‘They’ve rubbed her out.’ Above all else, I remember my involuntary conviction when the Shrewsbury police phoned at about 2pm on Saturday 24 March 1984.

At about 7am, an hour or so after sunrise that day, Police Constable Edmond Lane parks his patrol car outside the entrance to Ravenscroft, a large slate-roofed Victorian house at 52 Sutton Road, Shrewsbury. He knows this is the home of a Miss Hilda Murrell whose car was found abandoned, stuck on a muddy verge, in a local country lane three days ago.

He walks slowly into the wide, grey shingle driveway towards the side of the house facing the road. Seeing a door slightly open, he knocks and calls out twice. He goes round to the front porch, and rings a doorbell: again no response. He does not go inside the house, leaves the side door as he found it, and resumes his mobile patrol.

An hour later, PC Lane is back at Ravenscroft: the door is still open. Once again he knocks and calls out, without response. This time he enters through the kitchen where the curtains are closed and a light is on. He climbs the stairs to the landing, and sees a broken baluster. He finds another narrow flight of steps to the attic, and starts a systematic search of each room, finding no one.

Back in the kitchen, Lane notes the scrubbed table strewn with documents and two handbags. Oddly, wet white bedsheets lie in a heap on the scullery floor.

By now it is 8.30am. As he leaves, he sees a key on the inside of the door. He locks it and takes the key to Frances Murrell, the widow of a cousin of Hilda, across the road.

PC Lane then visits the town’s general and psychiatric hospitals to check if they have admitted Hilda Murrell. He radios the police communications room to suggest a dog handler be used to start a search of the area of her abandoned car.

At about 9am, neighbour Brian George arrives to tend his vegetable plot in Hilda’s large garden. He notices the curtains and shutters are partly closed in the downstairs rooms.

David Williams arrives to start his weekly job of helping to keep the garden tidy. Seeing the up-and-over garage door half-open with no white Renault 5 inside, he calls to George. They try the side door, locked only 30 minutes earlier by PC Lane. Nearby they find the conservatory door unlocked; surprisingly, so too is an inner door. Tentatively, they enter the house.

In the kitchen, Williams sees the two handbags and documents on the table. George first notices the wet sheets in the scullery, then Hilda’s upper denture plate on the wooden draining board of the sink. He knows she would never go out without wearing it.

With mounting concern, George calls out to Hilda as they climb the stairs. The broken baluster is in three pieces: one is on the landing carpet, the other two on an ottoman in the bathroom. They knock and enter Hilda’s curtain-dimmed bedroom. The bedclothes are pulled right back, and drawers are open in a dressing table. Curtains are closed across the window facing the drive. Unusually, the window overlooking the back garden is wide open, its curtains only partly drawn back. They check the other two bedrooms: curtains are closed, which is also unusual. A picture with its glass broken lies in the doorway of the smaller back bedroom. On checking downstairs, Hilda is not in the sitting room, dining room, toilet or cellar. In the front porch, they note a pile of Guardian newspapers and mail on the tiled floor. The chain and bolts are in place across the locked double doors.

Back in the kitchen, George decides to phone Betty Latter, Hilda’s cleaning lady. The telephone is on a small chest of drawers beside a wooden box seat built below a narrow window facing Sutton Road. Concerned that the receiver is partly off its cradle, he picks it up: there is no dialling tone. His eyes follow the thick grey plastic-covered cord from the phone to the junction box: the box cap is loose and unscrewed. Lifting it, he sees that three of the four wires inside are partially disconnected and the spade terminals are intact – so the cord has not been wrenched out.

Meanwhile, two hundred miles south in Dorset, Liz and I stayed in bed until around 9 o’clock before enjoying a leisurely breakfast.

At 9.20am Police Constable Robert Eades, a rural beat officer, is returning to Hunkington Lane, about three miles east of Shrewsbury as the crow flies. He is re-investigating a small white Renault 5 hatchback, seemingly abandoned and stuck on the soft grass verge, hard against a low hedge on a bank. He first inspected it before sunset on Wednesday 21 March with PC Paul Davies, when they established it has not been reported stolen, and is owned by a 78-year-old unmarried woman called Hilda Murrell living at 52 Sutton Road.

Eades enlists the help of the local gamekeeper, whose cottage is about a mile away. He is out, but his wife offers to help search with two gundogs. They start in hazel thickets flanking Hunkington Lane, about half a mile from Hilda’s car.

