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

  Following George’s arrest, Tozer reluctantly handed responsibility for the investigation to the senior West Mercia detective covering operations in the Shrewsbury area, DCI Mick Brunger. Brunger phoned to warn me that all evidence was being reviewed again by a team of 70 detectives. Miscarriages of justice in the 1980s had prompted a requirement to disclose all relevant evidence to the defence, in order to avoid any ‘ambushes’ during the trial. Accordingly, for three weeks in February 2004, we hosted meetings with two detective sergeants and George’s solicitor as they trawled through my archive. The latter showed interest in the conspiracy theories, and even discussed having me as a defence witness.

  Two weeks later in Shrewsbury, we mingled with Hilda’s friends gathering in the Shropshire Wildlife Trust car park for the 20th anniversary field trip on 19 March 2004. Suddenly, a maroon car drove up festooned with handwritten posters protesting ‘My Brother Is Innocent’. Andrew George’s younger brother Adrian wanted to speak to me. Kate intercepted him: ‘Let’s talk in court on Monday.’ He relented. Two days before, we had been angered on hearing, yet again for the first time at a briefing from Brunger, that Andrew George was to appear in Birmingham Crown Court, 20 years to the day after Hilda had been abducted. Fortunately we were able to change our plans and attend this vital hearing. The police should have advised us weeks earlier.

  On 21 March 2004 in Birmingham Crown Court, Kate and I watched him plead not guilty to abducting and murdering Hilda Murrell. We sat in the public gallery, surrounded by members of his family. When George stood up in the witness box, we were struck by his height: he was still scarcely more than five feet tall – almost five inches shorter than Hilda. As he stared up pathetically at us and the parents he hardly knew, I tried to imagine how unthreatening he must have looked as a 16-year-old boy.

  Immediately after the hearing, Adrian George spoke with Kate for nearly half an hour as the police and I watched anxiously. He was adamant Andrew was innocent, and could prove it. Andrew could not drive in 1984, and still had no licence.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE TRIAL

  In another creepy coincidence, on the 21st anniversary of Hilda’s abduction and exactly a year after Andrew George had pleaded not guilty in a court in Birmingham, Kate and I sat in the main court in Stafford’s modern Combined Court Centre for a preliminary murder trial hearing before Justice Sir Richard Wakerley. Staffordshire’s county capital, some 30 miles east of Shrewsbury, was chosen so that a jury would be less likely to have been influenced by media coverage of the crime.

  As representatives of Hilda’s family, we were seated in the well of the court looking across the barristers to the jury. The detectives responsible for assembling the prosecution evidence were, almost literally, breathing down our necks behind us. Andrew George would sit behind a bulletproof glass screen only five yards to our left, beneath the public gallery.

  Richard Latham QC, leading the prosecution team, had arranged for slim display screens to be installed. Tall, suavely handsome and confident, he was a barrister in his prime. He had established this electronic precedent in his previous case, a high-profile trial where a Cambridgeshire school caretaker, Ian Huntley, had been convicted of murdering two girl pupils.

  Kate apparently also made a little English juridical history by being granted permission to transcribe proceedings on her laptop. I had written to the judge requesting this after discovering only audiotapes were now kept of trials, and a transcript would cost us around £10,000. Besides, I needed to be free to observe proceedings. Justice Wakerley, an archetypical judge looking ten years older than his 63 years, noted with amusement that Kate was already quietly chronicling his words. Then he cleared her request with Latham and Andrew George’s barrister, Anthony Barker QC.

  Before proceedings resumed on Wednesday 6 April 2005, there was a traditional ceremony to mark the opening of the Spring Term of the High Court in Stafford. Wakerley, resplendent in long wig, red robes, black breeches and silk stockings, led a procession into the handsomely mediaeval Collegiate Church of St Mary. An organ introit by Elgar was followed by a hymn, confessional prayers and then an Old Testament reading by Lord Francis Stafford, the High Sheriff of Staffordshire. His chaplain read the Gospel and delivered the sermon before the main prayers, three of which I found relevant for their irony:

  We pray for the High Court of Parliament and all who hold positions of power and authority in this land: for the upholding of freedom and truth and all who work for the common good.

