A Thorn in Their Side--Hilda Murrell Threatened Britain's Nuclear State. She Was Brutally Murdered. This is the True Story of her Shocking Death

by Robert Green

  It was after Don had read about the inquest in the Shropshire Star that I accepted his offer to help me pursue the truth. A stream of closely typed assessments of the case, which I dubbed ‘Dongrams’, followed. By mid-January 1985 we had exchanged seven rounds of questions, comments and responses as Don teased out what I knew.

  He analysed the extraordinary coincidences in the case. The Oxford English Dictionary defined coincidence as a ‘concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection’. However, in Don’s scientific experience ‘genuinely random coincidences are rare, and the Universe would be impossible were it otherwise’. He went on to select three apparent coincidences from the case:

  Both Hilda’s telephones, in separate houses, faulty.

  The break-in and search of papers in Peter Hurst’s flat after Dalyell’s speech.

  The arson attack on Fron Goch.

  He argued that the probability of three separate coincidences actually being random was far lower than any single one of them. I found this really helpful, while not accepting that any of these was coincidental.

  Questions about Hilda’s telephones were first raised publicly by Derek Woodvine, a Labour councillor on Shropshire County Council, during interviews for both Wales This Week and World in Action. Woodvine was also a member of West Mercia Police Authority, a committee that acts as a police watchdog – but hitherto had rarely shown any teeth.

  A British Telecom employee contacted Woodvine following the police press conference the day after my interrogation in Sherborne, and the headlines about the questioning of Higgins over Hilda’s murder. Chief Constable Cozens wanted to refute claims made by Dalyell, including the MP’s contention that ‘the police version of the burglary did not tally with what was obviously a sophisticated break-in, in which the telephone had been cut, leaving it so callers could ring in but not out.’

  Woodvine’s whistleblower had not examined Hilda’s telephone personally. He had been in British Telecom’s Shrewsbury depot when an engineer had returned from inspecting the phone at Ravenscroft. While the police were saying the phone had been ripped out, the engineer disagreed. The main phone in Hilda’s bedroom was still working, and the kitchen extension had been disconnected carefully – as Brian George had told me. The effect was that a caller would have heard the normal ringing tone, but there would have been no sound in the house. Such a ‘silent ring’ would have led callers to believe no one was at home rather than suspect a fault, which might have prompted a personal visit or a call to British Telecom.

  Former Conservative MP and Higgins’ solicitor, Delwyn Williams, corroborated Woodvine in the second Wales This Week programme on the case, broadcast on 7 February. Williams, who like Woodvine had two engineer sources, made the following remarkable comment: ‘I believe that the Secret Service should have been looking at this house bearing in mind the connection with the Belgrano affair; and I would be surprised, and in fact upset, if they were not…’ He challenged the police to admit that a Secret Service presence might have interfered with their enquiries: ‘The truth will never hurt anyone.’

  At the end of the programme, Woodvine revealed that two members of the West Mercia Police Authority intended to initiate a discussion to resolve the questions. Williams added that, if this was unsatisfactory, ‘then the Home Office should set up an Inquiry which should be made public.’ The same evening, London’s Evening Standard broke the story of the telephone engineer under a headline ‘MURDER MYSTERY OF A SILENT PHONE’.

  Three days later, Clive Ponting was sensationally acquitted at the Old Bailey. This must have sent shockwaves through the State security authorities. No longer could they rely on a jury to convict anyone, including me, with a public interest defence.

  Soon after the Wales This Week programme, the West Mercia Police Authority met. Woodvine told me that Chief Constable Cozens made a ‘savage attack’ on him. ‘It was … like someone lining up to thump you. It was that sort of situation, gunning for me; an intimidatory, “I am the authority” attitude.’ He was all the more shaken because hitherto Cozens had been seen as a liberal, reasonable Chief Constable. Yet when Woodvine challenged him about the telephone, ‘he became hard and tough and was after me.’

