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

  Rocky Flats was a US laboratory for developing nuclear energy. The Board wrote to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission endorsing our concerns, but was rebuffed.

  Radford’s presence in the hall must have been an unpleasant surprise for Herbert. Speaking confidently, this tall, suave, silver-haired American explained how he had reacted when I briefed him. ‘I was appalled. This was a dangerous situation in a PWR of the type that the Sizewell reactor became. I pursued it through the Three Mile Island committee. The reaction from colleagues was disbelief. They said nobody would be fool enough to put a rod like that in a PWR – they didn’t believe me.’ He explained how I had pointed out to him that a description of the control rod alloy was in the official report on the Three Mile Island accident. The NRC’s reply was scientifically incoherent, and did not really address the issues. ‘I conclude that the nuclear industry, as represented by the NRC in the US, which is supposed to be knowledgeable about these things, does have a problem with this.’

  Thrown onto the defensive, Herbert insisted that, as Don did not discuss the issue with Hilda, it could not have been connected with her murder.

  To this, Ward retorted: ‘But who knew that?’

  ‘But that’s not the point,’ responded Herbert.

  ‘It is very much the point,’ Ward replied. He was alluding to my suspicion that the nuclear conspiracy motive came from an urgent Government need to neutralise anyone who might have discovered a problem with the Sizewell design, which Thatcher had been personally determined to introduce. MI5 spooks watching Don would have assumed he had told her. Moreover, they would have feared she would use her presentation at Sizewell to bounce the Inquiry with the control rod problem – or some other even more damaging revelation?

  Bishop Davies invited Don to respond. He did not disappoint his now fascinated audience. ‘I didn’t discuss control rods with Hilda Murrell … What I did know was that, at the very time that Hilda Murrell was meeting me, I was myself in the hot seat, and there is no doubt whatever that I was put out of the Inquiry. And the only possibility was that if the information about the control rods came out at Sizewell it could be damaging to the Inquiry; and so they wanted me out of the way…’

  It was indeed a historic and unique event – but not in the way Thursfield had hoped. The police were powerless to investigate Dalyell’s information that the Security Service had been involved. The conspiracy theories had survived, and the nuclear motive had been strengthened.

  The tenth anniversary prompted Judith Cook to write Unlawful Killing, her second book on the murder. In the final couple of pages, she revealed an extraordinary development. She had received her own independent corroboration, ‘on the authority of a senior MI5 operative, now retired’, of Dalyell’s central claim of British intelligence involvement. According to her new source:

  … accelerating panic over leaks of information to Tam Dalyell culminated on 19 March 1984, when the Government was faced with a set of questions proving that he held precise information. As a result a special committee set up to look into leaks activated a series of urgent measures in a last-ditch attempt to track down the source and that every possibility was considered, however remote.

  Shortly before Cook died of a heart attack in 2004, I learned that while researching Hilda’s murder, she was sent, unrequested and anonymously, the minutes of an emergency Cabinet meeting called to establish the source of a leak prompted by Dalyell’s questions. She subsequently destroyed them.

  Apparently, this secret meeting resulted in a number of searches being carried out including at Ravenscroft, where a freelance unit was used. Her source, the senior retired MI5 operative, told her that because of the ‘ensuing mess’, the unit’s MI5 handler was ‘severely castigated’. Cook’s husband Martin Green was present at a social function in London when this source tipped her off. He recognised him as a former National Service colleague whom he knew as ‘John’. Later they saw him on TV commenting anonymously about the secret services after a career in intelligence work. ‘John’ has since died.

  CHAPTER 8

  STALKER, SMITH AND INTIMIDATION

  Tennis elbow had forced me to stop thatching in 1990. In the run-up to the first Gulf War in January 1991, I spoke out against nuclear weapons. This was traumatic, as it was potentially treasonable. Then, in 1992, Liz and I divorced.

