Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (30 page)

And then, argued Cook, there was the diligence, or lack of it, being displayed by the police investigators. In the summer of 1984, she wrote, “three senior officers involved in the murder hunt were discovered to have been playing golf when they should have been out pursuing their enquiries.” This mattered because “the suggestion was made that possibly the police had their own reasons for not wanting to pursue the killer with too much enthusiasm.”
¹⁴
But what might those reasons—aside from the desire to play golf or a degree of fatalism because the case was now going cold—actually be? Logic suggested one possible alternative: the police knew or suspected who had done the old lady in but didn’t want to catch them. And if that was the case, then the question was, why?

At the time of Hilda’s death, her closest living relative seems to have been her nephew Rob Green, who at that time was living in Dorset and training to be a thatcher. Green soon tended to the view that his aunt’s death was somehow connected to her involvement in protests against nuclear power. Others, however, became convinced that it was Hilda’s connection to Rob Green that had provided the motive for her murder, for Green was bound up with that great cause célèbre of the first Thatcher term, the sinking in 1982 of the Argentinian battle cruiser
General Belgrano
.

The
Belgrano
affair had entered British folklore partly because it seemed to provide the one chink in Mrs. Thatcher’s adamantine exoskeleton. As the British task force had steamed toward the occupied Falkland Islands, and before full battle was joined, various diplomatic initiatives were under way in attempts to avert conflict. These were unpromising, given the mutually exclusive positions of the two sides. At the same time, Britain declared an area around the Falklands a “total exclusion zone,” within which hostile ships should expect to be attacked. The
Belgrano
was close to but not inside this zone when the submarine HMS
Conqueror
fired three torpedoes, which sank the ship, killing 323 of her crew.

A year later, in the course of her general election campaign, the one moment of awkwardness for the Iron Lady came when she was questioned on a live TV show by a middle-aged woman named Diana Gould. Combative but polite, Gould forced Thatcher to admit that the
Belgrano
had been heading away from the Falklands and suggested that the attack might have been part of a deliberate attempt by the government to forestall peace negotiations and ensure the issue would be decided by force of arms. It was widely, almost plaintively, believed on the center and left in Britain that had the Falklands not been invaded and an atmosphere of jingoism thus created, then the Tories would have lost the 1983 election. That being so, it was natural to invert this proposition and to suggest that, guessing this in advance, Thatcher had opted for war to improve her election prospects. If so, this was a major scandal and might even lead to Thatcher’s downfall.

And who were best placed to expose any such scandal but those who had been part of the
Belgrano
operation? The men on the
Conqueror
perhaps, or those in Thatcher’s war cabinet, or the men and women of naval intelligence, who saw all the signals sent on that day? As it happened, one of those men was Commander Robert Green of the Royal Navy, nephew of Hilda Murrell—a fact that immediately captured the attention of that British parliamentary phenomenon, Old Etonian Labour MP Tam Dalyell.

Dalyell, once described as “more a campaigning journalist than an MP,”
¹⁵
had made the fate of the
Belgrano
his life’s obsession since the sinking. Indomitable and unembarrassable, the MP for Linlithgow in Scotland was regarded by many as a somewhat absurd figure. But as the journalist Andrew Brown was to comment later, Dalyell, “by dint of an almost ludicrous persistence, which involved getting himself thrown out of the chamber five times, managed to implant in the national consciousness the idea that there had been something markedly less than heroic about the action which, more than any other, secured the safety of the task force that recaptured the Falklands.”
¹⁶

On December 20, 1984, as the police investigation into the Murrell murder entered its ninth fruitless month, Dalyell rose in the House of Commons to tell the world that he had effectively solved the crime. The police version, he argued, had always been improbable because it “did not tally with what was obviously a sophisticated break-in, in which the telephone had been cut, leaving it so callers could ring in but not out.” Such circumstances “pointed away from a random murder.” No, it was more likely that the intruders were looking for something—that this was an intelligence operation that had gone “disastrously wrong.” Dalyell was unconvinced by the Shrewsbury view that the botched search concerned nuclear documents, not least because he knew people high up in the nuclear industry and couldn’t believe that they “would dream of authorizing minions to search the house of a seventy-eight-year-old rose grower who had elegantly expressed, but quite unoriginal, views on reactor choice and nuclear waste disposal.” No, the issue was, of course, the
Belgrano,
and he had received tips from two “reliable sources” about exactly what had happened:

