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

  Although Hilda never spoke to me about Silkwood’s death, she had kept the issue of the Ecologist magazine featuring her case.

  Shortly before her murder, Hilda sent a donation to support the work of American Catholic nun and researcher for the National Cancer Institute, Dr Rosalie Bertell. Like some other whistleblowers against the nuclear industry, there were attempts on Bertell’s life.

  In 1977 Bertell discovered that radiation in the atmosphere, even at low levels accepted as safe, was responsible for increased incidence of leukaemia – and also diabetes, hardening of the arteries, cataracts and coronary disease. This had serious implications not only for people working in military and civil nuclear plants but also for anyone living in neighbouring communities.

  When we first met in 1994, Bertell told me: ‘The retaliation began. It was a surprise – mail opened; a nasty article in the local paper; a fuss at work led by a man whose research was funded by the Defence Department.’ As she became more widely known as a speaker, she found herself being met at airports by strangers who addressed her by name and offered to take her to her hotel. On one occasion she allowed a man, posing as an airport official, to lead her to her flight: she missed it and her speaking engagement. She also suffered mysterious cases of sudden and severe illnesses at gatherings where no one else got sick.

  In 1978 Bertell was openly threatened after she performed better in a TV debate than a physicist from a local nuclear power plant. Afterwards an executive from the power company angrily warned her: ‘Stay out of the Rochester area or we’ll get you.’ Ten months later she returned, a week after the power plant had malfunctioned attracting major publicity. Having given a presentation in the local hospital, she set off home along a three-lane expressway to Buffalo.

  Suddenly, a car following her came up on her left side and tried to force her to crash into a car in the slow right-hand lane. As she braked to avoid a collision, the lone male driver accelerated ahead of her and dropped a metal object out of his window. It landed directly in front of her car and was sharp enough to puncture a brand-new, steel-belted radial tyre, and heavy enough to bend the wheel rim. Bertell’s car veered left across the fast lane. By some miracle, the cars following avoided her. She regained enough control to come to rest on the median strip.

  As she was inspecting the damage, a brown car with ‘Sheriff’ written on the side and two blue lights on the roof stopped. The two male occupants were not wearing uniforms, and did not get out. They were only interested in whether she had noted the licence number of the car that had caused the damage, and whether she retrieved the object. When she said no, they told her the Rochester police would come, and took off. The police never came. On reporting the incident, the sheriff’s department confirmed there were no brown cars in the department fleet, and regulations required officers to stay with a disabled vehicle until help arrived. They also failed to investigate the incident. Later she learned her assailant was probably an employee of the security agency at the nuclear power plant.

  Bertell moved to Toronto in Canada, where she later founded the International Institute of Concern for Public Health. On 19 November 1981, as she and three fellow nuns were going to bed, four shots were fired through the fourth-floor bedroom windows at the back of their convent. No bullets were recovered; however, from the bullet holes in the windows, the police believed the shots were fired from over 50 yards away – so the bullets were from at least a .22 calibre rifle. The harassment stopped after that incident. According to Bertell, ‘the Jesuits talked with the Secret Service and put a stop to it’.

  In 1983, Bertell accepted an invitation from Gerard Morgan-Grenville to speak at the Sizewell Inquiry. Soon after I had presented Hilda’s paper, she presented her latest research into the deaths of low-weight babies, born downwind of nuclear reactors in Wisconsin. This provided further evidence that low-level radiation caused other illnesses apart from cancers and genetic disorders. Hilda had donated £50 towards Bertell’s costs to attend Sizewell and another £50 towards getting her book No Immediate Danger published. Morgan-Grenville then sent Hilda Bertell’s draft submission. This, and another paper on the genetic and other effects of radiation by British Professor Patricia Lindop, were two documents I never found when clearing Hilda’s house. In her early fifties, Lindop suffered a stroke at around the same time Don Arnott had his heart attack.

  Bertell told me that only a fraction of the attacks on anti-nuclear campaigners were ever made public. In some cases activists were successfully intimidated into silence; in others, they were effectively eliminated in ‘accidents’. Bertell died in 2012.

