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

  If the crime has political overtones, the police can come under pressure to lose their objectivity. Despite their protestations, they are subserviently linked to the State security apparatus. They hide behind the fact that evidence pointing to political conspiracy is rare, because it is difficult to obtain. Corroboration – usually involving leaking sensitive documents – risks the career, and sometimes the safety, of the source and their dependents. Also, beneath its veneer of democracy the British system of governance is intertwined with all the carrots and sticks associated with membership of the socio-political-military establishment. This age-old, supremely powerful State-controlled institution suppresses all but a few whistleblowers.

  It took me about two years to understand the implications of these realities for the West Mercia Police. As a former Royal Navy Commander turned roof-thatcher and anti-nuclear campaigner, I soon found I was one of 13 ‘wild cards’, or unpredictable factors outside the control of the State, in the Hilda Murrell case.

  First and foremost was Hilda herself. Born into a family ‘in trade’, Hilda had the formidable intellectual calibre, flair as a plantswoman and for business, and passion for preserving the natural and historical heritage of the British Isles that gained her access to the Establishment on sheer merit. Her financial and social independence, with no partner or children, meant these customary options for controlling dissidents had little traction when her deep patriotism and moral fortitude drove her to take on the nuclear State.

  Paradoxically, Hilda’s solitary lifestyle and growing frailty would have fuelled her fearlessness and sense of urgency, which must have blunted intimidation attempts. Also, her Bletchley Park experience meant that she would have taken care not to involve me because of my vulnerabilities as a recently retired naval officer, still subject to the Official Secrets Act, who had opted out of the military establishment by choosing an insecure, poorly paid new occupation.

  Hilda’s qualities and unusually independent situation would have encouraged whistleblowers, possibly including former Bletchley Park colleagues who were later in top government positions, to confide in her. This would have been more likely because she had shown both willingness and an ability to get dangerous information into the public realm. So had she become an intractable obstacle and a thorn in the side of the Thatcher government? If so, the only remaining option would have been for MI5 and/or the nuclear industry, with assistance and deniability from a private security agency, to interrogate her to retrieve the information, identify its sources and neutralise them. Abduction to a safe house was the least risky way to do this, after which she would have to be silenced and disposed of.

  I was the second wild card. Thatching freed me from the Establishment’s clutches. Also my first wife was strongly supportive of my pursuit of the truth, had no Establishment family links, and we had no children. Because my relationship with Hilda was low-key and long distance, the State security authorities would have underestimated its intensity – let alone the radicalising impact her murder had on me.

  One paradox was that my financial situation on leaving the Navy was severely constrained. Within six months of her murder, her modest bequest to me had eased that problem – until I spent most of it on helping stop a nuclear power plant at Hinkley Point. This, plus my sympathetic and flexible master thatcher, enabled me to take time off work at short notice to pursue my parallel investigation, and challenge the nuclear industry myself. Learning from Hilda’s experience, I developed a network of supporters, including skilled researchers like Don Arnott and Kate, and took security precautions when harassment and intimidation ensued.

  Initially, my genteel upbringing and conservative conditioning lulled me into trusting the police. However, I became increasingly alienated by their negligent initial response and subsequent failure to brief me as next of kin about major developments in the case. Their inexcusable blunder in allowing Hilda’s body to decompose, requiring a sudden funeral, was followed by the inquest whitewash. Then came their outrageous interrogation of me in response to Dalyell’s bombshell; refusal to connect dots over the arson attack on Fron Goch; pressure on whistleblowing telephone engineers; suppressing the Northumbria Report; disgraceful treatment of Con Purser, and sinister response to my slashed tyre outside Don Arnott’s home. When police behave like this, the motive is either corruption or political pressure. Such uncharacteristically incompetent and/or vindictive behaviour gradually convinced me that, in Hilda’s case, it was the latter. Ongoing surveillance and intimidation in New Zealand after I emigrated provided corroboration that this was a State crime.

