A Thorn in their Side

It is 30 years since a political scandal broke around the mysterious murder of Hilda Murrell, a rose grower of national fame in her Shropshire garden and an ardent campaigner for peace and against nuclear power and weapons. A new edition of the book about her murder "A Thorn in Their Side" has been published for the anniversary by her nephew Robert Green, who has devoted years to following his theory that she was killed because of her anti-establishment views and the fact that she had secret documents that could have threatened the security of the Thatcher and succeeding governments and that these documents are still at large. He wants the murder case - for which the man found guilty, Andrew George, is now in prison, to be reopened. Robert Green was a naval officer who had originally led the team providing top-secret intelligence support to the Polaris nuclear submarine on patrol in the surrounding seas. Previously, he had been in a "nuclear crew" with the capacity to drop a ten kiloton bomb on a military airfield near Leningrad, now St. Petersburg. He switched to anti-submarine helicopters, and finally became publicly opposed to nuclear weapons. Then in March, 1984, his aunt was killed. It was a long time before a murder suspect was charged and tried. "My experience of sitting through the five-week trial of Andrew George in 2005 was that the English adversarial judicial process proved woefully ineffective in discovering who had murdered Hilda," he writes. He thinks the book provides enough evidence to re-open the case. Michael Mansfield QC, writing a foreword to the book, has called for a Commission of Inquiry into Hilda's case. There was cross-party support for a Parliamentary early day motion tabled by Austin Mitchell supporting this. He points out that Hilda was killed shortly before she was about to deliver her paper entitled "An Ordinary Citizens' View of Radioactive Waste Management" to the first UK Public Inquiry into the nuclear power industry, focusing on the proposed Sizewell B plan in Suffolk. Her fundamental objection was to the dangers of dealing with high-level radioactive waste. This, in itself, was a danger to the established forces supporting nuclear energy. "Continuing pointers towards State complicity into Hilda's murder have been the endless and remorseless efforts to put the authors off their stride by harassment, surveillance and intimidatory intrusion. Even after publication of this book in New Zealand, this has not abated," Mansfield writes. "No one in the UK should be in any doubt about this reality following revelations in January 2011 about the extent of police undercover activities in relation to perfectly peaceful and legitimate protest groups." The brutal killing of Hilda Murrell by stabbing and blows to her body and face was assumed to be local. The police theory was that it had been committed by a lone, panicking burglar. Or it could have been committed by hired attackers for a different purpose - to silence her. Robert Green, now living in New Zealand, and his wife Kate Dewes, will not give up until their theory has been properly tested and investigated when, they believe, the real truth will finally emerge. ends