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 abolished.

[1] 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.

[1] The court ruled, in 2002, that subsequent DNA testing of surviving crime scene evidence conclusively proved Hanratty’s guilt beyond any doubt.

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.

The report made there acknowledged his unhappy home background (he claimed he was frightened of his mother and had no filial feelings towards his father) and his mental handicaps.

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.

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.

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.

After his release, his father resigned his job as dustman with Wembley council to start a window cleaning business with his son in an attempt to keep him away from crime.

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.

[17] 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.

When she refused, the man got out and forced her out of the car at gunpoint, pushing her on to the back seat, where he ordered her to undo her brassiere and remove her underwear before raping her.

[citation needed] In the evening of Thursday 24 August, the murder weapon, a .38 revolver, was discovered under the back seat of a 36A London bus, fully loaded and wiped clean of fingerprints.

On 29 August, Valerie Storie and another witness, Edward Blackhall, who had seen the driver of the Morris Minor, compiled an Identikit picture which was then released.

Valerie Storie did not recognise Alphon in an identity parade, and he was released four days later after being detained on a charge of assaulting Meike Dalal.

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.

[21] 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.

While 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.

The Police tracked down a Mrs Dinwoodie, who served in a sweetshop in Scotland Road, and who recalled a man like Hanratty asking for directions.

According to this, Hanratty had gone to Rhyl to sell a stolen watch to a 'fence', arriving there in the evening of Tuesday 22 August and staying in a boarding house near the railway line.

Private detectives tracked down a Mrs Grace Jones, a landlady with a guest house which had a green bath in the attic as described by Hanratty.

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.

[23] The 'A6 Defence Committee' was a self-appointed group of campaigners and activists, who included the journalist Paul Foot and the Labour politicians Fenner Brockway and Joan Lestor, the former and current MPs for the Eton & Slough constituency where Valerie Storie lived.

[26] During 1962, the case caught the interest of London businessman Jean Justice, the son of a Belgian diplomat and partner of barrister Jeremy Fox.

At the time of France's second suicide attempt in January, one of the letters he left was addressed to the coroner, in which he wrote 'I am of sound mind and body.

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.

[32][33] While some of the original items of physical evidence were destroyed, the sample from Storie's underwear had been discovered in 1991 and, in late 1997, the handkerchief was subsequently found in the possession of the Berkshire police.

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 other piece of evidence tested, a sample from 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.

[34][37][39]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.