by Robert Green
The crazy journey of Hilda’s car through Shrewsbury as she was apparently abducted was the only part of the crime to be witnessed.
Rosalind Taylerson is joining traffic on the Column roundabout when, suddenly to her left, a white Renault 5 car speeds across in front of her. She brakes violently to avoid a collision. However, she gets a good view of the right-hand side of the male driver’s face. He is in his late twenties-early thirties, with short, light-brown hair and a clean-shaven, tidy appearance.
Pamela Bird is standing on the pavement next to the Monkmoor Road junction lights. She sees a Renault car swerving into the right-hand lane. It is a controlled, confident manoeuvre across three lanes of traffic. The car stops, giving her a chance to look inside. The driver is a man in his mid-to-late twenties. His shoulders are broader than the seat. Someone slumped in the front passenger seat appears to be an elderly woman because she is wearing a broad-brimmed, floppy hat, but the head is hidden. The car speeds off up Monkmoor Road before the lights turn green, skilfully avoiding on-coming traffic.
William Moseley and his wife are in a car in Monkmoor Road about to turn right on a green traffic light into Abbey Foregate. Suddenly, a small white car crosses in front of them from left to right, having jumped the lights. Moseley sees two occupants: the driver is stocky with big shoulders, and looks quite odd in such a small car. He is aged 35-40, with dark, shortish hair and neat sideburns, and is not wearing a seat belt. A small woman passenger seems to be leaning to her left.
The route taken by the ‘running man’, between 1.30-2.30pm on the Wednesday, was becoming clearer to the police. He had apparently retraced the car’s route in reverse. Almost 50 witnesses made statements that they had seen the man. Most agreed he was in his early to late thirties, tall and well built, dressed in greyish, mud-stained clothing and trainers, and he seemed tired and distressed. The last sighting was not far from the police station. The police considered the running man significant enough to stage a re-enactment ten days later, with a public appeal for more witnesses made at cinemas.
A key witness was the farmer who first reported Hilda’s car abandoned in Hunkington Lane – but his story was not being released.
Between 2-2.30pm on Wednesday 21 March, John Marsh is driving to his farmhouse in Hunkington Lane when he spots a small white Renault that appears to have crashed into a low bank. Even though he is accustomed to abandoned cars there, he walks back to examine it. He notices the front offside wheel is covered in soil. Further along the lane he finds where tyre marks have left deep ruts on the opposite verge. Marsh feels very uneasy about this car. He goes home and reports it to Shrewsbury police station. Concerned by the lack of response, at 5.20pm he phones his local policeman in Upton Magna.
Marsh was corroborated by his neighbour, John Rogers, who rode his horse past the car that afternoon. Rogers was adamant the offside was close enough to the bank to prevent the driver’s door from opening. Therefore the driver’s only exit was via the front passenger door – after pushing the semi-conscious passenger out?
Liz and I were exhausted and mentally drained after clearing Ravenscroft. One of the last items we packed was a small handmade calendar, hung above the telephone. Beneath ‘21 March’ Hilda had written: ‘12.45. Symondson’. If the police had taken prompt action by sending officers to her house after Marsh first reported her car around 2.30pm, they would have seen the calendar. If they had checked with the Symondsons – whose phone number was in Hilda’s address book close by – the search for Hilda could have begun well before nightfall. With help from dogs, she could have been found alive – as Cole admitted in a briefing to police at the time.
From the many letters and cards of condolence arriving to pay tribute to her, I was learning more about Hilda. Until then, I had never known the extent of her friendships with a wide variety of people from the different eras and interests of her life, stretching back to her schooldays and Cambridge.
Joan Tate, a local friend whom I got to know well, provided an antidote to media reports of Hilda with this vivid, forthright portrait that punctured the stereotypical descriptions of her:
… 78 years old [ancient and tottery], ex-rose grower [as if she spent her whole life growing roses], spinster [hmm], above all old.