  By then I had found my niche in the anti-nuclear movement as chair of the British affiliate of an international campaign called the World Court Project. This challenged the legality of nuclear deterrence in the International Court of Justice at The Hague. When I attended the project launch in Geneva in May 1992, I met and was captivated by one of its New Zealand pioneers, Kate Dewes, whose husband had recently separated from her.

  A teacher and veteran peace and environmental campaigner, Kate had opposed, back in the 1970s, a failed attempt to build a nuclear power plant in New Zealand. She became involved in the Peace Squadron – flotillas of protest boats that had swarmed around visiting US nuclear armed and powered warships. Three months after Hilda’s murder, David Lange was elected Prime Minister pledging to make New Zealand nuclear-free. Kate was involved in this political struggle. Friends of hers were lucky to escape unharmed when the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior was sunk in Auckland by French secret agents a year later. In 1988, she was a non-governmental adviser on the New Zealand government delegation to the Third United Nations Special Session on Disarmament. Her pioneering work on the World Court Project grew out of that extraordinary experience for a 35-year-old mother of three young daughters.

  When I told her about Hilda, Kate instantly identified with her as a fellow woman campaigner against nuclear energy and weapons during the same period. Miraculously, I had found a soulmate who could cope with my ‘baggage’. Falling on my feet, with a new family and sanctuary, we were married in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1997. However, my anti-nuclear work and the need to care for my 88-year-old father would require me to continue to live with him in Twyford, Berkshire for most of the next two years until his death.

  Back in 1992, following my divorce, I had settled into my office bedroom upstairs in his modest home, the central third of a sub-divided former ancient coaching inn. He stoically put up with indications that the State security apparatus wanted to frighten him into discouraging my new work, with interruptions to his telephone and silent calls. Soon after I returned from meeting Kate in Geneva, a retired Wing Commander living in the front apartment took me aside. While he and his wife were going on holiday, ‘the police will be using our house as a stakeout for an undercover operation.’ Not long afterwards my new laptop crashed, mail was interfered with and my newly installed phone line started playing up. I assumed a bug had been placed in the wall of my room from the other side.

  One night I returned from a meeting in London to find my father asleep in his armchair. On waking him, he enquired: ‘Did you return earlier? Before I dozed off, I heard footsteps in the corridor upstairs. I thought you’d not wanted to disturb me and gone straight up.’ Upstairs on the unpatterned fitted carpet I found a trail of bootprints of black grit from a flat roof outside my bedroom window. They began beside my desk, and stopped halfway along the corridor. One window pane beside the latch was shattered. Nothing seemed to be missing. Had my father woken and cleared his throat noisily as he always did? There was no point in reporting it to the police. I was alarmed but not surprised when Kate reported her mail was being ripped open in her letterbox. With only phone or fax, we resorted to one-line coded fax messages to communicate sensitive information.

  John Stalker suddenly became elusive when I asked to meet him following his dramatic appearance at the tenth anniversary public meeting. After I had tracked him down to a Herefordshire hotel, he and his sidekick, ex-Detective Sergeant Rita Wilkinson, subjected me to an unpleasant grilling on film for almost an hour about my suspicions and unanswered questions. They ridiculed my understanding of the disputed condition of Hilda’s telephone, ignored the arson attack
on Fron Goch, my slashed tyre incident and Con Purser’s experience on trying to make a new statement, and dismissed my hypothesis of an Ulster-style snatch squad and interrogation of Hilda in a safe house. In so doing they made a mockery of Stalker’s initial invitation for those with controversial information to go to him.

  At the beginning of the Stalker Investigates programme, broadcast nationwide in November 1994, the narrator emphasised that ‘the police gave Stalker and Wilkinson full access to the Murrell files.’ Later he pointed out they were also able to examine ‘scene-of-crime photos never before seen by anyone outside the police force’. After Stalker’s dismissive response to my information, I was surprised when he admitted I was ‘at the heart of this’, because I had raised the nuclear motive with the police even before DCS Cole arrived at Hunkington.

