by Robert Green
Back in dear old ‘democratic’ Britain, however, ‘that sort of thing just doesn’t happen, old boy.’ So British State security agents have a clear run – particularly if they sub-contract the more risky work to private security agencies for deniability if anything goes wrong…
This meant that, if I was to survive pursuing the truth about Hilda’s murder, I had to learn from her experience.
On several occasions thereafter when I stayed with the Burys, Gladys insisted on driving me in her car during my local investigations. It was she who first noticed we were being tailed, sometimes discreetly but often quite overtly to unsettle us. During one memorable drive to visit Don, she decided to test our suspicion.
As I got into her Volvo saloon, she pointed out another ubiquitous red Ford Escort parked not far away, similar to those seen in Sutton Road and Hunkington around the murder. Sure enough, when we set off it followed close behind. She took the usual route until about halfway there – when she abruptly turned, without indicating, down a narrow country road. The other car stuck with us. Gladys, who knew the area intimately, made a succession of diversions until we were travelling along near-cart tracks. Our ‘tail’ was not shaken off until she darted down the drive into Rhiewport Hall.
We enjoyed regaling Don with our experience. However, the point was not lost on us about such misemployment of the Security Service – for a petty burglary gone tragically wrong?
Around then, I recalled with alarm a letter from Don dated 25 June the previous year. That was the day between the launch of Judith Cook’s book, when she broke Otter’s story, and the joint West Mercia-Northumbria Police press conference. Don had written:
It is possible that somebody may have had a go at me … Yesterday I drove down to the village on my motorcycle and became aware of an unusual sound, which subsequently proved to be the chain clunking against the chaincase. On arrival in the village I found that both chain adjusters – there is one on each side of the rear wheel – had apparently worked loose, in spite of locknuts, and were dangling; and that, apparently, the only thing which held the rear wheel axle more or less in position would be the big hexagonal locknut on the chain side.
He explained how he had corrected the fault enough to ride home, where he found that the locknut was only hand-tight:
This meant that, on my drive to the village, nothing whatever held the rear wheel in position once the chain adjusters had become dislodged – as they would have done through vibration; and that, had I been going to (say) Welshpool at my customary turn of speed the rear wheel would have worked forward until the chain became dislodged from the rear wheel cog and wrapped itself round the drive wheel cog – with spectacular and conceivably fatal consequences.
Just three weeks before, he had tensioned the chain, taking care to follow the instruction book because of the safety implications. Since then, he had ridden the motorbike many times. He continued:
There are only two ways in which this machine could be sabotaged (a) quickly, (b) without anything showing and (c) in such a way that the driver would only become aware that something was wrong when he was actually riding it. One is the method described. The other is brakes…
Acknowledging that the incident by itself was not significant, he added it would only become so in the event of further ‘unexpected happenings’.
By the third anniversary, Don felt the need to make further contingency plans. Later I was given a letter that he had hand-delivered to his solicitor and a few trusted friends in 1987. Tears welled up as I read it, previously unaware that he had done this. In it he wrote:
I have been warned that I may be in personal danger if I do not back down from involvement in the case. The warning comes from a friendly and knowledgeable source and is not in any way a threat. There is no question of my backing down … because … it can only mean that I am on the right lines … I want merely to place on record that if anything untoward should happen to me (such as that I disappear or am killed, involved in an ‘accident’ or subject to similar harassment), a connection with my refusal to back down over this case should be presumed … This has been done in order to ensure that, if I am removed from the scene, maximum inconvenience will be caused to the other side when these letters become public.
This was a man who had already suffered a suspicious heart attack, and then found his motorbike sabotaged.
On 19 September 1986, I was surprised to receive a phone call from Furber. Straining to be friendly, he probed my recent activities. Then he got to the point. ‘Why don’t you come to see me any more?’ I replied that, after Con’s treatment and the outrageous investigation into my slashed tyre, I had lost any confidence in the police. He told me that the lawyer and former local Conservative MP Delwyn Williams had been to see him, to ask what the police had done about the two ‘detectives’ who had leaned on Ray Heath. Furber had been unaware of all this. He admitted I might have a point.