Back in Shrewsbury, Brian George walks home to phone Betty Latter. She last saw Hilda when she cleaned Ravenscroft the previous Monday, and agrees to meet him there.

George phones Fron Goch, Hilda’s weekend retreat. The phone is out of order. He dials 999.

George, his wife Betty, Williams and Mrs Latter then search Ravenscroft together. It takes half an hour before a woman police constable arrives. She makes a call on her radio. PC Lane joins his colleague and neighbours in the drive after making no progress at the hospitals. They all re-enter the house where PC Lane is shown the disconnected telephone, and is told that Hilda would never leave her home untidy or unlocked.

When Detective Superintendent Needham arrives a few minutes later, he asks to use the Georges’ phone to contact his superior officer and meet him out at Hunkington.

Across the road, Frances Murrell watches with growing disquiet. She phones Carolyn Hartley-Davies, a daughter of Hilda’s cousin Leslie Murrell and a frequent visitor to Ravenscroft, who lives ten miles away. Carolyn phones her father.

Liz and I went on our weekend shopping trip to Yeovil. None of Hilda’s neighbours would have known how to contact me. I barely knew Carolyn, her father or Frances Murrell.

Shortly before 10am, PC Eades gives up searching the thickets. He remembers Hilda’s interest in birdwatching. The gamekeeper’s wife recalls seeing a pair of barn owls hunting along a hedge next to Moat Copse – a plantation of mature poplar trees over 500 yards across a waterlogged field of heavy red Shropshire clay sown with winter wheat. The quickest and easiest way to the copse is around the back via lanes and a cart track through Somerwood Farm.

As they enter it, the dogs point and run to the base of a poplar tree 20 yards ahead, where Eades finds a dead elderly woman. At 10.15am, within an hour of starting to search, he reports his discovery to a police search team assembling near the abandoned car.

Liz and I returned home from shopping. At about 10.30am my sister rang with the disturbing news that Hilda was missing. On phoning, I got no reply from Ravenscroft, and her Fron Goch phone was out of order. With no contact numbers for Hilda’s Shrewsbury neighbours, I phoned two of her friends at Llanymynech. They had not seen her or heard from her since the previous Sunday.

Hilda was a notoriously impatient driver. Anyone who dared to pull in front of her or slow her down would soon hear exasperated toots of her horn and some startling expletives. Could she have crashed and staggered away from the car, maybe suffering from concussion and amnesia?

Soon after 11.45am, a woman police surgeon reaches the body of a frail-looking, elderly woman lying on her right side. She is wearing a thigh-length, thick woollen brown overcoat. Her right arm is extended in front of her, her left arm alongside her body; her shrivelled white legs are slightly bent and mostly exposed, with severe abrasions and redness  on the knees. Only the coat and an underslip cover the top of her thighs; one thick brown stocking is crumpled around her left ankle; she is not wearing knickers. Items of clothing are scattered nearby: the other stocking, a green skirt and cream suspender belt, but no knickers. The clean cuts on each hand are roughly an inch long, but there is no blood visible on the hands. They look like classic defence wounds from a knife attack. There is complete rigor mortis and the body is stone cold with hypostasis in the legs, mainly around the knees. There is dried red blood near the right eye and temple, and three small stab wounds in the abdomen area. A bloodstained handkerchief and the keys to her car are in her right coat pocket. The police surgeon certifies death at 12 noon.

With no more news, at about noon I phoned Monkmoor police station in Shrewsbury to learn that a full-scale search was underway. As next of kin, I asked to speak to the officer in charge of the search; ‘Sorry, sir, that’s not possible.’

‘In that case, please tell him that my aunt Hilda was writing a paper for the Sizewell Inquiry criticising the nuclear industry, and she may have made enemies.’ The desk sergeant said he would.

At around 1.30pm, Detective Chief Superintendent David Cole, head of West Mercia Police Criminal Investigation Department, arrives at the police investigation caravans parked on a root crop storage pad near Hilda’s white Renault 5. He examines it. Further back up the lane are muddy tyre tracks that suggest the car went out of control, swerving from side to side before leaving the road. He notices the mud-clogged front offside tyre with a small hardback book lying in front of it. The driver has apparently tried to get the car moving.

DCS Cole enters Moat Copse, where the body of a frail-looking, thin old woman is lying next to a tree.

