by Robert Green
In 1993 the family was often disturbed, especially at night, by intermittent tapping on doors and windows, or whistles. Letters spelling ‘DEATH’ were found on the doormat eight times in 15 weeks. Even Stephen, now six feet five inches tall and weighing 16 stone, felt scared after Crater Face pointed a semi-automatic pistol at him. Gordon tried to install a video camera above the front window to catch Crater Face but the first time Patsy switched it on, he ducked out of sight and never approached the house the same way again.
In September 1993 they returned to Gordon’s mother’s London flat. Telephone death threats persisted for five weeks, and solicitor’s letters and photographs of Patsy’s injuries were stolen. So Bangert, who had recently found a publisher for Patsy’s book, hosted them for a couple of weeks. Phone problems started immediately, followed by visits by ‘police officers’. Within three months he died suddenly, allegedly from a known heart condition, aged 48. Patsy sent all his papers about her case to us in New Zealand.
I encouraged the Dales to write to MI5’s new woman Director General, Stella Rimington. Within ten days all intimidation stopped for 16 months. In November 1995 the incessant window tapping resumed. Sometimes Gordon recorded over 200 different taps only minutes apart. After Gordon reported this to the Garda, Crater Face again threatened Patsy with a gun. Gordon wrote twice more to Rimington threatening to initiate a case at the European Court of Justice. A reply enclosed a leaflet advising him to apply to the Security Service Tribunal.
Concerned about my safety, Kate kept copies of all documents in New Zealand and established an international support group. Crater Face warned Patsy not to correspond with Kate, and interference with our mail and phone intensified. After the Irish Daily Star highlighted their case, Crater Face beat Patsy with an iron bar across her neck and upper arm. Despite her leaving the bar for testing with the Garda, and offering to do a lie detector test, nothing happened. Following an interview for a documentary, a copy of Judith Cook’s 1994 Guardian article ‘True Lies’ about Hilda was found on Patsy’s bed with the words ‘Your [sic] dead’ scrawled across it. Kate began a letter-writing campaign to citizen organizations such as Irish CND and Amnesty International, leading politicians including Irish Foreign Minister Dick Spring, and MPs in New Zealand and Australia. Spring’s response was that ‘all complaints/incidents reported by the Dale family have been investigated with negative results’.
Gordon’s car then became a target. The air pressure in the tyres was deliberately inflated to a dangerous 60 psi; a new tyre was slashed with spikes normally only used by police; the clutch cable and the steering malfunctioned while overtaking a slow-moving vehicle. A local mechanic who inspected the car offered to speak out publicly about the sabotage if anything happened to the family.
After two Irish women Green MEPs began asking questions about Patsy’s case, all intimidation stopped for five weeks. When the window taps resumed they were witnessed by Irish CND’s Eoin Dinan and a visiting Maori elder from New Zealand. A few weeks after Kate and I were married in January 1997, I returned to the UK for six months. Patsy was badly beaten about the head with a brick, and Gordon received a phoned death threat saying ‘As for Murrell and Sheehan – tell Rob Green he’s next.’ Three more calls followed in quick succession: ‘Tell Mr Green to watch his grasses’; ‘The grass is greener on the other side’ and, bizarrely, ‘The Green, Green, Grass of Home’.
Kate kept up the pressure from New Zealand by sending photographs and affidavits from witnesses to the Irish Justice Minister and others. This prompted another telephoned taunt from Crater Face: ‘Katie is my darling, my darling.’ That same month carving knives were found on the back doormat four times, and Crater Face again half-strangled Patsy. He always knew when Patsy was alone, pouncing within minutes – confirming a comprehensive surveillance system was in use.
In October 1997, after pressure from members of the British Patsy Dale Support Group, Garda Detective Superintendent Kelly met the family and assured them he did not believe Gordon or Stephen were the perpetrators of all this harassment. Outrageously, local Garda had previously suggested this was the explanation. Telephone monitoring equipment was finally installed, whereupon the family had peace for nearly a month.
