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

  The press were told the report had not been published because it contained key pieces of evidence that the police could use to identify Hilda’s killer. However, they refused to release even an abridged version. Peter Smith announced that, apart from some minor niggles, he had found the handling of the case had been exemplary. His report fully supported Cole’s opinion that the murder had been ‘a burglary which went tragically wrong’. No other motive had been found, and no evidence had been suppressed. Smith assured reporters that, though he could give no details, he had asked questions in the ‘highest echelons’ of the Security Service to eliminate any conspiracy theories.

  Admitting it was one of the most bizarre cases he had ever encountered, he highlighted the number of coincidences. Then came his most memorable observation. ‘Looked at collectively, these coincidences could appear – as journalist Judith Cook said in a new book – like “a can of worms”. But taking them individually, and holding them to the light, there is no evidence of any involvement of British Intelligence.’ There were three mild rebukes for the West Mercia Police: the failure to find Hilda’s body for three days; shortcomings in how the police followed up the alleged connection between her murder and the death of Barrie Peachman; and the media should have been handled better.

  Journalists smelled a whitewash. Smith and Mullett quickly found themselves under pressure over police inaction. On discovering that Hilda owned the car, apparently the police telephoned her number but got no reply.

  Question: ‘That night?’

  Smith: ‘Yes.’

  ‘It was two days later before the police called at her house?’

  ‘Oh yes, exactly – I agree with you, and that’s my criticism, and…’

  ‘If they had acted promptly they might have found Hilda Murrell alive?’

  ‘I don’t think there are sufficient grounds for you to say “if they had acted promptly” … Let’s take the 250 abandoned vehicles…’ (launching into Drew’s bluster with Prebble.)

  Years later, I was astounded to watch DCS Cole, in a videoed briefing for other police forces shortly after the murder, admit: ‘The wounds alone wouldn’t have killed her… It is my belief that her assailant never intended to kill her up until the time the car crashed. When he did decide to do so, he made a pretty inept attempt. If she hadn’t laid [sic] out in the open on a freezing night she’d probably still be alive.’

  At the press conference Mullett tried to argue there was nothing unusual about the car – with stab marks in the dashboard? Contradicting the earlier police line, he suggested the marks were ‘nothing more than wear and tear’, even though they had featured prominently in the Crimewatch reconstruction. ‘I don’t know whether you have seen any of the photographs. I am unable to detect any stab marks in either the dashboard or the grapefruit. It is an old car. It’s full of scratches, bumps and grazes, and I would defy anyone seeing those photographs to identify them themselves.’ The Renault was three years old. The media were unimpressed. Dalyell demanded in the House of Commons that the Northumbria Report be published, and wanted answers to more questions. He was brushed aside by Home Office Minister Giles Shaw.

  The following evening, Dalyell told a packed public meeting near Birmingham he would not reveal the name of his ‘deep throat’ source. ‘Police would give it to the Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, who would prosecute the source for leaking official information, even if his identity was given in confidence to detectives.’ He added that he would not be asking his source for any answers to the questions raised by the Northumbria review, because ‘any more information would identify my source’.

  Nonetheless, on 5 March after the World in Action programme was broadcast, a TV interview with Patrick Burns on BBC Midlands Today included the following exchange.

  Dalyell: ‘I have to be exceedingly careful not to go beyond what I was told that British intelligence were involved.’

  Burns: ‘In a contract sense possibly?’

  Dalyell: ‘That would certainly cover it.’

  Burns: ‘Mr Dalyell is not alone in his suspicion that Miss Murrell may have been the subject of a clandestine surveillance operation here. I myself have been told the same thing on an unattributable basis.’

  CHAPTER 6

  INCONVENIENT EVIDENCE

  When I first heard the name Laurens Otter, I was basking in morning sun working on a thatched cottage in a little town in Dorset. It was Monday, 24 June 1985 – two days before the police press conference about the Northumbria review of the case. Judith Cook’s live interview on BBC national Radio 4 about her new book Who Killed Hilda Murrell? boomed out from my pick-up truck. The whole street therefore heard the next bombshell to hit the case.

