James Hanratty

James Hanratty

A letter to the home secretary saying ‘I did it’ would be enough to warrant a stay of execution wouldn’t you think? Especially when that man had precise details of the murder and knew things only a murderer or someone on the inside could.

But not if the then Conservative Home Secretary had anything to do with it. And so James Hanratty was executed – the eighth to last person to be hanged in England.

He was found guilty of the now infamous A6 murder, in which Michael Gregson was murdered, while his companion Valerie Storie was left paralysed after having been raped and then shot five times.

The murder took place in the aptly named Deadman’s Hill just off the A6 and, despite having an alibi that placed him in Rhyl at the time of the murder, Hanratty was nevertheless branded a killer and sentenced to death. But the case wasn’t closed there.

According to a retrospective in the Independent, there was a whole cavalcade of celebrities who lent their support to the condemned man’s cause, among them ‘John Lennon and Yoko Ono produced a 40-minute documentary and even lent the Hanratty family their Rolls-Royce to visit the scene of the crime.’