by Robert Green
Around that time, it became obvious our phone was tapped. When trying to phone us, a neighbour heard instead a conversation between two men discussing my movements. This reminded us of another strange incident early in 1983. Just days after I left the Navy, we came home from a shopping trip. As Liz opened the front door, she exclaimed, ‘Someone’s been in here.’ With no signs of forced entry or anything disturbed or missing, I dismissed her intuitive suspicions. This was soon after Dalyell began his campaign. Now I realised MI5 could have searched our house for any Belgrano-related documents over a year before Hilda was murdered – and only a day or two before my final visit to her, which would have been arranged by telephone.
Corroboration emerged following my meeting with Cole, when World in Action producer Stuart Prebble said he was told that I and some colleagues were investigated. Presumably all searches drew a blank. The net, therefore, would have been widened to catch not just potential sources such as myself, but also my trusted friend, Hilda.
By bizarre coincidence, another suspect was making the headlines as we left Sherborne police station that day. Hilda’s photo was on the front page of London’s Evening Standard newspaper, beside a banner headline: ‘I WAS PRIME MURDER SUSPECT – Burglar tells of questioning by police over case of the Navy officer’s aunt’.
Robert Higgins, who had admitted to five burglaries within a mile of Ravenscroft, had faced an identity parade in which one witness picked him out as the ‘running man’. He told the paper: ‘They were under pressure to find someone and I just didn’t have an alibi … I didn’t even know about the murder until they told me.’ Higgins’ biggest worry was he might be framed. His lawyer, former Conservative MP Delwyn Williams, told Shrewsbury magistrates Higgins had been extensively interrogated by detectives hunting Miss Murrell’s killer: ‘He has been through hell.’ He was not charged.
The day after my interrogation, the West Mercia Police escalated their aggressive strategy. Beneath a front-page headline ‘MURRELL COVER-UP IS DENIED’, the Shropshire Star on 9 January 1985 reported on a major press conference, reinforced by a centre-page exclusive interview with Chief Constable Robert Cozens. Negotiations were continuing with the BBC for a reconstruction of the murder on the Crimewatch programme around the first anniversary. So World in Action would have competition.
The next morning, in an extraordinary letter in The Times, pathologist Peter Acland dismissed the notion that he, or anyone else, had been influenced by ‘any Secret Service organisation’. He concluded:
I don’t know who killed Miss Murrell, but I have a strong suspicion that some twopenny halfpenny thief is gloating over a pint of beer in a pub not many miles from Shrewsbury about all this media interest.
Acland received widespread publicity, including an interview on peak-time national breakfast television. It was highly irregular for a pathologist to go public after an inquest, and would have needed approval from the coroner and Cozens. Probably aware that his pro-police speculation had damaged his impartiality, in the letter he offered to ‘discuss the case with any other pathologist nominated by the family’. I decided to call his bluff.
The first television programme to examine the murder in any depth was screened two weeks later from Cardiff. On 24 January, Harlech TV’s current affairs series Wales This Week highlighted some of the mysteries surrounding the case and ended with a live interview with Dalyell. I declined an invitation from producer John Osmond to take part. Instead, I suggested they should ask Dalyell whether he might have been set up when told the murder was linked with the Belgrano, to distract attention from the nuclear industry and tempt me to be indiscreet about the Falklands War. Dalyell replied that, although he did not believe he had been duped, it was something he had not considered and could not rule out.
Surprisingly, Dalyell then said: ‘Francis Pym [Foreign Secretary during the Falklands War] publicly complained in June 1984 that in March 1984 his room in the House of Commons was rummaged through, if you please; his papers were gone through … Obviously, the authorities were going absolutely berserk at the time to try and find where those leaks were coming from.’ He confirmed that the same source who alerted him to Hilda had recently alerted him to look at what Francis Pym said in June 1984.
