§ Miss Lestorasked the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether he now intends to hold a public inquiry into the conviction of James Hanratty for the A6 murder.
§ Mr. Roy JenkinsI have considered with great care the representations made to me about this case.
Mr. Peter Louis Alphon has withdrawn his earlier confession that he committed the murder of which Hanratty was convicted. His involvement in the case was an issue at Hanratty's trial, and neither his confession nor other allegations about his part in the case are supported by new material of substance.
Material has been submitted about Hanratty's claim that he was in Rhyl on 22nd and 23rd August, 1961, the date on which the murder took place. At my request Detective Chief Superintendent J. D. Nimmo of the Manchester City Police, who had not previously had any connection with the case, has made detailed and exhaustive investigations covering all possible lines of enquiry into the alibi.
This alibi was also an issue at the trial. It turned largely on identification (as did the case against Hanratty at the trial), and retrospective statements about identification cannot easily be given greater weight than those made with fresh recollection at the time of the trial, over five years ago. These difficulties could be set aside only if Mr. Nimmo's investigations had turned up some new evidence 3W of substance which raised material doubts about the original statements.
Mr. Nimmo's thorough investigations have not had that result. He has found nothing to strengthen the evidence called at the trial on Hanratty's behalf and no further evidence which, if put before the jury, might have influenced the verdict. The only witness from Rhyl who now appears to give direct confirmation of the alibi is a lady who claims that she saw Hanratty in Rhyl for a few minutes on the evening of 22nd August, 1961. But the defence, after interviewing her during the trial, decided not to call her as a witness; after the trial she was shown photographs of Hanratty by the defence and made a statement in which she declined to give a definite identification. When she was seen by Mr. Nimmo, she at first maintained that she had given a definite identification to the defence in 1962. Mr. Nimmo's conclusion (with which I agree) is that her firm identification of Hanratty is of recent origin and is in all the circumstances unreliable. None of the other Rhyl witnesses claims a positive identification relating to a particular date.
I have accordingly decided that there are no grounds for taking any further action in this case.