On December 20, 1984, as the police investigation into the Murrell murder entered its ninth fruitless month, Dalyell rose in the House of Commons to tell the world that he had effectively solved the crime. The police version, he argued, had always been improbable because it “did not tally with what was obviously a sophisticated break-in, in which the telephone had been cut, leaving it so callers could ring in but not out.” Such circumstances “pointed away from a random murder.” No, it was more likely that the intruders were looking for something—that this was an intelligence operation that had gone “disastrously wrong.” Dalyell was unconvinced by the Shrewsbury view that the botched search concerned nuclear documents, not least because he knew people high up in the nuclear industry and couldn’t believe that they “would dream of authorizing minions to search the house of a seventy-eight-year-old rose grower who had elegantly expressed, but quite unoriginal, views on reactor choice and nuclear waste disposal.” No, the issue was, of course, the Belgrano, and he had received tips from two “reliable sources” about exactly what had happened:
I am informed that the intruders were not after money, not after nuclear information, but were checking to see if there were any Belgrano-related documents of Commander Green in the home of his aunt . . . They had no intention of injuring, let alone killing, a seventy-eight-year-old rose grower. Yet being the lady she was, and in her home, Hilda Murrell fought and was severely injured. She was then killed or left to die from hypothermia—and the cover-up had to begin because the searchers were members of British intelligence, I am informed.17
While the notion of members of the British security services going around bumping off little old ladies in English market towns (more or less the exact opposite of their official role) may have amazed most MPs, it simply angered Mr. Dalyell. “On whose ministerial authority, if any,” he demanded to know, “did the search of Miss Murrell’s home take place? Was there clearance, or was this the intelligence services doing their own thing?” And he concluded: “Of one thing I am certain—that there are persons in Westminster and Whitehall who know a great deal more about the violent death of Miss Hilda Murrell than they have so far been prepared to divulge.”
Commander Green’s own MP, the Liberal member for Yeovil, Paddy (later Lord) Ashdown, requested that, in light of Dalyell’s revelations, there should now be a formal inquiry into the murder. The next day, there was substantial press coverage. The Guardian reported that the Home Office was investigating Dalyell’s claims and added (somewhat randomly, given that Dalyell had firmly dismissed the nuclear connection): “At the time of her death Miss Murrell, who was an active anti-nuclear power campaigner, was working on a document to be presented to the Sizewell B inquiry . . . It was this activity which fuelled earlier speculation about the reasons for the break-in at her home.”18 The London Evening Standard carried the headline “MP’s Amazing Murder Story,” and there was a speculative piece in the Sunday Times in which a senior officer was quoted as saying that the Murrell murder “doesn’t follow the accepted pattern of burglaries, not in my experience as a policeman.”19
Dalyell subsequently elaborated on his information and his theory. Two days before the March abduction, Dalyell had asked Defense Secretary Michael Heseltine some very pointed questions in the House concerning the Belgrano. The substance of his questions concerned material leaked to him (it later transpired) by a Ministry of Defense civil servant, Clive Ponting. But the questions had caused “a flap in Downing Street” and a demand that the source of the leaks be found at all costs. According to Judith Cook, with whom Dalyell was in contact, his sources had told him, “there had indeed been a semiofficial break-in at the home of Hilda Murrell . . . What Tam was told was that the operation had not been organized at a very high level. There had been no intention of harming Hilda, but it had been decided to search her house to see if she had any copies of documents or raw signals.” There had been two intruders in Ravenscroft when Hilda had come home unexpectedly and disturbed them. There was a struggle, she was hurt, and taken away, and left to die.20
There were many problems with the Dalyell story, however impeccable his anonymous sources. For example, why was Hilda’s return so unexpected given she had only gone shopping in Shrewsbury? But perhaps the biggest difficulty was the picture it painted of the security services: functionally incompetent in matters of basic tradecraft and, given the forensic evidence, sexually perverse. How could such a force deal with the threat from the IRA or Middle Eastern terrorism when it couldn’t even conduct a search of an old lady’s detached house without having to murder her? It simply wasn’t credible.