My relationship with the West Mercia Police had broken down. For the next 16 years, I would rely on my growing network of ‘ferrets’ in the media, and other trusted friends and contacts. They served me well.
CHAPTER 7
COMPLICATING DEVELOPMENTS
Don and I discussed the psychology behind a State crime. If we were right, then why abduct an elderly woman, driving her unnecessarily through the centre of town? She could have simply disappeared or been killed quietly in her home. Why leave such a deliberate trail and make fools of the police?
Several friends confided that many anti-nuclear women had been so terrorised by Hilda’s murder that they had stopped campaigning. The French have an expression for a demonstration of ruthless, selective State control: Pour encourager les autres – ‘To encourage the others’.
This led to a new suggestion, which brought some plausibility to the oddest part of the crime – and the only one to be witnessed. What if the driver wanted to be seen? Was there some symbolism in driving past the police station? Was this deliberate flaunting of the driver’s impunity? Only Hilda’s car keys in her coat pocket linked her with it. So, could the car have been used as a decoy?
Such a scenario made sense of evidence from another witness, Jill Finch. A neighbour and retired headmistress, she had been troubled by an experience around lunchtime on the Wednesday.
At about 12.20pm on 21 March 1984, Jill is collected by a friend, Diana Lampen, from outside her home at 167 Sutton Road. They drive to the by-pass junction, intending to turn right. While waiting for traffic, Jill hears the roar of a powerful vehicle approaching fast from behind. She looks round to see a brown Range Rover coming up on the inside. Convinced it is going to hit them, she throws herself across onto Diana. Somehow, the Range Rover misses them and swerves left out onto the by-pass heading for Atcham. Jill sees that the only apparent occupant is the driver, a farmhand type. The vehicle looks scruffy, as if used on a farm.
The Range Rover was heading for the Hunkington area by the quickest route. Jill knew this because she always went that way when exercising her dog on Haughmond Hill. Experiencing a similar gut feeling to my own on learning Hilda was missing, Jill felt strongly that somehow this vehicle was connected with Hilda’s murder.
Soon after hearing Jill’s story, Laurens Otter arranged for me to meet a former member of the Irish Republican Army, living in a West Midlands housing estate with a new identity. He told me Hilda’s abduction echoed snatch squad operations in Northern Ireland. The victim would be taken away for interrogation while someone disguised as the victim was driven in their own car as publicly as possible, to cause confusion and distract attention from the abductors. If the victim’s car broke down on a pedestrian crossing just as their best friend stepped onto it, the fit and well-drilled driver and ‘victim’ would abandon the car and be picked up by a support vehicle.
What if the operation was made to appear to have been botched? The cover of a bungling, sexually perverted burglar helped to discredit any State involvement. But if this burglar was so incompetent and pani
cky, why had he not been caught? The State could not be allowed to have it both ways.
Don and I also agreed about another deduction. Hilda would not have tried to leave papers with Con and then Otter unless she had come across new, damning evidence that nuclear energy problems were being concealed. If such revelations would have seriously damaged the future of the nuclear industry and thus the Government’s campaign against the miners, this would have provided the justification for MI5 to move against her. Reluctantly, I had to accept that the Belgrano connection with me could have been another major motive.
Andrew Fox was a producer on the regional current affairs programme Central Lobby for Central Television (CTV) in Birmingham. His half-hour documentary, filmed in June 1988, presented an overview of our latest findings.
A dramatic reconstruction was staged of Hilda’s abduction in a brown Range Rover by the most direct route via Atcham for interrogation in a safe house near Moat Copse, while Hilda’s Renault was used as a decoy. Fox interviewed myself, Don, Dalyell and ex-MI5 agent Gary Murray. Fred Holroyd, a former member of military intelligence working in Northern Ireland, confirmed that private investigators were used for ‘dirty’ work, and Hilda would have been a prime target because of her anti-nuclear campaigning and her connection with me and leaks about the Belgrano. The police refused to take part in the programme.