Hilda Murrell was younger and more alert than many people half her age. Nor was she a tweedy old thing in sensible shoes. She had a great flair for attractive and original clothes and wore them with style. She had a great sense of humour, a sharp wit and an independence of mind… She was single all her life, uncluttered you might say, so was able to concentrate on what she considered important to the world, not just to herself.
Ruth Sinker reduced me to grateful tears with these observations:
Dear Robert, Hilda always called you that to me: she talked of you so often, & you obviously meant more to her, and gave her more happiness, than anyone else in the world. I hope this may be a help to you. What would have horrified her is that you should be the one to bear the main burden of this appalling business.
Among other things, when I was utterly lost after my husband died, she came & forced me to make a garden, dug most of it herself, & stocked it with plants… we had a real, & rare, communication of thoughts & ideas.
Ruth’s son Charles Sinker was a distinguished botanist and former director of the Field Studies Council, who later edited Hilda’s nature diaries for publication in 1987. In his obituary of her for The Times, he described her thus:
… a rose-grower of international repute, and an ardent conservationist. A highly intelligent and charmingly eccentric woman of strong opinions, she was loved and respected by a wide circle of friends. She was an authority on rose species, old varieties and miniature roses.
Her deep love and concern for the countryside and wildlife of the Welsh Marches made her an active founder-member of the Shropshire Conservation Trust, and she also worked with vigorous dedication for the Shropshire branch of the Council for the Protection of Rural England.
Her close friends remember her as a fierce but fundamentally gentle warrior, a Bunyan-like soul on a lonely and constant quest for the real path of the spirit. She was valiant for truth.
She died in tragic circumstances, alone in the empty countryside. It is an almost intolerable irony that a life so dedicated to peaceful pursuits, and to the pursuit of peace, should have been terminated by an act of mindless violence.
Charles’ text as sent to The Times also included this paragraph, which was omitted from the printed version:
In recent years she became involved in the campaign against what she saw as the unacceptable hazards of nuclear power generation … Because she did her homework and was unswervingly honest, her spoken and written arguments commanded respect. When she chose to deploy her charm as well as her trained intellect, the toughest chauvinist expert might well beware.
Joan and Clive Tate, who lived in a comfortable old town house in the mediaeval heart of Shrewsbury, were our wonderful hosts for this and many of my subsequent visits. Together they made a formidable intelligence-gathering team in my absence.
By the weekend the police had come up with an artist’s impression of the car driver and running man, considered to be the same person. Described as between 25 and 40, powerfully built with broad shoulders, he had medium brown to dark-coloured hair, neatly groomed with a slight fringe, clean-shaven with a narrow face and sallow complexion. He was wearing either a grey suit or grey trousers with a grey-blue jacket and training shoes.
My growing concerns were now being voiced openly by others. Why had there been such a delay between the first report of Hilda’s abandoned car at 2.30pm and finding her body in the copse? Police statements glossed over what caused the delay.
At 6pm on Wednesday 21 March, PC Paul Davies comes on duty on his rural beat in the village of Upton Magna, about two miles south of Hunkington. He follows up a phone call 40 minutes earlier from local farmer John Marsh. His fellow rural beat officer, PC Robert Eades, picks him up in th
eir shared police vehicle.
By 6.20pm, around sunset, they reach the reported Renault 5. Eades finds the car is unlocked and opens the front passenger door. There are no keys in the ignition and no sign of any loose wires. In the boot he finds a bag of peat and a large grapefruit.
Meanwhile, Davies checks the identity of the car’s owner from the Police National Computer. Within minutes they know it is Hilda’s, that she is 78 years old, and where she lives. In the gathering dusk they briefly check over the hedge, see no one in the field, and assume she has gone for help. They decide the car is not causing an obstruction or danger to other vehicles, so they leave the scene at 6.30pm. A duty officer in Shrewsbury police station phones Hilda’s home: there is no reply. No further action is taken.