  The programme made several valuable points. The narrator described the first new finding as astonishing: ‘The body’s rectal temperature was taken but with the wrong thermometer, so the estimated time of death is unreliable. Hilda Murrell could have died much nearer the time that she was found. So, how could such a big mistake have gone unnoticed?’

  Wilkinson explained: ‘The police surgeon arrives at 11.45 Saturday morning, certifies death at 12, takes a rectal temperature on a thermometer that only reads as low as 70 degrees Fahrenheit. So it’s for a living person basically – it’s not a chemical thermometer. You need a low reading [thermometer] for dead bodies. The ambient temperature is not taken. Five hours later, the pathologist attends.’

  Stalker concluded the police and pathologist were therefore working with a flawed opinion. He explained the significance: ‘If the time of death was wrong, it could be that she hadn’t actually arrived at the place where she finally died.’ He added that ‘this is bloody crucial – it means the difference between whether she was there or whether she wasn’t.’

  This led Stalker to put ex-DCS Cole on the spot about Scott’s crucial evidence that Hilda’s body was not in the copse 24 hours after it should have been according to the police theory. Retired for four years, Cole struggled as he repeated the lame police line that the body was hidden in a dip in the ground and by undergrowth. He almost pleaded with Stalker to ‘bear in mind that eventually the body was found by gun dogs – it wasn’t actually found by a person…’

  This was immediately undermined by police photographs of the body in situ. The narrator continued: ‘Could anyone have missed the corpse if it was here, and if it was not, was Stalker dealing after all with a conspiracy?’

  What Cole may not have known was that Scott had told both John Osmond, producer of HTV’s Wales This Week programmes, and his presenter, that his dogs were with him in the copse. Scott must have told the police this crucial fact, but it was omitted from his statement. His solicitor complained to a mutual friend that Scott came under pressure from the police to change his story. Was this why he was not called to testify at the inquest?

  Years later I learned that a woman walked her dogs daily across the fields near the copse. On the Friday afternoon after the abduction, unusually her Airedale dog ran into the copse near where the body was found the next morning by the gamekeeper’s dogs. Thinking her dog was after a rabbit, she called it back. This strongly suggests that Hilda’s body was there by then – which, according to pathologist Bernard Knight, would still have allowed time for hypostasis to have formed as found.

  Stalker struggled to come up with a new scenario which avoided supporting any conspiracy, but which still fitted his support for Scott. He suggested the burglar made a controlled stop in the gateway leading to the hedge near where the hat, Hilda’s spectacles and knife were found. Her assailant then frogmarched Hilda in an arm lock, stabbing her and leaving her for dead. Stalker added one accurate, if verbose, observation: ‘[Hilda] would have fought, she would have screamed, she would have struggled, this old lady – she didn’t do anything she didn’t want to do, this old lady, there’s no way she would give up.’ He then speculated wildly that the panicking thief, having left her for dead, returned to the car, drove off, only to crash it 400 yards down the lane, and fled.

  What about the car keys in Hilda’s coat pocket? Did the attacker, after crashing the car, dash back and return them to Hilda? What about the police and pathologist’s admission that the knife found near the hedge had not inflicted her wounds?

  According to Stalker’s scenario, Hilda then recovered enough to stumble or crawl along the hedge. Because of her confusion – and even that she might have caught sight of Scott in the far distance – she headed in the wrong direction towards the copse rather than the road. She reached the copse 24 hours later despite the cold weather, the heavy clay field, and crawling with a broken collarbone and multiple stab wounds. This ignored Acland’s already implausible statement at the inquest that Hilda could have crawled only about a hundred yards.

  The programme broadcast police video footage and photographs of the copse entrance they believed Hilda had used. This matched Acland’s description as ‘just a foot wide and overgrown, with barbed wire across the opening’. For an experienced detective like Stalker to suggest Hilda had found it and crawled through was outrageous.

  Having asked whether Stalker was ‘dealing after all with a conspiracy’, the programme ducked the question, despite the implausibility of his alternative theory. Yet when Stalker challenged Don Arnott about why Hilda might have been singled out by the nuclear industry, Don replied that ‘just at the time the heat was on me was the very time I was working with Hilda here. If they were gunning for me then they were gunning for anyone I was associating with… including most definitely her.’