  Crimewatch was a popular BBC TV programme. Its reconstructions of crimes and appeals for witnesses proved effective in eliciting fresh information from the public. It also helped the police by broadcasting only their version of events. Nearly a year after the murder, the programme producers made it a special feature. Not to be outdone, Granada TV’s World in Action programme decided to get in first.

  Producer Stuart Prebble asked the police whether he could film Hilda’s car. He was told this was not possible as it had been dismantled in the search for evidence. The police instructed him not to divulge that the killer had taken a can of lager from Hilda’s drinks cabinet; and a stabbed grapefruit had been found in the car, plus stab marks in the dashboard. This evidence was sensitive as it was known only to the killer and the police, and was needed to cross-examine any suspect. For the same reason, Prebble was denied a photograph of the telephone in the kitchen at Ravenscroft.

  On 4 March 1985, the World in Action programme ‘Death of an English Rose’ faithfully complied with these strictures and reconstructed the police version of events. However, it also explored the Sizewell and Belgrano theories, the condition of Hilda’s telephones, and suppression at the inquest of Ian Scott’s sensational evidence that her body had not been in Moat Copse when he had checked it 24 hours after it was supposed to have been there.

  Prebble had secured an extraordinary filmed interview with Assistant Chief Constable Bernard Drew. Unfortunately, lack of time excluded from the programme the following exchange about how the investigation would have acquired a completely different dimension if the police had believed Scott.

  Drew: ‘Certainly we don’t consider that that’s a possibility worth pursuing.’

  Prebble: ‘Why not?’

  Drew: ‘I don’t have any evidence to suggest that that is in fact so.’

  Prebble: ‘Well, there’s Mr Scott’s evidence… Isn’t it extremely unlikely that this person [Hilda’s abductor] would have taken the body across the field in broad daylight where any number of people could have seen it?’

  Drew: ‘Certainly so far as the latter point is concerned, that is one of the most unusual aspects of the case. For anybody who has been to the scene, clearly it is open land there; and it remains quite remarkable that nobody saw Hilda Murrell and her assailant anywhere in the vicinity of that car, but that’s the position as it is.’

  Prebble should have retorted: was it not far more likely that Hilda was not seen because she was not yet there, with all the associated implications?

  In the unscreened interview, Prebble then asked Drew what was done once the owner of the car had been identified.

  Drew: ‘Well, the officers checked out with the house to find out whether the person concerned was there, and as you are already aware of course, there was no reply from the house.’

  Prebble’s researcher Jenny Rathbone: ‘Are you saying they then went to the house on the Wednesday?’

  ‘No.’

  Prebble: ‘That’s what you did say.’

  ‘Well, perhaps. I don’t know how detailed you want to be.’

  Drew then tried to hide behind his claim that, in the first three months of 1984, more than 250 cars had been reported abandoned in the area. Prebble riposted that local farmer John Marsh knew this, but felt this one was unusual enough to warrant reporting three times. Drew could only lamely agree.

  The obvious next step would have been to visit Ravenscroft immediately. Failure to do so at that crucial moment was suspiciously negligent.

  After Drew’s disastrous interview, the West Mercia Police must have realised that some dramatic diversion was needed to quash talk of conspiracies and cover-ups. Their desperate solution was to bring in another police force to conduct an ‘outside’ review of their handling
of the case.

  A few hours before the World in Action programme was broadcast, Cozens announced that the review team would also investigate the credibility of ‘various theories and speculations’ surrounding the murder. This ‘independent’ investigation would be carried out by Peter Smith, Assistant Chief Constable of Northumbria Police. Headlined as a ‘killer hunter’ with a 100 per cent success record, Smith declared: ‘I am coming in with a totally open mind.’

  The Crimewatch programme followed ten days later. Prebble watched bewildered as a reconstruction showed Hilda’s abductor stabbing a grapefruit and the dashboard with Hilda’s large kitchen knife. The police pointed out the can of lager, and showed a close-up colour photograph of the telephone, with both the receiver cord and extension cable apparently ripped out.