Unless. In the spring of 1985, the Sunday Telegraph carried a story about a private detective who had allegedly told Special Branch officers that the Murrell murder was a surveillance operation in which “something went badly wrong and it involved officialdom.” The next day the Guardian’s security specialist Richard Norton-Taylor reported that West Mercia Police were “believed to be considering the possibility” that the murder had been carried out by “a private detective acting for MI5 or another security service.” Norton-Taylor then lobbed in this bombshell: “It is known that private investigators . . . work from time to time for the security service. It is also known that private detectives were investigating objectors to plans to build a pressurized water nuclear reactor (PWR)—in which a number of companies, British and American, have a stake—at Sizewell, Suffolk, at the time Miss Murrell died in March 1984.”21 Here was a way to square the obvious circle: the crime had been carried out not by professional spooks but semi-amateurs, the dross of the policing and security world.
One such private operator was a Mr. Peter Hamilton, formerly an officer in military intelligence, who ran a company called Zeus Security Consultants and admitted that he had been asked by a “private client” to conduct clandestine investigations into the activities of Sizewell objectors. Judith Cook claimed that she had been given information that Zeus had then subcontracted some of this work out to even smaller outfits, such as Sapphire Investigation Bureau, based in the village of Acle near Norwich, and Contingency Services of Colchester.22 Contingency Services was run by Victor Norris, who, in addition to being a convicted pedophile, also operated a company selling Nazi memorabilia. The sexual connection was not perfect, since attraction to old ladies would appear to be a philia at the opposite end of the scale to that suffered—or enjoyed—by Norris. But it was highly suggestive, thought Cook, that just three weeks after the Murrell murder, the boss of Sapphire, one Barry Peachman, got into his car with a shotgun, placed it in his mouth, and shot half his head away. True, conceded Cook, Peachman had been having an affair, and this had led some to speculate that his suicide was caused by domestic difficulties, “but as we know, it was not quite like that.”23
Cook, Dalyell, and the Shrewsbury peace set were far from alone in their suspicions. Granada’s prime-time World in Action program of March 1985 had begun by suggesting that the police “know that there’s evidence that points toward two quite different and disturbing explanations for Hilda Murrell’s death” and concluded, twenty-six suggestive minutes later, by talking about the “possibility that some kind of conspiracy had occurred.”24
Then, in the early 1990s, a writer, Gary Murray, claimed that the truth behind the whole story had been vouchsafed to him by a prison inmate. The tale he heard (and believed) was that anxiety in Number 10 about Belgrano leaks had led an unidentified security agency to employ a northern firm, Ceres, to search Hilda’s house. On the fateful day, a Ceres team consisting of a leader code-named Demeter (a moonlighting garage owner), a woman named Helga, and a right-winger who used the nom de guerre Spengler turned up at Ravenscroft, looking for papers. When Hilda interrupted them, she was restrained and Spengler (who else?) set about torturing her to reveal the location of the documents. Unfortunately, the sadistic Spengler became aroused and felt compelled to leave his DNA over various items. Judith Cook was clearly of two minds about Murray’s analysis but as
ked, in a question worthy of an Umberto Eco novel, “If Zeus exists, then why not Ceres?”25 The whole thing was like some surreal updating of the Ealing comedy The Ladykillers.
Over time, there were plenty of theories and even confessions. The magazine Private Eye ran with the notion, probably originating with Rob Green, that Hilda’s body had been dumped in a roadside ditch on the night of the twenty-first, and only afterward was it placed in the Moat wood. Green still believes, as he recently told one interviewer, that his aunt’s death was “a result of a state-sponsored abduction, with her car used as a decoy.” His sense that the authorities were involved had been heightened, he said, by a series of odd occurrences. Hilda’s Welsh cottage had been set on fire; his tires had been slashed; his telephone and post “were often interfered with”; and he believed that on several occasions he had been followed when driving in Shropshire. As late as 1994, his father’s house—where he was living at the time—was broken into, but nothing was stolen. Meanwhile, Judith Cook reported getting intimidating phone calls suggesting that she leave the Murrell case alone.26 And in 2002 a Scottish journalist claimed that a member of a Nazi organization, the National Socialist Movement, was “suspected of the murder of elderly CND activist Hilda Murrell.” It isn’t clear whether or not this was the demonic Spengler.27
The comments made by police pathologist Dr. Peter Acland in January 1985—as the conspiracy theories were beginning to cohere—caused less of a furor. “I don’t know who killed Miss Murrell,” he wrote, “but I have a strong suspicion that some two-penny-halfpenny thief is gloating over a pint of beer in a pub not many miles from Shrewsbury about all this media interest.” We’ll see later in this chapter whether or not he was right. By the time he said it, however, Hilda was ceasing to be an ordinary elderly lady and was metamorphosing via “gutful, courageous, seventy-eight-year-old Edwardian woman” (Tam Dalyell) into a kind of secular martyr of the antinuclear and peace movements. She was a woman who had suffered and died for her beliefs. She was a victim of the notion of the enemy within.
