by Robert Green
After the book’s publication, we expected the harassment to end. However, mail continued to be interfered with. For example, early in 2012 we received an envelope inside a clear plastic bag from the British Royal Mail cynically headed ‘Our Sincere Apologies’. It was Christmas mail from Chris Eldon Lee, an experienced Shrewsbury-based radio journalist who had investigated the Hilda case since 1985. All the contents were crudely torn, including original Shropshire Star cuttings about the book. Eldon Lee was shocked, as this was the only one of over 200 cards to have been tampered with. It became a potent exhibit at public speaking engagements.
Following Kate’s meeting of the UN Secretary-General’s Disarmament Advisory Board in February 2012, we returned to Britain to stimulate political and media interest in the case.
Austin Mitchell has been Labour MP for Great Grimsby, Lincolnshire since 1977. He became a political and media personality in the late 1960s in New Zealand as a feisty commentator. In 1972 his book, The Half-Gallon Quarter-Acre Pavlova Paradise, was dubbed ‘the frankest, funniest, most provocative’ written about New Zealand. Over the years we kept both him and his close friend, former Prime Minister Helen Clark, updated on our anti-nuclear work and the Hilda case.
From the moment Mitchell read the book he became our political champion. Concerned with our ongoing harassment and interference with communications, he gave us unfettered access to his parliamentary office. Mitchell’s secretarial intern had persistent difficulties communicating with us, as did our media contacts, friends and even lawyers. She said: ‘Every time I tried to call Kate’s mobile, I couldn’t get through and was cut off.’
She also witnessed Kate receiving repeated messages on her cellphone that, allegedly due to lack of credit, calls had been disconnected. Only three days earlier Kate had put NZ$150 in her Telecom NZ account and had neither sent nor received any calls. When she tried to clear voicemail, she heard her own frustrated voice being recorded. Telecom NZ’s woman operator confirmed that 28 incoming calls had been ‘dropped’ – despite the phone not ringing or indicating a ‘missed call’. The operator was surprised when there was a blast on the line and the phone went dead. She promised to investigate the ongoing problems. Telecom later refunded NZ$90 and sent a list of the outgoing dropped calls, but was not authorised to give the numbers for the incoming calls.
We also received disturbing reports from key witnesses that they had experienced phone and computer problems and harassment similar to ours, which seemed to be linked to our UK visits. Some even experienced intruders and strange cars parked near their homes. For their protection, they must remain anonymous, despite giving us documented evidence of their experiences, because they feared further repercussions.
We were surprised to receive another email from police informer Mr A, one of the chief prosecution witnesses at Andrew George’s trial. When he read the book overnight as ‘some sort of closure’, it ‘sent me cold’. He assured us he had not stood us up in 2006: ‘You made another call to me on the day and told me not to come…’ We had travelled to Telford to meet him, so someone monitoring our calls had sent him a bogus text. He had found ‘so many truths and small things’ in the book that made ‘perfect sense to me’. He advised us to ‘get hold of the transcripts of my conversations with the police which were all taped over three full days’. Rashly he added:
In my own mind it’s always been about the woman who suggested they break into that particular house and the white van used which contained her ‘friends’ who helped afterwards, this woman wasn’t seen by Andrew or his brother again …When I read about the woman and the van in the book it confirmed what I was told. I was never asked in court about her or her friends, which was the final stage of the progression on George’s story to me.
We contacted him from Shrewsbury and agreed a time to meet. An hour before, he texted that ‘Someone doesn’t want us to meet as two tyres on my car have been slashed overnight.’ Having ferreted out where he lived, some resourceful friends drove us halfway across the middle of England to a motorway service area midnight rendezvous, where he let us tape the hour-long ‘counselling session’ in his car.
Mr A told us about his recent interview with BBC TV Midlands Today, which was later broadcast with his head silhouetted and voice disguised. In it, he revealed that George had told him others were involved, and from that moment the police tried to stop him communicating with George. However, he did meet and talk with him again, even after George was moved to another wing in Blakenhurst Prison, but then George was removed to another prison.
