, because, ‘I told you I have never had any bullets and never fired a gun.’ He appeared to feel that a simple denial on his part ought to be enough. As to the need for corroborative evidence of his whereabouts on the night of the murder, he said: ‘I am a very good gambler, Mr Acott. I have gambled all my life. I am going to gamble now. I am not going to name the three men. I can get out of this without them.’

He was mistaken.

On the morning after the murder two motorists in the Ilford area had noticed a grey Morris Minor being driven erratically and dangerously. One of the motorists had been sufficiently incensed to shout at the driver of the Morris; both had been close enough to see his face. At an identity parade both identified Hanratty. On the other hand, a passenger in one of the cars, who recalled that the driver of the Morris had had a ‘horrible smile,’ attended two identity parades and picked out a different man each time, neither of them Hanratty.

Miss Storie had by then been moved to the spinal injuries centre at Stoke Mandeville Hospital for further treatment.
On October 14 yet another identification parade was held. There were thirteen men in the parade, Hanratty among them.

On this occasion, Miss Storie asked that each man be told to say the sentence, ‘Be quiet will you, I’m thinking.’ After fifteen or twenty minutes, she identified Hanratty.

The following day he was charged with the murder of Gregsten.

His trial began at Bedfordshire Assizes on January 22, and lasted twenty-two days.

James Hanratty may or may not have been a mental defective in the medical sense of the term; he may or may not have been a psychopath; he was, without a doubt, a deeply stupid man. If he was guilty—and most probably he was—he made the prosecution’s task easier than it need have been. If he was innocent, he made his own counsel’s task infinitely more difficult, and contributed handsomely to his own destruction.

His story about the three men in Liverpool, whose names he knew and who could if they chose give him an alibi, was a lie. But he went on telling it after his arrest. He told it to his solicitor, and he told it to his defending counsel. He told it after the Magistrates’ Court hearing and his committal. It was not until early in February, after he had heard the prosecution’s case at his trial, that he let his legal advisers know that he had been deceiving them. He said that on the night in question he had really stayed in a bed-and-breakfast house at Rhyl in North Wales.

In the witness box, he explained himself this way: ‘I didn’t tell Superintendent Acott, because at that point I did not know the name of the street, the number of the house, or even the name of the people in the house. At that stage I knew that I was only wanted for interviewing, not for the actual A6 murder charge, which I found out later, or the truth would
have been told straight away. I know I made a terrible mistake by telling Superintendent Acott about these three men, but I have been advised that the truth only counts in this matter, and might I say here every word of that is the truth.’

His counsel then asked him: ‘Will you explain to my Lord and the jury why it was that after telling Mr Acott this story you persisted in it for so long?’

‘Because, my Lord, I am a man with a prison record,’ was the answer; ‘and I know that in such a trial as this it is very vital for a man once to change his evidence in such a serious trial. But I know inside of me, somewhere in Rhyl this house does exist, and by telling the truth these people will come to my assistance.’

Thanks to prompt and energetic inquiries made by the defence team, a Rhyl landlady was found who thought she remembered him. She ‘felt’ that he had stayed at her house on or about the date in question. She could not be certain though, and could not produce her visitors’ book for that time as it had been destroyed.

However, Hanratty did not
have
to prove an alibi. His defence was that they had the wrong man. The prosecution’s case for having the right man rested on Miss Storie’s identification of him at the parade of October 14, the identification of the two motorists, and on very little else. Prosecution efforts to connect him with the murder weapon, through the cartridge cases found in the hotel, were frustrated when the hotel manager, upon whose evidence the police had relied, proved to be a man with a long criminal record who admitted that he had lied in order to ‘help’ the police, and also confused Hanratty with another man.

With the annihilation of this witness the defence may well have felt that they were making headway. If so, they had reckoned without their client.

On the eighth day of the trial, the prosecution called upon a rather odd type of man to give evidence. He was twenty-four, and had, he readily admitted, a criminal record.

In November of the previous year he had been in Brixton Prison awaiting trial on a fraud charge. Hanratty had also been in the prison on remand at that time. The witness said that they had spoken to one another in the exercise yard on a number of occasions. Eventually, he said, Hanratty had told him that he (Hanratty) was the A6 killer, and had spoken of Miss Storie and how he had raped her. According to the ex-convict, Hanratty had also said that he was ‘sort of choked’ that Miss Storie was living, as she was the only witness against him.

The defence, of course, claimed that it was all a pack of lies. In his summing-up, the Judge advised the jury to approach this evidence ‘with care.’ It is possible to believe the ex-convict’s story nevertheless. A man of Hanratty’s mentality would be quite capable of telling a fellow prisoner that he was the ‘A6 killer’ simply in order to make himself seem important.

Certainly, the jury did not find Hanratty’s an easy case to decide. They were out almost ten hours. After six hours of deliberation, they sent a letter to the Judge requesting additional guidance. Its content is significant.