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

  Aaronovitch used Hilda’s case in his 2007 Times article to ridicule Baker’s hypothesis. Having underplayed the nuclear motive and emphasised that Dalyell’s sources were, like Baker’s, anonymous, he continued:

  There the accusation lay for more than 20 years – with many playwrights and journalists believing that the Thatcherite State was quite capable of such murderousness – until new DNA evidence and a cold case review established who the Murrell murderer was. He turned out to have been, at the time of the killing, a 16-year-old petty criminal called Andrew George, who lived in a local care home. In 2005 he was imprisoned for life.

  The Dalyell idea of a Murrell conspiracy mirrors in almost every important detail the Baker idea of the Kelly murder, with the dismissal of the ‘official version’ as somehow deficient…

  Was this why the State security system was so determined to convict Andrew George and close Hilda’s case?

  Aaronovitch’s 2009 book, Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History, featured Hilda’s case prominently. She was in illustrious company as he also briskly debunked conspiracies surrounding the deaths of John F Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana and Kelly.

  Yet the Kelly case refused to go away. In a dramatic development, on 5 July 2009 the Daily Express revealed he had been writing a book exposing highly damaging government secrets. Not only had he warned Blair there were no chemical weapons in Iraq, but apparently he had also decided to reveal that, as one of the world’s experts on anthrax, he had secretly helped the apartheid regime in South Africa develop germ warfare agents. He had several discussions with an Oxford publisher, and was seeking advice on how far he could go without breaking the Official Secrets Act. Following his death, his computers were seized and it is not known what happened to the information on them or if any draft was discovered by investigators. British author Gordon Thomas said: ‘I knew David Kelly very well and he called me because he was working on a book. I gained the impression that he was prepared to take the flak as he wanted his story to come out.’

  On 5 December 2009, six senior doctors began legal action to force a proper inquest into Kelly’s death, because they had no confidence in the Hutton Inquiry. Their spokesman, David Halpin, revealed to us that emails relating to the case had disappeared from his computer, and correspondence was missing. On 9 June 2011, despite intense media coverage and public support built by evidence uncovered by Baker and the doctors, the new Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, ruled out an inquest.

  In December 2011 the High Court refused permission for the doctors to seek a judicial review. In April 2012, they reapplied to the Attorney General in light of fresh evidence, including that Dr Kelly’s body had been moved between first being found and about an hour later.

  CHAPTER 13

  CASE CLOSED?

  The official closing of the case after Andrew George’s failed appeal in 2006 provoked further releases of information to me. For years I had known the police had ignored reliable reports of changes in the state of curtains, lights and the side door of Hilda’s house between the Thursday and Friday. Now, we were able to piece together an extraordinary jigsaw of suspicious activities around Ravenscroft and Hunkington, where Hilda’s car was found during the week of the crime. All these were reported to the police at the time – yet they appeared to dismiss them, and none was put before the jury at George’s trial. Failure by Cole, Smith, Stalker, Tozer and Brunger to connect these dots of inconvenient evidence and accept the implications, deepened my suspicion about their motives.

  MONDAY 19 MARCH 1984, two days before Hilda’s abduction

  At 1pm a man wearing a heavy, ankle-length coat with distinctive, small brown and grey checks is seen standing outside Hilda’s house by two men driving past. Aged 35-40, he is short and stockily built with tidy ginger-blond hair, a high forehead, and is smoking nervously. It is too warm to be wearing such a coat, which is too big for him.

  An hour later, the same witnesses see the same man walking along a road near Haughmond Hill. He walks over to where they are working in a field and requests a cigarette. He asks how far the next village is. They tell him – then challenge him that they have just seen him in Sutton Road. Shaken, the man replies: ‘You couldn’t have done’ before walking off towards Uffington. An hour or so afterwards, the witnesses spot two tramp-like men walking along the same country road. One is 30-35 years old, medium height and build, with greasy swept-back brown hair and wearing a dark coat, while the other is younger, slimmer and shorter.