  I was stunned when I saw the actress playing Hilda wearing the actual Totes rain hat found in the hedge – but which none of her close family or friends had recognised. After Cole’s outrageous accusations against me in Sherborne police station, I was angered that he had allowed such key pieces of evidence to be used and contaminated by the Crimewatch actors and himself. He, too, handled items with no gloves on. No mention was made of the significant fact that, on returning home, Hilda had crossed the road to pay Mary O’Connor for a raffle ticket. When I next saw Mary, she told me the police had warned her not to talk to me.

  The BBC reconstruction had Hilda escaping from her assailant while he was trying to put her bird book under the offside front wheel to gain traction. After grabbing the ignition keys from the car, she implausibly trotted off up the lane until her shouting, knife-wielding abductor caught up with her; whereupon he put her in an arm-lock and started stabbing her. This farcical speculation was to try to explain why the keys were found in Hilda’s coat pocket, and why her assailant risked taking her across an open field. The Belgrano and Sizewell theories were dismissed as ridiculous. The programme prompted 120 calls from the public. The team of 30 officers still working on the case followed up every new lead – but there was no breakthrough.

  One call the police did not welcome was from a mysterious man claiming to have worked for MI5, who later identified himself as Gary Murray. He drew attention to private investigator Barrie Peachman, who apparently phoned him three days after Hilda’s murder threatening to kill himself, and shot himself three weeks later. In 1963 Peachman had formed the Sapphire Investigation Bureau, one of the agencies involved in collecting information on Sizewell objectors.

  Obliged to investigate, the police concluded Peachman was nowhere near Shrewsbury on the day of the abduction. Apparently he was depressed because of a failed relationship and tax arrears. However, Murray heard that, shortly before he took his own life, ‘Peachman said his back was against the wall’ and ‘people were out to get him’.

  Crimewatch had backfired, merely creating more speculation.

  Taking up Acland’s offer in his Times letter to discuss his findings with a pathologist of my choice, I secured the services of highly respected Professor Bernard Knight. Soon after the first anniversary, he met Acland and Cole, and examined both autopsy reports and photographs of the body in the copse and mortuary. While I had no illusions that he would seriously challenge a fellow pathologist, he came to some significantly different conclusions.

  The police and coroner had accepted the time of Hilda’s death as between five to ten hours after she had been abducted on Wednesday 21 March. Knight revealed that the pathology about the time of death was imprecise. Hilda could have died at any time between the Wednesday evening and Friday evening. This clearly supported Scott’s evidence. It would have raised huge complications for Cole, all of them leading away from his simplistic hypothesis and towards the conspiracy theories.

  In his report to me, Knight also concluded that Hilda’s large kitchen knife was not the murder weapon (my emphasis added):

  … [I]t could not have caused all the wounds on the body, especially that on the right arm. The blade is too wide to have caused such a narrow track at the required depth of insertion, and this applies to several of the abdominal wounds which have penetrated the liver. The view is shared by Dr Acland and indeed the police. No blood was detected on the blade by the forensic laboratory, though of course it had lain in the rain for a considerable time…

  At the inquest, Acland and Cole had said nothing about this embarrassing forensic finding. So what was the knife doing in the ditch by the hedge, close to Hilda’s broken spectacles and hat? And where was the one that had been used?

  In Knight’s view, Acland had been under pressure from the coroner to give a more exact time of death for the sake of putting a date on the death certificate. ‘Dr Acland readily admits the lack of any firm basis for this time’ of five to ten hours from abandonment to death. When Acland was interviewed soon afterwards for another Wales This Week programme on the case, he conceded this. The uncertain nature of hypostasis, the settling of blood in a dead body, meant Hilda could have died later in the week; and yes, she even might not have died in the copse.

  These facts opened up other scenarios for the murder. Acland’s letter to The Times, aimed at quashing speculation about what had happened, had backfired.

  Northumbria’s Assistant Chief Constable, Peter Smith, and his assistant, Detective Superintendent Cecil Hall, interviewed 45 key witnesses and protagonists as part of their ‘independent’ review. When they met me at my home, they listened politely as I outlined my belief that the murder was linked with the Sizewell Inquiry.

