During my pursuit of the truth about Hilda’s death, I came across others who had experienced surveillance, harassment, death threats, assaults or worse when trying to give the police information pointing to a more sinister motive than a petty burglary gone wrong. I have described what happened to Don Arnott, Con Purser, Judith Cook and Dora Russell.

The stories that follow about Ian and Thalia Campbell, Laurens Otter, Avraham Sasa, Philip Griffith, Karen Silkwood, Dr Rosalie Bertell, Dr Patricia Sheehan, Patsy Dale, Willie MacRae and Dr David Kelly also help to answer a question often put to me: why was Hilda singled out for such horrific treatment? My answer is that her experience was part of a widespread pattern. In five of these latter cases, we met the victims and/or their family representatives, who gave permission and indeed asked us to publish their edited stories – and to tell the police about them. Four of them relate to witnesses with dangerous or inconvenient information about Hilda and the rest, except Kelly, had information threatening the nuclear industry. My final case study about Kelly has several parallels with Hilda’s case, with which it has been linked by the British media.

Ian and Thalia Campbell are well known anti-nuclear campaigners. Thalia helped found the Greenham Common women’s peace camp in 1981 against US Cruise missiles. From the moment they offered inconvenient information to the police about Hilda, they experienced intimidation.

Early in 1984, Ian Campbell was running for election to the European Parliament as the Labour Party candidate for North West Wales. After speaking at a campaign meeting shortly before Hilda was found, two local women who knew Hilda told him she feared for her life – hence her consequent frequent contact with trusted friends by telephone. They were concerned that Hilda had not been in touch recently and, when they had phoned her, there had been no answer. Late on Saturday 24 March, the Campbells returned home to hear of Hilda’s murder on the midnight news. Shocked, Thalia phoned Shrewsbury police at 1.30am on the Sunday morning. The duty sergeant took a keen interest when she explained Hilda’s friends’ concerns.

Two days later two men came to their door. One introduced himself as a senior detective and the other as his ‘driver’. Both treated the Campbells with contempt, telling them it was an opportunist burglary, they had a suspect, and not to take it any further. Thalia told me: ‘We felt they were there to find out what we knew, and to bully us and head us off.’ Ian was so concerned he phoned his media contacts – but they all accepted the police line.

A few weeks later Ian was driving out of Llangollen alone late one night when a car with no lights followed him. At the end of street lights, it drove gently into his car from behind. He tried to slow down, but it pushed him along the road. He steered towards a phone box in a lay-by, jumped out and dialled 999. As his pursuer drove close up against the door to prevent him opening it, he saw it was a marked police car with two men inside. On the phone he demanded that the police call off their patrol car – whereupon it put on its lights, reversed and drove slowly away. Campbell told the operator he would make an official complaint.

The following morning, he did so with a local Labour MP at the police area headquarters near Ruabon. Later he was told ‘both officers had accepted early retirement on health grounds, so his complaint could not be pursued’. Undeterred, the Campbells spoke to reporters and at peace rallies and meetings about their concerns about Hilda’s murder, despite more harassment.

Some years afterwards, they met a retired police officer in Wales and became friends. ‘He said he had been in the West Mercia CID at the time of the Hilda Murrell case.’ Apparently, he had been taken off the case after expressing misgivings about it to the Chief Constable.

Early in 1988 Laurens Otter wrote asking if I had received a letter from his longstanding friend, Avraham Sasa, in Bath. I had not. Sasa’s sister had just told him he had died in September 1987. Apparently, one wet evening Sasa was walking into town for a CND meeting when a car stopped on the other side of the road. The driver called him over asking for directions – whereupon another car knocked him down and drove off.

Otter realised with a shock that Sasa’s last letter had arrived about ten days after his death. It had taken two weeks to be delivered, and had obviously been opened. Sasa had unwisely asked him for my address, because he had ‘learned some information relevant to the Murrell case too sensitive to put in a letter’. Aware that I lived nearby, he intended to brief me and tell Otter about it when he visited him before Christmas – but of course he had not appeared.

Castle Frome, where Sasa was involved in organic farming, was a training ground for the Special Air Service. Having been involved in military intelligence in World War Two and done military service in Israel, Sasa could well have been confided in but overheard, or had heard a pub conversation there.

Also, Otter told me that on 4 September 1987 he had received an anonymous phone call from a man who said: ‘Why don’t you top yourself? Because people like you poke your nose in where it’s not wanted, we killed the Murrell woman and now we’ve killed your other friend.’

‘Which other friend?’

‘You don’t know about that?’

What was more, twice within the previous week while Sasa’s letter was in the post to him, two cars had narrowly missed Otter when he was out walking. On the first occasion, when he heard a car mount the pavement behind him, he threw himself behind a brick pillar in a gateway. A couple of days later, a car sitting in a lay-by suddenly started up and drove rapidly towards him; again if he had not jumped out of the way he would have been knocked down.

On 3 May 1986, I met Eileen Griffith, an anti-nuclear campaigner and rose grower friend of Hilda who lived near Fron Goch. When I introduced myself to this 68- year-old little hunch-backed woman, she gasped: ‘This is amazing. A year ago today, my son Philip was found murdered in Brighton – because he had found out something important about Hilda’s murder. Come and see where he is.’ She led me across her beautiful garden beside a disused chapel. On his grave she had planted a Hilda Murrell rose. She said he knew Hilda and had visited her a couple of times.

