by Robert Green
Like Joan Tate, Gladys told me that Hilda always dressed stylishly when she went out, even to shop. She found it very odd that, when Hilda’s body was found she was in an old jumper, underneath a rough brown coat that she only wore for fetching coal. The old, green, moth-holed skirt found nearby was not the smart, brown, pleated tweed one she wore to visit Mary O’Connor. Her stockings were heavily darned, and her suspender belt was tattered and missing a rubber grommet. Now why would a panicking lone burglar have wasted time dressing her in different clothes?
Gladys also confided that the Hilda she knew would not have been intimidated by a thief. She may have been in her late seventies, but she was fit and spirited enough to kick and scratch any assailant – especially a short teenage boy. Three incidents recorded in Hilda’s 1969 diary support this:
[11 July] Found 2 boys in kitchen garden, couldn’t catch them but threatened them with imprisonment in cellar and starvation!!! They had been in strawberries and this was 2nd time.
[27 July] …arrived just in time to storm at 8-10 boys… They went out again at remarkable speed…
[15 August] Went down garden for lettuce – 3 boys, 1 up plum tree, another under it & another just getting over the fence. 2 of them were back over fence in a flash, the third just stood and I hit him several times. He thought of retaliating but saw the knife and decided against it.
Mrs Latter was surprised and impressed by Hilda’s physical strength and determined tenacity, and felt that, if Hilda found anyone in her house up to no good, she would have shown no fear as she was used to dealing with staff and workmen. She would have curtly challenged them and tried to phone the police.
Olga Evans, a magistrate friend of Hilda, recounted an incident to me. On 13 January 1984, when she returned Hilda from a lunch party, Hilda confided that her spare house key was missing from its hiding place. When the subject of possible burglary came up, Hilda declared: ‘I would never fight over my possessions – only my papers.’
In another attempt to show the investigation was making progress, a police photograph was released of the large kitchen knife found in a ditch alongside the hedge which was ‘believed’ to be the murder weapon. Soon after, DCI Furber and a Detective Constable Nick Partridge visited Liz and me at home in Dorset with the knife, which I recognised as coming from a set of three beside Hilda’s kitchen sink. Its blade was eight inches long, broadening from the tip to more than an inch thick at the hilt. Detailed forensic tests had been carried out, with no mention of results. Why had they taken so long to go public when the knife had been photographed within a week of the murder? I took the opportunity to enquire if the bread knife had been found – it had not. Also, they were now downplaying the sexual assault as only ‘incidental’ to the motive for the murder.
Early in July the police invited ridicule when they released a second, very different, artist’s impression of the wanted man. In the first image, based on Rosalind Taylerson’s evidence, the driver had been depicted as a fit-looking man with light brown hair. We were now asked to believe he was also thin-faced with staring eyes and unkempt, longer dark hair. As journalist Paul Foot observed in the satirical weekly Private Eye, ‘Here are two artist’s impressions of the man the police don’t want to find in the Hilda Murrell case.’
In early August, the inquest was postponed for a second time – and Hilda’s body was suddenly released to the family. We were furious, and suspicions grew. Apparently there were no facilities for long-term storage of bodies at Shrewsbury’s Copthorne Hospital. The decision had therefore been taken to hold a second autopsy by a Dr Gower. He confirmed the body was so badly decomposed that it should be disposed of as soon as possible. Why had Hilda’s body been allowed to get into such a state if it had been so important to preserve it? Was this more incompetence, or something else?
Dr Helen Payling Wright, Hilda’s friend and a former pathologist, later told me, ‘The most extraordinary thing was that they did a second post-mortem. You get nothing out of them.’ She was appalled that Hilda’s body had been allowed to deteriorate because Birmingham Medical School could have kept it deep frozen.