  Smith and Hall insisted on visiting Judith Cook at her home in Newlyn, Cornwall at 10.45pm on the eve of the first anniversary. She had just returned exhausted from a big TV interview in Manchester. They interrogated her until after midnight about her sources for her New Statesman article, and also for her imminent book, Who Killed Hilda Murrell?. Smith warned Cook that, by pursuing her own unsubstantiated line while refusing to reveal her sources, she was hindering the police investigation. She insisted she could not break confidences.

  Cook had anticipated problems as soon as she discovered Hilda was a nuclear objector with a nephew who had recently been in Naval Intelligence in the Falklands War. While researching her New Statesman article, she became so worried that she phoned Tam Dalyell to warn him: ‘I think I’d better tell you what I know just in case something happens to me…’

  From the moment she agreed to write the book, ‘strange things began to happen.’ Cook and her husband Martin Green returned home after several days in London to find every letter in a pile of mail had been slit along the bottom. They reported this to the Post Office, whereupon letters arrived badly stuck down. After Cook’s story about the intimidation was published in The Guardian the post resumed arriving undamaged.

  However, instead the harassment changed. ‘I began to get really nasty telephone calls.’ A man with a Scottish accent said: ‘Hilda Murrell didn’t take any notice of the phone calls either, and look what happened to her.’ Another in the middle of the night warned she would ‘end up like Hilda Murrell’. Variations on this theme followed several times. If Martin picked up the phone, the man would ring off. These calls stopped after she phoned Dalyell and Ashdown about them. The book manuscript, which she had sent carefully packaged by recorded delivery to her publisher, did not arrive. Following a formal complaint and Post Office investigation, it turned up out of its packaging with pages torn. This echoed my own experience a year later, when a copy of Chris Martin’s eponymous drama documentary about the case arrived from him in similar condition. Later she had a break-in when only her papers were disturbed. Undeterred and angry, Cook rang The Guardian who published a report of her experiences.

  Dora Russell, the 91-year-old ex-wife of the famous philosopher and anti-nuclear campaigner Lord Bertrand, lived near Cook and knew her. Lady Russell wrote a supportive letter that The Guardian published. Soon after it appeared, her home was broken into and she was beaten up by an intruder. Then she received an initialled postcard in the mail with the fol
lowing written in an educated hand:

  We broke into Hilda Murrell, we broke into the Woolf’s, and if the Guardian continues to be puzzled, we’ll break in wherever we want to! But lots & lots of people will think differently.

  The Northumbria detectives left with a smug warning that Cook was going to make a fool of herself as ‘some kind of Cornish Miss Marple’, because they would ‘almost certainly find the killer by the time her book was in the shops’. Twenty thousand copies of her book sold out in ten days. Her publishing editor told her that their biggest author, Jeffrey Archer, who was Conservative Party Chairman at the time, prevented any more being printed. When a friend of mine requested a copy from her local library within a week of publication, the library reported that this was impossible because all remaining copies had been withdrawn from sale and pulped.

  Smith and Hall also interviewed Graham Smith, author of the first book on the case, Death of a Rose-Grower. On 19 February 1985, Smith called Cook to tip her off that he was also writing a book. After discussing it at length, they decided not to collaborate. The next morning, his publisher Cecil Woolf found his London home had been broken into through a kitchen window overlooking a snow-covered back lawn. Nothing was stolen – not even a gold watch in full view on his desk – and footprints in the snow had been carefully swept over. Woolf had recently published two outspoken short books by Dalyell about his findings from the Belgrano controversy.

  After eight weeks what became known as the Northumbria Report was presented to West Mercia’s new Chief Constable, Tony Mullett. Cozens had raised eyebrows by leaving to become a special adviser to the Home Secretary. However, the report designed to dispel accusations of a cover-up was never published.

  A few copies were circulated among senior officers and politicians, excluding Dalyell. Even members of the West Mercia Police Authority were denied access to it, apart from the Chair, a Tory councillor. The rest of us had to rely on information from a long overdue press conference at West Mercia headquarters on 26 June. The police had carefully arranged for it to be held two days after Cook launched her book on national radio. The press conference did not go well.