John Marsh was making no secret to friends that he reported the car twice that afternoon and again on Thursday and Friday. His cleaning woman remembered hearing him angrily berating the police on Thursday: ‘Get that car off my land!’
In April Joan Tate tipped me off that Marsh reported his farmworkers also saw two strange men in the field near the car on Thursday. Much more disturbingly, he added ‘on the Friday, the place was swarming with police’ and they told him ‘it was a murder hunt’. Did they know, as later confirmed by Marsh’s son, David, that no workers would be working there that day? Were these Special Branch, working independently of West Mercia Police who always claimed they did not begin searching for Hilda until the Saturday morning? However, an officer apparently visited Ravenscroft on Friday evening.
At 6pm on Friday 23 March PC Davies phones Shrewsbury police station from Upton Magna to be told that Marsh has made yet another call about Hilda’s car. He tries phoning her home, but there is still no reply. He returns to the car: it is as he left it on Wednesday. Taking the initiative, he decides to visit 52 Sutton Road.
By the time he arrives at 7pm, it is almost dark, and raining. He reverses his patrol car into the drive and gets out. He sees a light through curtains across a downstairs window, then notices the side door facing the road is wide open. He knocks: no answer. Walking round to the front of the house, he rings the bell: silence. He notes curtains and shutters are closed across windows either side of the front porch.
He enters the kitchen through the open side door. He calls out but there is no response. The light is on and he sees the table covered in papers, and also a handbag. Deciding nothing is suspicious he concludes Miss Murrell must have ‘popped out’ to the shops.
Without her handbag or purse, leaving her door wide open, and on foot because her car is still stuck out at Hunkington?
Davies decides not to go further into the house and retreats to the side door, which he first thinks has been blown open by the wind. He sees no key in the lock. Then he has to pull the door hard several times before it closes properly.
He checks the garden by torchlight but finds no one. As he drives away, he radios Shrewsbury police station at 7.20pm, requesting that someone contact the house again. Several phone calls are made until midnight, with no reply. The station duty officer decides it is too late to persist in case the occupant has returned. He arranges for an early shift officer, PC Lane, to visit at first light the next day.
Police reluctance to explain their actions prompted suggestions they were ‘instructed’ to do nothing. I was ready to believe these early conspiracy theories because of my initial instincts and Hilda’s last letter to me. It was increasingly difficult to accept that the murder had been committed by a local burglar. The police theory seemed to raise too many questions:
Would a burglar not escape immediately he heard a car on the shingle drive – especially as Hilda had briefly entered the kitchen to leave her basket before visiting Mary O’Connor?
Would a burglar abduct an elderly woman in her car?
Would a burglar not have taken jewellery and other valuables, or at least her chequebook and card – as well as the £47 cash?
Would a local burglar have taken a busy route through town and past the police station? The quickest and quietest way to open country was a right turn, not left, out of the drive.
Would an assailant who had beaten and stabbed an old but articulate woman not make sure she was dead before abandoning her? Or far more likely, would he not simply do so in her house?
The Shrewsbury underworld was equally incredulous. Micky Bridgewater, one of nearly a hundred burglars questioned by the police, said publicly he was convinced that a local thief was not responsible. A burglar would never normally abduct his victim, nor stay in the house if he disturbed the owner: ‘I’d be through the window and gone as fast as I could.’ He was confident that, had it been a Shrewsbury man, he would have heard about it through the local criminal grapevine. He would have been straight on the phone to the police and ‘grassed on him – because you don’t hurt an old girl living on her own’.
I was thoroughly alarmed by the next story I heard via Joan and Clive Tate – not from the police.
On Thursday 22 March at around 3.30pm, local landowner Ian Scott is in Moat Copse at Hunkington with his dogs – just over 24 hours after Hilda’s abduction. He wants to fell most of the poplars. He inspects each tree – 170 of them – before returning to his home at Somerwood Farm nearby.
