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

  The nearest official weather observation site is at RAF Shawbury, 15 miles east of Llanymynech. The Met Office informed me that thunder was reported at Shawbury only on 27 March. So, if Smith had checked the official weather reports instead of relying on a BT executive, he would have found that the fault was almost certainly not caused by lightning.

  The engineer who repaired the faulty phone at Fron Goch agreed. In 2005, two of his colleagues informed me that he had told them only one electrode had failed. Had it been lightning, more would have been affected. The same fault could have been produced by hitting the electrode with a hammer. On 4 March 1985, World in Action broadcast the engineer’s assessment. Two days later, he succumbed to police pressure and made a new statement agreeing with Smith’s version.

  The whistleblowing engineers also suspected an unauthorised intruder had been inside the Llanymynech exchange after normal working hours in the weeks before Hilda’s death. The engineer who worked there was concerned enough to stretch ‘access telltales’ – cotton threads – across the door which were subsequently disturbed by the mystery visitor several times. My informants had similar concerns at the Shrewsbury exchange. One commented that such behaviour was ‘very dodgy, because of the risk of unexpected callouts at any time’. In those pre-digital days there were two ways of intercepting a telephone conversation: a technician employed by MI5 either broke into the target’s property and planted a bug in the phone, or entered the exchange to install intercept equipment on the line.

  The Northumbria Report stated there had been a ‘systematic and tidy search’ of the house including purses and handbags, but ‘nothing is known to have been stolen’. Smith concluded this was ‘indicative of a normal burglar looking for cash’. Yet not only were jewellery and silver not touched, but Hilda’s chequebook and bank card were left on the kitchen table. Was this really typical of a normal burglar? Smith also ignored the family’s insistence that Hilda’s current handbag, purse and document satchel were missing.

  The report did not address whether any of Hilda’s papers might have been taken. On checking the nuclear papers in her house, I did not find two which she referred to in her diaries for 1983 and 1984. One was called Radiation Aspects of a Nuclear War in Europe by Dr Patricia Lindop, and the other was a draft Sizewell submission by American radiation expert Dr Rosalie Bertell. Both papers discussed the genetic effects of radioactivity, among other sensitive issues. Why did Smith not interview Harry and Gladys Bury about this aspect? Was it because Gladys would have recounted her discovery of two bogus detectives trying to search their house?

  Smith also failed to mention, let alone comment on, an attempt to prise open with a crowbar the front panel of two kitchen window seats, on one of which Hilda kept most of her nuclear papers. The spaces inside were empty, but would have been obvious places to check in any search for documents, which could then have been removed.

  To my amazement, Smith mentioned none of the 20 fingerprints I now know were found in the house. He only referred to the one on the inside of the rear window of Hilda’s car. He commented:

  This mark still remains outstanding after a most exhaustive search eliminating 1200 suspects to date.

  This was the only fingerprint found in the car. There were not even any prints left by Hilda. Why would Hilda’s abductor have touched the inside of the rear window? Presumably, no prints were found in any of the obvious places in the vehicle, like the steering wheel, driver’s and front passenger door, or keys? This strongly suggested that either the car had been cleaned of incriminating prints, or the driver and Hilda had worn gloves.

  Police photographs also show that, while the wheels were clogged with mud, surprisingly there was no mud on the bodywork around them.

  Later in the report, Smith helpfully listed all the eliminating factors used by the police:

  (a) Time of offence – between 12 noon and 2.30pm Wednesday, 21st March, 1984

  (b) Sole Pattern – Training shoe (Rumanian make)

  (c) Fingerprint impression – inside of car

  (d) A natural aspermic or person having had vasectomy

  (e) Narrow bladed knife

  (f) Smokes Hamlet cigars

  (g) Drinks alcohol

  The police examination of the footprint issue was incompetent. The lack of detail about a training shoe print under a chair in the kitchen and in front of the telephone was surprising. Police documents state that photographs ‘clearly showed the pattern and suggests a size around size nine’. Several of Hilda’s relations, including myself, and other visitors who had their fingerprints taken – including David Williams and Mrs Latter, whose fingerprints were identified – were never asked about their shoes.

  The last two eliminating factors demonstrated the inadequacy of the investigation. The Hamlet cigar wrapper, found in the car, was inconsequential compared to all the other evidence available to the police, including fingerprints in the house. If they had asked me, I would have volunteered that a family member smoked them. However, they were completely ignoring anyone who, for example, might have returned to Ravenscroft after the abduction to turn on lights, draw curtains and leave the side door open.

  On why the car keys had been found in Hilda’s coat pocket, Smith speculated this suggested:

  …she was in the car when it left the road. It seems she tried to make good her escape with the keys across the fields in the direction of the coppice whilst the offender was attempting to free the vehicle…

  Again, Smith had not thought this through. Witnesses who inspected the car said the driver’s door was jammed into the bank. The only way out for the driver was via the passenger door – which would have meant clambering across while pushing Hilda out. The police argued a mud-stained guidebook on birds, shoved under the front offside wheel, proved an attempt was made to drive off the verge. Cole told the inquest: ‘There were obvious signs that an effort had been made to move the vehicle after this minor accident.’ Both he and Smith failed to deduce that the driver must have got back into the car and restarted it. So was Hilda waiting patiently for the opportunity to steal the keys? Did Smith believe she could have got back into the car, stretched across to the ignition – assuming her right collarbone was not broken at this point – and grabbed them?

