On the first day of the trial, a juror admitted to the judge that the mere mention of blood made him ill. Since the case before the court involved a brutal gunshot murder, he was hastily excused. After 21 trial days and 70 witnesses later, the remaining eleven jurors brought in their verdict, ending the longest—and one of the most spectacular—murder trials in British legal history. Found guilty and sentenced to hang next week for the murder of Michael Gregsten last summer was James Hanratty, 25, a petty criminal and mental defective.
"Dear Mum." The case began on an August night in a cornfield off the highway, 20 miles west of London. There Gregsten, a married, 36-year-old research physicist, was parked with his girl friend, Valerie Storie, 23, a lab assistant. Suddenly a gun-toting man forced his way into the car and ordered Gregsten off on a wild drive through the countryside. Finally tiring of the joyride, the assailant had Gregsten pull the car off the A6 highway at a roadside parking area known as Deadman's Hill. There the attacker, startled by a sudden movement from Gregsten, shot him to death. Then he made the hysterical Valerie get into the back seat and raped her. Before fleeing, he fired seven shots at her leaving her paralyzed from the waist down. She described the murderer clearly to the police as a neatly dressed young man with wide, staring eyes and a cockney's inability to pronounce the letters th.
From descriptions by Valerie and a witness who remembered seeing an erratic driver the morning after the murder, police were able to construct likenesses of the murderer from an Identi-Kit.* Among the suspects identified was a man named James Ryan. Checking this lead, Scotland Yard found a traveling salesman in Ireland who reported that he had written some postcards to England for a near illiterate acquaintance named Jimmy Ryan. One card in particular had seemed odd; it was addressed to a Mrs. Mary Hanratty, and it began: "Dear Mum."
From Scotland Yard's records came the file on James Hanratty, alias Jimmy Ryan. Mentally retarded from the age of four as a result of a World War II bomb blast, Hanratty had undergone brain surgery and electric-shock treatments, been in and out of reform school and prison. Out went the alarm to pick him up. One night in mid-October, police in the English coastal town of Blackpool on the Irish Sea nabbed him on a routine check of teen-age joints. Hanratty protested his innocence, but from a police line-up paraded before her hospital bed. Valerie Storie picked him out as the A6 murderer.
A Man Called E. The Crown's case rested on Valerie's identification. Vigorously, Hanratty's defense counsel tried to prove that she had been hysterically out of her senses the night of the murder and thus was unable to identify the murderer correctly. Taking the stand in his own behalf. Hanratty said that he had spent the night of the murder alone in a rooming house near Liverpool. He remembered that the house had a green bath in the attic, but he had not signed the guest register and could find no witness who could positively remember having seen him there. On his way to Liverpool, Hanratty claimed, he had traveled in a train compartment with a man who wore gold cuff links initialed with the letter E. Despite appeals from the defense, no E came forward to testify.