The duty sergeant phoned me at about 2pm. An elderly woman’s body had been found. Any further thoughts of an accident were overwhelmed by that terrible gut feeling: my beloved aunt had been ‘rubbed out’.

Liz and I set off immediately to my sister, about an hour’s drive away on the way to Shrewsbury. Later I learned the body had been found one and a half hours before I had made that first phone call to the police at midday. As Hilda’s next of kin, I should have been told then.

Next to arrive in Hunkington Lane, at 4.45pm, is Birmingham pathologist Dr Peter Acland. He supervises removal of the body to Copthorne General Hospital in Shrewsbury. The two undertakers need his help to carry it out of the copse. Shortly after 6pm, Carolyn’s husband formally identifies the body as Hilda. Dr Acland begins the autopsy, which takes three hours and produces as many questions as answers.

At around 6.30pm the police phoned the family to confirm that Hilda was dead. A further police call at around 10.30pm confirmed she had been murdered.

Next morning, Sunday 25 March, my brother-in-law and I set off on an apprehensive three-hour drive to Shrewsbury. My first priority was to find out what had happened to Hilda’s Sizewell paper.

On our arrival, the police said they could not see us that day. Alarmed, I insisted on meeting the detectives in charge of the investigation the next morning. At Monkmoor police station, we were led through a large, crowded open-plan incident room where we could see the huge effort and resources already being devoted to the case. For the West Mercia Police, who had a 100 per cent success rate in solving murders, it was fast becoming their most extensive investigation.

In a side room we met DCS David Cole and his right-hand man, Detective Chief Inspector Chris Furber. Cole refused to let me see Hilda’s body until later that day. Disbelief and outrage welled up as I demanded to know why. Unmoved, he warned it might not be released for months, possibly years, because of the ‘very unusual’ circumstances of the case. He drew parallels with the 1979 murder in Saudi Arabia of English nurse Helen Smith: her body had been preserved for five years. The realisation that Hilda’s funeral would have to be shelved indefinitely came as a major new shock.

I told the two detectives about my instinctive feeling that the murder was linked with Hilda’s anti-nuclear work. Both looked at me blankly. When reminded, Cole confirmed he received my message, adding dismissively: ‘I had no idea what you were on about.’ I asked if Hilda’s Sizewell paper had been found. They gave me a copy of a version corrected in her handwriting. Later, they let me have a photocopy of her 1984 diary, in which her final entry confirmed she was working on the paper the night before her abduction.

Hilda had sent me an earlier draft with a letter dated 15 October 1983, which had a disturbing postscript:

She did go, to support a massive CND demonstration.

In Shrewsbury, the police invited me to make a statement about my relationship with Hilda, my recent movements, and how I learned she was missing. I outlined the close bond between us. Then came the next jolting, unmistakably hostile exchange:

‘When did you last see your aunt?’

‘About 14 months ago.’

‘And you claim to be close?’

Grief-laden anger welling again, I tried to explain our closeness was not dependent on frequency of meeting. We kept in touch through monthly phone calls and occasional letters. I had last stayed overnight at Ravenscroft on 7 January 1983 when I helped Hilda brainstorm the first draft of her critique of the Government White Paper on radioactive waste management, which became her Sizewell paper. It was the last time I had seen her.

On the Monday afternoon I was finally able to pay my respects, in Copthorne Hospital’s Chapel of Rest. In front of a modest altar and wooden cross, Hilda’s body lay in a coffin with only her head exposed. Staring with horror at a face discoloured by terrible bruising, I began to grieve. Traumatised and naively trusting the police, I did not question why her hands were hidden, let alone the details of her other injuries. Years later I learned that, among several organs, her brain had been removed. I suspect what was left of her in the coffin was probably in a body bag.

Later that day the story filled three pages of the county’s evening newspaper, the Shropshire Star, beneath the front-page banner headline ‘ROSE EXPERT IS MURDERED’. Readers learned that 60 police officers were looking for ‘a savage killer’. For nearly three days the police had treated Hilda’s car as just an abandoned vehicle. Now it seemed she had been abducted in her own car, before somehow ending up with multiple stab wounds and other injuries in Moat Copse.

Reports of Hilda’s movements before she was abducted were coming in to the police.

At around 11.30am on Wednesday 21 March, George Lowe parks just ahead of Hilda’s car, which he recognises because she is a relative and, until recently, a neighbour. He sees her in Safeways supermarket, but has no chance to speak to her. Ten minutes later Lowe returns to his car and sees Hilda sitting in hers. As he greets her, he notes she is wearing an unusual, wide-brimmed, floppy brown hat. She drives off.