  Such a farcical scenario points to the far higher probability that the keys were planted in a clumsy attempt to provide some circumstantial evidence that Hilda had been abducted in her own car.

  Just as nonsensical was Smith’s supposition that Hilda would head for the distant copse across the field. Surely she would have made for John Marsh’s farmhouse, which was clearly in view ahead of the Renault and much nearer, or waved down a passing car instead?

  The report confirmed the weapon used on Hilda was ‘a narrow bladed knife which has not been recovered’. So why did Smith not criticise the police for claiming it was probably Hilda’s large kitchen knife found near the copse? Smith also missed an important deduction, raising further significant questions: if the murderer already had a narrow bladed knife, then why did he take the kitchen knife? Or did someone else plant it?

  Smith assumed Hilda died on the day she was abducted. His ‘open mind’ was clearly closed to the evidence that the time of death could have been as late as Friday – and Acland’s public admission that this was a possibility. Unlike Stalker, Smith agreed with Cole that Scott must have been mistaken. Despite describing Scott as ‘intelligent and extremely alert for a man of 78 years’, Smith decided he must have been looking up at the trees, not where he was walking. After reading Scott’s statement, and seeing the police photographs of Hilda’s body in the copse, Smith must have known this was specious grasping at straws. As Stalker undoubtedly realised, Scott’s evidence was very damaging to the police line. Taken together with the bizarre abduction and changes to Ravenscroft, these strongly suggested not only a far more complicated crime, but professional involvement.

  The Northumbria Report also defended the two police officers who failed to v
isit Hilda’s home after inspecting the abandoned car. Yet in Smith’s concluding remarks on the overall police response to Marsh’s first report of the abandoned car, he contradicted himself by admitting:

  … it delayed the commencement of a murder enquiry for possibly two days, a period which the Police Service would accept from long experience as being the most crucial 48 hours in any Homicide enquiry.

  Smith reserved his sharpest criticism for PC Paul Davies, who had visited Ravenscroft on the Friday evening but, despite finding the door open, kitchen curtains closed and lights on, and knowing her car was crashed five miles outside Shrewsbury at Hunkington, had failed to raise the alarm. Nonetheless, Smith still relied on the constable’s description of the house and implied this had been the case since the Wednesday. Why did he omit the highly significant evidence of the postman, milk lady, friends and neighbours that this was not so?

  He failed to mention that the next morning PC Lane had been almost as incompetent. Not only had he not searched the house properly on his first visit at 7am, but he left the side door open on leaving. At least Davies claimed he had closed it. Lane also failed to notice the telephone had been partially disconnected – he had to have this pointed out to him by Brian George. It took a phone call by Dalyell to Smith to make him interview George.

  The telephone controversy was given a great deal of attention in the report. This was hardly surprising. The whistleblowing incident following the refusal by the engineer to change his first statement about his examination of the Ravenscroft phone to agree with the police line that it had been ripped out was almost certainly the trigger for Cozens to instigate the Northumbria review. So why did neither Smith nor Stalker interview him? Instead, when Stalker interviewed me he tried to make a fool of me on camera, ridiculing Brian George’s concerns and showing me police photographs of the phone I had never seen before.

  Smith reported the Scene of Crime Unit had:

  … established that another cable not in use, which had been part of the original installation, had obviously been wound around, folded over and tucked into the junction box.

  The live cable was made up of four inner wires each fitted with an open ended spade connector. These two cables, old and live, had been stapled side by side onto adjacent woodwork [my emphasis added] and were both in a convenient position to have been ripped out together in one aggressive action.

  Twenty-one years later, I was able to show this to Christopher Mileham, the engineer who had carried out a detailed inspection on the Monday following the murder. He said it did not make sense. There were not two ‘cables’; there was one cable and one cord. A redundant, cream-coloured cable led from the junction box to an extension once installed in another part of the house. A thicker, dark-grey, receiver cord connected the junction box to the telephone. Mileham emphasised that at the time he often saw the damage caused by the receiver cord being pulled out of such a junction box, usually by workers tripping over the cord.

  Smith was determined to ram his interpretation home:

  It would seem that the most obvious way to quickly disconnect the breakfast room telephone from inside, would be to wrench the two cables away from the junction box severing any connection the operative line may have had. Both were hung close together and could be grasped and pulled out with one hand. This sort of treatment would force away the staples supporting the cables to the window surrounds, which is what happened.

  Those final four words are evidence of Smith manufacturing fact from speculation.

