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

  At about 6.30pm that evening, according to Judith Cook and Tam Dalyell, a professional counsellor in Shrewsbury who helped with sex-crime investigations was visited by ‘two senior officers from Shrewsbury police station’. As mentioned earlier, they wanted leads on anyone who might have a sexual hang-up with old ladies, and might be violent. The following Monday, the counsellor was shocked to discover via the media that some of the details matched the scenario outlined by the two detectives. He contacted Cook and Dalyell because he realised the detectives had visited him the night before Hilda’s body was found.

  Around 7pm, a man who has lived nearby for 15 years and done decorating work for Hilda sets off on his regular walk along the pavement opposite her house. As he approaches it, two strange men are standing on the opposite pavement next to two cars parked close together bonnet to bonnet. A small white car like a Mini Metro is facing towards the by-pass with its rear almost alongside Hilda’s gateway. The other car is larger, like a Ford Granada, and dark buff in colour. In the gathering dusk, the walker notes the bigger man is in his fifties, clean shaven, about six feet tall and heavily built, wearing a collar and tie, cloth cap, and a long, dark-brown overcoat. He is talking earnestly with a man in his thirties, clean-shaven with short dark hair and smartly dressed in what could be a police uniform. When they notice the walker watching them, the older man hurriedly gets into the larger car and drives off quickly. The younger man jumps into the white car, and reverses into Hilda’s drive out of sight opposite the front door.

  The older man’s description matched that of the one seen in Drury Lane near Moat Copse at about 11am on the Wednesday, and then in London Road soon after midday. Was he ‘Inspector Davies’? Was he leading the ‘Special Branch murder hunt’ on Marsh’s land earlier on Friday? Had he just visited the sex counsellor? Was he instructing PC Davies what to do next after having finally taken the initiative and gone to Ravenscroft? If so, the policeman must have been under surveillance for the older man to be there. This would explain Davies’ extraordinarily incoherent, rambling statement about his fleeting and incompetent search of the house and lack of subsequent action. Was this why Latham stated in George’s trial that the police went into Hilda’s house only on the Saturday morning?

  Meanwhile, Besford House records regarding the evening movements of Andrew George read as follows:

  21.3.84 Went swimming.

  22.3.84 Stayed in all evening. In a lively mood, but reasonably well behaved.

  23.3.84 Stayed in watched video, generally well behaved.

  Staff at Besford House would have noted if he had gone missing at any time, or was behaving strangely. If George had succeeded in overpowering Hilda and placing her in her car, would he have gone back in to Ravenscroft, locked and bolted the front door, locked the side door leaving the key on the inside (as a policeman reported on Saturday morning), and found his way out through the conservatory doors? Even presuming he could drive, which he could not, how could he have been driving the hatchback reversing into her drive around 8.10pm – let alone the unlit small saloon car reversing out half an hour after midnight? Whose vehicles were they anyway?

  And how could he have come back to Ravenscroft undetected between the Thursday and Friday and closed curtains, turned on lights and unlocked the side door? Why on earth would he have bothered, with the huge attendant risks? As for the footprint fiasco, at George’s trial, why were the prints of an unusual Romanian trainer design size 8-9 apparently first found, only for the casts of them to disappear once George was charged? Instead, the cold case review seemed to find Doc Martens bootprints in Hilda’s kitchen – a pair of which George owned in March 1984, but which were also standard police footwear. Was it because his foot size was only 6 at the time and he did not have trainers?

  Objective analysis of this avalanche of evidence, concealed from me for over 20 years, made a mockery of ACC Smith’s feeble explanation in June 1985 for the extraordinary number of coincidences in the case. Most of these reports were made within days of Hilda’s murder, by local people who recognised habitual visitors and traffic. Eleven strangers and ten different strange vehicles acted suspiciously at or near Hilda’s house between early on the Monday or Tuesday and soon after midnight on the day of her abduction. Most of these were seen by more than one witness, and some seen twice by the same one. On separate occasions two different strange men were seen by the same witnesses near Hilda’s house and in the Hunkington area.

