Conclusion

Exercise 3:

Consider for a moment that the DNA evidence had been available in the 1962 trial.

1. What story might the prosecution have told? 2. What story, or stories, might Hanratty and his defence team have told?

Conclusion

In this chapter we have sought to show that the vigorous and sustained campaigning for Hanratty’s innocence may be partly understood by turning to the storytelling model of adjudication. The lack of a coherent story to explain Hanratty’s motivation and guilt was for a long time (at least up until the results of the DNA evidence in 2001) argued to refl ect a gross miscarriage of justice. Indeed, even in the face of the DNA evidence, Hanratty’s supporters continued to believe in his innocence and argued that the newly discovered evidence was a result of cross- contamination ( Milmo, 2014 ). This perhaps tells us something important: despite the DNA evidence, a man who seemingly had none of the requisites to make a behavioural progression from theft and burglary to abduction, rape and murder simply could not be understood in the absence of a plausible story. However, it is more than this. The A6 murder was fraught with complexities arising from contradictions and coincidences throughout the investigation, not least the discovery that Alphon had stayed in the same hotel where the empty cartridge cases were found, that Storie admitted he bore a resemblance to her assailant, and that he confessed to the crime. Indeed, the strong belief in Alphon’s guilt was further fuelled by his visit to the Hanratty family asking if he could compensate them for what had happened to their son ( Foot, 1971 ). The Hanratty case is exceptionally unique in that the absence of motive and a plausible story in the prosecution’s case was accompanied by another person’s confession. For Hanratty’s defenders, Alphon’s confession ultimately made sense of the lack of a story to explain Hanratty’s guilt. However, as Griffi n (2013 ) argued, a juror’s construction of a story that fi lls in the gaps in the evidence may lead to bias and erroneous judgments and, indeed, not all isolated pieces of evidence can fi t neatly into a story or necessarily be connected in a way that arrives at the truth. Perhaps when it comes to the case of Hanratty, Malcolm’s (1999 : 26) observation about the truth may be particularly relevant: ‘truth is messy, incoherent, aimless, boring, absurd … [it] does not make a good story; that’s why we have art’.