We kept Superintendent Kelly updated regularly, and in March 1998 we met him in Ennis. He revealed that one night, when he and his wife were driving home from the cinema, they had been followed by a car with no lights on. It sped up behind, raced past and then slammed its brakes on in front, causing him to stop suddenly. He felt the incident was linked to the Patsy case. Immediately after we left Ireland, Crater Face tried stabbing Patsy in the chest, but the knife was deflected by some jewellery. The knife was found on the back door mat and given to the Garda. Within hours he taunted: ‘Aren’t I a clever little boy? I can get away with murder – sorry, attempted murder – and I’m not that little.’ When the Garda turned off the telephone monitoring equipment because there had been no offensive calls for seven weeks, the calls resumed.
In June 1999 Patsy gave up her life-threatening struggle. She had endured 14 years of threats, abuse and assault – and had just been beaten again, this time by a younger, tall, dark-haired man. She had already spent much of the year in hospital and was physically and emotionally worn down. Gordon posted copies of all original documents to us and they moved to a country cottage where they lived safely and happily for nearly seven years.
This all changed after we visited them in June 2006 to check a draft of their story for this book. Aged 61, Patsy was on oxygen 16 hours a day – she had been diagnosed with lung cancer. On phoning them from Heathrow airport a week later, we learned they had received two death threats. We feared our visit had revealed their whereabouts and provoked the threats. One day in August, when Patsy was alone in the garden while Gordon and Stephen were out, a young man wearing a black jacket attacked her, injecting her twice in the thigh. Later, while Gordon took Stephen to the doctor, the same assailant broke into Patsy’s bedroom, beat her up and cut the phone wire, oxygen tube, and radio power cord. The farmer landlord found her cowering behind the spare bed. We phoned the Garda repeatedly insisting that they take immediate action. They set up a monitor on the phones that prevented abusive calls for a few weeks until it was removed in late November.
The following day, while Gordon and Stephen were briefly in town with Patsy locked inside the house, her young tormentor returned. He tried strangling her with the phone cord, beat her with a baseball bat that he also used in an anal rape, raped her vaginally and orally and left her unconscious. The attack was carefully planned: the landlord was working in fields and his wife was out all day. Tragically, the Garda took three hours to respond to Gordon’s emergency call. If they had sent an ambulance immediately, DNA from the blood and semen could have been retrieved before Gordon showered her and washed her clothes. Amazingly, Patsy recovered slowly with rape counselling and daily calls from us.
Six months later, just before they moved to Kilrush, Patsy was sitting alone in the locked car in the supermarket car park for a few minutes. Her assailant brazenly walked over and bragged to her through the window: ‘I’ve got away with rapes in Scotland; I’ve got away with rapes in Ireland, and now I’ve got a six-month posting in Wales.’
Over the next year things were reasonably quiet apart from a couple more serious assaults. We believe this final, utterly incredible phase of Patsy’s suffering was used to try to stop us publishing her story. So, to take pressure off them, we told the family over the phone that we were not going to include it in this book. From then on they were largely left in peace. However, Patsy did not live to read this, nor to see some justice for Stephen and herself. After weeks in intensive care with chronic breathing and other problems, she died in Limerick hospital on 17 August 2011.
Although there were many attempts to murder her, Patsy probably survived them because, unlike other victims such as Dr Patricia Sheehan and Hilda Murrell, she lived in a house with two large, fearless, supporti
ve men who have witnessed the consequences of attacks by her highly skilled, well resourced and informed assailants. With an indomitable spirit, Patsy also had a group of supporters and politicians who knew about the case, and a media profile that might have made her a martyr.
Nonetheless, the fact that her tormentors were never apprehended leads to a disturbing suspicion of pressure on the police in both England and Ireland. Only the Security Services associated with the British government and nuclear industry were capable of this. Was their primary objective to break her psychologically as an example of what can be done to those who dare to oppose the British State?