  We pray for all the judges and magistrates, barristers and solicitors, the police and the probation and prison services and all who administer the law, that they may be people of wisdom, courage and compassion.

  We remember before God all who have suffered injustice; those whom our society and our institutions have failed; all who are vulnerable, in need or in trouble in our communities and to whom we have a duty of compassion and care.

  After another hymn and blessing, the service ended with the National Anthem. The congregation remained standing while the procession of civic dignitaries, church leaders and senior police officers emerged into the spring sunshine and followed Wakerley along a path lined by soldiers of the Staffordshire Regiment to the Court Centre. Eerily timed, this pageant flaunted the power of the British State. In light of what we had uncovered about Hilda’s case – let alone what was to come – it exposed the deep, cynical hypocrisy of its representatives and their faithful servants.

  An ‘abuse of process’ hearing requested by the defence began on 6 April with a statement by Barker, George’s barrister. He argued that a fair trial was not possible because of the length of time since the crime. Also, in 1984 the police had eliminated Andrew George as a suspect because the fingerprints did not match, and they were looking for a much bigger, older man as the car driver. Footprints found in Hilda’s kitchen were about size 9, yet the accused had size 6 feet at the time. A police replica of the footprint had been lost. Barker cited an independent expert’s report that, contrary to the police view, it was possible to match George’s fingerprints in 1984. Latham did not challenge this.

  However, as explained in the Northumbria Report, the fingerprint on the rear window of the car was used to eliminate 1,200 suspects at the time because the police assumed that the driver was also the murderer.

  While summing up, Wakerley read out a startling, brief new defence case statement by Andrew George that had just been handed to him. George now admitted burgling Hilda’s house on 21 March 1984. His new defence was that he had followed his older brother Stephen to the house with a view to stealing money, and found him in the kitchen attacking Hilda. Stephen dragged her upstairs to a bedroom and tried to rape her. Meanwhile, the defendant went into another bedroom to burgle it, before joining Stephen who also tried masturbating an unwilling and shocked Andrew. Stephen then forcibly abducted Hilda in her car. Andrew took no part in the abduction or killing, remaining in Ravenscroft. Later he returned to the local authority home, Besford House, where he was living.

  We were shocked. Until then we had expected his defence team to run with some of the conspiracy theories. Why had Andrew changed his story at the last moment? The prosecution objected to the new defence case statement, but Wakerley ruled that justice could still be done. Andrew George would stand trial for Hilda’s abduction and murder.

  Now, all the defence had to establish beyond doubt was that Andrew George was not the driver of Hilda’s car, so he could not have abducted and then murdered her. However, most of the prosecution’s problems had fallen away. Latham could stick doggedly to the original police line, and attempt to discredit witnesses who argued the driver looked nothing like Andrew or Stephen because both were small and scrawny teenagers.

  Over the next five weeks, we became increasingly frustrated by both sides as the list lengthened of key questions that were not being raised. The trial was a harsh demonstration that the adversarial English criminal system is about winning or losing a case, not uncovering the trut
h.

  The next day, a jury of six men and six women was empanelled. Before the session began, Andrew George’s younger brother Adrian tried to sit near us so that he could stare at his brother, to put pressure on him not to blame their elder brother. When he was banished to the public gallery above the defendant, he indicated to Kate that he urgently wanted to talk again. Over a late lunch in the empty Court Centre cafe, he apologised for his behaviour the year before – because now he believed Andrew was guilty.

  Not long before their father Harold died, Adrian took him to visit Andrew in prison. When Harold demanded the truth, Andrew confirmed he had been in the house. He said he had disturbed two men who held guns to his head and threatened to kill him. They told him that if he kept his mouth shut he would be paid £60,000. The money never came, so Adrian had not believed this account.

