The facts
At about
06:45 on 23 August 1961, the body of Michael J. Gregsten (b. 28 December 1924) was
discovered in a lay-by on the A6 at Deadman's Hill, near the Bedfordshire
village of Clophill; he had been shot twice in the head with a .38 revolver at point
blank range. Lying next to him semi-conscious was his mistress Valerie Storie
(b. 24 November 1938). She had been raped and then shot, four times in the left
shoulder and once in the neck, leaving her paralysed below the shoulders.
The evening
after the murder, the car Gregsten and Storie had been in at the time, a grey
four-door 1956 Morris Minor registration 847 BHN, was found abandoned behind Redbridge
tube station in Essex. The car had been jointly owned by Gregsten's mother and
aunt, and lent to the couple who, according to Storie, were 'planning a car
rally'.
Gregsten was
a scientist at the Road Research Laboratory at Slough.
Storie was an assistant at the same laboratory and had been having an affair
with Gregsten, although this did not become public knowledge until much later.
Gregsten lived with his wife Janet and two children at Abbots
Langley, whither he had returned in December 1960 after living with Storie
for an unspecified period.
DNA evidence
and appeal in 2002
The case for Hanratty's innocence was pursued by his family as
well as by some of the opponents of capital punishment in the
United Kingdom, who maintained that Hanratty was innocent and sought to draw
attention to evidence that would cast doubt on the validity of his conviction.
However, following an appeal by his family, modern testing of
DNA from his
exhumed corpse and members of his family convinced Court of
Appeal judges in 2002 that his guilt was proved "beyond doubt". Paul Foot and
some other campaigners continued to believe in Hanratty's innocence and argued
that the DNA evidence could have been contaminated, noting that the small DNA
samples from items of clothing, kept in a police laboratory for over 40 years
"in conditions that do not satisfy modern evidential standards", had
had to be subjected to very new amplification techniques in order to yield any
genetic profile. However, no DNA other than Hanratty's was found on the evidence
tested, contrary to what would have been expected had the evidence indeed been
contaminated.
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