BRITAIN: Britain's Court of Appeal yesterday dismissed a bid by family and campaigners to clear the name of James Hanratty, one of the last men hanged in Britain.
Lord Chief Justice Woolf, the country's top judge, ruled that DNA evidence taken from the hanged man's exhumed remains was "certain proof of James Hanratty's guilt".
But while the DNA alone was enough to convict, there had been ample corroborative evidence including Hanratty's manner of speech and the discovery of bullets in a room he had stayed in the night before the attack.
"The court concludes that this number of alleged coincidences mean they are not coincidences but provide overwhelming proof of the safety of the convictions from an evidential perspective," Lord Woolf said.
Hanratty was hanged 40 years ago after his conviction in 1962 for what became known as the "A6 Murder" in which scientist Michael Gregsten was shot and killed, and his mistress, Valerie Storie, raped, shot and left for dead.
During his trial - then the longest in British history - the prosecution said 25-year-old Hanratty had surprised the lovers in a cornfield and then forced them to drive to Deadman's Hill, near Bedford, central England, where he shot them.
The crime shook Britain, but doubts about his conviction arose soon after he was hanged and played a significant role in Britain's abolition of the death penalty three years later.
Protesting his innocence until his execution, Hanratty urged his family on the eve of his execution to clear his name.
All their previous attempts failed but when the latest appeal was heard last month by Lord Woolf and two other senior judges, the Hanratty family's Lawyer Michael Mansfield argued that James Hanratty had been denied a fair trial.
He claimed there had been "extensive and inexcusable non disclosure" by the police handling the case, and "malpractice on a substantial scale" by the late Det Supt Robert Acott who led the investigation.
Storie identified Hanratty after a police line-up and said she had no doubt he was the killer.
"It was the eyes. They looked at me and I looked at him. He knew perfectly well that I knew who he was," she told the makers of a Channel 4 documentary on the case. Hanratty's family argued that Storie only saw her attacker for a matter of seconds and had initially identified another man.