  At their previous meeting, Adrian told Kate his brother could not drive. Now, after being given new information by the police, he had changed his mind. Apparently, his older brother Stephen was unaware that Andrew was trying to frame him until the Shropshire Star man phoned him the previous night about what was said in court.

  The start of the trial coincided with the funeral of the Pope, and Prince Charles marrying Camilla. We were relieved when celebrity media coverage almost forced the trial off the front page of the Shropshire Star.

  As the opening presentation for the prosecution began, the screens filled with an attractive colour photograph of Hilda I had not seen before. Latham turned to the jury and told them: ‘The victim in this crime was Hilda Murrell, who was murdered on 21 March 1984.’ I glanced at Kate, who also realised he was restricting her time of death to the first day. He described how Hilda was a well-known native of Shrewsbury who ‘studied French history at Oxford University in 1927’. We grimaced at each other at this flawed attempt to flaunt his knowledge of Hilda’s academic background. Her Cambridge degree was in English, modern and mediaeval languages, and French. Our reactions prompted a reprimand from the judge to us via the police for showing body language in front of the jury! No doubt he was aware we probably knew too much about the case. We responded by respectfully asking that Wakerley and the QCs pronounce Murrell correctly, with emphasis on the first syllable. He duly apologised, and directed the court to comply.

  Such simple errors of fact undermined our confidence that the truth would emerge. As further inaccuracies followed, we resorted to squeezing each other’s knees or scribbling notes. Everyone else seemed free to express their emotions, including the judge, barristers and defendant! Also, we learned to shield our notes after a young police officer brazenly tried to correct Kate’s spelling on her laptop.

  Hilda’s photo was replaced by an aerial shot of Shrewsbury followed by one of Ravenscroft. The court heard about her trip to the bank and supermarket, and then the police theory on how the defendant had attacked and abducted her, leaving her to die in Moat Copse. Without warning, she was on the large screens again – as a corpse sprawled in the copse. As Latham described Hilda’s clothing, a police officer held up each item, including her slip, bearing a watery brown stain, the lingering residue of blood, and a hole where a sample had been cut off for DNA analysis. Then Hilda’s naked cadaver was shown on the mortuary slab. Sickened, I turned away while a detailed, illustrated lecture proceeded about her stab wounds and bruises. The jurors were told they needed to see the images, which according to Latham were ‘sad and unpleasant – not horrid’.

  At every opportunity he dwelt on the sexual angle. ‘There was no physical sexual damage – that doesn’t mean to say there was no sexual activity … She was wearing no skirt, no knickers, no suspender belt…’ He was relentlessly building a picture of a brutal and perverted killer. However, he claimed that:

  Hilda apparently died five to ten hours after her abduction – despite the fact that it may have been as much as 36 hours.

  She crawled around Moat Copse – although she had a broken clavicle and hyoid bone as well as multiple stab wounds.

  The car driver was only seen fleetingly – when in fact several witnesses had a clear view of him, some twice.

  The defendant attacked Hilda in her home, where she was ‘seriously injured’ – yet no blood was found there or even in the car.

  ‘Without her glasses, Hilda could not see more than a metre in front of her’ – not so: she only needed them for reading and driving.

  The telephone cable was ‘torn away’ from the junction box.

  Latham stated the police went into Ravenscroft on the Saturday morning, omitting to mention PC Davies’ visit the previous evening. He warned the jury to ‘put conspiracy theories to the back of your minds. Don’t allow yourself to be contaminated by them; they are speculative, and merely tell you more about those putting them forward.’ However, Latham revealed that, among several contradictory claims, Andrew George had told his partner of six years during an early prison visit in 2003: ‘This is bigger than the Shrewsbury police.’