  Cook revealed that, just three weeks earlier, she had received incendiary new information from Otter. In 1960 he was a member and Secretary of the Committee of 100. Formed by philosopher Lord Bertrand Russell, this more militant group within the fledgling Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament had practised civil disobedience following the Gandhian model, such as sit-ins and marches against nuclear weapons. Otter lived in Wellington, ten miles east of Shrewsbury, where he continued campaigning and organising local peace groups.

  He had sent Cook three closely typed pages, which she later copied to me, describing what happened to him on the morning of Hilda’s abduction. An edited extract follows:

  At about 11am I received a phone call from a woman who sounded elderly and well educated. I deduced that she was in a public phone box, because she had trouble connecting the call at first, as if unused to the instructions.

  She did not give her name, but told me she had asked me a question after a meeting of the Shropshire Peace Alliance. She then asked if I was coming to the Alliance meeting that night. I said ‘Yes’.

  She explained she was working on a paper objecting to Sizewell: ‘I’ve found glaring errors in the official case. I want to make sure these reach the Inquiry – but I’m certain the authorities are going to use any means to prevent my material reaching it. My telephone is tapped. I am being followed; my house is being watched, and there has been an attempt to break in. I have received threats, and my post is being opened.’

  Then she asked: ‘Where would you publish something that the Government would not want published?’

  ‘I would suggest Peace News.’ I added that I would deliver it personally to the office in Nottingham.

  ‘Can you come into Shrewsbury and get the papers immediately?’

  ‘I’ll get the timetable and look up the time of the next train.’

  ‘Oh, I can’t wait that long. I have an appointment at midday to meet an Inspector Davies. He phoned this morning – he’s coming up from London to see me. I’m not sure what it’s about. It’s a bit of a difficulty, as I’m due to have lunch with the Symondsons – do you know the Symondsons?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Oh well, I won’t be able to see you until this evening, will I? Bring a stout bag; there are a lot of papers. You will be coming tonight, won’t you? You won’t forget? It’s very important. I don’t know what the interview’s about – it’s not just about Sizewell.’

  Aware that Tam Dalyell was making headlines with his increasingly effective campaign over the Belgrano sinking, I blurted back: ‘Is it the Belgrano?’

  The phone had gone dead. She had probably run out of money.

  Otter duly turned up for the peace meeting with a large bag, and stayed with two other men for an hour and half. When no old woman appeared, they went home.

  This was the sort of information I had been waiting to hear. Unusually, Hilda declined to give him her name, which suggested she was concerned about surveillance. However, why had this man apparently taken 15 months to come out with such an explosive story? I hurried north to find the answer.

  Otter was a caricature of the veteran peacenik, complete with shock of white hair, goatee beard and wearing an anti-nuclear T-shirt and knee-length shorts. I knew at once he had a credibility problem, not least
with me. Listening to him was hard work, as he frequently launched into labyrinthine, pedantic digressions. Nonetheless, he was quite sure the elderly woman caller mentioned the Symondsons. This impressed me, because it identified her as Hilda. This fact had not appeared in any media report. He had tried to find their phone number, without success. He had looked up names starting with ‘Si…’, not realising theirs had a ‘y’ and ‘d’ in it.

  Otter was clearly highly intelligent and well educated. He seemed disarmingly sincere in his regret and self-reproach at not making sure his evidence had emerged sooner. Above all, he did not have the vindictive, calculating, ego-driven character to have fabricated such a dangerous tale. For if he was telling the truth, he and his family, and any witnesses prepared to corroborate him, were now at risk.

