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

  Encouraged when I told her about Cole’s appeal, Con now felt strongly that she should make a new statement. I asked her to wait while I made some enquiries. If I could find some corroboration, here was important support for the nuclear conspiracy motive and Laurens Otter.

  In Hilda’s diaries, she last went to London on 21 October 1983 for the CND rally. Not to have recorded a further visit placed it in the ‘sensitive/threatening’ category. I requested another meeting with DCI Furber.

  On 10 April 1986, during a tough three-hour discussion I gave him Con’s information along with her request that they interview her again. Furber was well prepared this time. Producing Hilda’s 1984 diary, he smugly pointed out that her last recorded visit to Con was on 8 March – not 15 March as stated by Con in her first police statement. Another unreliable witness.

  I countered: ‘You should hear what she has to say, now that she has cleared her mind.’ Furber retorted: ‘In my long experience, what people say first is normally the truth.’ I exploded: ‘How can you say that equally for a man reporting a broken window and an old lady whose best friend has just been brutally murdered? Now you’re being offered new and potentially important information by one of Hilda’s friends, you have a duty at least to take a second statement from her – even if you then dismiss it, as you did with Otter.’ Furber said he would consider it. I tipped off John Osmond of Harlech TV, who quickly filmed interviews with Con and Otter.

  Two days later, Furber told me they had decided not to take another statement from Con. Furious, she repeatedly phoned Shrewsbury police station, undeterred by their tactic of leaving her hanging on the line and then telling her no one was available. After Furber realised she was not going to give up, he sent two detective constables.

  Instead of simply taking Con’s statement, they interrogated her. ‘Has Rob Green been here? Has Harlech TV interviewed you?’ They then produced her first statement and leaned on her to stick with her original evidence. They even tried to make her say I had put her up to all this. Exhausted and frightened, she signed a statement that did not accurately reflect what she wanted to say.

  Con’s ordeal was not over. One evening about ten days later, she was in her kitchen when her old black Labrador started barking violently at the locked back door. Someone was trying to open it. After a few minutes the intruder seemed to go away, and the dog calmed down. Next morning, she opened the door to find a wooden plug lying on the ground outside. It had been prised out of an old finger-hole through which it used to be possible to lift the original wooden latch. As Con arranged for new locks and chains to be fitted, she had no doubt that the intruder was linked to Hilda’s case.

  Twenty-one years later, Kate, my second wife and skilled researcher, trawled through Hilda’s 1984 diary for every reference to Con – and struck gold. On Sunday 18 March, three days before her abduction, Hilda had written:

  Arr R. 5.40. Got good fire going, had 2 of Con’s scones warm for tea…

  Kate pounced. Scones go stale and hard within a few days. After her final, desperate visit to Con, Hilda would have enjoyed the comfort of them as soon as she got home – and certainly not ten days after her last recorded visit on 8 March. She had left subtle, poignant corroboration for Con’s claim in her diary. Paradoxically, this supported Furber’s assertion that part of what Con had said first was nearer the truth. On 18 March, Hilda recorded she went to Fron Goch that morning. Leaving after lunch, she called in at neighbours. She would then have had time to drive home via Con: a major detour, but taking only an extra hour or so.

  Con’s story supported Otter’s. Here was circumstantial evidence that Hilda did have sensitive documents which she needed to leave with a trusted friend – and if that failed, then with an experienced activist. The remoteness of Con’s farmhouse, the plethora of hiding places there, and the fact that Con was not involved in the anti-nuclear movement, made her a shrewd first choice. Close anti-nuclear friends like Harry and Gladys Bury would have been too obvious – witness the two ‘detective’ intruders in their house in May 1984.

  After first hearing Con’s story, I checked with Diana Moss, Hilda’s neighbour and secretary of the local CND branch. She clearly recalled Hilda saying she had ‘attended another CND event in London’ on 22 January 1984. Hilda’s diary that day made no mention of any journey, but it was the shortest and most anodyne entry for that year. Could Hilda have used the ‘CND event’ as a cover? These two claims, from two of Hilda’s friends who never met each other, provided mutual corroboration that she went back to London sometime in January 1984. Only some major discovery relating to her anti-nuclear campaign would have persuaded her to make the huge effort again in the middle of winter.