  Chronologically, the third and fourth wild cards were Gerard Morgan-Grenville and his long-standing friend Tam Dalyell. Both maverick Establishment members, they were dangerous because they had good connections and information pointing to political conspiracies – in Dalyell’s case the Belgrano connection, while Morgan-Grenville had sound reasons to support both this and the nuclear industry motive. Worse for the State’s gatekeepers, these two Old Etonians were financially independent and therefore not easily controlled. On the contrary, if they had been threatened they would have simply seized on it as corroboration. However, lack of corroboration from Hilda’s diary about her last disturbing phone call to Morgan-Grenville, and Dalyell’s refusal to name his most dangerous source because of political and social loyalties, let the police and MI5 off the hook.

  Laurens Otter was wild card number five. Passionate about the need to get rid of nuclear weapons, he became Secretary of the Committee of 100 and worked for Peace News. Consequent awareness of the secret State, plus a streak of stubborn integrity, would have made him unusually difficult to intimidate. Thus, Hilda’s last-ditch choice of Otter to try to pass sensitive material to for publication was shrewd.

  The West Mercia Police came under public pressure from the moment farmer John Marsh made his first phone call about her crashed car at about 2.30pm on the Wednesday. They could easily have visited Ravenscroft that afternoon – it takes only about five minutes to drive there from Monkmoor police station. Her calendar above the phone showed her lunch appointment with the Symondsons. Questioning them and neighbours would have quickly triggered a proper search around her car. DCS Cole admitted that, if she had been found that day, she would probably have still been alive. However, in these circumstances I suspect Hilda’s body would never have been found.

  To sustain a cover-up when whistleblowers are provoked by what they know is going on, the lying and denials become increasingly difficult and less believable. Friends of the victim are drawn in and start connecting dots. When witnesses too frightened to go to the police see this, sometimes they feel strongly enough to come forward to those who will believe them and can protect them with publicity.

  The role of the media, as in Hilda’s case, is therefore pivotal. It took Judith Cook’s New Statesman article to persuade Dalyell to intervene. However, it can be a two-edged sword. From what he told me, MI5 probably exploited Cook’s revelation of my role in the Falklands War. I must have been under suspicion as one of Dalyell’s sources. After Clive Ponting’s arrest in August 1984, the State security authorities knew his most well-informed one was still active. They correctly judged Dalyell could not resist running with my Falklands link. He admitted that particular tip-off did not come from one of his usual sources. His spectacular Parliamentary intervention, two weeks after the inquest had finally been convened with minimal fuss, must have redoubled political pressure on the police. This explains their aggressive interrogation of me, probing whether I had leaked information to Dalyell – and even trying to intimidate me as a suspect in my aunt’s murder – followed by their first attempt to frame a burglar.

  Trying to make facts fit the panicking petty thief theory led to whistleblowing telephone engineers. No doubt from long experience, there was an assumption that leaning on them would work. It did for the one who examined Hilda’s faulty Fron Goch phone, but provoked the others to resist – and let the political cat out of the bag.


  By then television had taken up the case. Harlech TV’s John Osmond led the way with his tenacious and skilled succession of Wales This Week programmes, the last of which covered the tenth anniversary. Stuart Prebble did his best with World in Action, ensuring that the State version as depicted by Crimewatch backfired, provoking a far more dangerous whistleblower to break cover: a former MI5 agent. Wild card number six, Gary Murray became sufficiently motivated by the case to become involved.

  Bringing in the Northumbria Police to review the case revealed the panic level on the eve of the first anniversary. Suppressing Peter Smith’s report was probably wise in light of the terminal damage it could have done to several senior police officers’ careers, especially if the telephone engineer had spoken out about his concerns. West Mercia Police faced fresh media ridicule and disbelief, generating huge publicity for Judith Cook’s first book Who Killed Hilda Murrell? and providing a platform to break the Laurens Otter story. Of course Cook’s harassment, and the dreadful attack on Dora Russell followed by the sinister postcard to her, strengthened my suspicions of State involvement.