  In the early 1990s Sellafield, on the Cumbrian coast, was causing increasing concern on the other side of the Irish Sea. The massive Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP) was due to open in the face of opposition from campaign groups and the Irish Labour Party. It was feared more radioactive waste would be blown or washed across the sea. Meanwhile, new evidence was emerging about the impact of the world’s first serious radioactive fire in 1957 at Windscale, which was subsequently renamed Sellafield because of this.

  In the 1980s, Irish scientist Dr Patricia Sheehan had discovered a cluster of children born with Down’s syndrome whose mothers had been at a boarding school together in the Irish coastal town of Dundalk in the 1950s. Her study of 157 mothers showed they had eight Down’s syndrome babies, 12 with other birth defects, two stillbirths and one death within six weeks of birth.

  A few months before her suspicious death in a car crash in 1994, the Irish papers reported Dr Sheehan’s results of a recent study amongst 319 women who had been at another boarding school on the coast at the same time. She had found that five gave birth to Down’s syndrome babies, and 33 babies were born with other serious conditions including spina bifida, heart defects and deafness. Five mothers had stillbirths, seven babies died within weeks and six more died in childhood. There were also 161 miscarriages and 23 premature births among the 1,086 pregnancies.

  British Nuclear Fuels dismissed the Irish concerns about fallout – but someone tampered with the weather records. Dr Chris Busby, an independent expert on the health effects of low-level radiation, tracked down records for Windscale from the Meteorological Office Archives. Pages covering the day of the fire had been removed and replaced with new sheets, in a slightly different colour, which simply stated ‘No record’. However, the Air Ministry meteorological records clearly showed the wind would have blown the cloud of radioactivity towards Ireland.

  In June 1994, a few weeks before she was due to present her controversial evidence to an inquiry investigating the birth defects and alleged link with Windscale/Sellafield, Dr Sheehan was killed when driving alone. The Karen Silkwood parallels are striking. Adi Roche, chair of Irish CND, reported to me initially that another car had been involved. Colleagues said research papers she would have been carrying were not found in the car. She had told friends her mail had been opened and she had received death threats to ‘back off’ from her research. The crash was never fully investigated.

  The Stop THORP Alliance Dundalk group continued the struggle and was given £350,000 by the Irish Government to pay for ‘technical assistance’, but had to raise funds to take their case to court. In 2004 the Irish High Court ruled it did not have jurisdiction against British Nuclear Fuels. A judgment in favour of the children would have unleashed millions in compensation claims, creating a greater impact on the nuclear industry than any protest by environmentalists or foreign government.

  Patsy Dale (formerly Davis) suffered 27 years of abuse and violence because she became a threat to the Royal Navy’s nuclear establishment. Most people cannot believe a law-abiding British citizen could be subjected to such an horrific campaign of intimidation and torture in two ‘democratic’ countries. With police, media, lawyers, MPs and MEPs aware of the ongoing intimidation; death threats to Patsy and me; rapes and many attempts to murder her, it is astounding that it continued until her death in August 2011. Her story deserves a book in its o
wn right – this is a summary.

  In March 1990 I was asked to meet Chris Bangert, a British Telecom employee and Quaker giving Patsy support. He explained that, when two men attacked her in her home near Staines in 1987, only notes for her draft book were taken. Her assailants left behind two photocopied pages depicting the police sketches of Hilda’s murderer from Death of a Rose-Grower, with ‘DEATH’ scrawled between them. The message was clear: ‘Shut up or you will end up like Hilda.’ Patsy wondered if the thugs were connected to Hilda’s murder.

  Patsy had been married to a sonar operator serving in HMS Resolution, the Royal Navy’s first submarine armed with Polaris nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles. In 1968 their first son was born perfectly healthy. Five years later Stephen was born with a harelip and a cleft palate, damage to the front temporal lobe of his brain and a defect in his right eye. She had suffered four miscarriages and a daughter, Rosanne, was prematurely stillborn.