In the run-up to the trial, Mr A was released with an electronic ankle tag with three and a half months’ remission of his prison sentence for the information he had provided to the police. Despite this, they frequently contacted him, threatening to ‘pick him up’. About an hour before appearing in court, he was shocked to be given just a five-page summary of selected parts of his interviews, which the police wanted him to read. ‘They jumbled it up, condensed it, then cherry-picked the bits that fitted what they wanted.’ He discovered that his character had been ‘assassinated [by the defence] even before I took the stand’. He protested that he was not a ‘hardened criminal: it was my first time in prison.’ He had been pressured into informing them about armed robberies because he ‘was with the wrong group of people’. The police ‘told me to stay away from you, which I couldn’t understand.’ They insisted on driving Mr A to court and back, ‘like I was some supergrass and I might get shot or something…’
We pressed him about the woman and ‘friends’ in the white van. He told the police, who clearly knew about the van, that George said ‘they were going to clean up, tidy the house, get stuff out…’ George also confirmed ‘the Government was involved, and other people did it… but he didn’t mention anything specific…’ Mr A thought two of the other men involved were ‘Cock-eye and Laney; I don’t know who they were.’ Kate replied: ‘They were Andrew’s friends, but the police eliminated them using their DNA.’ Mr A complained: ‘I’m really annoyed with the police; once I gave the evidence, they just dumped me.’
Mr A ‘kinda liked George’. He declared: ‘I guarantee he will die in that prison. Why would they risk him coming out knowing the can of worms?’ Then he remembered that George said two other, older men were involved: ‘One had cancer and one was in prison for arson similar to me. It wasn’t Laney or Cock-eye. I’m sure I mentioned it to the police. Someone gave evidence against George, or against one of his friends about something else… Get the transcripts.’
As we departed, we felt alternately exhausted, elated and confused. Had it been worth the time, stress and energy to interview the prosecution’s prize informant, who had now effectively become a defence witness?
On reflection, it had. In George’s trial it was reported that, on being arrested, the one thing he told DC Partridge was: ‘This is bigger than the Shrewsbury police.’ He also said this independently to his partner and me. Other relevant statements in the trial included: ‘I lied because I was frightened’, ‘I’d have had my throat cut if I’d have told the truth’ and ‘I was not in that house on my own.’ He had indicated that half of what Mr A said was true. Now, Mr A had at last succeeded in telling us that George had told him ‘the Government was involved and other people did it’, including ‘two other older men’. George’s long-term partner had also reported to Kate that ‘Hilda was kept in a stable or hut for two days’ and George told me that ‘she never was in the field; they took her somewhere else.’
On the 28th anniversary of Hilda’s abduction we organised a ‘Meet the author’ public meeting, chaired by Chris Eldon Lee, at the Shropshire Wildlife Trust. Over 120 people crowded in, with more than 30 turned away.
Eldon Lee asked if anyone had known Andrew George, and about 15 hands shot up, including several women who had cared for George in Besford House. All agreed he was too ‘thick’ to have abducted and murdered Hilda by himself.
After I recounted how George had allegedly told h
is dying father that, when he entered Hilda’s house, two men held guns to his head and told him he would get £60,000 if he kept his mouth shut, a man asked to speak. Identifying himself as Director of Dorricott Construction and George’s one-time employer, he confirmed he could not drive. He added: ‘I always remember Andrew saying to me that one day he would have a lot of money and be able to have his own business.’ Until then he had been mystified by that statement.
As I started signing books, the police surgeon who had initially examined Hilda in Moat Copse before Acland arrived spoke to me. She had been surprised by the lack of blood. When I asked if she thought the stab wounds could have been inflicted after death, she nodded assent. She added: ‘Acland and DCS Cole did not discuss my findings with me. Later, I wasn’t allowed to have a copy of my statement.’
Another respectable-looking woman in her seventies told me: ‘Hilda may have been involved with Bletchley Park.’ It was not the first time the top secret code-breaking centre in World War Two had been mentioned to me. During George’s trial, a sceptical policeman had passed me a note from a Dr Robert Hetherington, who wrote:
My wife, born 1918, was in signals intelligence in 1944-5 in Enigma Ultra, feeding material to Bletchley Park. I wrote to Commander Green who came here with his wife. As you will know he had been in sigint and was involved in the Belgrano. We tried to shake him out of his notions about Sizewell etc.