  Two days later, between noon and 12.30pm on the Wednesday Hilda was abducted, the same witnesses see the ginger-blond man a third time, still wearing the distinctive coat. He is standing stroking horses over a wall near the Uffington junction on the road where, less than half an hour later, Hilda’s car passes on its way to Hunkington.

  Around 7.45am on either the Monday or Tuesday morning, a woman is cycling past Ravenscroft, where she knows Hilda lives alone, when she sees a white Ford Fiesta parked across her driveway. This is a dangerous and disruptive place to stop, where Sutton Road narrows and bends slightly; so there must be an overriding reason for a car to stop there. The driver is a clean-shaven, well-built 30 to 40 year-old man with tidy collar-length dark brown hair, pronounced sideburns and is wearing an unusual dark green, peaked cap. The woman cyclist notices he is looking at Hilda’s house.

  TUESDAY 20 MARCH, the day before Hilda’s abduction

  I already knew that in the morning, Mary O’Connor, Hilda’s elderly neighbour living almost opposite, had been concerned about a strange young man outside her home. She found him sitting on the pavement leaning against her low garden wall, smoking an ornate pipe. Having to step round his legs to enter her property, she was concerned enough to fetch a garden fork and go back to her front garden to show him she was watching. He got up, sauntered off across the road and disappeared down the alleyway between Hilda’s house and Millmead Flats.

  A local woman is walking past Mary O’Connor’s house, when she sees the same strange man coming out of the alleyway onto Sutton Road. He sits on a low wooden fence in front of Millmead Flats. The woman meets Mary, and they discuss this suspicious behaviour and his appearance. Aged about 20, he is of medium height and build with dirty, collar-length ginger hair, a chubby face, and wearing a black leather motorcycle jacket, blue jeans, a stained waistcoat with badges on it, and black motorcycle boots. Looking around, he walks off past Ravenscroft.

  Soon afterwards, a man living in Millmead Flats strolls over and starts chatting with Mary outside her house. They notice another strange man walking towards them from town. He passes them, crosses the road and walks back past Ravenscroft, looking around. They watch him until he is some 300 yards away, near Stonehurst Flats, where he loiters for a while. He is clean-shaven, 35-40 years old, medium height and build, with tidy brown collar-length hair brushed forward. He is wearing a khaki-coloured mackintosh.

  At 2pm, another neighbour sees a stranger standing outside Stonehurst Flats. He is about 50 years old, medium height and build, with short straight hair but untidily dressed, and he is looking around warily.

  At 3.30pm in Cross Houses, a village five miles southeast of Ravenscroft, a stranger with an Irish accent asks the way to Atcham, the location of Little America. He is clean-shaven, aged about 40, medium height, with well-trimmed collar length mousy hair. He is wearing a heavy fawn mackintosh that almost reaches his ankles.

  At about 5pm the following afternoon, four hours after Hilda’s abduction, the same witness is surprised to see the same man in the same long coat walking about 400 yards from Hilda’s house.

  WEDNESDAY 21 MARCH 1984, the day of Hilda’s abduction

  Going to work early that morning, Brian George was concerned about an odd-looking man and woman in long coats walking fast and furtively a short distance apart in the same area.

  At about 9.20am, a woman driving along Sutton Road has to stop for oncoming traffic because two cars are parked close toget
her outside Hilda’s house. The first one is a white Renault. A wider car ahead of it is a distinctive metallic turquoise blue with a thick white rear bumper. No one is in or near either car. Ten minutes later, another neighbour notices only a metallic blue Talbot car, now parked on the verge opposite Ravenscroft.

  About an hour afterwards, around 10.30am, a nurseryman who once worked for Hilda is driving past her house when he has to stop suddenly because a red Ford Escort, with no one in or near it, is parked partly on the pavement. Half an hour later, a similar red car is seen parked about a hundred yards further along the road.