Lowe drives to his previous home almost opposite Ravenscroft, to collect mail. On leaving, he notices that Hilda’s car is not in her drive. He then passes her waiting to turn into Sutton Road: she spots him and waves. It has been 15-20 minutes since they spoke – so she has been somewhere else.

Soon after, a woman cleaning the front room of a house opposite Ravenscroft watches Hilda walk slowly, nursing her arthritic feet, out of her drive, across the road towards her, then out of sight to the witness’s left. Hilda is visiting her neighbour Mary O’Connor to pay for a raffle ticket. The cleaning woman notices Hilda is dressed smartly in a large, wide-brimmed felt hat, matching brown coat, pleated tweed skirt, patterned thick stockings and shoes. Some minutes later she watches Hilda re-enter her house through the side door. She does not see Hilda’s car in the drive, but notices the garage door is shut, so she assumes the car is inside.

Hilda did not tell Mary O’Connor she had a lunch appointment with friends of 20 years, Drs Alicia and John Symondson, half an hour’s drive away. The invitation was for 12.45pm. She never arrived. If she was about to go out, why did she put her car in the garage?

DCS Cole speculated publicly that Hilda had unpacked the vegetables and fruit she had bought before going upstairs to change, where she surprised a burglar. For some crazy reason the burglar decided to abduct her, and the baluster was broken as she resisted. He probably knocked her unconscious to get her through the front door into her car, which Cole assumed she had left parked in the drive. This ignored the evidence of the cleaning woman. His second assumption, that Hilda had been taken out through the front door, was because it was not directly visible from the road. But would her abductor have left her free to escape from the car while he went back in through the side door to chain and bolt the front door, then locked the side door facing the road, risking discovery?

Witness reports indicated that, bizarrely, Hilda’s abductor apparently drove with her slumped in the front passenger seat into town past the police station, then out on the Newport Road to Haughmond Hill. There he swung right into a back lane leading through the cover of woods where he could more easily have dumped her. Yet he drove on into open country, before seeming to lose control of the Renault and getting it stuck against a hedge and bank about 400 yards short of Hunkington Farm.

A woman’s hat was found near a hedge beside a heavy clay field some 300 yards from the car. Hilda’s smashed spectacles, her moccasin-style house boots and a large kitchen knife lay nearby. Cole concluded her abductor frogmarched her at knifepoint on a fine spring afternoon across the field to the hedge. Somehow, despite severe injuries, she then crawled or was dragged a further 300 yards to the copse. Later, a large man vaguely resembling the driver was seen running back into Shrewsbury by the same route.

Hilda had been hit in the face, and possibly strangled because her hyoid bone was broken. Her broken right collar bone had probably been stamped on. There was a knife wound through her right upper arm and several more shallow ones in her abdomen. Pathologist Dr Peter Acland’s assessment was that she had died of hypothermia. Cole decided her killer was probably local, despite his admission that it was ‘an odd area’ for an assailant to take his victim.

When Cole first briefed me, he added that in Ravenscroft there were signs of a struggle in a back bedroom as well as on the landing. However, no bloodstains were found anywhere in the house or car. I was shown the footwear found some 20 yards apart between the hedge and the copse. They were Hilda’s old beige quilted cotton house boots, which she would only go out in to fetch coal from her backyard. They were bloodstained. This implied Hilda was stabbed while upright after leaving the car, but before reaching the copse.

The next day, Tuesday 27 March, my sister joined us. After another meeting at the police station she, her husband, Carolyn Hartley-Davies and I were asked to visit Ravenscroft. We donned white protection suits and gloves, as the house was still being examined by forensic experts.

My immediate reaction was the house was untidy, but not ‘ransacked’ as reported by police and media. In the kitchen, I noticed a large dark area of damp rush matting where the wet sheets had been. They had been removed by the police, who seemed uninterested in them. Hilda would never have left them like that – she always took her bed linen to a local laundry. I saw the telephone receiver partly off the hook, the end of its cord and an extension cable lying clear of the junction box. On the table, two handbags – which none of us recognised – were open beside a man’s empty wallet, an empty purse and, to my surprise, Hilda’s watch, cheque book and bank card. Also, her dental plate was on the sink draining board. She would never have gone out without this or her watch. The downstairs toilet was stained by liquid faeces on the bowl rim, which Hilda would never have left. In the sitting room, partly closed curtains and an open door of the drinks cupboard were the only unusual aspects.

Upstairs, apart from the broken baluster and picture glass, there were no obvious signs of violence. Hilda would meticulously close drawers and doors of cupboards, some of which had been left open. An almost full can of lager was found in the toilet in the bathroom.

However, during our brief tour I was preoccupied with shock and grief in a house previously associated with happy memories and stimulating conversations. It was impossible to tell what might be missing. Nonetheless, I did not see four familiar and significant items: Hilda’s current purse and handbag; a leather music satchel she used to carry important documents; and a large, brown wooden-handled carving knife she used to cut bread which usually lay on a big plate with a bold flower pattern on the kitchen table.

Hilda’s cleaner Mrs Latter also did not recognise the handbags on the kitchen table, or the wallet or purse. She recalled Hilda using a ‘free-standing, dark brownish handbag possibly made of leather with two handles’. Carolyn agreed, adding that Hilda told her she had difficulty opening certain types of clasps due to her arthritis, so her everyday handbag had an easy one.

When the police asked us to identify the Totes rain hat with a narrow stiff brim found in the hedge halfway to the copse, none of us could. We were shown a second, wide-brimmed hat made of canvas, which we did recognise. Only later did I realise that the wide-brimmed floppy brown felt hat Hilda was wearing when George Lowe, Mary O’Connor and the cleaning woman saw her, and apparently worn by the passenger in her car, was never shown to us or returned to the family.

Months later, for some reason the police asked Mrs Latter to review the state of the house. She made some interesting fresh observations. She said three pieces of clothing, found on the bed in the small back bedroom where a struggle with Hilda was supposed to have taken place, had been there for several weeks. One of these, a green jacket left on the pillow, matched the old skirt found near Hilda’s body. Although some things were out of place, the bed looked undisturbed. It was where Hilda often sorted old clothes and materials for mending or jumble sales. Mrs Latter thought the bandages, rags and old ironing board cover found on the bed had come out of a drawer in that room.

Mrs Latter also commented on the box seat below the kitchen window where Hilda stacked her anti-nuclear papers. The front panel of the seat had two recent marks, possibly made by a crowbar to prise it open as part of a search. The police seemed dismissive about this.

As news of the murder spread, I cleared Fron Goch with the help of a resourceful removals firm. Workers had to cope with the steep, stepped paths and tortuous cart track below. The property seemed untouched. I found no anti-nuclear papers. Instead, I made a thrilling discovery: two loose-leaf binders and a large envelope full of notes and sketches. They were from her expeditions along the Welsh Borders, and her holidays in Mallorca, Anglesey, Ireland and the Scottish Highlands over 30 years. Hilda kept a daily diary, but these were her nature diaries. A wonderful blend of botanical observations, romantic musings and accurate sketches of plants and flowers, they revealed an artistic talent I had no idea she possessed.

A week after Hilda’s abduction, the forensic experts announced they had completed their examination of Ravenscroft. It meant Liz and I could start clearing it. Responsibility for the house was formally handed over to me by the police, while a constable kept guard at the drive entrance.

During the handover, they pointed out two microphones taped crudely to the walls of the kitchen, plus pressure pads on the floor inside the side and front doorways. Apparently these devices were ‘for security’. Only later did I wonder just whose security they had in mind… At the time I had too much else to worry about. Clearing Ravenscroft was a massive, distressing task and sorting through Hilda’s possessions made us feel we were violating her hitherto intensely private life.

While we were doing this, the police suddenly trumpeted a discovery supporting their idea that the crime had been committed by a petty burglar for cash. Hilda had withdrawn £50 from Lloyds Bank the morning she was abducted, and it had not been found. She had supposedly been killed for about £47, left after she had bought a few vegetables and fruit at Safeways. The police said nothing else was taken. They dismissed the complicating suspicion that her everyday handbag and purse were missing, along with her documents satchel. No one could prove if any of her anti-nuclear papers had disappeared, but the house had clearly been searched.

The police also reported the telephone at Ravenscroft was ‘torn out’. On reading this in a newspaper report, Brian George was furious. He sought me out while I was clearing the house, to recount what he first saw on the Saturday morning. He was adamant the phone wires were only partially disconnected, not ripped out. What was going on?