Abruptly we had to rearrange summer holidays and organise a funeral. On 25 August we were joined by close friends for a short service at Emstrey Crematorium in Shrewsbury. The police made no effort to pay their final respects, or update us. Three weeks later – and two days after I had presented her anti-nuclear paper at the Sizewell Inquiry – we carried Hilda’s ashes up the flank of Bwlch Maengwynedd in the Berwyn Mountains. We chose a grassy knoll strewn with chunks of quartz crystal, and built a glittering white cairn to mark the spot where we scattered the ashes, while a solitary raven soared and tumbled in aerial salute above us.
I had not publicised my conviction that her murder had been connected with the nuclear industry. Instead, I had concentrated on tidying and presenting Hilda’s paper at the Sizewell Inquiry.
On 13 September 1984, I found myself seated at the front of a large stage with my back to an 800-seat auditorium. The sides of the stage, accustomed to operatic divas, choirs and musicians, were now lined with lawyers behind tables; and the auditorium seats, normally packed with lovers of classical music and opera, were empty apart from a few towards the front taken by anti-nuclear campaigners. I was in Snape Maltings in Suffolk – a picturesque, old, white, weatherboard-clad building originally designed to turn barley into beer but converted in 1967 into a lofty concert hall for the Aldeburgh Music Festival, instigated by Benjamin Britten in 1948. Because of its size and proximity to the proposed site for Britain’s first pressurised water reactor (PWR) on the North Sea coast, now it was the incongruous setting for the Sizewell B Inquiry, which had been sitting since January 1983.
The Burys, who were now two of my strongest supporters, had travelled across the country from Shrewsbury to witness the culmination of Hilda’s anti-nuclear project. At rear centre stage, facing me with an encouraging expression, was Sir Frank Layfield, the Inspector in charge of the Inquiry. To my right sat a phalanx of impassive barristers representing the nuclear industry, led by the wily, diminutive Lord Silsoe at a reputed cost to the taxpayer of £1,500 a day.
It took me about an hour to read An Ordinary Citizen’s View of Radioactive Waste Management, given an Inquiry code number HM01. Hilda’s conclusions reverberate poignantly for the victims of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant catastrophe in Japan:
The inescapable burden now inflicted on posterity imposes a straight moral choice, which was not faced in the beginning but which must be faced now. Even a desperate need for energy would not justify creating these worst of all pollutants, whose control for merely a few centuries (in the case of High Level Waste) we cannot guarantee…
This is a failed and dying industry, which is a major liability and should be closed down. The fact that plans can be made for adding to it shows an unbelievable degree of irresponsibility and stupidity in all concerned.
The Ordinary Citizen implores the Inspector to urge the right moral choice on the government, which should redirect all its spare billions towards energy conservation, cleaning up fossil-fuelled power stations, and developing alternative energy sources.
Because I was not the author, I could not be cross-examined about it. Nevertheless, nearly six months after her murder I had fulfilled Hilda’s request in the postscript of her last letter to me. It was my initiation as an anti-nuclear campaigner.
That evening, in a prime-time BBC TV programme called Crimewatch, the West Mercia Police revealed that, for the first time in a British murder investigation, they had been assisted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI had taken three months to come up with a profile of the suspected killer. The next day, the Shropshire Star reported excitedly beneath a headline ‘America’s FBI boffins join murder hunt’:
Data … was sent to the bureau’s behavioural science research department where experts drew up a picture of the man they want.
And the information backs up what murder chie
fs from the West Mercia force had already agreed.
The man police want to interview – and they believe he could strike again – is:
Between 30 and 35, with medium to large build with broad shoulders, dark hair and deep set eyes.
He is a loner and a withdrawn individual who either lives or works locally, has an intimate knowledge of the area and or who has lived locally.
He is unsociable, likely to be an unskilled worker and often visits local pubs.
Someone locally is probably shielding the person and they should contact the police immediately.
The underwhelming, and somewhat self-contradictory, outcome of this dramatic collaboration fell into a similar desperate category as reports that the police had resorted to hypnosis of key witnesses of the crazy last journey of Hilda’s car. These merely fuelled my suspicions regarding the police’s blundering and ineffective handling of the case. I was ready to turn my attention to pursuing the truth.
