by Robert Green
According to Mrs Latter, the skirt’s matching jacket had been lying on the bed in the back bedroom for some time, and one old suspender belt had been waiting to be repaired in the large guest bedroom for weeks before the murder. Hilda would never have changed into such old clothes for a lunch date, or even to go shopping.
So why had the police ignored the obvious deduction: who forced her to change? Was it because this effectively ruled out a lone, petty burglar, and raised the inconvenient likelihood that more than one intruder must have been involved? In sum, did all these anomalies, questions and suspicions point to a deliberate decision to demonstrate the State security system’s power to finally control and humiliate Hilda?
After his failed appeal, Andrew George gave me permission to visit him in HM Prison, Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight. He could have refused to see me. I knew that at any point he could end the meeting, but we were together for over an hour. I did not know if he was speaking the truth, and some of his answers contradicted what he said in the trial. However, throughout George remained alert, respectful, held eye contact and showed no sign of stress.
I asked him directly: ‘Was Hilda’s car there?’
‘No. I saw the door open facing the road. I never tried burgling a place if anyone was there – it was too much grief.’
This led me to go through his shotgun burglary a week after Hilda was abducted. George confirmed he knew the teacher who owned the gun, where he lived and that he was teaching. ‘I did it because I felt extremely frustrated and angry about things.’
‘Did you fire it to get arrested and be taken away from Shrewsbury?’
He nodded.
‘Is it true you told the police that when you went into Hilda’s house, two men held guns to your head, warned you not to talk about what you saw, and promised you £60,000 if you kept your mouth shut?’
Another nod.
‘There were a lot of valuables to steal, like silver. I know, because I cleared the house.’
Nod and chuckle.
‘I also know about your burglary a week before, where you stole some cash and shared it out to friends in Besford House.’
He grinned: ‘Yeah, I was a bit stupid.’
When I described my theory about the abduction route, he nodded again, and said: ‘She never was in the field – they took her somewhere else.’
How did he know that? I told him about Ian Scott’s story that the body was not in the copse on the day after Hilda was abducted – and how this meant the crime was much more complicated than the police theory.
George agreed: ‘It was much bigger than the Shrewsbury police.’
‘So in your trial you had to say things which were not true to try to blame your brother?’
He nodded. ‘If I had murdered Miss Murrell, I would have topped myself. I had lots of opportunity, especially when I was taking drugs.’
I told him about our mail interference, which the police agreed was professionally done.
He said: ‘Why was this happening to you if it’s just about me? You take care, Mr Green.’
I described how I had met a woman in Shrewsbury who had taught him. ‘She said you were naughty – but only a rascal, not a murderer.’
He replied: ‘Though I was always getting into trouble, I’ve never served time before. I always got caught and admitted it. The police let me go because they thought I hadn’t done it. I wouldn’t have stayed in Shrewsbury if I’d committed such a terrible crime.’ Pause. ‘Perhaps it was my fate.’
With hindsight, I regret not asking him why he had changed his defence just before the trial. When I asked his lawyer about this, he simply replied: ‘We had to follow our client’s instructions.’ This ducked the obvious question: who visited Andrew George a few days before the trial and persuaded him to change his defence?
CHAPTER 12
OTHER RELATED VICTIMS
During my pursuit of the truth about Hilda’s death, I came across others who had experienced surveillance, harassment, death threats, assaults or worse when trying to give the police information pointing to a more sinister motive than a petty burglary gone wrong. I have described what happened to Don Arnott, Con Purser, Judith Cook and Dora Russell.
The stories that follow about Ian and Thalia Campbell, Laurens Otter, Avraham Sasa, Philip Griffith, Karen Silkwood, Dr Rosalie Bertell, Dr Patricia Sheehan, Patsy Dale, Willie MacRae and Dr David Kelly also help to answer a question often put to me: why was Hilda singled out for such horrific treatment? My answer is that her experience was part of a widespread pattern. In five of these latter cases, we met the victims and/or their family representatives, who gave permission and indeed asked us to publish their edited stories – and to tell the police about them. Four of them relate to witnesses with dangerous or inconvenient information about Hilda and the rest, except Kelly, had information threatening the nuclear industry. My final case study about Kelly has several parallels with Hilda’s case, with which it has been linked by the British media.
Ian and Thalia Campbell are well known anti-nuclear campaigners. Thalia helped found the Greenham Common women’s peace camp in 1981 against US Cruise missiles. From the moment they offered inconvenient information to the police about Hilda, they experienced intimidation.
Early in 1984, Ian Campbell was running for election to the European Parliament as the Labour Party candidate for North West Wales. After speaking at a campaign meeting shortly before Hilda was found, two local women who knew Hilda told him she feared for her life – hence her consequent frequent contact with trusted friends by telephone. They were concerned that Hilda had not been in touch recently and, when they had phoned her, there had been no answer. Late on Saturday 24 March, the Campbells returned home to hear of Hilda’s murder on the midnight news. Shocked, Thalia phoned Shrewsbury police at 1.30am on the Sunday morning. The duty sergeant took a keen interest when she explained Hilda’s friends’ concerns.