On 7 March 1989, Fox phoned me. The programme had been pulled, although it had been approved for showing on the fifth anniversary. CTV’s controller of factual programmes had said it ‘brought nothing new to the story’. Fox protested: the decoy/snatch squad scenario was new. He had also interviewed Acland, who revealed for the first time that he did not carry out any toxicology tests on Hilda’s body, admitting he ‘did not think it necessary’. The programme director was equally dismayed as it had cost £40,000.
Fox contacted me again in October the following year. He had found footage from the Hilda programme lying on the floor in an editing room. Had someone been sufficiently interested to copy or destroy the film, and left in a hurry when disturbed?
In November 1986, the Daily Mirror printed a front page story headlined ‘I’VE KILLED 9 WOMEN’. A 32-year-old Scot, David McKenzie, had been arrested and charged with two brutal and frenzied attacks on old women in London. He confessed to these and seven other murders, including Hilda’s.
McKenzie withdrew his confession a year later. Declared mentally unfit to stand trial, he was sent to Rampton Secure Psychiatric Hospital. Despite this, he was taken to Shrewsbury for questioning about Hilda – the first of several interviews with DCS Cole. In February 1990, McKenzie was found fit to plead, put on trial for the two London murders, and convicted of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. He was recommitted to Rampton.
During his trial, he repeated his confession about killing Hilda. His solicitor, Paul Bacon, told the press it was ‘highly likely’ his client would now be charged with her murder on the basis of the confession, despite his record as a liar and that he did not fit the description of the driver of Hilda’s car. This prompted me to meet a key witness.
An Easter weekend in Shrewsbury in April 1990 gave me the opportunity. Rosalind Taylerson, a highly intelligent teacher married to an Army officer, told me what happened at the start of her lunch break on 21 March 1984. She had a clear view of the driver of Hilda’s speeding Renault at the Column roundabout as it cut across in front of her. The man was in his late twenties or early thirties, slim, clean-shaven with close-cropped sandy hair and pronounced high cheekbones: ‘quite refined-looking and neat’. She was troubled, therefore, when the police issued a second artist’s impression that differed markedly from the detailed description she had given them.
In November 1986, Mrs Taylerson was summoned to yet another identity parade, which this time included McKenzie. The men were almost all overweight and dark-haired like him. She was an excellent witness, with a good memory. Now she was angry.
Alarm bells rang for me. In Westminster, Dalyell was equally fearful of a miscarriage of justice in an attempt to close the case. When I phoned him, he invited me to lunch at the House of Commons. For six years we had exchanged views via the media. When we met for the first time, Dalyell welcomed me warmly. To clear the air after my initial experience over his bombshell, I handed him a letter explaining why I believed he might have been set up in linking the murder only with the Belgrano. He carefully digested my argument that he might have been deliberately fed misinformation to distract attention away from the nuclear industry and discredit me.
To my surprise he did not dispute anything. Instead, he asked who I thought had phoned him to suggest he read Judith Cook’s New Statesman article? At the time he was uneasy, because it was not how his sources had approached him. He did not receive any more information that way. When I suggested it could have been someone from the Security Service, he nodded grimly.
Dalyell explained why he had devoted so much effort to uncovering the truth about the Belgrano. ‘My motive was not so much the sinking. It was the lying.’ He was strongly supportive of the Armed Forces. We parted having agreed he would table Parliamentary questions about McKenzie.
Dalyell learned he would be given the chance to put a question directly to the Attorney General, Sir Patrick Mayhew, responsible for overseeing the justice system in England and Wales. To try to prevent Thatcher’s top legal adviser from ducking the question, Dalyell suggested I write to Mayhew.
