by Robert Green
One morning early on I woke to find the back door wide open. I had been sure I had locked it the night before, so felt a bit guilty for my apparent oversight. That night I paid special attention to securing the back door before going to bed; yet the following morning it was wide open again. This left me feeling sick…
I didn’t want to worry the girls, but needed to check if they had been coming in and out of the back door at all during the night – they assured me they had not. This left me feeling quite anxious at night and a lot more sensitive to movements in the house…
During one night I rose to go to the toilet. There were heavy drapes at the end of the hallway that I needed to pass through to get to the bathroom… I froze: there was breathing and a definite shape in the drapes as I approached.
I scuttled back to the bedroom and convinced myself that I was being silly. Despite my vigilance, the back door was unlocked again but not wide open.
It was on one of these mornings that, on entering the living room, I found Hilda’s chair and a table lying on its side under the window and everything that was on it placed around: very strange…
Hilda’s kitchen chair was one of the few antiques I had kept from Ravenscroft. Kate’s daughter Lucy also saw the upturned furniture as she walked past the living room that morning. She thought it particularly odd because the table legs were right up against the wall below the window, which could not be opened because of corrosion. Ornaments and plants had been carefully moved onto a nearby couch and the floor. In an adjoining front room, the girls found a window slightly open and newly hung curtains partly pulled off their hooks. An intruder must have tried to make a quick escape, and after failing to open the window in the living room, fled into the front room, swinging on the curtains on his way out.
Kate could immediately tell that her office and other rooms had been meticulously searched. Nothing seemed to have been taken. Before we left, we had removed sensitive documents to a safe location. Nevertheless, my stomach churned. I had long feared my new family would not be immune from harassment. It was therefore a huge relief and comfort when Kate, her daughters and our assistant all angrily expressed their determination not to be intimidated. On the contrary, they redoubled their commitment to support me in my pursuit of the truth.
Delamotta’s centre-page feature article had appeared on 12 October, complete with a large recent photo of me. Her account was remarkably accurate, broadly covering my latest position on the murder, which had not been in print before. The break-ins had begun soon after its appearance in the Shropshire Star.
Apart from ongoing interference with our mail, we had no further trouble for a year, when Kate and I had to go overseas again. Lucy was no longer living at home, but decided spontaneously to visit and stay the night before our departure. She was alone upstairs in the house after we left at 5am:
I heard the lounge sliding doors opening and closing downstairs. At first I wasn’t alarmed until I checked my watch and realised it was 7am, and it wasn’t Mum and Rob moving around downstairs. Because I hadn’t heard my parents leave in the morning I didn’t want to worry in case their flight had been delayed. I went to school and then emailed my Mum and Rob to ask them: their flight had been on time.
When we returned home we found nothing apparently missing, but drawers in the lounge had been rifled through and our family photograph albums damaged. After these incidents, we assumed our house had been bugged. Slowly we became resigned to the irksome, irritating discipline of never discussing sensitive issues in our home.
CHAPTER 9
COLD CASE REVIEW
Tony Blair’s landslide victory in May 1997 had one unexpected outcome: for the first time Shrewsbury elected a Labour MP, Paul Marsden. Unknown to me, he took advantage of the fact that, after 18 years of Tory rule, Britain had a Labour Home Secretary.
With encouragement from Tam Dalyell, Marsden wrote to Jack Straw asking him what the Home Office knew about the Hilda Murrell case. His frustration and suspicions grew when he was referred back to the West Mercia Chief Constable.
Soon after the 15th anniversary in March 1999, Dalyell – now a veteran backbencher – argued that revolutionary advances in DNA forensic techniques provided grounds for re-opening the moribund case. A year later, Straw agreed to meet a persistent Marsden. In support, Dalyell asked in a Parliamentary question whether evidence had been referred to the DNA Centre in Birmingham. Straw admitted it had.