  Ursula Penny told me that, around 11.10am, she was standing on the pavement opposite her house chatting with a woman friend when they saw Hilda drive past into town. Moments later a strange man jumped over a low wall in front of Stonehurst Flats and walked rapidly towards Ravenscroft. He was about 40 years old, medium height, athletic build, with a clean-shaven weathered face, fairish short-cropped hair, and wearing a grey lapel-less windcheater zipped up and grey slacks.

  A woman is visiting her daughter who lives opposite Hilda. At about 11.30am, she glances out of the front window expecting a washing machine repair man. Instead, she sees a stranger standing on the pavement outside Hilda’s house. In his late twenties, fairly short and slim, he has a sallow, Pakistani complexion with thick black wavy hair parted in the middle and a small moustache. He is watching the traffic, and fiddling nervously with his coat. It is military style with a belt, full-length and too big for him, dark navy or black with a collar pulled over what he is wearing underneath. The witness is distracted by the repair man arriving. When she looks out again, the suspicious man has disappeared.

  Ten minutes later, two plasterers working outside a house near Stonehurst Flats notice a scruffy man in his late twenties walking towards Ravenscroft, looking furtive. As he passes them ten yards away, he turns back to face them, then walks on. Stocky and medium height, he is unshaven with untidy, collar-length wavy dark brown hair parted in the middle and hanging over his face. He is wearing a red-and-black check lumber jacket and faded jeans with a tear in the right knee. The witnesses keep an eye on him until he disappears from view at the bend by Hilda’s house.

  Within minutes of Hilda driving into town, three suspicious men converged on her house, one of whom matched Rosalind Taylerson’s description of the driver of Hilda’s car. High walls along the front of Ravenscroft, and around a complex of outbuildings with an outside toilet and cover to enter the house through the conservatory, provided plenty of options to lie in wait. The overgrown alleyway down the side of the garden offered discreet and easy access over a fence. Hilda had often chased young boys stealing fruit back over it.

  At about 11.40am Hilda came home and left her shopping basket in the kitchen before visiting Mary O’Connor. A woman cleaning the front room of another house opposite watched her walk slowly out of her drive leaving the kitchen door open, and return about ten minutes later entering Ravenscroft through that door. The woman did not see Hilda’s car in the drive, so she assumed she had parked it in the garage, because its door was shut.

  Did Hilda put her car away to keep her driveway clear for ‘Inspector Davies’ coming to question her at midday, as Laurens Otter claimed she told him?

  At about noon, a neighbour has to drive around a white transit van parked on the pavement beside Hilda’s front wall. Ten minutes later, another man walking past her gateway sees an unmarked white van parked well back in Hilda’s drive opposite the front door with its rear to the road – but no white Renault. The van, similar to a Toyota Hiace, has no windows in the rear doors. He sees no people.

  So, here was corroboration that her car was in the garage. Hilda had not yet been abducted. What was a van doing there at that crucial moment?

  As a young woman leaves her parents’ house off London Road a few blocks from Sutton Road to walk into town around midday, she sees a strange man walking towards her. Seeing her, he quickly turns and walks back to the main road, where he stands as she passes. He follows her, dropping back until she loses sight of him. He is about 50 years old, six feet tall, well built, clean shaven with a pockmarked face and broad nose. He has grey, bushy collar-length hair under a checked cloth cap, and is wearing a stone-coloured full-length mackintosh and dark brown trousers.

  From London Road there is a pedestrian shortcut through back streets to Sutton Grove, which joins Sutton Road almost opposite Ravenscroft. Was this fourth stranger the same older man outside Stonehurst Flats the previous afternoon?

  At 12.20pm, a woman riding a moped past Hilda’s house towards the by-pass has to brake suddenly as a vehicle – ‘not a lorry or a van’ – pulls out of the Ravenscroft gateway to her right, and drives off ahead of her at speed.

  Was this the Range Rover that roared past Jill Finch in her friend’s car at the junction of Sutton Road with the by-pass at this time? Was this how ‘Inspector Davies’ arrived for his ‘meeting’ with Hilda? According to police, the first confirmed sighting of Hilda’s car on its ‘abduction run’ was some 25 minutes later, at the junction between Sutton Road and Wenlock Road.

