Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (31 page)

The comments made by police pathologist Dr. Peter Acland in January 1985—as the conspiracy theories were beginning to cohere—caused less of a furor. “I don’t know who killed Miss Murrell,” he wrote, “but I have a strong suspicion that some two-penny-halfpenny thief is gloating over a pint of beer in a pub not many miles from Shrewsbury about all this media interest.” We’ll see later in this chapter whether or not he was right. By the time he said it, however, Hilda was ceasing to be an ordinary elderly lady and was metamorphosing via “gutful, courageous, seventy-eight-year-old Edwardian woman” (Tam Dalyell) into a kind of secular martyr of the antinuclear and peace movements. She was a woman who had suffered and died for her beliefs. She was a victim of the notion of the enemy within.

Her posthumous celebrity came quickly. The year 1985 saw two books published about her murder as well as numerous articles and features. The writer Maggie Gee based a novel on her death. Three years later, an English band, Attacco Decente, recorded a song about the murder, titled “The Rose Grower.” And three separate dramas were fashioned out of the story. In the summer of 1986, you could have gone to see
Who Killed Hilda Murrell? An Investigation
at the well-regarded Tricycle Theater in Kilburn in north London, taken a brief holiday, and returned for a performance of
Celestial Blue: The Life and Death of Hilda Murrell
by an entirely different author at the equally acclaimed Gate Theater in Notting Hill in West London.
Unlawful Killing
, Judith Cook’s own play, was put on at the Theater Royal Stratford East in the spring of 1991. After that, interest in the Murrell case waned, though even now (late 2008) you can visit the Hilda Murrell website maintained by her nephew Rob Green.
²⁸

CONSPIRACY—COMING TO A SCREEN NEAR YOU

A striking phrase recurred in the descriptions of the case by many of those who thought that Hilda Murrell might have been killed by the secret state. She was, or might have been, they suggested, the “British Karen Silkwood.” In their minds was the famous case of an employee at a plutonium fuel plant in the United States, who had died in a mysterious car accident on an Oklahoma highway ten years before. Or, at least, the
movie
of the famous case, since Silkwood’s death made very little impression on the British public until it was turned into a film starring the most celebrated Hollywood actress of that moment, Meryl Streep—a film that had been playing in cinemas all over Britain only months before Hilda’s death. In real life, Karen Silkwood was a union activist who had criticized the safety of the plutonium fuel plant where she worked and was killed in a road accident that involved no other vehicle. Her death was soon regarded as a setup by some of her fellow activists, who suspected her employers, Kerr-McGee, of having somehow arranged for this irritant to be removed. The plant itself closed down the following year.

In the film, Silkwood is depicted as an ordinary woman with problems in her marriage, struggling to keep everything together but possessed of an extraordinary amount of courage and integrity. On becoming ill, she begins to realize that the safety practices at the plant are endangering the workforce, and develops an obsession (to the predictable detriment of her love life) with discovering evidence to prove neglect. Having collected this evidence into a dossier, she is en route to meet a reporter from
The New York Times
when her “accident” takes place. The authorities blame it on a combination of alcohol and tranquilizers; the movie draws no definite conclusion but leaves the filmgoer with the strong impression that Silkwood was somehow assassinated.

That Karen Silkwood earned movie eponymity owed something to fashion. Five years after her death came one of those coincidences of fact and fiction that filmmakers must have interesting dreams about. On March 28, 1979, there was a partial core meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear generating station near Harrisburg in Pennsylvania, with observers following in real time the debate about whether or not to evacuate the local population. Although no such decision was taken, no one was killed,
ⁿ
and the reactor was brought under control, the impact on public consciousness was profound.