  Mileham had several concerns about the police photograph of the phone, which Stalker used to discredit Brian George’s story and wrong-foot me. When I showed a copy to him, he said: ‘It wasn’t like that when I checked it.’ In the photo both the cord and cable were lying across the window seat, with the four wires at the end of each clearly visible disconnected from the junction box. Mileham was adamant that when he saw it, the cream cable was still stapled to the wall around the end of the seat – if it had not been, he would have mentioned this in his report. He explained that the receiver cord ‘was never stapled’ – it was always left loose, otherwise the telephone would have had to stay in the same place.

  In light of Mileham’s disturbing response, were these photographs taken after he left Ravenscroft having examined the telephone? The police video shot on the Sunday afternoon shows the telephone cabinet had been shifted about two feet away from the window seat. If the grey cord and the cream cable had been ‘ripped out’ at that point, surely the ends of both would have fallen to the floor? They are clearly still partially connected, which corroborates both Mileham and Brian George.

  On reading the typed copy of his police statement I had handed to him, Mileham wanted to check it against his original handwritten report – which was held by the police.

  The Northumbria Report offered this explanation for Smith’s conclusion:

  Such force would have applied pressure to the grommet surrounding the operative cable on its entry to the junction box. In support of this a broken piece from the entry aperture to the box was found on the window seat below. This type of force could well be expected to pull the spade terminals from under the screws without damaging them as was the case. This would leave the four holding screws loose which is what happened, giving rise to speculation that they had been manually turned.

  Mileham was stunned to read this. He was certain the junction box was undamaged. Bakelite pieces broken off the box opening were well-known indicators that the cable had been yanked out, so he had specifically looked for them. Had he found any, he would have recorded this. The police had not mentioned this to him: was that because a piece had not yet broken off?

  Mileham added: ‘This was a deliberate unscrewing. The yank from pulling out wires would not cause unscrewing.’ A loose screw risked a poor connection, causing malfunction and noise on the line. If a phone cord was pulled out, the wires almost invariably broke at their weakest spot, the connection with each spade terminal – which would be left undamaged and still under each screw.

  Soon after Derek Woodvine broke the telephone story on TV in March 1985, Mileham came under outrageous police pressure to agree that the telephone had been ‘ripped out’. After refusing to buckle, he was left with the strong impression that ‘my view was not one that the police were comfortable with.’ Was this another reason why the police did not publish the report, and neither Smith nor Stalker interviewed him, in order to avoid Mileham’s potentially disastrous complaint of misrepresentation and implied manipulation of evidence? Apparently, a British Telecom colleague told Woodvine that the card for that job had disappeared.

  Smith volunteered one other over-confident, unwise observation:

  If the theory of a well trained Government Intelligence officer is considered, then the cutting of telephone wires is the most usual method adopted by professionals in preconceived situations.

  On the contrary, unless MI5 had decided to telegraph that it was responsible, their agents would have taken enormous care to avoid leaving any evidence that this was their work.

  Both Smith and Stalker had access to all the witness statements. It took me until 2009 to discover the full extent of evidence that the appearance of the house had changed between the Wednesday and Friday, and of suspicious activity around Ravenscroft and the copse. Why had two such senior and experienced detectives, let alone their West Mercia colleagues, ignored all this?

  Only towards the end of his report did Smith start to ask the right questions:

  The following events are probably the most difficult to understand. Why take her from the house and expose himself to the risk of being identified? Did she know or recognise him? Did she think she was being taken for medical treatment? Who dressed her and considering the circumstances, why was she wearing a hat?

  What happened was indeed difficult to understand. What became utterly implausible was trying to make the facts fit the theory that the killer was a lone bungling burglar. That last question, for exampl
e, was a good one: it pointed to the likelihood that her car would be recognized as Hilda’s, and witnesses would assume it was her – but the hat concealed the wearer’s face.

  Curiously, Smith’s most helpful conclusion in his entire report was his final sentence. It would undoubtedly have been seized on by the media had it been published:

  However, this is only an opinion which in no way should dampen the appetite to follow up speculation.

  Here was the first acknowledgement that the police could have been wrong. Publication of his report would merely have fuelled further speculation, and risked exposing his attempt to make some of the facts fit their theory. Its errors, omissions, misrepresentations and sweeping assumptions would have reinforced, not repaired, West Mercia’s damaged image. Was this why it was shelved?

  After my father died in March 1999, I sold his house and formally emigrated to New Zealand. In due course, a container of belongings arrived in Christchurch, including my archive on the Hilda case. The removal man gave a baffled shrug when I insisted he squeeze a slashed car tyre between the legs of my father’s old piano.

  Within days of unpacking, I received a letter from the Shropshire Star, forwarded by West Mercia Police. Deanna Delamotta, the new Woman’s Editor, wanted an update on the case and my situation. Wondering what had prompted this and when her article might appear, I emailed her some notes.

  In October 1999, Kate and I returned from several weeks working overseas to disturbing news. During our absence a young woman, who had recently started working for us, had stayed downstairs in our house with two of Kate’s teenage daughters sleeping upstairs. She described what happened: