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The Tension Between Evidence and Storytelling in the Trial of James Hanratty I am not a man the court can approve of, but I am not a maniac of any kind.1
The crime At about 6.30 am on 23 August 1961, John Kerr, a student arriving to work on a traffic census on the A6 south of Bedford, saw the bodies of a man and a woman in a lay-by. When he got nearer, he found that the man was dead with two shots to the head; but the woman was still alive, although she had been shot five times, including once in the spine, which paralysed her for life. She identified herself as Valerie Storie and the dead man as Michael Gregsten. Kerr flagged down a car to ask the driver to call the emergency services. Once the police arrived, and given that Gregsten was dead, it fell to Storie to narrate – briefly at the scene and much more fully after she was recovering in hospital – what had happened and how she and Gregsten came to be in this lay-by. Gregsten (36) and Storie (22) both worked at the Road Research Laboratory in Slough (then in Buckinghamshire), some 60 miles from where they were found. They were having an affair (Gregsten was estranged from his wife) and on the previous evening they had driven a few miles from work for a drink in a pub at Taplow and from there to nearby Dorney Reach where they had parked in a cornfield. They were in Gregsten’s car, a grey Morris Minor (possibly having sexual intercourse, as forensic analysis 40 years later would suggest [Hanratty v Regina, 2002]), when at around 9.30 pm, a man approached their car, tapped on the window with a gun and said: 22