  Her research, done without her husband’s support, uncovered another five deformed children born within 26 months whose fathers were junior ratings in HMS Resolution, four of them with harelip and cleft palate – an incidence rate of one in 28. Some children had hydrocephalus and spina bifida.

  Patsy’s ordeal began when she agreed to be interviewed in a 1985 Yorkshire Television documentary called Inside Britain’s Bomb about radiation leaks in Polaris submarines. Other affected parents were frightened off by threats over jobs, pensions and the Official Secrets Act. In October 1985 Patsy received four calls warning she would be killed if she persisted with the interview. Threats followed from a suited man with short, fair, curly hair and a pockmarked face in a black VW Scirocco as she walked to work with a friend. Other malicious callers listed personal details of her elder son and his friends and their daily schedule, confirming they were all under surveillance.

  Yorkshire Television contracted former MI5 agent Gary Murray to investigate. When he met Staines Police on Patsy’s behalf, they said the Navy had told them Patsy was trying to extract compensation from the Ministry of Defence. Murray advised her to make a sworn affidavit in case she was killed, and later published it in his book Enemies of the State. He experienced sabotage to his car while investigating another case about civilian workers on nuclear submarines. Confirming Patsy’s phone was bugged, he showed her how to record all incoming conversations. He then received threatening calls from the same people who had threatened her. Her interview was subsequently broadcast on Yorkshire TV in December 1985. Soon afterwards she found her front and back doors wide open, footprints in the snow, the tape recorder whirring and conversations erased.

  In February 1987, two men introducing themselves as police officers knocked on her door at 11.30pm. One was tall and broad wearing a trench coat and tortoise-shell spectacles; the shorter one had long greasy hair and was wearing jeans and a donkey jacket. She quickly recognised the pockmarks and voice of the taller man as the Scirocco driver whom she nicknamed Crater Face. They burst in and slammed her back into a door. As she screamed, Crater Face tried to throttle her, warned her to stay quiet, and kicked the dog while the other man ransacked a nearby room. They stole her draft chapters, tapes recording phone calls and the phone numbers of affected families. This was when she found two pages from Death of a Rose-Grower with ‘DEATH’ written across it. On reporting this to the police, they dismissed her as a nuisance.

  The death threats continued at home and work, despite changing her ex-directory number four times. In February 1989, Patsy armed herself with a friend’s truncheon, which she used when an intruder wielding a thin-bladed knife tried to strangle her. Her neighbour made a police statement after another man jumped over the garden fence having cut her Citizens’ Band (CB) radio aerial lead.

  One CB radio friend was Gordon Dale, a former British soldier who had served in Ulster and been a Vietnam mercenary in support of US Special Forces. When he started taking her phone calls and demanding the caller’s name, his London flat was burgled and her papers and tapes stolen. After they married in October 1989 two ‘police officers’ questioned Gordon’s sister, Patsy’s papers and notes left with her were stolen, and Gordon’s car was nearly forced off a motorway flyover by a black Scirocco.

  Early in 1990 Paul Foot published details of Patsy’s campaign and persecution in his Daily Mirror column. Embarrassed into action, Staines Police Detective Inspector Bruton fingerprinted the house and swept it for bugs, but nothing came of it.

  Since 1984, Chris Bangert had lobbied five Labour MPs, including Tam Dalyell, to ask parliamentary questions and stir media interest. He also sought legal and police support, without success. Bangert and I met Patsy in June 1990, just before she fled in desperation to her 84-year-old mother in Ennis in western Ireland to escape her tormentors. Patsy impressed me deeply as an honest, articulate and tenacious woman, and a devoted mother. I promised to try to persuade a lawyer to take up Stephen’s case, and do some research through my naval contacts.

  Immediately after they arrived in Ireland, the police (Garda) accused them of driving a stolen vehicle. Within weeks Crater Face, in the same VW Scirocco, resumed his harassment. On 11 April 1991, he brutally assaulted Patsy in an Ennis community centre toilet after a Bingo night. As she entered he grabbed her by the throat, threw her against a wall, kicked and punched her to the ground, and plunged a hypodermic needle into her leg. The security guard, Michael Carmody, heard her screams, called the police and took her to Ennis hospital. The doctor, concerned at the seriousness of her injuries, offered to make a police statement. For the next five days she suffered nausea and vomiting 20 times a day – but no toxicology tests were done.