Her posthumous celebrity came quickly. The year 1985 saw two books published about her murder as well as numerous articles and features. The writer Maggie Gee based a novel on her death. Three years later, an English band, Attacco Decente, recorded a song about the murder, titled “The Rose Grower.” And three separate dramas were fashioned out of the story. In the summer of 1986, you could have gone to see Who Killed Hilda Murrell? An Investigation at the well-regarded Tricycle Theater in Kilburn in north London, taken a brief holiday, and returned for a performance of Celestial Blue: The Life and Death of Hilda Murrell by an entirely different author at the equally acclaimed Gate Theater in Notting Hill in West London. Unlawful Killing, Judith Cook’s own play, was put on at the Theater Royal Stratford East in the spring of 1991. After that, interest in the Murrell case waned, though even now (late 2008) you can visit the Hilda Murrell website maintained by her nephew Rob Green.28
CONSPIRACY—COMING TO A SCREEN NEAR YOU
A striking phrase recurred in the descriptions of the case by many of those who thought that Hilda Murrell might have been killed by the secret state. She was, or might have been, they suggested, the “British Karen Silkwood.” In their minds was the famous case of an employee at a plutonium fuel plant in the United States, who had died in a mysterious car accident on an Oklahoma highway ten years before. Or, at least, the movie of the famous case, since Silkwood’s death made very little impression on the British public until it was turned into a film starring the most celebrated Hollywood actress of that moment, Meryl Streep—a film that had been playing in cinemas all over Britain only months before Hilda’s death. In real life, Karen Silkwood was a union activist who had criticized the safety of the plutonium fuel plant where she worked and was killed in a road accident that involved no other vehicle. Her death was soon regarded as a setup by some of her fellow activists, who suspected her employers, Kerr-McGee, of having somehow arranged for this irritant to be removed. The plant itself closed down the following year.
In the film, Silkwood is depicted as an ordinary woman with problems in her marriage, struggling to keep everything together but possessed of an extraordinary amount of courage and integrity. On becoming ill, she begins to realize that the safety practices at the plant are endangering the workforce, and develops an obsession (to the predictable detriment of her love life) with discovering evidence to prove neglect. Having collected this evidence into a dossier, she is en route to meet a reporter from The New York Times when her “accident” takes place. The authorities blame it on a combination of alcohol and tranquilizers; the movie draws no definite conclusion but leaves the filmgoer with the strong impression that Silkwood was somehow assassinated.
That Karen Silkwood earned movie eponymity owed something to fashion. Five years after her death came one of those coincidences of fact and fiction that filmmakers must have interesting dreams about. On March 28, 1979, there was a partial core meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear generating station near Harrisburg in Pennsylvania, with observers following in real time the debate about whether or not to evacuate the local population. Although no such decision was taken, no one was killed,n and the reactor was brought under control, the impact on public consciousness was profound.