In my letter I advised Mayhew that I had spoken to a key witness, who was adamant McKenzie bore no resemblance to the driver of Hilda’s car. I drew his attention to a TV programme about confessions by psychiatric patients in which McKenzie was interviewed. I had not seen any evidence implicating him in Hilda’s murder. A public statement was needed, either to scotch the rumour that the West Mercia Police were about to charge McKenzie, or to stop them hounding the man any further.
Referring to my letter, Dalyell asked Mayhew to clarify the position with regard to McKenzie. Mayhew stonewalled. A report had been sent by the West Mercia Police to the Director of Public Prosecutions, who suggested ‘further lines of inquiry’.
In September 1990, Mayhew informed Dalyell that ‘the available evidence is insufficient to sustain a charge of murder against any person’. McKenzie was off the hook – we had rumbled them. Dalyell did not receive the letter until three weeks after it was sent. He was about to leave for the Labour Party Conference in Blackpool, where he broke the story. This was seen on TV by Paul Bacon, who had had no idea until then that his client would not be charged.
Dalyell and Bacon agreed I should write again to Mayhew. This time I asked why the police had pursued McKenzie when they knew he could not have killed Hilda. Paul Foot, in his weekly column in the Daily Mirror, revealed more evidence ignored by the police. The day before Hilda’s abduction, McKenzie was over three hundred miles away in Dundee, living in his mother’s flat with no money or transport. The police knew this, and that in 1980 McKenzie was convicted of wasting police time after confessing to a murder he could not have committed.
Despite all this, DCS Cole remained convinced he had found Hilda’s killer. Awarded the Queen’s Police Medal for Distinguished Service in 1985, Cole had retired from the West Mercia Police in the spring of 1990. Shropshire Star journalist David Sharp told me he asked him before he left the force if he could prove McKenzie’s guilt. All Cole could say was: ‘He couldn’t prove he wasn’t guilty.’
The Attorney General’s Legal Secretariat finally responded to my letter in November 1990. Their reply began with an apology to Bacon for failing to keep him informed, and denial of any attempt to frame McKenzie. However, there was nothing in papers submitted by the police to suggest they had evidence which eliminated McKenzie – echoing Cole’s perverse line that he ‘couldn’t prove he wasn’t guilty’.
In 1992, the Appeal Court cleared McKenzie of killing the two women in London after hearing evidence he was ‘a serial confessor not a serial killer’. Having admit
ted murdering Hilda Murrell, forensic evidence ruled him out. The small quantity of aspermic semen found on her underslip could not have been his because he was fertile – Bacon had got McKenzie’s semen tested, which eliminated him. The police knew this too.
Years later, I watched a police video of interviews with McKenzie. Cole and Furber, obviously determined to try to incriminate him, took him through some of the most sensitive details in the case with endless blatantly leading questions, to which McKenzie simply agreed. However, when he occasionally had to provide information he was all over the place. I was outraged.
I first met Gary Murray in 1988, at one of no less than five different, successful production runs of Chris Martin’s documentary play Who Killed Hilda Murrell?, inspired by Judith Cook’s book. We warily exchanged views on the case. He suspected I had something to hide about the Falklands War. I tried to probe his alleged former MI5 career, suspecting he might be a plant. He was writing a book that would include Hilda’s case. In May 1993, Enemies of the State appeared, attracting considerable media interest.
With only two chapters devoted to Hilda, I was astonished and touched that Murray had dedicated the book to her. He portrayed her character well, but was irritatingly erratic about other aspects of her work and my background. Hilda’s research had not ‘uncovered a number of flaws in the design of PWRs’: Don Arnott had found one fundamental flaw in the Sizewell design. Hilda had no ‘well-documented files’ on nuclear weapon construction. More damagingly, I knew nothing about any ‘Prime Minister’s message to HMS Conqueror’. I had not ‘resigned because of the Falklands War’; nor had I been disaffected.