Two days later two men came to their door. One introduced himself as a senior detective and the other as his ‘driver’. Both treated the Campbells with contempt, telling them it was an opportunist burglary, they had a suspect, and not to take it any further. Thalia told me: ‘We felt they were there to find out what we knew, and to bully us and head us off.’ Ian was so concerned he phoned his media contacts – but they all accepted the police line.
A few weeks later Ian was driving out of Llangollen alone late one night when a car with no lights followed him. At the end of street lights, it drove gently into his car from behind. He tried to slow down, but it pushed him along the road. He steered towards a phone box in a lay-by, jumped out and dialled 999. As his pursuer drove close up against the door to prevent him opening it, he saw it was a marked police car with two men inside. On the phone he demanded that the police call off their patrol car – whereupon it put on its lights, reversed and drove slowly away. Campbell told the operator he would make an official complaint.
The following morning, he did so with a local Labour MP at the police area headquarters near Ruabon. Later he was told ‘both officers had accepted early retirement on health grounds, so his complaint could not be pursued’. Undeterred, the Campbells spoke to reporters and at peace rallies and meetings about their concerns about Hilda’s murder, despite more harassment.
Some years afterwards, they met a retired police officer in Wales and became friends. ‘He said he had been in the West Mercia CID at the time of the Hilda Murrell case.’ Apparently, he had been taken off the case after expressing misgivings about it to the Chief Constable.
Early in 1988 Laurens Otter wrote asking if I had received a letter from his longstanding friend, Avraham Sasa, in Bath. I had not. Sasa’s sister had just told him he had died in September 1987. Apparently, one wet evening Sasa was walking into town for a CND meeting when a car stopped on the other side of the road. The driver called him over asking for directions – whereupon another car knocked him down and drove off.
Otter realised with a shock that Sasa’s
last letter had arrived about ten days after his death. It had taken two weeks to be delivered, and had obviously been opened. Sasa had unwisely asked him for my address, because he had ‘learned some information relevant to the Murrell case too sensitive to put in a letter’. Aware that I lived nearby, he intended to brief me and tell Otter about it when he visited him before Christmas – but of course he had not appeared.
Castle Frome, where Sasa was involved in organic farming, was a training ground for the Special Air Service. Having been involved in military intelligence in World War Two and done military service in Israel, Sasa could well have been confided in but overheard, or had heard a pub conversation there.
Also, Otter told me that on 4 September 1987 he had received an anonymous phone call from a man who said: ‘Why don’t you top yourself? Because people like you poke your nose in where it’s not wanted, we killed the Murrell woman and now we’ve killed your other friend.’
‘Which other friend?’
‘You don’t know about that?’
What was more, twice within the previous week while Sasa’s letter was in the post to him, two cars had narrowly missed Otter when he was out walking. On the first occasion, when he heard a car mount the pavement behind him, he threw himself behind a brick pillar in a gateway. A couple of days later, a car sitting in a lay-by suddenly started up and drove rapidly towards him; again if he had not jumped out of the way he would have been knocked down.
On 3 May 1986, I met Eileen Griffith, an anti-nuclear campaigner and rose grower friend of Hilda who lived near Fron Goch. When I introduced myself to this 68- year-old little hunch-backed woman, she gasped: ‘This is amazing. A year ago today, my son Philip was found murdered in Brighton – because he had found out something important about Hilda’s murder. Come and see where he is.’ She led me across her beautiful garden beside a disused chapel. On his grave she had planted a Hilda Murrell rose. She said he knew Hilda and had visited her a couple of times.
Over mugs of tea, she told me that on 3 May 1985 her 31-year-old adopted son Philip had phoned her from a public callbox in Brighton sounding upset and scared. He warned Eileen against making any more enquiries about Hilda. ‘Please don’t – I know what you’re like. And keep quiet about this: I’ve just come from a pub where I overheard three men bragging about how they had killed her. I know a lot of what happened.’ When she told him to go the police he told her not to be so naïve: ‘The police are up to their necks in it.’ He wanted to stay the weekend with her because ‘it is all so dangerous here.’
Philip had then phoned his younger brother Jerry ‘in a terrible state – he feared for his life’, before phoning his older sister twice. The first time, he said he had a ticket for France departing the next day to pick fruit and stay with friends as he had done for many years. She was surprised when he phoned again at about 6.30pm, sounding ‘strange: as though he had been drinking, but not drunk – and very frightened’. He kept repeating: ‘Please listen to me, I will telephone you when I get to France.’ A man called ‘Sime’ took over the phone and reassured her Philip was OK. This call was made 90 minutes before the alleged official time of death at 8pm.
However, the next morning (4 May) at 6.02am, David Thomas was walking his dog in Queen’s Park when he found Philip ‘still alive’ propped up against a tree. He recognised him immediately because he was his bricklayer foreman on a building site. He had tried to revive him and went to phone an ambulance. The police surgeon was unable to give a cause of death. A used hypodermic syringe was found on the body.