Another suspicious death was that of a leading radical Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) lawyer and anti-nuclear campaigner, Willie MacRae. He was openly critical of the investigation into Hilda’s case. On 5 April 1985, a week after the first anniversary of her murder, MacRae left for his holiday home in the Western Highlands. He never arrived. The next morning, tourists found him unconscious and covered in blood at the wheel of his car, crashed off the road in an isolated spot. It was treated as an accident until a gunshot wound was found behind his right ear when he was examined in the hospital. He died 36 hours later without regaining consciousness. No formal inquest was held, and cause of death was officially recorded as suicide. However, papers and his smashed wristwatch were found about 20 yards from his car; and the gun, with no fingerprints on it, was in a stream even further away.
His close friend, Mary Johnston, said on an investigative TV programme, Scottish Eye, on 5 April 2011: ‘He wouldn’t have done it [suicide]. Everything was going well for Willie: he had so many plans.’ She outlined several parallels with Hilda’s case. Like her, MacRae was preparing to give evidence at an inquiry into the nuclear industry, in Scotland. Apparently he told Mary that ‘now he had something they couldn’t wriggle out of… Also, his holiday home was broken into – but nothing vital was taken. He was quite gleeful: they didn’t get what they were looking for.’
Because of this, MacRae told friends he knew he was under surveillance by Special Branch, his phone was tapped and mail opened, and was on a ‘hit list’. A car followed him to his home a few days before his death. On 6 April 1985, a group of walkers near where MacRae’s car crashed reported that, during the afternoon, a man drove up the road, parked, got out and fired some shots in their direction as if to warn them not to approach. His car was a red Ford Escort. Two years after MacRae’s death, Hamish Watt, a former SNP MP and councillor in Grampian, told the Aberdeen Press & Journal that a nurse working at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, where MacRae was taken, had told him that two bullet wounds were found in his brain – which clearly ruled out suicide.
During the last few years of her life, Hilda corresponded with and telephoned leading Scottish anti-nuclear campaigners, including MacRae. Shortly before she died she sent them packages of papers outlining corruption in the nuclear industry. Like Hilda, MacRae was fearlessly opposed to the deep geological disposal of nuclear waste. Don Arnott had advised him at the Mullwharchar Inquiry in 1980, which overturned plans for such disposal in the Ayrshire hills in southern Scotland. Gary Murray, in his book Enemies of the State, described MacRae as ‘probably the nuclear industry’s most formidable opponent in Scotland’. Murray also wrote that, during World War Two, MacRae had served in the Royal Indian Navy in Naval Intelligence. While there, he joined the Indian Congress Party, at the time an illegal organisation opposed to British occupation. This first brought him to the attention of the British Security Services who, Murray claimed, kept him under surveillance for the rest of his life.
On 7 December 2010, The Scotsman newspaper reported that, 25 years on, new evidence had emerged about MacRae’s mysterious death. Member of the Scottish Parliament and former policeman John Finnie, now the SNP group leader on the Highland Council, called for his case to be re-opened after receiving new information from several different sources pointing to a more sinister motive. Apparently, police removed the car from the scene, only to return it when it became known that aspects of MacRae’s death were suspicious. Another former police officer turned private investigator claimed he was asked by an anonymous client to place MacRae under surveillance three weeks before he died; days before his death his office was broken into.
On 23 October 2007, a prominent article appeared in The Times headed ‘A weapons expert, a rose grower and a fantasist’. In it David Aaronovitch rubbished a sensational new book by Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker, The Strange Death of David Kelly. Over the previous few days, the right-wing Daily Mail had surprisingly serialised extensive highlights. Baker exposed anomalies in the police investigation of the apparent suicide on 18 July 2003 of the chemical weapons expert and member of the United Nations inspection team in Iraq since 1991, who had fallen foul of the Blair government over the ‘sexed up’, ‘dodgy’ dossier justifying the 2003 invasion.
Parliament had just adjourned for the long summer recess when Dr Kelly’s body was discovered. In extraordinary haste, Blair had within hours commissioned a non-statutory inquiry by Lord Brian Hutton – a former Chief Justice for Northern Ireland who had presided over many juryless terrorist trials – instead of allowing the Oxfordshire coroner’s inquest to continue. This was the first time Section 17A of the Coroner’s Act had been invoked for a single death. It meant that, unlike at an inquest, evidence was not under oath, witnesses could not be compelled to attend, and could only be cross-examined with Hutton’s permission. The excuse given was to allow witnesses to be examined ‘in a neutral way’.