  A comparable pattern of suspicious vehicles and strangers was reported around the copse and then Hilda’s car after it crashed. The police never mentioned any of them. However, they admitted to us at our final meeting that five of the strangers seen in Sutton Road were never traced. No one saw any suspicious small teenage boys near the house or copse. Despite several witnesses and police touching the car inside and out, the only fingerprint found was on the inside of the rear window – and in police photographs the car’s bodywork looked suspiciously clean despite muddy wheels. Who locked the car on the Wednesday evening after the first police visit, before the keys were subsequently found in Hilda’s coat pocket?

  What had emerged was a circumstantial smoking gun, pointing to a sinister web of vehicles and disguised agents in a carefully coordinated major operation, encircling poor Hilda and where her mutilated body was eventually found. Above all, the police theory of a lone, petty burglar – let alone a teenage truant who could not drive – was demolished. Anger welled up as I realised how the media, Dalyell and I would have confronted Cole had I known then that the police knew all this.

  Meanwhile, pathologist Peter Acland had been abandoned by the police. In July 2008, he failed to get the High Court to override a decision by West Midlands Police to refuse to give him work. He was awaiting disciplinary proceedings for alleged incompetence in two murder cases the previous year, and four police authorities in the Midlands had stopped using him. In 2009 his name was removed from the Home Office Register of Forensic Pathologists. In July 2012, the General Medical Council’s Fitness to Practise Panel found that he had failed to perform adequate post mortems in these cases. Despite finding that his fitness to practice was impaired, the Panel allowed him to continue working as a doctor.

  After I had openly admitted in media interviews and to friends and supporters that I was writing this book, it came as no surprise when our mail experienced renewed interference, and we had indications that surveillance had been stepped up. The British State security apparatus seemed increasingly desperate to impede us, and frighten us into not finishing it. Of course, the effect of such corroboration that it had things to hide was to encourage us to keep going.

  A neighbour living opposite our Christchurch home told us that, for a month after we returned from the trial in mid-2005, he saw various cars parked outside our house for several hours during the daytime with the driver reading, alone. It was so persistent that he thought he was under surveillance. This was corroborated by a young woman working for us when she went out for lunch. We were advised that the car was probably fitted with special monitoring equipment capable of picking up our conversations through any electronic appliance in our house, and accessing our computers.

  In February 2006, former Central Television producer Andrew Fox came to help us start writing this book. Shortly before he left, while we were being interviewed for both British and New Zealand TV programmes on the case, we found a large envelope containing a feature article about us slit open in our letterbox. Earlier that morning, a neighbour saw a strange young man run out of our drive. The date, 3 February, was the centenary of Hilda’s birth. Soon afterwards, graffiti of our initials appeared on our gatepost. Feeling threatened, we took the precaution of briefing Prime Minister Helen Clark, whom Kate knew, while she was visiting Christchurch. Thereafter we updated her periodically.

  Early in 2008, as we were about to go to Britain for three months to research and work on this book, Fox posted us a CD of his latest draft by ‘track and trace’ airmail so we could r
eview it before we left. He received notification of its safe arrival on 1 February – but it had still not appeared when we departed ten days later. The day after we left, it turned up at the ‘safe’ address of a barrister’s chambers.

  Over Easter we visited my sister for a family reunion. Unfortunately she emailed that she had booked us into a local pub. At 1.30am on the last night of our stay, we were woken by an intruder trying to unlock our door. He had gained initial access through a latchkey in an outside door at the top of old stone steps leading into a corridor. Luckily the old deadlock on our door was faulty, and we had inserted our key in it. Viewed briefly through the keyhole, a big man in a blue tracksuit who, unlike a drunk, remained silent, failed, and left. Moments later, vehicle hazard lights flashed in the street below. A white rental van with aerials had been parked across the street since we arrived. The pub manager, who had gone home after closing time, later confirmed we were the only occupants that weekend. On returning to Fox’s home to resume work on the book, we had five silent phone calls over the next two days.

