Hilda Murrell - Murder

Murder

Hilda Murrell was scheduled to present her paper "An Ordinary Citizen's View of Radioactive Waste Management" at the Sizewell B Inquiry, the first public planning inquiry into a new British nuclear power plant. On 21 March 1984, her Shrewsbury home was apparently burgled and a small amount of cash was taken. She was abducted in her own car, a white Renault 5, which many witnesses reported seeing being driven erratically through the town and past the police station during the lunch hour. The vehicle was quickly reported abandoned in a country lane five miles outside Shrewsbury, but the West Mercia Police took another three days to find her body in a copse across a field from her car. She had been beaten and stabbed multiple times, but did not die from her injuries, instead succumbing to hypothermia. Her autopsy was performed by Dr. Peter Acland who together with the detective leading the case, Detective Chief Superintendent David Cole, wrote about this and other cases in a "The Detective and the Doctor: A Murder Casebook".

Hilda was the aunt of Commander Robert Green, Royal Navy (Retired), a former naval intelligence officer who was wrongly said to have passed the order for the sinking of the Argentine ship the Belgrano by the nuclear submarine HMS Conqueror during the 1982 Falklands War. Labour MP Tam Dalyell, hounding Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher about the controversial sinking, added a second conspiracy theory about Murrell's death when he announced in Parliament early on 20 December 1984 that British Intelligence had been involved. Until then only her anti-nuclear work had been suspected as a political motive. Dalyell raised the issue in the Commons again in June 1985, having originally been prompted to take an interest in the murder by an anonymous phone call asking him to read an article by Judith Cook in the New Statesman of 9 November 1984, which discussed the case. Cook later wrote a book about Murrell's murder, Unlawful Killing.

She was cremated, nearly 5 months after her death, at Shrewsbury Crematorium and her ashes scattered at Maengwynedd, in Wales. A commemorative stone was unveiled in Tan-y-bryn, Llanrhaeadr in 2004 in a birch grove planted on the twentieth anniversary of her death.

In March 2012 Michael Mansfield QC called for an inquiry into what MI5 knew about the case.