  Two days later I spent over an hour with DCI Furber in Shrewsbury police station. We had not met since my Sherborne interrogation in January. He said when he had personally interviewed Otter the day Cook broke his story, he had dismissed him as an unreliable witness because, like Morgan-Grenville, he could not corroborate his story. ‘If Hilda had been so concerned, and you and she were so close, why had she not contacted you?’ I decided not to remind him of the ominous postscript of her last letter to me in October 1983, which I had revealed on World in Action in March. I shot back: ‘If she had been under heavy State harassment, Otter would have been the best local choice to collect her sensitive nuclear papers and get them published. He was used to surveillance and intimidation, and had worked for Peace News. And she would have avoided involving me at all costs.’

  Furber had not checked Hilda’s diaries for corroboration that she questioned Otter at a previous Peace Alliance meeting. After a tense search together, we found she recorded attending meetings on 12 November 1982 and 18 March 1983. I reminded Furber that George Lowe saw Hilda turning into Sutton Road about 20 minutes after setting off from shopping. So she went somewhere else, and had time to make such a phone call.

  Otter told me Furber had revisited him the day after the June 1985 police press conference for a final, hostile meeting, threatening to prosecute him for wasting police time. Afterwards Otter recalled that on Saturday, 24 March 1984 – when Hilda’s body was found – he was at a peace meeting in Birmingham, where he mentioned the phone call to some friends. After Cook broke Otter’s story, one of them recalled the conversation and offered to travel to Shrewsbury to make a statement. Otter thanked him, but ‘decided that everyone would assume it was a put-up job and advised against so doing’.

  Otter kept me updated with local news about the case. Over the next few years, he gained enough confidence in our relationship to reveal he had acted much earlier. Close examination of Hilda’s diaries revealed two other peace meetings she attended, on 24 May and 13 October 1983.

  It took until 1987 before I found someone else prepared to support Otter’s claim that Hilda had wanted to meet him. It was Brian George, and he signed a statement for me. By then, I had talked to Brian many times about Hilda, the state of the house and the telephone wires, and had confidence in his integrity. Apparently, during 1983 she began to worry about going out alone in the evenings, and driving at night. So she asked Brian to take her to meetings, which he did on at least three occasions, although he was not involved with CND.

  We had made no mention of Otter, when Brian suddenly said that, several weeks before the murder, Hilda told him she wanted to meet ‘a gentleman by the name of Laurens Otter who was involved in support of CND activities in the Telford area’. She had read his numerous letters to newspapers which she had found to be very supportive of her views, including Sizewell B.

  She asked if Brian would take her to Telford to meet Otter at one of the peace meetings. However, Brian declined as he did not want to travel outside Shrewsbury. She also mentioned that she hoped to ask Otter to come to Shrewsbury by train as he did not drive a car. She would collect him from Shrewsbury railway station, and bring him to Ravenscroft ‘to enable her to learn first-hand his views on her Sizewell paper, which she was about to finalise’.

  Otter first wrote to the police offering information about Hilda’s phone call within two weeks of the murder, but received no response. He then sent the police a postcard inside an envelope after reading Anthony Tucker’s Guardian article on Hilda’s Sizewell paper in August 1984. The police still ignored him. In a third attempt, he wrote to Cook after reading her New Statesman article. The letter never reached her, like some of her mail at the time.

  On 14 May 1985, Otter heard Dalyell speak in Shrewsbury about Hilda’s case. This spurred him to write a fourth letter, to him. Dalyell immediately phoned him and passed a copy to the police and to Cook, who also phoned Otter. The police took a month to contact him and only a junior detective visited to take a statement. Nothing more happened until the day after Cook broke his story.

  Initially, Furber had been pleasant to Otter, to find out how much he knew, and admitted he had found his postcard. On it, Otter referred to his first letter sent only two weeks after Hilda’s murder. Furber’s feeble excuse was they could not find the earlier letter, without which ‘it didn’t mean much’.

  Laurens Otter made a major impact on the case. If his story was true, here was circumstantial evidence for both conspiracy theories.