The crazy journey of Hilda’s car through Shrewsbury as she was apparently abducted was the only part of the crime to be witnessed.

Rosalind Taylerson is joining traffic on the Column roundabout when, suddenly to her left, a white Renault 5 car speeds across in front of her. She brakes violently to avoid a collision. However, she gets a good view of the right-hand side of the male driver’s face. He is in his late twenties-early thirties, with short, light-brown hair and a clean-shaven, tidy appearance.

Pamela Bird is standing on the pavement next to the Monkmoor Road junction lights. She sees a Renault car swerving into the right-hand lane. It is a controlled, confident manoeuvre across three lanes of traffic. The car stops, giving her a chance to look inside. The driver is a man in his mid-to-late twenties. His shoulders are broader than the seat. Someone slumped in the front passenger seat appears to be an elderly woman because she is wearing a broad-brimmed, floppy hat, but the head is hidden. The car speeds off up Monkmoor Road before the lights turn green, skilfully avoiding on-coming traffic.

William Moseley and his wife are in a car in Monkmoor Road about to turn right on a green traffic light into Abbey Foregate. Suddenly, a small white car crosses in front of them from left to right, having jumped the lights. Moseley sees two occupants: the driver is stocky with big shoulders, and looks quite odd in such a small car. He is aged 35-40, with dark, shortish hair and neat sideburns, and is not wearing a seat belt. A small woman passenger seems to be leaning to her left.

The route taken by the ‘running man’, between 1.30-2.30pm on the Wednesday, was becoming clearer to the police. He had apparently retraced the car’s route in reverse. Almost 50 witnesses made statements that they had seen the man. Most agreed he was in his early to late thirties, tall and well built, dressed in greyish, mud-stained clothing and trainers, and he seemed tired and distressed. The last sighting was not far from the police station. The police considered the running man significant enough to stage a re-enactment ten days later, with a public appeal for more witnesses made at cinemas.

A key witness was the farmer who first reported Hilda’s car abandoned in Hunkington Lane – but his story was not being released.

Between 2-2.30pm on Wednesday 21 March, John Marsh is driving to his farmhouse in Hunkington Lane when he spots a small white Renault that appears to have crashed into a low bank. Even though he is accustomed to abandoned cars there, he walks back to examine it. He notices the front offside wheel is covered in soil. Further along the lane he finds where tyre marks have left deep ruts on the opposite verge. Marsh feels very uneasy about this car. He goes home and reports it to Shrewsbury police station. Concerned by the lack of response, at 5.20pm he phones his local policeman in Upton Magna.

Marsh was corroborated by his neighbour, John Rogers, who rode his horse past the car that afternoon. Rogers was adamant the offside was close enough to the bank to prevent the driver’s door from opening. Therefore the driver’s only exit was via the front passenger door – after pushing the semi-conscious passenger out?

Liz and I were exhausted and mentally drained after clearing Ravenscroft. One of the last items we packed was a small handmade calendar, hung above the telephone. Beneath ‘21 March’ Hilda had written: ‘12.45. Symondson’. If the police had taken prompt action by sending officers to her house after Marsh first reported her car around 2.30pm, they would have seen the calendar. If they had checked with the Symondsons – whose phone number was in Hilda’s address book close by – the search for Hilda could have begun well before nightfall. With help from dogs, she could have been found alive – as Cole admitted in a briefing to police at the time.

From the many letters and cards of condolence arriving to pay tribute to her, I was learning more about Hilda. Until then, I had never known the extent of her friendships with a wide variety of people from the different eras and interests of her life, stretching back to her schooldays and Cambridge.

Joan Tate, a local friend whom I got to know well, provided an antidote to media reports of Hilda with this vivid, forthright portrait that punctured the stereotypical descriptions of her:

Ruth Sinker reduced me to grateful tears with these observations:

Ruth’s son Charles Sinker was a distinguished botanist and former director of the Field Studies Council, who later edited Hilda’s nature diaries for publication in 1987. In his obituary of her for The Times, he described her thus:

Charles’ text as sent to The Times also included this paragraph, which was omitted from the printed version:

Joan and Clive Tate, who lived in a comfortable old town house in the mediaeval heart of Shrewsbury, were our wonderful hosts for this and many of my subsequent visits. Together they made a formidable intelligence-gathering team in my absence.

