Introduction
Clear cut examples of political murder, or state assassination in the mainland UK have been virtually non-existent. It is that fact which has helped focus so much attention on the deaths of Hilda Murrell and, in Scotland, of Willie McRae.
Lobster got into this area relatively early, printing in issue 16 a long report on the Murrell murder. The report arrived anonymously and was too good to worry about minor details like who the author of the piece was. He turned out to be Gary Murray — to whom, belatedly, my apologies for ripping-off his work like that.
On 26 February, 1994, the Independent reported David Thursfield, Assistant Chief Constable of West Mercia police, as saying that his officers had been ‘been given access to security service, military and nuclear industry files and had found no links to Miss Murrell.’
No doubt. But they can’t seriously have expected to find such links, can they? Mr Thursfield is further quoted as saying, ‘We have visited the headquarters of the security services where we spoke to a senior official. The service co-operated fully with our inquiries and we are entirely satisfied that from these and other inquiries the security service was not involved in Miss Murrell’s murder and had no knowledge of her before her death.’
I have seen no evidence that MI5 were involved in the Murrell’s death but just to be told, ‘Well, we asked and they denied it’ won’t do. (Though what would do, I admit, isn’t entirely clear.) As Gary Murray commented in a statement on this police report, they might examine the well-documented Stalker case when there were a plethora of such (worthless) assurances.
A hatchet job by Nick Davies
On March 21, 1994, the tenth anniversary of the murder, Nick Davies — not the Robert Maxwell Nick Davies — surveyed the case in the Guardian, dismissing and making fun of the non-official investigations to date. One of those named and mocked, Laurens Otter, a well known figure on the British anarchist scene, sent me some of his writing on the case and recent copies of statements by Gary Murray and Murrell’s nephew, Robert Green, a retired Royal Naval officer.
On the evening of the 10th anniversary of the murder, Otter organised a meeting in Shrewsbury.
Laurens Otter: ‘The meeting only had 70 people, which I found disappointing, but two television channels, Central and Harlech, did programmes at it or before; local radio had three or four hour-length programmes in the build up to the day; and more important John Stalker announced a few weeks before the meeting that he would be conducting an investigation and broadcasting the results; (which was probably why the police changed their minds and came to the meeting).
‘Assistant Chief Constable Thursfield, the man in charge of the police investigations of the case (including the allegations contained in the book by Gary Murray), backed by Chief Inspector Herbert, came to the meeting, to present the police account of events. Unfortunately they contented themselves with making fun of the investigators, (telling quite a few lies about what we’d said in the process). By coincidence, no doubt, by and large Nick Davies’ article in the Guardian repeats the line that Chief Inspector Herbert took at the meeting.’
Part of the problem with the Davies piece is that he isn’t on the same case as the unofficial investigators. Here is Davies’ view of the murder. Someone ‘broke into her house…. kicked Miss Murrell in the head and shoulder, stabbed her half a dozen times in the belly and once in the arm with such force that the blade came right through her bicep, he masturbated on her underwear, stole her cash and drove her out to the countryside where he dumped her half-alive, naked from the waist down, and left her in a lightly wooded field to die slowly from the cold…. this ugly but apparently straightforward crime.’ (Emphasis added.)
For Laurens Otter, on the other hand, the crime was ‘the story of a burglar who took at most 50p, leaving behind jewellery; who for some reason abducted the householder, in her own car, driving her, by the most public and inconvenient route possible to a remote lane; carried her, without leaving any trace, across a field so boggy that in horse-ploughing days it was proverbial for killing plough horses, to a copse, deposited there to die of cold; whipped back to the lane, left the car, and ran back to Shrewsbury (so drawing attention to himself and being seen by a school excursion).’
Whatever else the case is — even in the category ‘unsolved murders’, let alone the category ‘possible security state assassination’ — it isn’t a ‘straightforward crime’.
Davies’ assault on the unofficial investigators achieves most of its effect by selective quotations from their writing on the case which make them sound daft. In Robert Green’s case this has been achieved by presenting some of the less likely hypotheses generated by the case — Masons, ley lines, for example, which Green explored before rejecting — as if Green believes them, and excluding what Green actually does believe. In Otter’s case, Davies mocked him, saying that his ‘latest theory is that Miss Murrell was not only under surveillance before her murder but that on the day of the crime she attracted two different hit squads who turned up to kill her and ended up squabbling about who should do the job.’
Except it isn’t Otter’s theory.
Laurens Otter comments: ‘Nick Davies’s claim about my “latest theory” is based on a letter I sent Rob [Green] and other potential speakers for the meeting of the 21st March. It said, inter alia:
‘…..I have since heard, from a third source, — an ex-soldier who again would not be prepared to come forward as a witness, in whom I wouldn’t place the same unqualified trust as I would in Reg, but who certainly believed the story he was telling me, — that the surveillance had been by a different lot, and that on the day, two distinct hit-squads arrived, unaware of each other’s existence, and that there was an “argument” between them as to which had priority.’