  As I extended my investigations to Sutton Road, several of Hilda’s close neighbours told me of suspicious activities they had witnessed during the week of her murder.

  Around mid-morning on the day before Hilda’s apparent abduction, Mary O’Connor had worried about a young man smoking an ornate pipe sitting on the footpath outside her house, and another strange older man dressed like a tramp nearby. Early the next morning, Brian George noticed an unusual man and woman walking fast near the junction of Sutton Road and Wenlock Road. Both acted as if they did not want to be recognised. The woman, in her mid-twenties, wore a long heavy fawn tweed coat with the collar up around her face. The man was aged about 30, in a smart light grey suit – but was wearing white, well-worn trainers.

  At 11.10am on Wednesday 21 March 1984, Ursula Penny was standing chatting to a friend on the footpath opposite her house in Sutton Road. Hilda drove by into town, ‘wearing a brown hat’. Seconds later a man emerged from the garden in front of a large Victorian house converted into flats almost opposite, jumped over a low wall onto the footpath and walked rapidly towards Hilda’s house. He was about 40 years old, medium height and athletic build, with a clean-shaven, weathered face and fairish short-cropped hair, wearing a grey lapel-less windcheater zipped up and grey slacks. She did not recognise him as a resident. Along with key witnesses to Hilda’s apparent abduction, in the next few years Penny would attend several identity parades, but would never see the man she and her friend had witnessed.

  These neighbours made statements to the police because they felt it was unusual to see four strangers not far from Hilda’s house that week. The man seen by Penny matched the features described by many witnesses of Hilda’s car driver. The one spotted wearing a suit and trainers in Wenlock Road looked like the ‘running man’.

  Years later, I also learned of changes to Hilda’s house between her abduction and discovery of her body. Her friends Lucy Lunt and Hana Bandler had visited without warning on the Thursday morning. They saw curtains closed across an open rear window in her bedroom, and closed shutters and curtains in her sitting room, out of sight from the road. Thinking she might be unwell, they called out and tried to open the front and side doors, but found them locked. Then they realised Hilda’s car was not there. Hana was worried enough to want to contact the police but Lucy dissuaded her, suggesting Hilda had probably gone to Fron Goch. Tragically, they took no further action.

  On the Friday morning at about 9 o’clock, Brian George was waiting for a lift outside Ravenscroft. He saw the kitchen door was open, kitchen curtains closed, and the light on. At that moment his lift arrived, and could not wait.

  For six years the postman had delivered Hilda’s mail, arriving regularly at about 9.45am. Everything seemed normal on the Wednesday and Thursday. However, on Friday he noticed the kitchen door was ajar, and the kitchen curtains were closed, which he had never seen before. Also, overnight two 20ft long, half-inch deep tyre scuff marks had appeared in the shingle drive curving away from the kitchen door towards the gateway – as if a vehicle had left in a hurry.

  The milk lady regularly delivered two pints a week to Ravenscroft. On the Friday at 10.30am, 45 minutes after the postman, she noticed the kitchen door was wide open. As usual, the conservatory door was unlocked for her to put the milk ins
ide, out of sight from the road. The inner door between the conservatory and house was kept locked. An hour and a half later, at noon, a woman delivering leaflets corroborated the milk lady’s report. She dropped a leaflet inside the kitchen doorway, noticing that the open rain-swollen door was scuffing on the linoleum.

  At 7 o’clock that evening, PC Davies confirmed the kitchen door was still wide open, the kitchen curtains closed and lights on when he made his half-hearted search for Hilda. He needed a few pulls to shut the door before leaving. Three hours later, a retired fireman who regularly walked his dog past Hilda’s house noticed the side door was half open again and the house was in darkness when his dog ran into the drive. The next morning, PC Lane found the door ajar, but with the lights back on. The police were silent about all these anomalies.