  The first evidence concerned the abduction. The prosecution described how George Lowe met Hilda shopping and later saw her turning into Sutton Road. However, no one pointed out she had clearly been somewhere else. Four statements were read out from women who saw Hilda wearing a wide-brimmed floppy hat. The fact that the Totes rain hat found in the hedge was quite different, and not recognised by close friends and family as Hilda’s, was not mentioned.

  The witnesses who were called all testified that the man they saw driving Hilda’s car bore no resemblance to a 16-year-old Andrew George. The prosecution’s response was to try to show that these witnesses may have been confused. Rosalind Taylerson, who had two of the best views of the driver, was the only witness to be shown a picture of Andrew George aged 16, under cross-examination by Barker. To George’s visible relief, she was adamant he was not the driver.

  Retired PC Robert Eades recounted his response to reports of an abandoned car in Hunkington Lane with his colleague, PC Davies. Eades described how he discovered the body in the copse the following Saturday. He admitted he also saw Hilda’s clothing on the ground. Nothing was said about the crucial issue that Ian Scott had apparently missed both this and her body.

  The trial turned to medical and forensic evidence with Dr Peter Acland first to take the stand. Latham prefaced his cross-examination by declaring: ‘There is no dispute about what is in the findings.’ By this he meant the defence was not challenging anything in the pathologist’s autopsy report. Barker raised very few of the anomalies in the evidence because he was focusing primarily on what happened in the house.

  Acland had grown more cautious over the years. Unlike at the inquest, he now acknowledged the imprecision of his science. Latham shrewdly built on this, to the point where he obtained his agreement that the ability to pin down time of death from examination of rigor mortis and hypostasis was a myth, especially in cold weather. Acland asserted it was very cold on the first day of the crime – when in fact it was well above freezing, sunny and calm. Yet in an earlier interview he claimed it was ‘below freezing in the daytime’.

  The consensus between Acland and another pathologist, Dr Nathaniel Carey, was that Hilda’s kitchen knife found near the copse was too wide to have caused all the stab wounds. According to veteran pathologist Professor Knight back in 1985, another narrow-bladed knife that was never found must have been used. Carey, who had re-examined the medical evidence for the cold case review, agreed with the police line that Hilda’s neck injuries indicated she had been held in an arm lock and frogmarched while a knife was stabbed into her stomach. He was asked to explain why the wounds were so close together and did not go any deeper. He answered that the attacker was probably keeping control of the knife, determined not to cause very threatening injuries. The wounds were ‘almost deliberately superficial’.

  Barker cross-examined both pathologists further about this. ‘If an individual is stabbing another, once the knife goes in surely there is very little resistance? So if the intent was to kill, why not go in
up to the hilt?’ His inference was that, even if the defendant was Hilda’s attacker, the charge should be downgraded to manslaughter.

  Carey admitted Hilda would have had very limited movement in her right arm because of her broken clavicle and the knife wound right through it. Several other questions were not asked. Why did a panicking teenager want to inflict ‘deliberately superficial’ wounds when he was about to leave his victim to die? Did this not seem more like torture, perhaps to extract information? Just as baffling, how did the attacker keep such control of this knife (or two knives?) while restraining his victim and struggling across a heavy, muddy field in broad daylight? This was even more difficult to imagine if the attacker was nearly five inches shorter than the victim.

  The next expert testimony concerned Hilda’s coat. We realised the importance of what we were about to hear after an earnest discussion between the judge and the two opposing barristers without the jury in court. Latham told Wakerley: ‘It doesn’t look like the knife has gone through the coat.’ A few minutes later he added: ‘The coat can’t have been covering the body at the time the knife went into the body.’ This made nonsense of the police line that Hilda had been stabbed while being frogmarched. It also raised other more likely scenarios for when and where she had been stabbed, which were not mentioned. The discussion concerned whether Carey should be required to comment on this information, which was in the testimony of the next witness, Mark Webster. Another forensic scientist, Webster had worked on the original investigation, but had recently reviewed his findings.