  Andrew Fox’s courageous 1988 documentary clearly rattled the State cage. For a Central TV programme costing £40,000 to be pulled days before being broadcast, on a case where the police insisted it was just a petty burglary for cash gone tragically wrong, was unprecedented. Fox’s experience of such crude censorship sustained his interest in the case. Twenty years on he agreed to help write early drafts of this book – thus qualifying as the seventh wild card.

  The attempt to frame the mentally unfit David McKenzie drove me to team up with Dalyell, a politician the Thatcher government had cause to fear. This decision to try to close the case must have been taken after McKenzie confessed in November 1986, two years before the Fox documentary was suppressed. Again, such heavy-handed abuse of the judicial system was risky, especially with two wild cards – myself and Dalyell – fired up and being fed new evidence from an outraged key witness, Rosalind Taylerson. Dalyell empowered me to challenge Thatcher’s top legal adviser directly, and the result was not just failure for the government. Dalyell was provoked into picking up Hilda’s case again and he remained its Parliamentary champion until Andrew George’s trial.

  Trina Guthrie’s dramatic affidavit in Gary Murray’s book Enemies of the State made her wild card number eight and ensured media interest revived for the 10th anniversary. Murray corroborated revelations about surveillance of anti-nuclear activists and Sizewell objectors, and published Patsy Dale’s affidavit.

  John Stalker was a ninth wild card. When he attended the tenth anniversary public meeting with a Central TV film crew, I felt my pursuit of the truth had received a major boost. Here was a distinguished former senior police officer who had recently won his spurs challenging the State security system in Ulster. He had come through that and the fire of unfair dismissal with his reputation for no-nonsense integrity intact. Now he had a TV channel behind him and his own programme for a second ‘independent’ review of the case – but it was deeply disappointing. Nevertheless, it briefly shone a useful spotlight on the denial of Ian Scott’s evidence by DCS Cole, and raised questions about the time of death.

  A 10th wild card was the courageous dissident policeman who arranged for me to see two stolen files from Shrewsbury police station and receive a set of police photographs of Hilda’s body and a copy of the Northumbria Report. This windfall revived my faltering quest. However, the files were relatively innocuous; it took another ten years or so before I obtained enough evidence to expose the shortcomings of ACC Smith’s review.

  The news of multiple break-ins to my new home in Christchurch, New Zealand was a severe shock when I returned with Kate from overseas in 1999. After years living in Britain under surveillance, and having to keep sensitive documents in safe locations, I had hoped I was no longer enough of a threat to be followed to the other side of the planet, and the case had gone quiet for three years. Our harassment and intimidation warned us that the issues underlying Hilda’s murder must have been extremely serious, and were ongoing. I found such corroboration encouraging: it meant I could trust my original gut feeling, and the sacrifices and stress entailed in my pursuit of the truth were worthwhile.

  Involvement in the cold case review had its healing, cathartic value. Also, it produced an 11th wild card. When I wearily began briefing Kate and taking her through my archive, I discovered she should have been a detective. Her fresh mind on the case, energy, persistence, and aptitude for painstaking research and analysis were extraordinary, and sustained me. Allied to these skills, her significant role in the 1970s-80s campaign that convinced most New Zealanders to reject nuclear deterrence for their security and nuclear energy meant she understood those issues Hilda had grappled with as a woman campaigner.

  Kate had other distinctive advantages and qualities. As a New Zealander, she was less deferential to those in authority than I. Her international experience representing citizen organisations had taught her how to speak truth to power without causing offence. She was on friendly terms with several leading politicians from a cross-section of parties. She had no career job to lose, but her academic skills and part-time lecturing at the local University of Canterbury kept her in touch with students, some of whom were inspired to work for us. Her role as mother of three girls kept her grounded, and having lived in her home for over 15 years, she had nurtured a strong family, neighbourhood community and network of friends, into which I was welcomed. This meant we had no shortage of support like house-sitters, a vital security need whenever we were away from home.