Osmond repeatedly contacted the police asking for a background briefing and interview, but was refused. Then just before the programme was to be aired, a senior police officer requested it be stopped as it might risk jeopardising their investigation. The next morning two officers met with Osmond, his producer and the HTV solicitor.
Their demeanour surprised Osmond. Normally, police are brisk and businesslike, seeking co-operation to publicise a case: ‘They call the shots.’ Instead, they were on the defensive, even embarrassed at how much Osmond knew. ‘They were unable, or unwilling, to give satisfactory answers to many of my questions.’ He suspected they had come as much to find out what he knew, and what he intended to report, as to protect their operational handling of the case.
Thirty-six hours after the programme, Hilda’s weekend retreat Fron Goch caught fire. The cedarwood chalet would have been destroyed in minutes but for the prompt action of a neighbour. On seeing smoke at 8am, he ran up to find flames around the back door. A nearby rainwater storage tank and bucket enabled him to put out the fire before it could take hold.
The police sealed off a wide area around the chalet and brought in forensic experts, but never publicly revealed what was found. Welsh nationalists were suspected, because they were targeting second homes owned by people in England. However, this arson attack did not match their usual, highly effective methods. Also, they invariably took responsibility for their attacks, but had not done so in this case.
The West Mercia Police dismissed the incident as a dangerous prank by children. They hid behind the fact that, as Fron Goch was on the Welsh side of the border, it was the responsibility of Dyfed-Powys Police to investigate. It took me until April the following year to meet with the detective in charge of the investigation, DCI Dai Rees.
Rees told me there was no attempt to break in, ruling out a tramp. The fire had no detonator or accelerator, eliminating Welsh extremists. Unusually, it had been lit in damp newspaper in a tea chest laid on its side filled with logs beside the back door, and had probably smouldered for 12-15 hours. He agreed this showed both cunning and malice. However, he refused to consider it was intended to bring family pressure on me to stop pursuing the case.
By then I had tracked down the fireman who was first at the scene. He remembered how defensive the senior Shrewsbury police officers had been. ‘We were quickly asked to retreat from the incident. This was very unusual. Also, we were expecting to hold a routine press conference, but it was clamped on.’ Like DCI Rees, he reckoned the fire was odd, and could have been lit up to 12 hours earlier. In his opinion, neither a nationalist nor a child was the culprit. Welsh nationalists used diesel-soaked rags lit by candles left on all the windowsills. This was the work of someone who knew how to burn down a building using a technique leaving few clues and plenty of time to get away. He agreed it looked like a heavy warning to me to ‘get off the grass’.
At the time Fron Goch was unoccupied and vulnerable. I had no doubt the attack was another vindictive reaction by the State security apparatus to the fact that the spotlight had been thrown back onto conspiracy theories. Two days after the fire, on 28 January the trial of Clive Ponting opened in the Old Bailey in London.
On 27 January, The Observer newspaper broke a story headlined ‘PRIVATE EYES SPY ON OBJECTORS TO SIZEWELL PROBE’. It revealed that monitoring had been organised by a private detective agency with links to British intelligence. Zeus Security Consultants, run by a former military intelligence officer, had been hired to:
… ascertain identities of principal objectors at the Sizewell atomic power station inquiry at Snape Maltings. If possible, obtain list of objectors, their connections with media, political leanings, etc.
Zeus refused to name who had commissioned the
operation. I later learned its ‘private client’ was a firm of London solicitors that, in turn, took instructions from a large corporate client whose identity was never confirmed. However, it built nuclear power stations and therefore had a keen interest in the Sizewell Inquiry.
The Observer had obtained a list of some of the people targeted for surveillance. Hilda’s name was not on it because it was dated January 1983, before she decided to become an official objector. Nevertheless, she was in frequent contact with some people on the list. These included CPRE Director Robin Grove-White; Colin Sweet, an economist who testified for the National Union of Mineworkers; Peter Bunyard of the Ecologist magazine; and members of the Stop Sizewell B Association and Ecoropa.