I am informed that the intruders were not after money, not after nuclear information, but were checking to see if there were any
Belgrano-
related documents of Commander Green in the home of his aunt . . . They had no intention of injuring, let alone killing, a seventy-eight-year-old rose grower. Yet being the lady she was, and in her home, Hilda Murrell fought and was severely injured. She was then killed or left to die from hypothermia—and the cover-up had to begin because the searchers were members of British intelligence, I am informed.
¹⁷

While the notion of members of the British security services going around bumping off little old ladies in English market towns (more or less the exact opposite of their official role) may have amazed most MPs, it simply angered Mr. Dalyell. “On whose ministerial authority, if any,” he demanded to know, “did the search of Miss Murrell’s home take place? Was there clearance, or was this the intelligence services doing their own thing?” And he concluded: “Of one thing I am certain—that there are persons in Westminster and Whitehall who know a great deal more about the violent death of Miss Hilda Murrell than they have so far been prepared to divulge.”

Commander Green’s own MP, the Liberal member for Yeovil, Paddy (later Lord) Ashdown, requested that, in light of Dalyell’s revelations, there should now be a formal inquiry into the murder. The next day, there was substantial press coverage. The
Guardian
reported that the Home Office was investigating Dalyell’s claims and added (somewhat randomly, given that Dalyell had firmly dismissed the nuclear connection): “At the time of her death Miss Murrell, who was an active anti-nuclear power campaigner, was working on a document to be presented to the Sizewell B inquiry . . . It was this activity which fuelled earlier speculation about the reasons for the break-in at her home.”
¹⁸
The London
Evening Standard
carried the headline “MP’s Amazing Murder Story,” and there was a speculative piece in the
Sunday Times
in which a senior officer was quoted as saying that the Murrell murder “doesn’t follow the accepted pattern of burglaries, not in my experience as a policeman.”
¹⁹

Dalyell subsequently elaborated on his information and his theory. Two days before the March abduction, Dalyell had asked Defense Secretary Michael Heseltine some very pointed questions in the House concerning the
Belgrano
. The substance of his questions concerned material leaked to him (it later transpired) by a Ministry of Defense civil servant, Clive Ponting. But the questions had caused “a flap in Downing Street” and a demand that the source of the leaks be found at all costs. According to Judith Cook, with whom Dalyell was in contact, his sources had told him, “there had indeed been a semiofficial break-in at the home of Hilda Murrell . . . What Tam was told was that the operation had not been organized at a very high level. There had been no intention of harming Hilda, but it had been decided to search her house to see if she had any copies of documents or raw signals.” There had been two intruders in Ravenscroft when Hilda had come home unexpectedly and disturbed them. There was a struggle, she was hurt, and taken away, and left to die.
²⁰

There were many problems with the Dalyell story, however impeccable his anonymous sources. For example, why was Hilda’s return so unexpected given she had only gone shopping in Shrewsbury? But perhaps the biggest difficulty was the picture it painted of the security services: functionally incompetent in matters of basic tradecraft and, given the forensic evidence, sexually perverse. How could such a force deal with the threat from the IRA or Middle Eastern terrorism when it couldn’t even conduct a search of an old lady’s detached house without having to murder her? It simply wasn’t credible.