  Jane and Mick Gilmore, two younger anti-nuclear friends of Hilda, told me she had seemed depressed when they met around Christmas 1983. At one point, she suddenly said: ‘The nuclear industry will be the death of me.’ Daphne Phillips, a long-time family friend, remembered a strange conversation early in 1984 when Hilda had told her: ‘I am walking on dangerous territory…’

  While Don and I were doing our research in 1986, an unusually committed and resourceful freelance producer/director in TV and radio, Christopher Haydon, interviewed Hilda’s friends and key players in the case on audiotape. To Haydon’s surprise, Dr Peter Acland agreed to an interview, in which he made some highly contentious statements.

  The pathologist asserted that on the Wednesday ‘it was below freezing in the daytime’. He stressed this to support his claim that, in such conditions, Hilda would have become hypothermic within five to ten hours, and died that evening. However, records at RAF Shawbury, the nearest official weather observation site just five miles north of the copse, show it was sunny with temperatures between 3 and 6 degrees Centigrade during Wednesday afternoon. They did not dip below freezing until 2am on Thursday.

  Also, Acland insisted Hilda’s leg injuries showed she had been crawling before dying. Yet he knew she had a broken right collarbone, which would have made it impossible for her to support herself on her arms. She suffered other debilitating injuries, including a penetrating wound through her upper right arm, deep cuts in both her hands and stab wounds to her stomach. He undermined his inquest conclusion by admitting he could not exclude the possibility that Hilda had been dragged. He even said: ‘I can’t rule out that people came along later and moved the body.’

  Acland made another extraordinary admission, about Hilda’s body being allowed to decompose in the Copthorne Hospital mortuary. Acknowledging ‘it was only kept in a 4 degree fridge’, he confirmed that the pathologist and mortuary technicians had complained about the smell. He said it should have been taken to deep freeze facilities within two to three days after he performed the first autopsy – but the decision was Cole’s responsibility. Deep freeze facilities were available in Hereford and Birmingham.

  On Easter Day, 30 March 1986, The Observer published a short article titled ‘Commander accuses State over Hilda Murrell murder’. It was based upon a paper I had written and distributed to the media called Some Reflections Two Years On. I suggested the murder was linked to the State through its need to hide the truth about the Belgrano sinking where it was beginning to lose the argument, and to protect the nuclear industry. When BBC Radio Shropshire interviewed me, I encouraged those who knew what had happened to Hilda to contact me because I would believe them – and could help protect them with publicity.

  Less than two weeks later, I again drove two hundred miles north from Dorset to Don. He wanted to meet before being interviewed about the murder and the Sizewell Inquiry for HTV’s Wales This Week at 2pm before the film crew went on to interview Con and Otter. Ten minutes after midday, I parked outside Don’s front door to be greeted by his daughter Alison and two granddaughters, Arabella and Abigail, aged 12 and nine. Don and I started to go through the main points of his interview in the sitting room.

  At about 12.40pm Alison drove off on a routine errand, leaving us alone in the house while the children played outside. Five minutes later I saw Arabella leading a pony ridden by Abigail past the bay window; my car was out of sight to the right of the window. Soon afterwards, Arabella knocked on the door and announced breathlessly that my car’s front tyre was flat. We hurried out after her. Abigail had heard hissing as she passed the car. The sidewall of the front nearside tyre had clearly been cut.

  I changed the wheel, and took the damaged tyre to the local garage, whose owner Ray Heath knew Don. An experienced mechanic, Heath confirmed the tyre was an almost new, tubeless radial design with steel reinforcement. It had definitely been slashed: ‘Probably a Stanley knife with a hacksaw blade.’ Noting two cut marks close together, he reckoned it had taken two attempts by a strong man to puncture it.

  Berriew was a quiet, friendly village. Don was a popular and respected resident of some ten years’ standing, a parish councillor and a regular at the Lion Inn. Why would a local vandal walk two hundred yards up his drive and damage a car, which was not Don’s, parked outside his house?

  Though not visible from the road, Rhiewport Hall could be watched from a lane across the valley. Continuous shrubbery gave cover from the road to the edge of the drive directly in front of the house. From there a professional intruder would have taken ten seconds to cross to the parked car, slash the tyre and escape. However, he would have needed to know that I was coming, to have observed my arrival, and chosen a moment when most of the family members were at work or on regular errands and the children out of sight. This meant Don’s home must have been under sustained surveillance.