After an unusually quick inquiry lasting 24 days, with just half a day spent considering the cause of Dr Kelly’s death, Hutton delivered his report, which was published the same day (28 January 2004). Kelly apparently died of haemorrhage from incised wounds to the left wrist, coproxamol ingestion and coronary artery atherosclerosis, after walking from his home in the Oxfordshire village of Southmoor to Harrowdown Hill. Astonishingly, Hutton recommended that all Kelly’s medical records and photographs of his body in situ be kept secret for 70 years ‘for the sake of the family’.
Evidence conflicting with the official cause of death raised many disturbing questions with echoes of Hilda’s case:
Two days after appearing before the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Select Committee, Kelly had emailed a US journalist about ‘many dark actors playing games’.
He left no suicide note. He had arranged to go with his daughter, who was getting married soon, to see a foal that evening. He had booked a flight to Iraq and emailed that ‘it will all blow over by the end of the week and I can travel to Baghdad and get on with the real work.’ He had left an upbeat phone message for a friend looking forward to playing cards on 23 July. Also he was a member of the Baha’i faith, which strongly condemns suicide. The sole witness to an early part of his fatal walk reported he said: ‘See you again then, Ruth’ – and the route he was taking was not to the lonely wood where he was found.
Shortly before his death he told Mai Pederson, a close US colleague in the UN inspection team, that he ‘expected to be found dead in the woods’ near his Oxfordshire home.
The Thames Valley Police investigation reportedly began at 2.30pm on 17 July – about half an hour before Kelly had left home and nine hours before he was reported missing.
According to Mrs Kelly, ‘a vehicle arrived with a large communications mast on it… then during the early hours another … 45-foot mast was put up in our garden.’ Were these needed to keep the Prime Minister informed?
The ‘police’ sent the family out of the house while they stripped the wallpaper before Kelly’s body was found. Were they removing listening devices? He had access to the highest levels of the Security Services and, like me, was cleared to see the most highly classified intelligence.
The paramedic’s Patient Report Form, and a scanned copy, disappeared. Also Kelly’s dental records were inexplicably mislaid and then reappeared.
Pederson claimed an injury to his right arm had left Kelly unable to
cut even steak with it – he had to do this clumsily with his left hand. Yet he supposedly cut his left wrist with his blunt pruning knife.
There was not enough blood loss from the cut ulnar artery, which is buried deep in the wrist and can only be reached by an extremely painful process of cutting through nerves and tendons. Neither radial artery was cut, the normal ones in a suicide.
As with the surprising lack of fingerprints on and in Hilda’s car, no fingerprints were found on Kelly’s knife, water bottle, coproxamol painkiller pill packs, glasses, mobile phone or watch. He was not wearing gloves.
Regarding motives for State security involvement in assassinating Dr David Kelly, he was one of only a few people involved in drafting the ‘dodgy dossier’ with its spurious claim not just that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, but that some of them were ‘deployable within 45 minutes of an order to use them’.
Moreover, as probably the most authoritative source on this aspect, he objected to this distortion of intelligence for political purposes. When Kelly’s request for this to be corrected was ignored, he briefed Andrew Gilligan, a reporter on BBC national Radio 4’s Today programme, who went public about it, severely embarrassing the Blair government. For this, Kelly’s name and role were leaked, whereupon he was subjected to a humiliating televised pillorying before the Foreign Affairs Committee.
Baker speculated in his book whether Kelly was assassinated by hitmen hired by British, American or Iraqi State security agencies, and his death made to look like suicide. Baker’s information pointing to foul play included mugging of informants too frightened to give their names. One had apparently been tipped off by a fellow former MI5 colleague that Kelly’s death had been a ‘wet operation, a wet disposal’ – slang for a covert intelligence operation involving assassination, alluding to bloodshed. Three weeks later, in a mysterious burglary, the informant’s computer with all the Kelly material on it was stolen. Also, sensitive files about Kelly disappeared from Baker’s computer in his constituency office in Lewes, East Sussex.