The possibility that Hilda had been the victim of a political conspiracy made no national impact until November 1984 – when I was confronted with a second theory.
Judith Cook, an experienced investigative journalist, author and regular contributor to The Guardian and the New Statesman magazine, had followed up the conspiracy rumours. She visited me in September, when I briefed her on the discrepancies in the police investigation and my own theory. I carefully made no mention of my role in Naval Intelligence, and she did not ask me about it.
I was therefore surprised and alarmed by Cook’s feature article in the New Statesman on 9 November. She raised good questions about the bizarre route taken by the attacker through the town centre, and the police delay in acting on the abandoned car. She also mentioned Hilda’s agitated phone call to Morgan-Grenville, and Ian Scott’s categoric statement that there was no body in the copse the day after Hilda’s abduction. The shock came towards the end of the article. After speculating that Hilda’s house was broken into by somebody who was interested in her Sizewell paper, Cook abruptly introduced a novel twist and punchline:
[D]id somebody somewhere think Miss Murrell had access to even more sensitive information because of her close links with her nephew in naval intelligence and the very sensitive work on which he had been engaged? Is it possible, in the current climate of paranoia, that it was thought – quite wrongly – he had passed on information to his aunt?
Cook must have spotted a framed citation from Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse, Commander-in-Chief Fleet, commending my work during the Falklands War. The main impact of her article was to establish a disturbing link between me, Hilda’s murder and the Falklands War – and specifically the sinking of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano. It also stimulated renewed media interest in the case, and in the inquest when it was finally held on 5 December.
The inquest took place in an oak-panelled upstairs chamber of the Elizabethan Market Hall in the heart of Shrewsbury. At the last minute I arranged for a solicitor to represent Hilda’s family. I had put the police on written notice that I wanted answers to a whole range of questions. Their response was for DCI Furber to try to reassure me over the phone about my concerns. He did not succeed.
I was surprised there was no jury for such a controversial, high-profile murder. I was then alarmed to learn that neither John Marsh nor Ian Scott would be called. The Shrewsbury coroner, Colonel David Crawford-Clarke, permitted just two witnesses to testify: DCS Cole and the pathologist Dr Acland. Neither Cole nor Furber greeted me and my sister as the victim’s next of kin; all Cole could manage was a nervous nod in our direction as we arrived.
Acland took the stand first. I had not been allowed a copy of his autopsy report, and the police had never briefed us about the full extent of Hilda’s injuries. Now, I listened with mounting horror as he read it dispassionately. ‘Hypostasis was faint in the right lateral position … On the right side of the face was a diffuse bruise over the right forehead, around the right eye and across the right cheek measuring ten centimetres by six. There was a split to the skin just below the right eye.’ Acland said the face injury was probably caused by a broad, blunt instrument. Hilda had probably been kicked. There was also a bruise measuring 3.5 centimetres across on the left side of her chin, from a punch or falling. On Hilda’s right shoulder there was more bruising where her collarbone had been broken. He offered no cause for this; later I was advised Hilda’s shoulder had probably been stamped on.
He described the knife wounds in excruciating detail: ‘On the right arm 12 centimetres below the point of the shoulder in the region of the biceps muscle was a penetrating incised wound…’ There were five shallower stab wounds in Hilda’s right upper abdomen. ‘The first was three centimetres away from the umbilicus and was a small incised wound measuring 0.6 centimetres in length…’ Two had reached the liver: in his opinion they were disabling but not fatal. I was struck by how small the wounds were. If Hilda’s large kitchen knife had inflicted them, it would have needed considerable control to keep them so shallow. What he was describing was deliberate, skilfully applied torture – by a lone, panicking petty burglar? Cuts on her palms showed that poor Hilda had tried to fend off the knife.