  Soon after the second anniversary, Don Arnott and I conducted field research in and around Moat Copse when conditions would have been similar to those at the time of the murder. Don’s scientific approach led us to start where the body was found.

  We went to Hunkington equipped with a Shropshire Star photograph of DCS Cole helpfully crouching at the spot. By matching the trees and ground behind him, we refined to within a tree or two where he was photographed. The trees in that position had been felled, so Ian Scott must have walked directly over the ground where Hilda’s body was found two days later. There was almost no ground cover, and I recalled how starkly obvious her body looked in the police photograph produced at the inquest.

  Don timed me walking from where Hilda’s car had crashed across Funeral Field to the copse. With heavy clay clinging to my gumboots, I was struggling by the time I reached it. The experiment became even more arduous, and took twice as long, when I followed the hedge where the knife, hat and spectacles were found.

  We had satisfied ourselves on two crucial aspects of the evidence. No abductor would have succeeded unobserved in frogmarching Hilda across Funeral Field’s impossibly waterlogged clay on a fine weekday lunchtime in full view of Hunkington Farm and the lane. In the hour we were there Don noted nine cars passed the crash site. Also, Scott could not have been mistaken when he stated Hilda’s body was not where the police said it was in Moat Copse. As we absorbed these deductions, a thought struck Don. ‘Rob, did you realise the only circumstantial evidence that Hilda was in her car when it crashed is that the keys were in her coat pocket?’

  I spent several days interviewing as many local residents as possible, and kept a record. Some were never approached by the police. Almost all were unhappy about the investigation, which they said was mechanical, incomplete, and conducted ‘between 9am and 5pm’.

  I found John Marsh’s tractor driver Bryan Salter, who saw the large dark car and its suited driver walk to the copse and back soon after Scott had been there. I also heard about another mysterious visitor to the copse. Nick Waters, who lived in Drury Lane behind the copse, was walking his dog at about 9pm on the Wednesday evening when he spotted a torch light for about five minutes in the copse near where Hilda’s body was later found. His first thought was that it might be a rabbit ‘lamper’ – a poacher with a torch to dazzle rabbits that are then killed by a dog – but the beam was too dim and steady. Also, if Hilda had been there that night, a poacher’s dog would have found her.

  On the second anniversary in March 1986, DCS Cole issued a renewed appeal to the public. He complained that witnesses were being frightened off by talk of State crime and conspiracy, for which ‘not one shred of evidence’ had been foun
d. Coincidentally, an old friend of Hilda came forward with disturbing new information.

  Aged 85, Constance Purser was still running a small farm museum called the White House in Aston Munslow, 20 miles south of Shrewsbury. She had been interviewed by police shortly after the murder, because Hilda was a longstanding friend, a trustee of the museum and a regular visitor. Con was worried about what she had said in her statement, and wanted to see me urgently.

  Over coffee in her rustic kitchen, Con recounted she first told the police that on Hilda’s last visit about a week before she died, she seemed her usual self and just talked about gardening. However, so soon after her dear friend’s brutal murder she was too grief-stricken, frightened and confused to remember Hilda visited her again, only about three days before her abduction. Arriving unexpectedly in the afternoon, Hilda was ‘taut and trembling’ as she entered the kitchen carrying a basket filled with plants, their roots wrapped in newspaper.

  Hilda told her she had taken her Sizewell paper to London sometime in January, and ‘shown it to some people who were very pleased with it’. She was also concerned about the security of Ravenscroft. A man had recently called on her, claiming to be a new neighbour, and told her that ‘if ever she felt nervous about anything, she should let him know’. Far from reassuring Hilda, she felt intimidated.

  Hilda produced what looked like an ‘exercise book covered in brown paper’ from beneath the plants in her basket. When Con realised Hilda wanted to leave it with her for safekeeping, she fearfully declined. Looking dismayed, Hilda quietly hid the book again. They then walked slowly in silence across the farmyard to Hilda’s car.