Unless. In the spring of 1985, the
Sunday Telegraph
carried a story about a private detective who had allegedly told Special Branch officers that the Murrell murder was a surveillance operation in which “something went badly wrong and it involved officialdom.” The next day the
Guardian
’s security specialist Richard Norton-Taylor reported that West Mercia Police were “believed to be considering the possibility” that the murder had been carried out by “a private detective acting for MI5 or another security service.” Norton-Taylor then lobbed in this bombshell: “It is known that private investigators . . . work from time to time for the security service. It is also known that private detectives were investigating objectors to plans to build a pressurized water nuclear reactor (PWR)—in which a number of companies, British and American, have a stake—at Sizewell, Suffolk, at the time Miss Murrell died in March 1984.”
²¹
Here was a way to square the obvious circle: the crime had been carried out not by professional spooks but semi-amateurs, the dross of the policing and security world.

One such private operator was a Mr. Peter Hamilton, formerly an officer in military intelligence, who ran a company called Zeus Security Consultants and admitted that he had been asked by a “private client” to conduct clandestine investigations into the activities of Sizewell objectors. Judith Cook claimed that she had been given information that Zeus had then subcontracted some of this work out to even smaller outfits, such as Sapphire Investigation Bureau, based in the village of Acle near Norwich, and Contingency Services of Colchester.
²²
Contingency Services was run by Victor Norris, who, in addition to being a convicted pedophile, also operated a company selling Nazi memorabilia. The sexual connection was not perfect, since attraction to old ladies would appear to be a philia at the opposite end of the scale to that suffered—or enjoyed—by Norris. But it was highly suggestive, thought Cook, that just three weeks after the Murrell murder, the boss of Sapphire, one Barry Peachman, got into his car with a shotgun, placed it in his mouth, and shot half his head away. True, conceded Cook, Peachman had been having an affair, and this had led some to speculate that his suicide was caused by domestic difficulties, “but as we know, it was not quite like that.”
²³

Cook, Dalyell, and the Shrewsbury peace set were far from alone in their suspicions. Granada’s prime-time
World in Action
program of March 1985 had begun by suggesting that the police “know that there’s evidence that points toward two quite different and disturbing explanations for Hilda Murrell’s death” and concluded, twenty-six suggestive minutes later, by talking about the “possibility that some kind of conspiracy had occurred.”
²⁴

Then, in the early 1990s, a writer, Gary Murray, claimed that the truth behind the whole story had been vouchsafed to him by a prison inmate. The tale he heard (and believed) was that anxiety in Number 10 about
Belgrano
leaks had led an unidentified security agency to employ a northern firm, Ceres, to search Hilda’s house. On the fateful day, a Ceres team consisting of a leader code-named Demeter (a moonlighting garage owner), a woman named Helga, and a right-winger who used the nom de guerre Spengler turned up at Ravenscroft, looking for papers. When Hilda interrupted them, she was restrained and Spengler (who else?) set about torturing her to reveal the location of the documents. Unfortunately, the sadistic Spengler became aroused and felt compelled to leave his DNA over various items. Judith Cook was clearly of two minds about Murray’s analysis but asked, in a question worthy of an Umberto Eco novel, “If Zeus exists, then why not Ceres?”
²⁵
The whole thing was like some surreal updating of the Ealing comedy
The Ladykillers
.

Over time, there were plenty of theories and even confessions. The magazine
Private Eye
ran with the notion, probably originating with Rob Green, that Hilda’s body had been dumped in a roadside ditch on the night of the twenty-first, and only afterward was it placed in the Moat wood. Green still believes, as he recently told one interviewer, that his aunt’s death was “a result of a state-sponsored abduction, with her car used as a decoy.” His sense that the authorities were involved had been heightened, he said, by a series of odd occurrences. Hilda’s Welsh cottage had been set on fire; his tires had been slashed; his telephone and post “were often interfered with”; and he believed that on several occasions he had been followed when driving in Shropshire. As late as 1994, his father’s house—where he was living at the time—was broken into, but nothing was stolen. Meanwhile, Judith Cook reported getting intimidating phone calls suggesting that she leave the Murrell case alone.
²⁶
And in 2002 a Scottish journalist claimed that a member of a Nazi organization, the National Socialist Movement, was “suspected of the murder of elderly CND activist Hilda Murrell.” It isn’t clear whether or not this was the demonic Spengler.
²⁷