The coinciding fictional event had occurred less than a fortnight earlier, when the movie
The China Syndrome
, about a possible accident at a nuclear plant in California, had opened in the United States. Carrying the ominous tagline “Today only a handful of people know what it means . . . Soon you will know,”
The China Syndrome
took its name from the proposition that a nuclear core meltdown might be so powerful that nothing could prevent it from burning its way right through the earth until it came out on the other side—in China. In the movie, Jane Fonda plays a California TV news anchor, Kimberly Wells, who just happens to be filming at a nuclear power plant with her cameraman (Michael Douglas) when there is a minor earth tremor and panic breaks out in the control room. Even if her TV bosses are unimpressed, the incident interests Wells. She soon comes into contact with head technician Jack Godell (Jack Lemmon), who, on investigating what happened during the earthquake, discovers that short-cuts were taken by the contractors when they built the plant. Godell tries to warn his bosses, but, parsimoniously, they refuse to shut operations down while he sorts things out. In an obvious echo of the Silkwood case, Godell is attacked while he is driving to give evidence at a public hearing, but he survives. Desperate that there might be a catastrophic accident, Godell commandeers the plant control room at gunpoint, and is broadcasting via Wells to the public when the transmission is cut off and a police team break into the room and shoot him dead.

The themes that run through the Godell, Silkwood, and Murrell cases—fictional or historical—are similar. On the one side, there is the dissident who gradually becomes aware of the dangers of nuclear power and decides to speak out to prevent disaster. On the other, there is the secret state and its commercial partners whose objective is to prevent dissent from interfering with their concept of national security or, more venally, the profits that may accrue from the harnessing of perilous technologies. And somewhere in the middle is the media.

The dissident—though emotionally damaged or eccentric—is good; the state—though powerful and seemingly benign—is bad. But the media has the capacity to be either. It may try to cover up or ignore the truth, but in the hands of courageous or farsighted journalists it can become a tool for the exposure of wrongdoing. Don’t, however, hold your breath.

A VERY BRITISH EDGE OF THE REALM

After
Silkwood
, as we’ve seen, came Hilda Murrell, and after Hilda Murrell came a remarkable series of conspiracy-theory dramas produced for British television and cinema. For four years, these films and programs captured middlebrow imaginations in Britain and then—just as suddenly as they had arrived—they disappeared.

British television drama in the early 1980s had been dominated by two hugely expensive serialized epics: Evelyn Waugh’s
Brideshead Revisited
, which turned the lugubrious Jeremy Irons into a star, and Paul Scott’s
Raj Quartet
, broadcast as
The Jewel in the Crown
in 1984. Superficially, both series could be seen as nostalgic, being set in an England and an empire still within living memory but now gone. But both series also portrayed the worm in the bud, the internal corruption of lost, aristocratic England and of British India. When, however, the director of
The Jewel in the Crown
, Christopher Morahan, unveiled his next project, it was set very much in the present—or, rather, in a very dark version of the present.

In the Secret State
, shown on the BBC on March 10, 1985, was an adaptation of a book by Robert McCrum. In a very minor version of the Three Mile Island coincidence, the drama was shown just two days after Cathy Massiter’s revelations about MI5 surveillance of CND members and others, and in the same week as the
World in Action
program about Hilda Murrell. This time, the whistle-blowing hero is a civil servant who discovers that his department’s new computer is being used both to create false files on political opponents of the government, such as an awkwardly crusading radical MP, and also to perpetrate a gigantic and lucrative tax fraud on behalf of certain crooked businessmen. The civil servant is just about to solve the whole puzzle when he is blown up by a bomb placed in his car. The opening sequence was memorable for its shot of a large rat suddenly emerging from a garbage bag an image that dovetailed with the obviously significant words of one of the main characters: “Suspicion. It’s a virus. We are the carriers. We’re like rats scuttling through medieval sewers.”

Coincidentally,
In the Secret State
was in production at the same time as another British feature film about whistle-blowers and bombs, released in November 1985. In
Defense of the Realm
, Gabriel Byrne played Nick Mullen, an amoral young reporter on an amoral British tabloid newspaper. Mullen is following a story of a scandal that, on the face of it, discredits a crusading opposition MP. But with the help of an older and more principled colleague, he investigates further and finds out that the original scandal has been manufactured to prevent the MP from raising in the House of Commons an embarrassing question about a missing boy. The principled old journalist is killed (quite possibly by Special Branch) in a way that makes it look as if he died from natural causes. Nevertheless, Mullen discovers that the boy was killed in a runway accident on an American nuclear base in England—an accident that very nearly led to a nuclear explosion. Mullen has his scoop, but the newspaper’s knighted owner, who has interests in the armaments business, orders the story to be spiked. A frustrated Mullen then makes sure that the foreign press gets the information and provokes a major scandal, but this is the audience’s only consolation, as Mullen is then killed when a bomb blows up his flat.