  At about 12.45pm, a woman driving along Sutton Road sees a vehicle emerge from Hilda’s gateway, and turn left towards town. Moments later, a woman police surgeon standing outside her home in Sutton Road almost opposite Laundry Lane is nearly run over by Hilda’s car trying to avoid gasmen digging up the road nearby. Three days later, she is the first person to examine Hilda’s body in Moat Copse.

  At 1.20pm the man who saw the white van in Hilda’s drive at 12.10pm returns. The white van is still there.

  This extraordinary weight of evidence, from neighbours who were reliable witnesses, demolished the police theory and hugely complicated the case. While that van was there, witnesses had seen two other vehicles drive out of Ravenscroft. Could the first one around 12.20pm have been the Range Rover heading by the shortest and safest route to Hunkington with a drugged Hilda hidden inside?

  Here was evidence of the Ulster snatch squad scenario, with the driver of Hilda’s Renault and her female impersonator able to get into it unobserved via the side door of the garage. Was she the woman seen walking suspiciously early that morning by Brian George? None of the many witnesses who saw Hilda’s car driven through the town recognised the slumped woman passenger as Hilda, because her face was obscured by a large floppy hat. Did the driver and passenger wait for about 25 minutes before setting off on the decoy run, until they knew Hilda was in a safe house?

  Did the van then come into its own, removing a terrified 16-year-old petty thief found upstairs after the abduction team held guns to his head, and he had defecated in the downstairs toilet?

  None of the many sightings of strangers near Hilda’s house that week was of a small, scrawny 16-year-old boy and his brother. At his trial Andrew George claimed he was walking through the alleyway beside the house, and saw no car and the side door open. This could have been in the five to ten minutes while Hilda was visiting Mary O’Connor. The white van was parked outside, invisible behind the wall to George when he took a disastrous snap decision to hop over the fence and burgle Ravenscroft, unobserved by a team waiting in the van to abduct Hilda and search her house after she returned? This would also explain Mr A’s claim that George told him at least three others and a white van were involved.

  Later that afternoon, there are two sightings by neighbours of another scruffy man near Hilda’s house. In his late twenties, medium height and thin, he has greased-back, straggly collar length black hair, and is wearing a light-coloured mackintosh. At 3.50pm a local woman on an errand to a neighbour notices the man standing just inside Hilda’s gateway. On her way back about ten minutes later, he is on the pavement but still in the gateway. As she tries to see his face, he deliberately turns away. However, she notes it is thin, and under the mac he is wearing jeans and a dirty pair of trainers.

  About half an hour after this, another woman walking along the alleyway notices a light on in an upstairs room
in Hilda’s house, on a fine afternoon.

  From late that afternoon until at least 11.30pm, a blue Hillman Hunter saloon is seen parked about 40 yards from the entrance to Ravenscroft.

  That evening around 6.30pm, a neighbour saw a red Cavalier estate stop outside Ravenscroft, reverse to get a better look at the house, then drive on.

  Some 15 minutes later, another neighbour living in Laundry Lane behind Ravenscroft returns home and finds the white gate into his property jammed shut. This gate has been difficult to open, so he always leaves it ajar. He struggles to pull it open. Concerned, looking around he glances at the unoccupied bungalow next door. A shed door at the back is open, which has never been like that. Entering his house, he finds no other evidence of an intruder.

  Was that shed another hiding place for members of the team involved in Hilda’s abduction? They only needed to walk down the lane, then a hundred yards along another back street to gain access to Ravenscroft through the secluded bottom of the garden, surrounded by a warren of houses with access lanes and pedestrian walkways between them.

  At about 8pm, a student at the Technical College and his girlfriend walk past Hilda’s house into town. They see an unoccupied red saloon car parked on the grass verge almost opposite, facing Ravenscroft. When they return at about 11pm, it is still there.