By the weekend the police had come up with an artist’s impression of the car driver and running man, considered to be the same person. Described as between 25 and 40, powerfully built with broad shoulders, he had medium brown to dark-coloured hair, neatly groomed with a slight fringe, clean-shaven with a narrow face and sallow complexion. He was wearing either a grey suit or grey trousers with a grey-blue jacket and training shoes.

My growing concerns were now being voiced openly by others. Why had there been such a delay between the first report of Hilda’s abandoned car at 2.30pm and finding her body in the copse? Police statements glossed over what caused the delay.

At 6pm on Wednesday 21 March, PC Paul Davies comes on duty on his rural beat in the village of Upton Magna, about two miles south of Hunkington. He follows up a phone call 40 minutes earlier from local farmer John Marsh. His fellow rural beat officer, PC Robert Eades, picks him up in their shared police vehicle.

By 6.20pm, around sunset, they reach the reported Renault 5. Eades finds the car is unlocked and opens the front passenger door. There are no keys in the ignition and no sign of any loose wires. In the boot he finds a bag of peat and a large grapefruit.

Meanwhile, Davies checks the identity of the car’s owner from the Police National Computer. Within minutes they know it is Hilda’s, that she is 78 years old, and where she lives. In the gathering dusk they briefly check over the hedge, see no one in the field, and assume she has gone for help. They decide the car is not causing an obstruction or danger to other vehicles, so they leave the scene at 6.30pm. A duty officer in Shrewsbury police station phones Hilda’s home: there is no reply. No further action is taken.

John Marsh was making no secret to friends that he reported the car twice that afternoon and again on Thursday and Friday. His cleaning woman remembered hearing him angrily berating the police on Thursday: ‘Get that car off my land!’

In April Joan Tate tipped me off that Marsh reported his farmworkers also saw two strange men in the field near the car on Thursday. Much more disturbingly, he added ‘on the Friday, the place was swarming with police’ and they told him ‘it was a murder hunt’. Did they know, as later confirmed by Marsh’s son, David, that no workers would be working there that day? Were these Special Branch, working independently of West Mercia Police who always claimed they did not begin searching for Hilda until the Saturday morning? However, an officer apparently visited Ravenscroft on Friday evening.

At 6pm on Friday 23 March PC Davies phones Shrewsbury police station from Upton Magna to be told that Marsh has made yet another call about Hilda’s car. He tries phoning her home, but there is still no reply. He returns to the car: it is as he left it on Wednesday. Taking the initiative, he decides to visit 52 Sutton Road.

By the time he arrives at 7pm, it is almost dark, and raining. He reverses his patrol car into the drive and gets out. He sees a light through curtains across a downstairs window, then notices the side door facing the road is wide open. He knocks: no answer. Walking round to the front of the house, he rings the bell: silence. He notes curtains and shutters are closed across windows either side of the front porch.

He enters the kitchen through the open side door. He calls out but there is no response. The light is on and he sees the table covered in papers, and also a handbag. Deciding nothing is suspicious he concludes Miss Murrell must have ‘popped out’ to the shops.

Without her handbag or purse, leaving her door wide open, and on foot because her car is still stuck out at Hunkington?

Davies decides not to go further into the house and retreats to the side door, which he first thinks has been blown open by the wind. He sees no key in the lock. Then he has to pull the door hard several times before it closes properly.

He checks the garden by torchlight but finds no one. As he drives away, he radios Shrewsbury police station at 7.20pm, requesting that someone contact the house again. Several phone calls are made until midnight, with no reply. The station duty officer decides it is too late to persist in case the occupant has returned. He arranges for an early shift officer, PC Lane, to visit at first light the next day.

Police reluctance to explain their actions prompted suggestions they were ‘instructed’ to do nothing. I was ready to believe these early conspiracy theories because of my initial instincts and Hilda’s last letter to me. It was increasingly difficult to accept that the murder had been committed by a local burglar. The police theory seemed to raise too many questions:

The Shrewsbury underworld was equally incredulous. Micky Bridgewater, one of nearly a hundred burglars questioned by the police, said publicly he was convinced that a local thief was not responsible. A burglar would never normally abduct his victim, nor stay in the house if he disturbed the owner: ‘I’d be through the window and gone as fast as I could.’ He was confident that, had it been a Shrewsbury man, he would have heard about it through the local criminal grapevine. He would have been straight on the phone to the police and ‘grassed on him – because you don’t hurt an old girl living on her own’.