As people left the meeting, one younger man lingered. He told me that his friend had left, too nervous to talk because ‘he was subject to the Official Secrets Act’. However, he had given him permission to pass on the following explosive information:
At the time of the murder, he was helping guard the main gate into RAF Shawbury. Early on the morning of 21 March 1984, four Dutch or Swiss agents who spoke perfect English came out of the base having been flown in. Claiming to be electrical engineers, they were ‘muscley, fit and scary to look at’, and spent no time in the base where they were supposed to be working. They returned four days later and were flown out. Apparently, Hilda was held at Sundorne Territorial Army Centre, which was closed for the week.
In 1984, RAF Shawbury, some seven miles north of Moat Copse, was an air traffic control training base. These dates coincided with Hilda’s abduction and finding her body. The Territorial Army Centre on Sundorne Road, on the northeastern outskirts of Shrewsbury, was on the route taken by Hilda’s car. The centre was now abandoned; its boarded-up buildings included large Army vehicle garages. Was this the ‘hut’ where, as George had intimated, Hilda had been held for two days?
This triggered flashbacks to two other disturbing items of information. After the tenth anniversary public meeting in 1994, Laurens Otter had sent me a note. In it he mentioned that the ex-IRA man he arranged for me to meet had subsequently told him that Ulster snatch squads were occasionally housed at the Sir John Moore Army Barracks in central Shrewsbury. He claimed that one was there at the time of Hilda’s abduction, and had been involved. This corroborated a mysterious phone call to Otter in 1985 by a man with a ‘very aristocratic’ voice who said that ‘the perpetrators came from Sir John Moore Barracks, and you ought to get in there and talk to them.’ In that same note, Otter had given further details of the suspicious death of Avraham Sasa, including that he had worked in Israeli military intelligence.
The other item related to Trina Guthrie’s boyfriend Malcolm Leel, whose fingerprint in Hilda’s car was used to eliminate over 1200 suspects. According to MI5 agent Gary Murray, Leel was ‘the son of a senior Army Signals Intelligence officer employed by the Ministry of Defence… in a Shrewsbury signals unit, where his work involved handling intelligence traffic between GCHQ and the Falklands.’ Could Leel’s father have worked in Sir John Moore Barracks?
After the meeting, a professional-looking man spoke to Kate outside in the dark. What he told her (in complete confidence) pointed to pre-planned, official State involvement in Hilda’s murder. Now we had to contend with the possibility that she had documents containing information far more damaging to the Thatcher government than anything we knew about, either from the nuclear industry or Falklands War. Could this information threaten even the current government? This might explain all the extraordinary attention we continue to experience.
Soon after news of the book appeared in the Shropshire Star, we received several letters from a local tradesman whom police had questioned as a suspect about a year after the murder. He had a proven alibi that he had been home all day minding his young family. He did not know Hilda, but ironically had sold snowdrops to the Murrell shop in Shrewsbury as a boy. He had not yet read the book.
Some years after the murder, an elderly acquaintance called Joyce, from Clun in south Shropshire, told him Hilda had been her supervisor at Bletchley Park. Joyce was a former Naval Intelligence officer in World War Two. This had come up when he asked her what the strange machine was on her sideboard. She had replied that it was an Enigma German coding and decoding machine. He told her he had used a teleprinter in the Royal Observer Corps. She had also used them, a CORAL machine (a Japanese derivative of Enigma) and computers at Bletchley before computers were ‘officially’ invented.
When he told Joyce he had been a murder suspect, she became nervous. She said: ‘Don’t tell anyone: I don’t want to end up the same way as Hilda.’ She confided in him that, after the murder, she had been taken to Bournemouth on a holiday. Some women from Naval Intelligence questioned her about Hilda. Sensing danger, Joyce pretended to be senile, despite being extremely intelligent and fluent in several languages.