Hilda often phoned Maurice Telford, a retired teacher living near Sellafield. He kept her updated about what was going on in the troubled headquarters of British radioactive waste management. A month before her murder, they had a long phone call discussing his meetings with Sellafield workers. She offered to buy them a Geiger counter to measure radioactivity levels along the fence, linked to new evidence of clusters of child cancers and deformities around the site.
The Observer scoop proved for the first time that surveillance was carried out on opponents of the nuclear industry. It also opened up the murky world of private investigators. Zeus sub-contracted the work to another agency, Sapphire Investigation Bureau, which then enlisted the help of Contingency Services. This was run by Adrian Hampson, alias Victor Norris. His criminal record and background were uncovered by Paul Foot in the Daily Mirror in an article headed ‘Satan, Sex and the Sizewell Snooper’. Norris had six convictions for sex offences involving his young daughters, was the leader of a devil-worshipping sect called the Anglian Satanic Church, and had founded the Nazi Phoenix Society.
The Observer article led to wider claims that private investigators were regularly employed by the Security Service. Norris himself explained: ‘We have a couple of very good imitation lefties. They know the score: they know the patois these people use. They can drop names; they’ve got connections. We can infiltrate alright. I do the work the Home Office don’t want their people to do.’
My network of local informants in Shropshire, journalists and TV producers had developed to the point where I was beginning to conduct my own parallel investigation into the case. Pre-eminent among these was Don Arnott.
We first met following Hilda’s thanksgiving service. Looking like a bent-over, bearded gnome, Don’s rich, deep voice, clear diction and marvellous use of words reminded me of the actor Leo McKern. I immediately warmed to him and his puckish sense of humour.
Don had been headhunted in 1941 as a brilliant young radio-chemist for Amersham International, which became the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) after World War Two. However, on hearing about Hiroshima, he resigned from a secure post that would have involved working on Britain’s Bomb. Instead, he devoted much of his life to developing techniques in radio-medicine. He contracted polio at the age of 38, leaving his spine permanently locked in a severe stoop. This did not prevent him from working for the International Atomic Energy Agency, and writing their first handbook on radioactivity. In 1978 he had retired and bought Rhiewport Hall, a massive, rambling Regency country house on the outskirts of Berriew, near Welshpool, which he shared with his extended family.
As opposition to Thatcher’s nuclear schemes grew, local anti-nuclear campaigners discovered Don was a major asset. He was a precious rarity: a high-calibre nuclear scientist who was prepared not only to advise them but to speak and write publicly against any new nuclear power plants, and the problem of what to do with their radioactive waste. Don guided a campaign called People Against Nuclear Dumping On Rural Areas (PANDORA), which headed off proposals to bury waste in the Welsh mountains.
On 3 May 1984, needing his help with Hilda’s paper before I presented it at the Sizewell Inquiry, I had tried to avoid the worst of the potholes in the long tree-lined drive into Rhiewport Hall. Hilda had last visited him for advice about the nuclear industry just over a year earlier. Curiously, Hilda never told Don she was writing a critique of the Government’s White Paper on radioactive waste management, and he never probed her motive for seeking his advice. He answered her questions without revealing the evidence he planned to present at the Inquiry. Also, he never told her that he knew he was under surveillance.
Don was to be an expert witness for a consortium of trade unions – anathema to Thatcher – representing fire fighters and health workers who would be called upon to deal with any emergency at the planned power station. His evidence included his concerns about a fundamental flaw in the safety system of the US pressurised water reactor design on which the Sizewell plant was to be modelled. He had stumbled across it while studying the official report into the nuclear near-disaster at Three Mile Island in March 1979.
He spotted that the control rods, designed to drop into the reactor core and stop the nuclear chain reaction during an emergency, were made of an alloy of 80 per cent silver, 15 per cent indium and 5 per cent cadmium. His chemistry expertise enabled him to calculate the melting point. To his horrified disbelief, it was the lowest of any material in the core, because the control rods should be the last to melt. Then he discovered the control rods had melted at Three Mile Island. Moreover, the Sizewell design would have the same alloy in its control rods.