According to Acland, large abrasions on Hilda’s knees were consistent with her crawling around, which probably led to her losing her ‘lower clothing’. However, he did not rule out the possibility that she had been dragged. There were apparently no marks on her back, ‘but soiling by earth and debris was noted over the buttocks’.
His choice of words at one point was so unintentionally inappropriate that I jotted them down. ‘The brain weighed 1415 grams and appeared unremarkable.’ With a shudder, I realised he had removed it.
Acland added that the hyoid bone in her larynx had been broken, but there was no evidence of asphyxia. This suggested being held in an armlock. To my relief, there was ‘no indication of sexual assault’. After all the police fuss and lurid media reports, this was his only reference to the sexual aspect. He concluded that ‘death was due to hypothermia, plus penetrating wounds to the abdomen with multiple bruises to the face.’
In response to a question from the coroner, Acland said there was some evidence Hilda had been crawling, but not more than 100 yards from where her body was found. He estimated that ‘in very cold weather’ she would have died between five and ten hours after being left in the copse.
Questioned by the family solicitor about the sudden second autopsy, he replied that Dr Gower ‘entirely agreed with all my findings and conclusions’. Acland admitted that, had she received medical treatment within 5-10 hours after the attack, ‘she may have survived’. This was the only question raised about the consequences of the police delay in following up the abandoned car.
Despite advising caution about drawing too many conclusions, Acland then speculated: ‘Miss Murrell may have been trying to escape from the car and was pursued and possibly frogmarched with an arm across her neck and the knife held towards her… The evidence suggests she had been stabbed through her clothing.’
On the need for a second autopsy, the coroner explained: ‘I was advised after a period of time that the natural processes were reaching a stage when it would shortly thereafter be quite impractical for the second post-mortem to be subsequently carried out if somebody was charged…’, so that the body could be made available to the defence. He offered no explanation for how it had been allowed to decompose.
DCS Cole began his testimony by refusing to disclose all evidence in his possession. ‘This is in no way an attempt to conceal anything. I must be in a position to put evidence to a suspect which has not been previously released so that the accuracy of any confession may be tested.’
Outlining his initial enquiries, Cole exonerated his officers from any negligence regarding the three-day delay in finding Hilda’s body. He made no mention of the state of Hilda’s telephones. He summarised Hilda’s last known movements, and five reports from the 69 witnesses to the car’s strange journey.
He empha
sised that Hilda’s character and lifestyle had made it a difficult investigation – for example, none of her friends reported she was missing. He surmised: ‘Once inside her house Miss Murrell apparently had time to change from her outdoor clothing and put away some of her shopping.’ Questions erupted in my mind as he claimed there was evidence of a struggle upstairs. Why? A broken baluster and a picture that had fallen off the wall did not automatically mean Hilda was even present when this damage occurred. There was no blood, and the clothing found on two of the beds had been there, undisturbed, for some time.
Cole confirmed Hilda was subjected to ‘sexual activity’. ‘It then appears that either because of further violence or under extreme duress, Miss Murrell was abducted and driven away from her home in her own vehicle, a distance of approximately six miles, to the scene of her death.’ He omitted to mention witnesses noted that the woman slumped in the front passenger seat looked either ‘unconscious’, ‘handicapped’, or ‘asleep’. This raised another question: had she been knocked out – or drugged? Yet Acland had made no mention of any alcohol or toxicology tests.
Cole confirmed there was also no blood in the car, which suggested she was stabbed somewhere between the lane and the copse. His only reference to the knife found near the hedge was that it probably came from a set in Hilda’s house. Neither man mentioned any forensic results. Despite the huge forensic effort at Ravenscroft, Cole also made no mention of fingerprints or footprints. When the family solicitor asked why farmer John Marsh was not giving evidence, Cole replied he was too ill after a heart attack. The absence of Ian Scott was more difficult to explain. Regarding Scott’s dramatic claim, Cole said: ‘This has been carefully considered and researched. He may be mistaken. The body was in a slight hollow and dressed in clothing which matched the undergrowth.’