Apparently, these women were concerned that Hilda had had phone or radio communication regarding the Belgrano being armed with US Vulcan Phalanx guns, which could shoot down any missile or attacking aircraft. At the start of the Falklands war, the British warships had no Phalanx guns and had probably lost ships as a result. The women claimed that this could have been an additional reason why the Belgrano had to be sunk. Because of Hilda’s opposition to the war (she had distributed Ecoropa leaflets about nuclear weapons being deployed), it was feared she might reveal this vulnerability to the media. Therefore she had to be questioned.
I found this claim disconcerting. Despite my key intelligence position during the Falklands War, I had never heard any hint that the Americans had supplied any Argentinian warship with the Phalanx system.
There was also a rumour that Hilda had tuned into the Very Low Frequency Submarine Transmitter at Criggion in Wales. This reminded me that once when I was driving past Criggion with Hilda to her weekend cottage at Llanymynech, she pointed out that she knew what the huge cables, slung between a cliff face and masts, were for. I knew this too, but being bound by the Official Secrets Act, I did not discuss that the transmitter was aligned to beam signals in a northwest direction out into the Atlantic, where submarines could pick them up virtually worldwide without surfacing.
Reluctantly, I was now forced to investigate whether there was a link with Bletchley Park. My heart skipped a beat when I found, on its Roll of Honour, a Miss I Murrell, listed as ‘FO Civilian’ working in Block E of the Communications Centre as a Morse slip reader intercepting and transmitting encrypted radio messages. However, the archivist at Bletchley Park doubted this was Hilda because she was too highly qualified for this particular work. He told us that well over 2,000 workers are still unaccounted for. The names of civilian workers can only come from other veterans or their families because the official record is very incomplete. He advised that Hilda, as a Cambridge honours graduate with competence in languages, would more likely have worked in an outstation for the Foreign Office or even MI6. It would be impossible to find official confirmation of this. Hilda would have been a suitable recruit: in her mid-thirties at the time, single and available, she was fluent in French and could solve the Times crossword in less than 20 minutes. Also, it is curious that her diaries from 1941-43 are missing.
Further correspondence with our source included more tantalising information that strengthene
d the link with RAF Shawbury. In the 1960s, he had flown on an air experience flight from there in an RAF Provost aircraft. It had used a prominent landmark near where he lived, about 20-25 miles to the southwest, as a navigation turning point. For three days, beginning on the day of Hilda’s abduction, he and his wife were surprised to see a black Canberra photo reconnaissance aircraft fly over before the murder became public. He had never seen one before or since. It could have been used to monitor activity in the area.
In the months after the murder, he was in a local pub frequented by servicemen and police. He overheard some RAF Shawbury personnel talking about how a helicopter crew had been ordered to photograph Moat Copse. When he questioned them, they said the crew had refused to be involved after hearing it was linked to a crime. Apparently, this was why the Canberra was used.
Our source also reported that he had met some ‘hippies’ who had been in the area at the time, and had seen ‘a running man in shorts picked up by a helicopter’. They had dared not report this to the police as they were on a ‘hash run’ delivering drugs from Telford.
While in Shrewsbury we learned that George’s defence counsel, Anthony Barker QC, had died. Ironically, this made it possible for Michael Mansfield QC to become more involved in the case. At a public meeting in London, he warned that political pressure would have to be built for a Commission of Inquiry. If the government refused one, an inquiry could be held to examine their reasons.
Mansfield and I gave pre-recorded interviews in London to BBC TV Midlands Today. When the report was broadcast, transmission failed the moment I began speaking. Embarrassingly, two more failures followed.
While revisiting Shropshire we met a former policeman. Familiar with the Moat Copse area, he corroborated tractor driver Bryan Salter’s evidence, but went further. Salter told him that on the Friday he also saw a green Triumph 2000 (similar to the large dark car he had seen on the Thursday) parked near the strange men who said they were ‘police on a murder hunt’. Salter was deeply concerned when police showed no interest in his statement. Was this why, when John Osmond visited local constable Paul Davies while researching his first HTV programme, Davies said he could not talk to him because he was ‘under the Official Secrets Act’ before slamming the door?