  The two-week visit by DCI Tozer and DC Partridge in September 2002 was a one-off opportunity to help the police solve the case. However, the trial and George’s subsequent failed appeal were travesties of justice. The West Mercia Police and State security system got what they desperately wanted: the case closed. For us, there was no closure, especially with a man imprisoned for 15 years for a crime he could not have committed alone. Police stonewalling at the two subsequent wash-up meetings was an ugly experience, renewing my sense of betrayal and alienation from them.

  On the other hand, the flow of new, key information provoked by George’s wrongful conviction infused us with fresh power and energy. I found it exhilarating to see the police thrown back on the defensive when we confronted them. Our belated discovery of so much suspicious activity around Hilda’s house and Hunkington made me feel like a jigsaw-puzzle player who, after struggling for too long, is visited by a friend who has nearly solved it. I need hardly mention there are several people who have risked careers, if not their safety, for us to have reached this point.

  Andrew George is the 12th, and perhaps wildest, card in the case. While there is plenty of evidence to acquit him, he was undoubtedly in Hilda’s house, and his aspermic seminal fluid was found on Hilda’s slip.

  If what he told Mr A is true, George was encouraged by a mystery woman to burgle the house. Loitering in the alleyway beside it, he would have seen the side door open and no car in the drive. Once inside, he probably quickly checked each room downstairs, but he would have had only a few minutes before hearing Hilda return. His escape route blocked, he might well have nipped upstairs to hide. All hell would have broken loose downstairs as Hilda confronted the team, was overpowered, drugged and abducted in one of their vehicles. The search for papers would have begun – whereupon he would have been discovered.

  Knowing he was now in the house, the team would have found him, held guns to his head, threatened to kill him and offered him £60,000 to keep his mouth shut. Literally shitting himself, he would have done whatever they told him, including not telling the whole truth to his family, his lawyer, Mr A, the jury, and me. Was this why he let slip to his employer that one day he would have a lot of money to buy his own business?

  Mr A’s three failed attempts to meet me, followed by what he told us when we met him, qualifies him as the 13th wild card. As a former police informant and one of the prosecution’s ke
y witnesses, he repeatedly took risks approaching me, despite harassment and intimidation. This indicates he had been genuinely disturbed by George’s conviction, and then this book.

  Mr A’s role and George’s predicament illustrate the power of the State security system to control evidence. Other pertinent examples in this case include the inmate who spoke to Trina Guthrie, and those he cited as members of the search and abduction team. All were struggling to survive after falling foul of the system where the State holds almost all the cards. It is too easy for witnesses to be intimidated, especially if they are, or have been, in prison. This shows the huge difficulties of establishing that a State crime was committed – which means MI5 have an almost clear run to repeat such operations.

  After nearly 30 years pursuing the truth about my aunt’s murder, I hope I have explained why I suspect she was a victim of a major, carefully planned operation to abduct her for questioning under torture about what she knew. Did Hilda have extremely sensitive, hitherto unknown embarrassing information, about the Falklands War, nuclear industry, or other issues that potentially could bring down not just Thatcher’s but any subsequent government? Is it possible that some brave whistleblowers have tried to get information to me about this, but their correspondence has been intercepted? This could explain why our mail and other forms of communication both in the UK and New Zealand continue to be interfered with.

  Because of my persistence and ability to sustain my pursuit, there must have been political pressure on the West Mercia Police to close the case. The extraordinary convicting power of DNA provided the opportunity for them and the State judicial system to charge Andrew George and recover their damaged reputation. They succeeded – but in so doing provoked the release to me of vital evidence, ignored in George’s trial, which would have probably acquitted him.