Eileen assumed Philip’s failure to contact her meant he had gone to France. It took two weeks before her local policeman gave her the terrible news. When she and her daughter formally identified him they saw a severe wound on his forehead: ‘It was a big, round bloody mess. He had been hit with something like a hammer.’ Yet when Thomas left him, he was adamant there had been no head wound. So someone had finished him off. When his family challenged the police, they said it had happened when his body was being carried into the ambulance. This convinced the family that Philip had been murdered, and they suspected the police were not investigating it objectively because of the link with Hilda’s case. Mindful of Philip’s warning, Eileen did not tell the police the contents of his last desperate phone call to her.
Philip’s flat had been emptied by someone. Except for his watch, an expired 12-month British visitor’s passport, £3 cash and an empty wage packet, all his possessions – including a ticket to France and a new suit bought specially for the trip – were missing. The police initially treated the death as a potential murder, but later suspected suicide. He had three injection punctures above his right elbow. A Home Office forensic pathologist, Dr Basil Purdue, told the inquest Philip had ‘morphine in the blood but not enough for a lethal overdose’. He was a ‘well-nourished, muscular young man’, with no evidence of other drug-taking. The autopsy report stated that ‘a very large amount of alcohol in the body would have contributed to his death, but would not on its own have proved fatal in the absence of postural asphyxia or inhalation of vomit, evidence of neither of which was present.’
In a letter from the police to Eileen, they stated that Purdue had also reported:
… the presence of numerous superficial bruises and directional abrasions about the body, especially on the limbs and trunk, suggest that the body was manhandled into the place and position in which it was found at about the time of death or very shortly before or after. There is no evidence of a fight or struggle, and the injuries would in no way have contributed to death.
Purdue made no mention of the severe head wound, nor did he comment that no one could have injected himself three times above the right elbow, and then placed the syringe somewhere on his body.
Philip was quite a heavy man. If he was drugged, then dragged from a house and driven in a car to the park, it would have taken at least two men to do it. Who were they, and what was their motive? To the credit of East Sussex coroner Edward Grace, he said: ‘Because Philip had drunk so much, it was possible that he was not able to resist someone else injecting him with the drug. Perhaps he did take too much drink to be good for him, but what happened after that I am sure was not his fault. I am sure he would not have deliberately injected himself or allowed himself to be injected if he were sober. Something happened which we can only guess at to cause his death.’ He recorded an open verdict.
Eileen had few doubts about what happened. Philip’s abrupt exit from the pub alerted the thugs to the probability that he had overheard them. He had to be silenced so they followed him, to find him emerging from a public phone box.
Frustrated by the lack of information from the police and unsatisfactory outcome of the inquest, the Griffith family demanded a meeting with senior police. Among many other unanswered questions, they asked why Philip’s flat had not been searched until two weeks after his death. Eileen then employed a solicitor to follow these up. When he challenged the police that Philip had been murdered, Assistant Chief Constable Dibley wrote back:
There is no evidence of corruption, murder, assault, of any other offence and no evidence of any injustice. The person or persons who placed a body in the park have not been traced in spite of substantial effort by police … At no time was it ever assumed by Police that this was a case of suicide … There is certainly a strong possibility, that having consumed excessive alcohol [Philip] took a voluntary or accidental drug overdose.
Dibley reassured the family that the case was not closed and they ‘would be contacted in the event of any further developments’.
The family was outraged by the police suggestion either that he might have been suicidal or on drugs. Morphine was found in the used syringe. This is used for only two purposes: as a painkiller or to kill. However, as it is derived from heroin, it was far more likely that his killers had confused the trail with both alcohol and morphine.
I promised Eileen to do what I could, and persuaded John Osmond of HTV to send researchers to Br
ighton. On 18 September 1986, Wales This Week featured a programme about Philip’s mysterious death. No direct link with Hilda’s murder was established; but there had undoubtedly been some form of cover-up.
Things went quiet until, following the tenth anniversary of Hilda’s death, Kate and I visited Eileen. Soon afterwards, I received confirmation from a reliable source that Philip had been followed out of the pub. When the thugs saw him go into a phone box, ‘they got some of their mates onto him. He was drugged in the flat and pulled down the stairs, and placed in a sleeping bag. The names of two of the guys who beat him were Peter and Simon…’
At the end of July 1994 I visited Philip’s sister, a solo mother with two young children. Even after I had briefed her about this, she resumed investigating her beloved brother’s murder. She then experienced phone harassment, including silent calls, and was watched for four to five days by two men parked in a strange car in her cul de sac. When a male friend challenged them, they drove off ‘like the clappers’ and never returned. Understandably, she abandoned her enquiries. Since then, the family has heard nothing. Eileen died in 2005 without even receiving a copy of Philip’s death certificate.
Hilda has been labelled by some media as the ‘British Karen Silkwood’. In 1974 Silkwood, a 27-year-old American union activist at an Oklahoma plutonium processing plant, had compiled a damning dossier of violations of safety regulations involving workers exposed to dangerous levels of radiation and denied protective clothing. She arranged to hand over her evidence to a New York Times journalist, but the meeting never took place. She was found dead at the wheel of her car, which had left the road and crashed into a concrete culvert. Tyre tracks indicated she had been forced off by another vehicle; the dossier was missing; and her home was found to have been deliberately contaminated with plutonium.