  Patsy began sending me copies of her draft chapters, Gordon’s daily log of ongoing harassment, and statements from people who had witnessed the intimidation in Britain. At a 1991 conference on the health effects of low-level radiation, London solicitor Martyn Day agreed to take up Stephen’s case, by trying to sue the Ministry of Defence for damages. I traced and interviewed retired HMS Resolution crew, including Patsy’s former husband. I found no evidence of a radiation leak accident – but did uncover a potentially more serious cause.

  When welders were repairing coolant pipes in the reactor compartment of the submarine during HMS Resolution’s first refit in Rosyth in 1971, several of the fathers of deformed children, including Stephen’s, had acted as ‘welding sentries’, standing next to the welders with a fire extinguisher. None of them was ever required to wear even an industrial filter facemask, let alone an anti-gas respirator. They all confirmed this was so they ‘wouldn’t feel nervous’.

  Alex Falconer, the European MP for Rosyth and former shop steward for dockyard workers during that refit, confirmed sentries wore white protective overalls, hats, gloves and overshoes – but no face masks. By contrast, each welder was protected by a ventilated suit and visor, and a forced-draught system that blew the fumes away from him – but towards the sentry. Don Arnott confirmed the most likely contamination pathway was inhalation of microscopic radioactive particles containing iron, cobalt or manganese isotopes released when welding stainless steel that had been neutron-activated, or from carcinogenic thorium in the welding arc. The particles would have gone directly into their bloodstream, risking damage to their genes and, consequently, defects in their children.

  The problem applied to every nuclear submarine refit from the mid-1960s until the early 1990s, when heavy polythene trunking was finally introduced to draw off the welding fumes. Hundreds of families with deformed children could have been entitled to huge compensation. If established, the health and safety record of British nuclear propulsion would be discredited, and would have implications for the rest of the international nuclear industry. In November 1991, when Stephen was denied legal aid on the grounds of ‘Crown exemption’, Martyn Day reluctantly dropped his case.

  My continuing investigations, plus Gordon’s frequent phone calls, probably provoked the next outrage. In January 1992, while Patsy was walking home, Crater Face drove a
longside her repeating ‘Keep walking Mrs Dale’, until they reached an empty building site. He got out, pointed a handgun at her, ‘pressed the barrel against my chest and said: “As for you, and your trumped-up solicitor and so-called Commander – this is what you’ll all get.”’ He then drove off. The Garda Detective Chief Superintendent took this seriously, allocating two detectives to tracing him, to no avail.

  The media also showed support. I joined Patsy and Alex Falconer on a local radio programme, and a Sunday Press article with the headline ‘Ennis woman will sue Britain over son’s birth defects’ re-ignited interest in her research and intimidation. The next day a folded piece of paper featuring Patsy’s story from James Cutler’s book Britain’s Nuclear Nightmare with ‘DEATH’ scrawled on it was dropped in their letterbox.

  The intimidation intensified. Their mail, like mine, was intercepted and tampered with. Patsy was home alone on 15 May 1992 when Crater Face again kicked and injected her, and demanded that she tell the Garda she had been lying. In a signed statement, a neighbour described Crater Face as a ‘white man, approximately six feet tall, wearing spectacles and a great three-quarter length overcoat. His face was heavily pocked.’

  In July 1992 I accompanied the Dales to meet Detective Inspector Bruton again at Staines police station. He was impressed when the UK registration number of the Scirocco, E644 EOK, was confirmed false through the national computer. A year later, Gordon reported Crater Face’s new white Citroen car number as J223 NCA, which Bruton also found to be false. While in Britain, another policeman confided that they had been told to stop their enquiries into the case. Meanwhile, Bangert convinced three Irish politicians to try to get police protection, but none eventuated.