On Monday 26 March, Scott contacts Shrewsbury police station. He is concerned about reports that Hilda has died in Moat Copse the previous Wednesday afternoon. He tells the police ‘categorically’ that she was not in the copse when he was there 24 hours later. He explains that he must have walked within a yard of where her body was found – yet he neither saw her nor any item of clothing. He says he would have seen a dead rabbit, let alone a body.
Scott’s report convinced me that this was a much more complicated and sinister case than the police were admitting.
After an exhausting and traumatic week in Shropshire, Liz and I had to go home and back to work.
CHAPTER 3
MORE THAN A BURGLARY GONE WRONG
When Gerard Morgan-Grenville phoned on 2 April 1984, I recognised his name from Hilda’s last letter in which she asked me to get her draft Sizewell paper to him ‘just in case of anything happening’ to her.
He told me he had made a statement to the police about a half-hour phone call with Hilda ‘a few weeks’ before she was murdered. ‘Hilda phoned me late one evening, and seemed unusually agitated and anxious – to the extent that my wife summoned me out of my bath. I recall getting very cold standing dripping wet with just a towel round me.’ Her last words were: ‘If they don’t get me first, I want the world to know that at least one old woman has seen through their lies.’ He had never heard her speak like that. For the first time, she sounded ‘rather desperate’.
Was this confirmation of my gut reaction when I first heard Hilda was missing, that ‘they’ had ‘got’ her? The police dismissed this disturbing evidence because he could provide no corroboration other than his wife’s, and there was no mention of the call in Hilda’s diary. Morgan-Grenville agreed to meet me the next day at his home in Wales. My return to Dorset had lasted all of two days.
I pulled up outside a magnificent old fortified manor house overlooking the market town of Crickhowell in the southern Welsh Black Mountains. Morgan-Grenville had all the qualifications for membership of the British ‘Establishment’ – old Etonian, former Guards officer, Countryside Commissioner with friends in high places, including Cabinet ministers who were regular weekend house party guests. Despite this, it seems he experienced something of a similar mid-life crisis to mine, committing himself to admirable ecological causes.
Our meeting was affable. Although he could not specify the date of Hilda’s last, agitated phone call to him, her 1982-84 diaries record that they were communicating intensively. For example, between the end of June and July 1983 they phoned each other nine times, and exchanged seven letters. On 12 March 1984 Hilda complained in her diary:
Tel. bill £52.90 – the largest I have ever had. Must limit talk with Robert, Gerard…
For February her diary records two long calls to me – but only one to him, on 11 February:
I tel. G.M.-G. & told him about reading papers. He said it would be much more effective if I were to read it (this is clear enough). He thought I would find it ‘encouraging’. That’s about the last view I take of such an enterprise.
Her concern about her record phone bill offers circumstantial evidence that she must have made more calls to Morgan-Grenville later in February, but chose not to mention them. She recorded that a letter from him arrived on 16 March – about a week before her body was found, and two weeks before he heard of her death. The entry reads:
Nice letter from Gerard Morgan-Grenville, he has discussed my paper with Peter Bunyard, it will stand up on its own and will make a greater impact if it comes from an individual than if it were part of say, the Ecoropa case. This was always my point. Wishes me good luck. I shall need it.
Earlier entries suggest she often phoned him in the evening after receiving a letter. Did she not write about her final, distressed phone conversation with him because she wanted her diary to survive?
During my meeting with Morgan-Grenville, my naval career inevitably came up in conversation. He casually drew my attention to a review copy of a book on his desk, The Sinking of the Belgrano, by Arthur Gavshon and Desmond Rice. It became a best-selling account of how, on 2 May 1982, in a hiatus in the Falklands War, the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano was torpedoed by the British nuclear submarine HMS Conqueror, with the loss of 321 Argentine sailors. This controversial attack gave Thatcher the full-blooded war she desperately needed to salvage her political career.