Marsden reported all this to me at our first meeting in July 2000 in the House of Commons. He also gave me a copy of a five-page Home Office brief on the case, written by officials for Straw. It included the following statements:
The Government at the time stated categorically that the allegations of Security Service involvement were without foundation.
The Security Service does not kill people or arrange their assassinations. Not now, not at the time of Mrs [sic] Murrell’s death.
The final paragraph of a background note revealed a major development in the police investigation:
West Mercia advise that the case has remained open, being subject to regular review. In particular the forensic evidence is being reviewed, using the Forensic Science Service’s procedure of ‘cold case review’. The exhibits from the case are currently with the Forensic Science Service for further tests. These were previously referred for review in the early 1990s when it was attempted, unsuccessfully, to develop DNA from the samples in the police’s possession…
Anger welled up in me on reading this. While I was grateful to both MPs for ferreting it out, yet again the West Mercia Police had failed to inform Hilda’s family.
Nearly a year later, on a visit to Britain, I contacted Marsden. It was a serendipitous phone call: the next day he was to meet Detective Superintendent John Cashion, Senior Investigating Officer of the cold case review. Marsden suggested I go instead; and a surprised DS Cashion agreed to see me.
This was my first meeting with the police for eight years, and I had never been to West Mercia’s headquarters in Hindlip Hall near Worcester. Cashion explained that an experienced team of detectives and forensic experts was being assembled, and no theory would be excluded. The review would involve much more than re-testing forensic exhibits for DNA. First, all written records of the case would be transferred onto a new computerised investigation system.
In 2002, on the 18th anniversary of Hilda’s abduction, Kate and I had a progress meeting at West Mercia HQ with Cashion and DC Partridge. Involved in the investigation since 1985, Partridge was now its ‘walking memory’. We were allowed to view police colour photographs of Hilda’s house and car, and her body in the copse and mortuary. We read both autopsy reports, and the suppressed 1985 Northumbria Police Report. I did not reveal that I already had copies.
In a long and intensive discussion, Kate emerged as a serious new contributor. She raised searching new questions and perceptive suggestions about the forensic evidence, and made observations totally missed by the police. These included questions about whether the blood stains and cuts on Hilda’s clothing matched her injuries, and anomalies about her suspender belt and stockings. The meeting again ended amicably. After the years of suspicion and refusal to discuss my findings, I felt we had made a significant breakthrough.
While we were in the UK, alarming reports appeared posing new questions about the safety of Sizewell B. It was the first, and still only, pressurised water reactor (PWR) built in Britain – on Thatcher’s orders despite the narrowly avoided catastrophic failure of this US nuclear power plant design at Three Mile Island in 1979.
In 1988, following the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, I had taken up Hilda’s anti-nuclear energy torch when a public planning inquiry was announced into a second British PWR. This was to be built at Hinkley Point, on the Bristol Channel coast some 35 miles upwind of my home in Dorset. Having registered as an independent local objector, I used most of Hilda’s modest bequest to me to bring a brilliant former US Navy nuclear engineer, Dr Richard Webb, to be my expert
witness. He had been in Admiral Hyman Rickover’s elite team who had designed the prototype PWR extrapolated from the propulsion system for the first nuclear submarine USS Nautilus.
Dr Webb challenged the entire safety case, thereby helping to extend the Hinkley Point C Inquiry by over a month. It was then overtaken by Thatcher’s plan to privatise the electricity industry, which destroyed the economic case for any more PWRs like Sizewell B. Effectively, we helped to stop Hinkley Point C. In 2010 history was repeated when the Government announced a major programme of new nuclear power plants, including one at Hinkley Point. Yet little progress had been made to improve their safety or economic efficiency, and there was still no solution to the problem of radioactive waste.
On 29 March 2002, the Wolverhampton Express & Star made the connection with Hilda in a feature article headed ‘Sizewell and a murder puzzle’. It reported:
This week … safety at Sizewell has been dramatically called into question. A similar reactor in America has been closed down because of unexpected corrosion in the main pressure chamber.