  If we were right, then Con Purser’s new information must have rattled those who knew how and why Hilda was murdered. Perversely, the incident gave us enormous encouragement. We quickly realised it could be linked with the arson attack at Fron Goch on 26 January the previous year. I used this as a lever to gain access to DCI Dai Rees at Dyfed-Powys Police HQ in Newtown, who had led the investigation into the fire at Fron Goch and in whose area of responsibility Don lived.

  Coincidentally, I was meeting DCI Furber later that day to discuss my second anniversary paper, and his refusal to take a new statement from Con. As I drove alone to Shrewsbury with the slashed tyre in the boot, I reflected grimly on these dramatic developments. It was less than a week since Con had rung me and ten days since a leading national newspaper had printed my challenge to the State security authorities. Was the slashed tyre a brazen new warning to me to ‘get off the grass’, and frighten other witnesses such as Otter and Con from speaking to the media? On meeting Furber, he listened impassively as I reported it and handed him a corroborating statement from Don. Furber had no choice but to arrange an appointment for me with DCI Rees four days later.

  After discussing the Fron Goch fire, Rees undertook to investigate the damaged tyre and send it to the Home Office Forensic Science Centre in Swansea, South Wales for examination. I warned that if it disappeared, I would publicly conclude the police were colluding in a State crime.

  On my next trip to Berriew, mechanic Ray Heath told me the police had taken a statement from him. A few days later, two strange men in casual clothes appeared on his garage forecourt. Claiming to be detectives, they leaned on him to water down his statement. He angrily refused.

  It was mid-August before a letter arrived from Dyfed-Powys Police:

  The report of the examination of your damaged tyre has been received from the Forensic Science Laboratory. The scientist has concluded that ‘the damage is the result of a concussion impact with an object or bodywork. The damage is not consistent with that caused by a sharp object such as a knife’…

  It took another month for the tyre to be returned to Newtown police station. Rees reported he had ‘drawn a blank on the incident’ when I retrieved it. On returning home, I obtained the following assessment of the damage from a tyre expert who knew nothing of the circumstances:

  [A] cut was found in the
sidewall, and this cut was the cause of the deflation of the tyre.

  On reading the letter from the police, he asked: ‘What made them say that?’

  This was the first hard evidence that the police were not pursuing the case objectively. Instead of trying to support Hilda’s next of kin, they appeared to be colluding with the State security apparatus, attempting to intimidate anyone who dared provide information pointing to a political motive and a State crime.

  Con’s ordeal encouraged her to trust her memory of Hilda’s last visit. She felt relieved that her determination to help the police in their enquiries had borne fruit, albeit in an unnerving way. She and I now had no illusions about what we were up against in pursuit of the truth; neither had Don, John Osmond and his HTV film crew, Laurens Otter or Ray Heath.

  In my second anniversary paper I wrote that the police were, in a sense, also victims in Hilda’s murder. Now I feared some of them were willing accomplices. Furthermore, whoever was interfering with the police investigation was so confident of their power to do so with impunity that they simply did not care what damage it did to their reputation.

  Hitherto, I had presumed only MI5 and their private agency thugs were likely to be involved. Now, in addition to the police it seemed MI5 interference extended to British Telecom, the Forensic Science Service, Royal Mail and Fire Service. I could also never forget the hostility towards me by the coroner, Cole and Furber, and Acland’s aggressive letter to The Times.

  I recalled in my paper that, at the time of the inquest, a public trial of State security agents was in progress in communist Poland for the abduction and assassination of a ‘turbulent priest’, Father Jerzy Popiełuszko. To the ‘free’ world’s amazement, they were convicted. In a totalitarian state, little attempt is made to hide the tools of repression and control. On the other hand, excessive zeal can be counterproductive – especially if directed against a popular priest where Roman Catholicism provided a leading source of alternative political power. Therefore, the State needed to be seen to punish such excessive thuggery.