The coinciding fictional event had occurred less than a fortnight earlier, when the movie The China Syndrome, about a possible accident at a nuclear plant in California, had opened in the United States. Carrying the ominous tagline “Today only a handful of people know what it means . . . Soon you will know,” The China Syndrome took its name from the proposition that a nuclear core meltdown might be so powerful that nothing could prevent it from burning its way right through the earth until it came out on the other side—in China. In the movie, Jane Fonda plays a California TV news anchor, Kimberly Wells, who just happens to be filming at a nuclear power plant with her cameraman (Michael Douglas) when there is a minor earth tremor and panic breaks out in the control room. Even if her TV bosses are unimpressed, the incident interests Wells. She soon comes into contact with head technician Jack Godell (Jack Lemmon), who, on investigating what happened during the earthquake, discovers that short-cuts were taken by the contractors when they built the plant. Godell tries to warn his bosses, but, parsimoniously, they refuse to shut operations down while he sorts things out. In an obvious echo of the Silkwood case, Godell is attacked while he is driving to give evidence at a public hearing, but he survives. Desperate that there might be a catastrophic accident, Godell commandeers the plant control room at gunpoint, and is broadcasting via Wells to the public when the transmission is cut off and a police team break into the room and shoot him dead.
The themes that run through the Godell, Silkwood, and Murrell cases—fictional or historical—are similar. On the one side, there is the dissident who gradually becomes aware of the dangers of nuclear power and decides to speak out to prevent disaster. On the other, there is the secret state and its commercial partners whose objective is to prevent dissent from interfering with their concept of national security or, more venally, the profits that may accrue from the harnessing of perilous technologies. And somewhere in the middle is the media.
The dissident—though emotionally damaged or eccentric—is good; the state—though powerful and seemingly benign—is bad. But the media has the capacity to be either. It may try to cover up or ignore the truth, but in the hands of courageous or farsighted journalists it can become a tool for the exposure of wrongdoing. Don’t, however, hold your breath.
A VERY BRITISH EDGE OF THE REALM
After Silkwood, as we’ve seen, came Hilda Murrell, and after Hilda Murrell came a remarkable series of conspiracy-theory dramas produced for British television and cinema. For four years, these films and programs captured middlebrow imaginations in Britain and then—just as suddenly as they had arrived—they disappeared.
British television drama in the early 1980s had been dominated by two hugely expensive serialized epics: Ev
elyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, which turned the lugubrious Jeremy Irons into a star, and Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, broadcast as The Jewel in the Crown in 1984. Superficially, both series could be seen as nostalgic, being set in an England and an empire still within living memory but now gone. But both series also portrayed the worm in the bud, the internal corruption of lost, aristocratic England and of British India. When, however, the director of The Jewel in the Crown, Christopher Morahan, unveiled his next project, it was set very much in the present—or, rather, in a very dark version of the present.
In the Secret State, shown on the BBC on March 10, 1985, was an adaptation of a book by Robert McCrum. In a very minor version of the Three Mile Island coincidence, the drama was shown just two days after Cathy Massiter’s revelations about MI5 surveillance of CND members and others, and in the same week as the World in Action program about Hilda Murrell. This time, the whistle-blowing hero is a civil servant who discovers that his department’s new computer is being used both to create false files on political opponents of the government, such as an awkwardly crusading radical MP, and also to perpetrate a gigantic and lucrative tax fraud on behalf of certain crooked businessmen. The civil servant is just about to solve the whole puzzle when he is blown up by a bomb placed in his car. The opening sequence was memorable for its shot of a large rat suddenly emerging from a garbage bag an image that dovetailed with the obviously significant words of one of the main characters: “Suspicion. It’s a virus. We are the carriers. We’re like rats scuttling through medieval sewers.”
Coincidentally, In the Secret State was in production at the same time as another British feature film about whistle-blowers and bombs, released in November 1985. In Defense of the Realm, Gabriel Byrne played Nick Mullen, an amoral young reporter on an amoral British tabloid newspaper. Mullen is following a story of a scandal that, on the face of it, discredits a crusading opposition MP. But with the help of an older and more principled colleague, he investigates further and finds out that the original scandal has been manufactured to prevent the MP from raising in the House of Commons an embarrassing question about a missing boy. The principled old journalist is killed (quite possibly by Special Branch) in a way that makes it look as if he died from natural causes. Nevertheless, Mullen discovers that the boy was killed in a runway accident on an American nuclear base in England—an accident that very nearly led to a nuclear explosion. Mullen has his scoop, but the newspaper’s knighted owner, who has interests in the armaments business, orders the story to be spiked. A frustrated Mullen then makes sure that the foreign press gets the information and provokes a major scandal, but this is the audience’s only consolation, as Mullen is then killed when a bomb blows up his flat.
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