A routine four-yearly inspection of the Davis-Besse reactor near Toledo, Ohio, had revealed that leaking boric acid had eroded a hole ‘about the size of a brick’ through the six-inch thick, heavy carbon steel lid of the container for the reactor core. Only the lid’s three eighths of an inch thick stainless steel liner, bulging up into the hole under 2,000 pounds per square inch water pressure, had kept the radioactive coolant from spewing into the reactor building in a potentially catastrophic accident like Chernobyl.
Ironically, the leak was from a tank installed as a result of the Three Mile Island accident. This was designed to inject the neutron-absorbing acid into the core’s cooling water in the event of failure of the control rods to shut down the reactor.
Millions of Americans lived within a radius of a hundred miles of the Davis-Besse plant. This lucky escape was another warning about the safety problems of nuclear reactors, and particularly of PWRs. The article added that the UK Health and Safety Executive refused to discuss its implications. The British nuclear industry was still determined to hide the dangers from the British public.
It took two years for West Mercia Police to announce that the cold case review was underway. The Guardian reported in April 2002 that the police hoped:
… fresh forensic analysis of material found on Ms Murrell’s clothes and a review of other evidence, including unmatched fingerprints and casts of a footprint, might finally lead to her killer.
Soon after, Cashion retired early. The review continued under DCI Jim Tozer, who accepted my challenge to visit us in New Zealand for two weeks to examine my archive.
This forced me to brief Kate fully about it. Fortunately, she relished plunging into my boxes of old files, posing many more fresh questions from the point of view of an experienced woman anti-nuclear campaigner. Her rigorous research techniques, honed while writing her doctorate, and her proficient touch-typing enormously enhanced our preparation. Our list of questions became the agenda for the British detectives’ visit, and Kate kept a record of all our meetings.
One of my aims was to achieve some healing and reconciliation with the police after more than 15 years of estrangement. As Hilda’s representative, I wanted to help lay her murder to rest. To do this I had to challenge the police negligence and flaws in their theory, and brief them on various attempts to intimidate me, my family and witnesses who had come forward with inconvenient information. Our intention was to make the review a more worthwhile exercise by pooling information and intellectual resources.
Tozer, who brought DC Partridge with him, was a generation younger than his predecessor. In his early thirties, he was clearly high-calibre and his easy, urbane manner was pleasantly surprising. Over a dinner in our home to welcome them, Tozer declared a commitment to solve the Hilda Murrell case.
For our first formal meeting, we borrowed a local barrister’s house. This had the desired effect of raising the awareness of both detectives about the constraints under which we lived, courtesy of the British Security Service. I began by airing my grievances about the handling of the case. I requested, and later received, three written apologies from Tozer on behalf of the West Mercia Police. First, for their failure to act more quickly during the first three days when Hilda was missing. Second, for the sudden release of her body after keeping it for four months for unexplained reasons. And third, for the brusquely hostile response from the coroner during my correspondence with him over the long-delayed inquest.
The first agenda item was to ‘introduce sensitive material’. Both detectives looked suitably startled as we produced copies of the Northumbria Report and two Shrewsbury police files. Tozer considered asking us to hand them over, but then acknowledged I had kept quiet since receiving them six years earlier. In return, we gave them copies of some missing documents from their files.
My next exhibit was the slashed car tyre from the 1986 incident outside Don Arnott’s home, still sporting a label from the Home Office Forensic Laboratory in Swansea. Partridge helpfully revealed his father had been a tyre specialist. After he and Tozer reluctantly performed passable comparisons with ‘doubting’ St Thomas as they fingered the cuts, I had the satisfaction of hearing two detectives at last accept the tyre had indeed been slashed.
I reiterated my concerns about the January 1985 arson attack on Hilda’s weekend retreat Fron Goch, and the unacceptable behaviour of the police after Con Purser asked to make another statement in 1986. I described how the attempted conviction four years later of David McKenzie had sustained and deepened my alienation from the police, and caused me to team up with Dalyell.