  We returned home to find Kate’s computer running. She had switched it off and unplugged it with instructions to her daughter and a friend house-sitting in an upstairs apartment that it should not be used. They, and two of our assistants who called in periodically, agreed it had been off until about two weeks before we returned. One who visited Kate’s home office weekly noticed it was off again at one point and then back on, but assumed Kate had changed her instructions.

  Yet again our mail was interfered with, despite being delivered to a PO box in our local post shop. A large padded envelope, filled with United Nations books and pamphlets and posted by surface mail from the UK, arrived unusually quickly. It was torn open, but with a single strip of broad sellotape wound longitudinally around it to prevent the contents spilling out. These seemed complete, but they now included a small padded envelope with a UK airmail sticker and unfranked stamps from a Yorkshire address by someone unknown to us. Marked ‘Urgent Spares’, it was addressed to a stranger in Wellington, New Zealand. Having photographed it, we handed the small package unopened to our local Post Shop manager for onward delivery. He agreed this looked like intimidation, and briefed his sorting staff.

  Another A4 padded envelope posted at the same time from Shropshire arrived slit open and empty of all documents. It was enclosed in a Royal Mail plastic bag marked ‘Item Damaged Before Arrival In UK’ – yet it was clearly stamped ‘SU Royal Mail postage paid UK’. During this time one of our staff once found our PO Box unlocked.

  This was serious enough to warrant briefing the Prime Minister again. In a letter, hand-delivered by one of her ministers who was a trusted friend, we explained the latest mail interference, surveillance and the pub intruder. We requested that, in the event of any ‘accident’ befalling us during our next UK visit, she would immediately initiate a formal inquiry. We also asked her to investigate whether there was any involvement by the NZ Security Intelligence Service (SIS), or if they had any knowledge of such operations. When we next met her, she confirmed that, as head of the SIS, she had been assured they were not involved. Meanwhile, visits to our home by MPs, including ministers, and journalists to discuss our disarmament work and security problems helped protect us.

  Before leaving again for Europe in early July 2008, we warned our middle-aged male house-sitter about earlier breakins. He expressed sceptical amusement. Late that night, as he drove up the drive he saw through the living room window a man silhouetted by torchlight. On our return after two weeks he described how, thoroughly ‘freaked out’, he had left hurriedly without investigating further. Then, determined not to let us down, he nervously returned. As usual there was no sign of forced entry, and nothing seemed to have been taken.

  There was another disturbing incident. The same house-sitter, now fully alerted, noticed a car parked outside our house several times. Returning late one evening, he found it still there. Pulling up about 20 feet behind it, he could see a man in his thirties to forties in the driver’s seat, apparently doing nothing. Having waited about 20 minutes with headlights on, our now intrepid house-sitter was about to get out and challenge him when the car started, executed a violent 180-degree turn and disappeared down the street with tyres squealing. We reviewed our security procedures, including never discussing book details in our home, keeping copies of draft chapters in safe locations, and minimising discussion of plans by phone or email.

  In April 2009, Kate had a remarkable 45-minute meeting with the SIS Director, Dr Warren Tucker. After explaining that the only motive for such persistent harassment could be that we were writing this book, she showed him the damaged envelopes and a photocopy of the small padded package of mysterious ‘spares’. Suddenly, he recognised the addressee: it was an acquaintance of his. Repeating Prime Minister Helen Clark’s assurance that it was nothing to do with the SIS, he commented with a wry smile: ‘You wouldn’t know we had been there. These guys wanted you to know.’ He asked who we thought was trying to intimidate us. Kate replied: ‘MI5 or MI6.’ She recounted Tozer’s response to my request in 2002 for our house to be swept for bugs before he returned to Britain. Tucker undertook to brief the Inspector-General and Police Commissioner about this blatant harassment of two law-abiding New Zealanders, and request intermittent police protection.

  Three months later, he honoured his promise to Kate that he would visit me at home. While she was overseas attending a meeting of the United Nations Secretary-General’s Advisory Board on Disarmament (which gave us added protection), Tucker listened carefully for over an hour – aware we were probably being bugged – while I briefed him on why I believed the British State security apparatus seemed so determined to try to intimidate us. I could never imagine having a similar meeting with the Director of MI5. Soon after Kate returned, we decided on impulse to walk to a local restaurant for dinner. We were pleasantly surprised to see a New Zealand policeman sitting in an unmarked vehicle outside our house.

  We were now under no illusions as to what we were up against in trying to finish this book. After 27 years of surveillance and harassment, I had become inured to having to discipline myself to be discreet when using my own phone – and despite this enduring the irritation of phone calls disconnected in mid-conversation. Then there were all the silent calls. There was the need to find and then arrange to use safe phones to make sensitive calls, and to organise safe addresses for mail. Because of the ease with which a mobile phone user can be followed and listened to, I do not have one. Kate became expert at removing the simcard and battery from hers before leaving the house for any sensitive discussion, and we had to ask those we met to do the same. Constantly restraining our anger, we endured the slightly fearful frustration of not being free to discuss the book in our home or car – instead we had to go to safe houses, with the associated risk of involving friends. There was the tedious business of backing up computer files, making and hiding copies, and arranging safe storage for my archive. Finally, where possible we always travelled overseas together; while there we never used rental cars, and when visiting Britain, I felt like a fugitive in my own country.

  CHAPTER 14

  ‘BIGGER THAN THE SHREWSBURY POLICE’

  The first edition of this book was launched in October 2011, appropriately in Christchurch’s Horticultural Hall in the central park. It was one of the few city venues to have survived two major earthquakes, on 4 September 2010 and 22 February 2011, and over 10,000 aftershocks during the next two years. The capacity audience included four Christchurch MPs, two of them former government ministers.

  Equally appropriately, the book was launched by a distinguished woman author, Fiona Farrell. She described her shock on seeing the photos of Hilda’s body. This was ‘not the posed stuff of primetime television with its nightly diet of murdered women. This is a person… this is Hilda Murrell, a horticulturalist, a rose-grower, an expert in her field of such repute that David Austin named a rose for her… Rob Green’s beloved aunt, someone wh
o shared with her nephew a deep love of her country – not the feeble sports ground, PR-generated patriotism with its flag waving and incitements to be “loyal” – but a clear vision of what is good and beautiful in a country and worthy of defence.’

  Publishing the book was unusually challenging. Aside from working through frequent earthquakes and consequent damage, our experience of surveillance and harassment meant we had to take extraordinary security precautions. This entailed no electronic communication, and only face-to-face meetings with our intrepid septuagenarian co-publishers in the North Island. They arranged for printing and binding to be done at night during weekends, and the books couriered and stored at several secret locations in Christchurch.

  One ironic consequence of the earthquakes was that the storage location for most of the original source documents, in a legal firm’s documents safe on the 19th floor of a city-centre tower block, suddenly became too secure. When it was condemned to be demolished, a team of fit, brave ‘sherpas’ climbed emergency stairs to retrieve most of them from the chaos.

  Christchurch’s flagship daily Press featured the book in a major article headlined ‘PEACE ACTIVIST TARGET OF “OFFICIAL” HIT SQUAD’. At 3am that morning, we covertly launched an updated Hilda Murrell website where, among much hitherto unpublished material, we placed a copy of the suppressed 1985 Northumbria Report. National coverage quickly followed, including TVNZ’s Channel 1 primetime evening news, and features in the Listener and on Radio NZ.