  The West Mercia Police could take no comfort from Stalker’s intervention.

  The decision in 1985 not to publish at least an edited version of the Northumbria Report had backfired badly. Instead of dispelling the notion of conspiracy, it had the opposite effect. Pressure to publish was revived in 1994, but again the police stonewalled. They thought they had succeeded in keeping it under permanent wraps. They were wrong.

  Two years later, in February 1996, a journalist working for a major national newspaper phoned me. He asked: ‘Are you expecting any developments in the Hilda Murrell case?’ With six weeks to go before the 12th anniversary, all was quiet. ‘OK, you’d better come and see me.’

  When we met discreetly in London, he handed me a large brown envelope. Inside were two original police files from Shrewsbury containing all the major incident reports during the search for Hilda; copies of both autopsy reports and the Northumbria Report; and a set of the colour photographs of her body in the copse and the morgue I was briefly shown at the inquest. The person who delivered these to the journalist wished to remain anonymous, but particularly wanted me to see them. When I returned the files having copied them, I told the journalist they contained nothing sensational, and neither of us took further action. Later I learned his source was a disaffected Shrewsbury policeman.

  Ten years on, by 2006, Kate and I had gleaned enough information from other sources to analyse the Northumbria Report in depth. We found that its 83 pages did contain some sensitive evidence, but minor censoring could have allowed publication of most of it. It attempted to clarify the known facts and evaluate all the speculation. Yet Assistant Chief Constable Peter Smith failed to address, or dismissed with his catch-cry of ‘no shred of evidence’, a number of key questions. On several issues he got facts wrong, and drew faulty conclusions.

  In the paragraphs devoted to Judith Cook’s allegations, Smith focused on the errors in her New Statesman article in November 1984. On the interference with her mail and phone, he noted she had not reported her concerns to British Telecom or the police, and she could not produce the damaged letters. In fact, when he and Hall interviewed her, she had not yet received the threatening phone calls specifically mentioning Hilda.

  Smith took my concerns about my telephone more seriously. I had experienced many instances of phone interference since Hilda’s murder, including
bizarre crossed lines, cut-offs and silent calls. Smith reported that my fears ‘have been dispelled by a high-level inquiry at British Telecom’ – yet the interference had, if anything, intensified.

  Lieutenant-Commander Peter Hurst had told Smith he suspected the burglary of his flat and phone interference were linked with his Falklands War intelligence work, which had given him greater access to sensitive information than I had. Smith recorded Hurst had become so concerned that he reported the interference to his supervisor in Naval Security. Again, ‘inquiries at high levels in British Telecom’ had found no basis for his fears.

  The report claimed I had been ‘notified by the Shrewsbury Police’ that Hilda was missing. This was not so. It also stated I had heard an ‘engaged’, not ‘out of order’, tone on phoning Fron Goch. Smith had obviously not thought through the different consequences. If I had heard an engaged tone, I would have assumed Hilda was there, and contacted a neighbour to check. It was Brian George who first reported the fault after hearing an ‘out of order’ tone on the Saturday morning, and alerted the police almost an hour before I learned Hilda was missing. The police file I had received from the journalist had an extract from their telephone log noting the follow-up action:

  09.40 Oswestry requested to check Fron Goch Bungalow, Penyfoel. Llanymynech 830131 (out of order).

  According to Smith, the engineer who investigated the line found a ‘faulty electrode’ in the protection unit at the bottom of the lane leading up to Fron Goch. The fault was ‘caused by lightning’. Smith had checked, not with the Meteorological Office, but with ‘an executive engineer employed by British Telecom at their Shrewsbury exchange’ who kept ‘an overall weather picture’ to help him explain varying fault rates. His records allegedly showed lightning activity ‘in Shrewsbury’ on 27 March 1984, and ‘that it was also present in the area over the whole of the preceding week.’