For the rest of the detectives’ visit, we met each working day at a discreet neutral location. We were treated as ex-officio members of the review team, and made a significant contribution. Together we watched some of the police videotapes of Moat Copse and Hilda’s house, discussing them in detail. We showed them my copy of Andrew Fox’s 1989 CTV documentary, pulled for spurious reasons and never shown. They agreed it presented a balanced view of the possibilities, and should have been broadcast.
We went through my hypothesis regarding the conspiracy theories, focusing on how the nuclear and Belgrano motives overlapped; the political climate at the time; and Don Arnott’s concern about the Sizewell reactor control rod design. I explained the significance of Dalyell’s 19 March 1984 letter to Heseltine as a trigger for MI5 to be let off the leash against Hilda. We discussed the possibility of false trails from planted evidence, and how the police would inevitably have to follow them; and the disputed condition of the telephones at both of Hilda’s homes. Finally, I challenged Tozer to review the evidence of Laurens Otter that Hilda had phoned him from a callbox on the morning of 21 March 1984 asking him to meet to receive sensitive documents from her. The two detectives even confirmed that anonymous tip-offs, some of which I divulged to them, were permissible as evidence in court.
The discussions went smoothly until a wrap-up session. Suddenly, Tozer casually speculated that the damage to my tyre could have been done before I left Dorset on the four-hour drive to Don. Something in me snapped. Outraged, I exploded back at him: ‘So, that would have been attempted murder! You mean they didn’t just kill Hilda – they were out to get me as well?’
Shocked by my outburst, Tozer tried to soothe me, suggesting I was ‘still suffering from post-traumatic stress’. Having never seen me in such a state, Kate demanded that they let me express the full extent of my pent-up anger and sense of betrayal to them as representatives of the British State. My relief at this opportunity to release these deeply held emotions was mixed with amazement that they were still so strong. It was also cathartic that the police were at last having to listen to me.
As this final session drew to a close, I requested a favour. I showed them examples of our mail, especially from Britain, which had obviously been intercepted and opened. We explained that skilled intruders had searched our house on several occasions without apparent
ly taking anything. ‘Jim, could you ask your New Zealand colleagues to arrange for our house to be swept?’ Tozer thought for a moment, then replied smoothly: ‘Ah, Rob: that could be a problem. If there are bugs and they are state of the art, they won’t find them. If they’re not, and they do find them, do you want another break-in?’
Eight months later, I could not let go my shock, disappointment and a sense of deep foreboding on hearing from Tozer that Andrew George, a teenage truant at the time of Hilda’s abduction, had been arrested.
Slipping back into a well-worn routine, I made my own enquiries. Andrew George had been born in Shrewsbury, the middle of three brothers. Aged two, four and five when their parents had abandoned them, they had grown up in local authority homes or with foster families.
A Shropshire journalist sent me details of all George’s court appearances until his last offence in 1997. Involved in a few minor burglaries, drunken fighting after football matches, and possession of drugs or stolen goods, he had been quickly caught each time and admitted his guilt. He had never been imprisoned. Nonetheless, with George’s semen found on the underslip on Hilda’s body and his fingerprints in her house, his chances of proving his innocence looked poor. Yet his description bore no resemblance to the driver of Hilda’s car.
During a visit to the cold case review team in Stourport on Severn police station in September 2002, Kate took the opportunity to challenge an unsuspecting detective about how George’s semen could have been aspermic, and how it was such a small sample. Having discussed the matter with her father, a veterinary surgeon, before leaving New Zealand, she established that it could only be through one of four options: infertility, vasectomy, seminal fluid from arousal but not ejaculation, and extraction of seminal fluid by finger pressure on the prostate up the anus. When confronted with these options, the detective’s rather embarrassed response was that George had refused to have his semen tested to see if he was infertile. He was extremely unlikely to have had a vasectomy at the age of 16.