Otter adds: ‘The ex-soldier mentioned, who said I “could call him Sam or Bob or anything I liked really” — i.e. refusing to give his name — came and saw me at work, once, during the Winter of 88/9. Contrary to what Nick Davies said, my letter to Rob doesn’t put any weight on his evidence, except in so far as it was one of two stories confirming what [another source] Reg said; and then I only bothered to mention him a long time after his visit. As it happens, when he came, I was somewhat rude to him, saying that if he wasn’t prepared to give me his name or something by which to judge his reliability, I wasn’t prepared to go on listening to him; because even if everything he told me was true I couldn’t use it; and the main trouble with the Murrell case was that there was all too much evidence one couldn’t use. What I wanted was someone with the guts to stand up in court.’
Davies dismisses both the Belgrano papers and the Sizewell theory of Murrell’s death. The latter he rejects by asserting that that Hilda had nothing new to say about nuclear power: ‘No one who examined Hilda Murrell’s work on Sizewell could ever point to any fact or argument which she had uncovered which could conceivably justify spying on her. When Rob Green later read her paper to the inquiry, it created no controversy. There was no Sizewell motive.’
Which really isn’t good enough. For Davies is ignoring the possibility that the nuclear state might have — wrongly — believed that Murrell knew something. For Davies, of all people, to ignore this really is extraordinary, for he was one of the journalists who did the work which showed that the nuclear state had hired private security firms to spy on Sizewell objectors against whom there was nothing at all; in other words, to spy on Sizewell objectors per se.
In any case, before her death Murrell was in touch with someone who did provide a rational reason for the nuclear state to take an interest. His name was Don Arnott and he is missing entirely from the Davies piece, despite the fact that Davies received the material about him from Robert Green before he wrote it. What follows is taken from a recent paper by Robert Green.
The Don Arnott Connection
In the months before her death Hilda was meeting Don Arnott, a retired nuclear scientist living not far from her near Welshpool. She was having general nuclear science lessons from him. Don Arnott claims to have discovered a fundamental error in the design of the Sizewell reactor. When the Three Mile Island accident happened in 1979, Arnott was puzzled by the fact that despite the reactor’s shutdown systems having apparently worked correctly, over half the core melted before it was brought to safe state. He read the official US report, where he discovered that Pressurized Water Reactor control rods (like those of Sizewell B) were made of an alloy of 80% silver, 15% Indium and 5% Cadmium. He quickly calculated its melting point — and found that it was the lowest of any material in the core. A control rod system with a melting point lower than that of the fuel it as meant to control if it overheated looked fundamentally unsound. His fears increased when he found almost no published information on the control rods.
In April 1983, about two weeks after Murrell’s last science lesson, Arnott went to speak at an anti-nuclear conference in the Connaught Rooms in London, and had a heart attack after the coffee break. Despite having had no heart trouble before or since, this put him into intensive care for some days and out of the Sizewell Inquiry. No-one else raised the control rod problem.
Three months later, Hilda was persuaded by Robin Grove-White, Director of the Council for the Protection of Rural England, one of the major objectors at Sizewell, to take her paper to the Inquiry. Six weeks before she was murdered, Don Arnott felt strong enough to speak in public again, to a group of the Medical Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons at Shrewsbury Hospital. A retired doctor friend of Hilda’s thought she would be interested, and invited her. She chatted with Don afterwards.
Green believes that first Arnott and then (mistakenly) Murrell were nobbled to prevent Arnott’s anxieties about the control rods being presented to the Sizewell inquiry. In fact Murrell was having general nuclear science lessons from Arnott, and knew nothing of his views on the control rods.
In 1989 Robert Green helped Don Arnott to present his control rod concerns at the Hinkley C Inquiry into the second UK PWR. Although the nuclear industry did not concede that there was a problem, vital information was extracted about it. As a result, Don Arnott is confident that the PWR designers, in sacrificing safety for performance, have no alternative but to use the Silver Indium Cadmium alloy in the full knowledge of the risks of a catastrophe like Chernobyl.
In November 1992 Robert Green met Professor Edward Radford, a radio-biologist living in the UK. Professor Radford is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board to the Three Mile Island Public Health Fund, established after the accident in 1979 to investigate unresolved issues. When Robert Green briefed him on the PWR control rod issue, he was unaware of it and undertook to put it to the Three Mile Island Scientific Advisory Board. On 23 September, 1993, the Board members wrote to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) challenging them about it. The NRC reply on 4 November, 1993, did not satisfy them, and 26 February 1994 Professor Radford, on behalf of the Three Mile Island Scientific Advisory Board, briefed the Washington Post.
Did agents working for the British nuclear state first interrogate and then murder Hilda Murrell, as Robert Green suspects? Direct evidence there is none that I am aware of. But no-one with their eyes and ears open in the 1980s should find ridiculous the hypothesis that the nuclear state in this country is willing to discredit, nobble, and, yes, kill a few people standing in the way of its interests.