If British audiences hadn’t yet got the point about the secret state, its allies, and its enemies, there was a TV series to come in the winter of 1985.
Edge of Darkness
was first shown in six episodes on BBC2 in November and December, and then, following critical praise and high audience figures, was immediately repeated in three jumbo episodes on consecutive evenings on BBC1. The series later won four BAFTA awards and, according to the British Film Institute, also achieved “cult status.” In
Edge of Darkness
, one of the most popular actors then working on the British stage, the tall, serious Bob Peck, plays Craven, a senior policeman whose student daughter Emma is shot dead on the steps of the family home in what appears to be a botched attempt by criminals to kill her father. Determined to discover the truth about Emma’s death, Craven follows a convoluted trail that leads to a cover-up of the illegal production of weapons-grade plutonium at a British nuclear reprocessing plant. This, in turn, links to an American plan to militarize space. In the course of his investigations, Craven is contaminated by plutonium, but together with a rogue CIA agent manages to tell the world about the conspiracy before, presumably, expiring from the effects of radiation.

The narrative similarities between these dramas are extraordinary. The questing hero starts out as an apolitical or even Establishment figure who almost unwillingly uncovers secrets that invariably involve nuclear power or nuclear weapons. There is always dark cooperation between corporate and state forces—which usually combine to murder the protagonist, but only after he/she has made the vital disclosure, thus creating a martyr. It is left unclear whether the impact of the hero’s sacrifice is lasting or momentary. In its own way, the genre displays all the uniformity of the 1950s Western.

In 1988 came the culminating expression of this fashion.
A Very British Coup
, shown in three parts on Channel 4 and based on a novel by left-wing journalist Chris Mullin, posed the question of what this same nexus of spooks, Americans, and tycoons—the military-industrial-newspaper-intelligence complex—would do if the British people were impertinent enough to elect a socialist Labour government. The answer was that the new administration would be subjected to financial pressure by the Americans, spied upon by the security services, and undermined by a press seeking scandal.

But by now the conspiracist moment was over. The circumstances that had created the specific paranoia of the early 1980s had changed. The accession to the Soviet leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev, and the astonishing speed with which his reform and openness programs (named
perestroika
and
glasnost
, respectively) dissipated fears of nuclear confrontation, began with the Reykjavik summit in 1986, and progressed through an arms control treaty signed in Washington at the end of 1987. Ronald Reagan departed the presidency at the beginning of 1989; barely eleven months later, the Berlin Wall had fallen, and a year later Mrs. Thatcher, too, had gone, to be replaced by an altogether more emollient kind of Conservative—the sort of man who didn’t look as though he would authorize the assassination of journalists in their own flats.

Death of a Rose Grower, Part Three

But what of Hilda? Her case was forgotten by all but her closest friends, and remained unsolved throughout the 1990s, as the Soviet Union fell and Bill Clinton followed Bush and Bush followed Clinton. Technology, however, marched on, and in the spring of 2002, West Mercia detectives announced they were conducting a cold-case review of the Murrell murder, reexamining all the testimony and, most critically, the physical evidence.

Just over a year later, police knocked on the door of a flat in Meadow Farm Drive, Harlescott, in northeast Shrewsbury, no more than three miles from where Hilda’s body was found. The man they arrested was a thirty-five-year-old laborer with a long criminal record. Andrew George had been sixteen and resident in a local children’s home at the time of the murder, and it was his DNA that the police cold-case team had found on the semen-stained tissue and on Hilda’s clothes. When the case came to trial at Stafford Crown Court, the jury heard that George had been burgling the house—he had noticed that the door was sometimes left open—when Hilda had come home and found him. She had then been bound to the banisters with an ironing-board cover, sexually assaulted, stabbed three times, bundled into her own car, and driven for six miles. After crashing the car, George had stabbed Hilda again and then dumped her close to a tree. Although he refused to answer any police questions about the murder, George did tell his girlfriend during a prison visit that he was not guilty, blaming his brother Steven. They had been looking for money. On Friday May 6, 2005, over twenty-one years after Hilda Murrell’s murder, Andrew George was found guilty and sentenced to a minimum of fifteen years in prison. The judge told George that the sentence reflected his age at the time of the offense and added, “If you had committed that crime recently as an adult, I would have considered a whole-life order—no release ever.”