The UKAEA learned of Don’s discovery soon after Sir Walter Marshall, Thatcher’s front man for the nuclear programme, took over as chairman. Don and Marshall first met during World War Two at Amersham International. Don told me he alluded to the control rod problem in the last PANDORA newsletter, which he always sent to Marshall.
When the arrangements for the Sizewell Inquiry were published, Don wrote to Marshall complaining about the mismatch in Government funding between the nuclear industry and objectors. To Don’s surprise, Marshall invited him to UKAEA headquarters in London, and sent a limousine to collect him. For their meeting Marshall had summoned two other heavyweights: Lewis Roberts, then head of Harwell, the birthplace of the UK nuclear industry, and Ron Flowers, the top scientist at Nirex, the body set up to deal with the waste problem. There was little talk about funding objectors; instead, the three of them questioned Don closely on what he knew about the control rods.
He received more unexpected attention at a pre-Inquiry meeting at Snape Maltings in Suffolk. While staying overnight at an inn, he found himself in a scene out of a third-rate spy thriller. In the bar, a man sidled up to him and whispered that he should be careful, as he was being watched. Apparently, the spook had been hired by the Central Electricity Generating Board, which opposed the UKAEA’s push for US-designed reactors, which would spell the end for British designs.
Far from troubling Don, the warning intrigued and encouraged him. He was annoyed, however, when a file containing his correspondence with Marshall disappeared during the visit. He was left in no doubt that he was seen as a threat to the Government’s nuclear energy plans.
Don was not deterred, but he failed to testify at Sizewell. On 13 April 1983, with the Inquiry into its fourth month, he was invited to speak at an anti-nuclear conference organised by the Greater London Council. Before he could do so, he collapsed from a heart attack shortly after a coffee break. This put him in intensive care for five days and forced him to withdraw from the Inquiry. No one else raised the control rod problem. He had been under intense stress preparing for the Inquiry, but when he eventually died in 2000, it was not from heart problems. Had his coffee been spiked, perhaps with an overdose of caffeine, to induce cardiac arrest?
Because of his heart attack, Hilda had left Don alone for a few months. They met once more, on 8 February 1984, six weeks before she was murdered. Harry Bury invited her to hear Don speak at a Shrewsbury meeting of the Medical Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons. Describing his talk on the anatomy of a nuclear bomb as ‘riveting’, she chatted to him afterwards – without mentioning she had written her paper and had applied to present it at Siz
ewell. If Hilda had been under surveillance by then, their rendezvous under cover of such a subversive meeting, where she was not a member of the group, would have rung more alarm bells in MI5. They would have suspected Don had briefed her to raise his concerns about the control rod design when she testified.
At our first meeting in May 1984, Don was shaken to read Hilda’s draft paper, because it was so good. He suggested I should ask the Secretary to the Sizewell Inquiry to be allowed to read it into the record. This was approved by the Inspector, Sir Frank Layfield. A long working partnership with Don ensued, through which I took up Hilda’s torch against the nuclear industry and investigated her murder with him.
I sent her paper to Anthony Tucker, The Guardian’s science correspondent. On 18 August 1984, a front-page article by him appeared under the title ‘Murder victim’s Sizewell scorn’. A lengthy supportive review, with her main points quoted verbatim, continued on an inside page under ‘Ministers “hiding facts on nuclear waste”’.
Having finally had Hilda’s funeral, I presented her paper to the Inquiry on 13 September 1984. However, it was no threat to Thatcher’s plans for the nuclear industry. So why had she not told Don at their final February meeting she was about to testify at Sizewell? Could it have been that by then she was into something far too dangerous to risk his safety? If so, MI5 and the nuclear industry would have been further agitated by the prominent media coverage of her Sizewell paper.