Over mugs of tea, she told me that on 3 May 1985 her 31-year-old adopted son Philip had phoned her from a public callbox in Brighton sounding upset and scared. He warned Eileen against making any more enquiries about Hilda. ‘Please don’t – I know what you’re like. And keep quiet about this: I’ve just come from a pub where I overheard three men bragging about how they had killed her. I know a lot of what happened.’ When she told him to go the police he told her not to be so naïve: ‘The police are up to their necks in it.’ He wanted to stay the weekend with her because ‘it is all so dangerous here.’

Philip had then phoned his younger brother Jerry ‘in a terrible state – he feared for his life’, before phoning his older sister twice. The first time, he said he had a ticket for France departing the next day to pick fruit and stay with friends as he had done for many years. She was surprised when he phoned again at about 6.30pm, sounding ‘strange: as though he had been drinking, but not drunk – and very frightened’. He kept repeating: ‘Please listen to me, I will telephone you when I get to France.’ A man called ‘Sime’ took over the phone and reassured her Philip was OK. This call was made 90 minutes before the alleged official time of death at 8pm.

However, the next morning (4 May) at 6.02am, David Thomas was walking his dog in Queen’s Park when he found Philip ‘still alive’ propped up against a tree. He recognised him immediately because he was his bricklayer foreman on a building site. He had tried to revive him and went to phone an ambulance. The police surgeon was unable to give a cause of death. A used hypodermic syringe was found on the body.

Eileen assumed Philip’s failure to contact her meant he had gone to France. It took two weeks before her local policeman gave her the terrible news. When she and her daughter formally identified him they saw a severe wound on his forehead: ‘It was a big, round bloody mess. He had been hit with something like a hammer.’ Yet when Thomas left him, he was adamant there had been no head wound. So someone had finished him off. When his family challenged the police, they said it had happened when his body was being carried into the ambulance. This convinced the family that Philip had been murdered, and they suspected the police were not investigating it objectively because of the link with Hilda’s case. Mindful of Philip’s warning, Eileen did not tell the police the contents of his last desperate phone call to her.

Philip’s flat had been emptied by someone. Except for his watch, an expired 12-month British visitor’s passport, £3 cash and an empty wage packet, all his possessions – including a ticket to France and a new suit bought specially for the trip – were missing. The police initially treated the death as a potential murder, but later suspected suicide. He had three injection punctures above his right elbow. A Home Office forensic pathologist, Dr Basil Purdue, told the inquest Philip had ‘morphine in the blood but not enough for a lethal overdose’. He was a ‘well-nourished, muscular young man’, with no evidence of other drug-taking. The autopsy report stated that ‘a very large amount of alcohol in the body would have contributed to his death, but would not on its own have proved fatal in the absence of postural asphyxia or inhalation of vomit, evidence of neither of which was present.’

In a letter from the police to Eileen, they stated that Purdue had also reported:

Purdue made no mention of the severe head wound, nor did he comment that no one could have injected himself three times above the right elbow, and then placed the syringe somewhere on his body.

Philip was quite a heavy man. If he was drugged, then dragged from a house and driven in a car to the park, it would have taken at least two men to do it. Who were they, and what was their motive? To the credit of East Sussex coroner Edward Grace, he said: ‘Because Philip had drunk so much, it was possible that he was not able to resist someone else injecting him with the drug. Perhaps he did take too much drink to be good for him, but what happened after that I am sure was not his fault. I am sure he would not have deliberately injected himself or allowed himself to be injected if he were sober. Something happened which we can only guess at to cause his death.’ He recorded an open verdict.

Eileen had few doubts about what happened. Philip’s abrupt exit from the pub alerted the thugs to the probability that he had overheard them. He had to be silenced so they followed him, to find him emerging from a public phone box.

Frustrated by the lack of information from the police and unsatisfactory outcome of the inquest, the Griffith family demanded a meeting with senior police. Among many other unanswered questions, they asked why Philip’s flat had not been searched until two weeks after his death. Eileen then employed a solicitor to follow these up. When he challenged the police that Philip had been murdered, Assistant Chief Constable Dibley wrote back:

Dibley reassured the family that the case was not closed and they ‘would be contacted in the event of any further developments’.

The family was outraged by the police suggestion either that he might have been suicidal or on drugs. Morphine was found in the used syringe. This is used for only two purposes: as a painkiller or to kill. However, as it is derived from heroin, it was far more likely that his killers had confused the trail with both alcohol and morphine.

I promised Eileen to do what I could, and persuaded John Osmond of HTV to send researchers to Brighton. On 18 September 1986, Wales This Week featured a programme about Philip’s mysterious death. No direct link with Hilda’s murder was established; but there had undoubtedly been some form of cover-up.

Things went quiet until, following the tenth anniversary of Hilda’s death, Kate and I visited Eileen. Soon afterwards, I received confirmation from a reliable source that Philip had been followed out of the pub. When the thugs saw him go into a phone box, ‘they got some of their mates onto him. He was drugged in the flat and pulled down the stairs, and placed in a sleeping bag. The names of two of the guys who beat him were Peter and Simon…’

At the end of July 1994 I visited Philip’s sister, a solo mother with two young children. Even after I had briefed her about this, she resumed investigating her beloved brother’s murder. She then experienced phone harassment, including silent calls, and was watched for four to five days by two men parked in a strange car in her cul de sac. When a male friend challenged them, they drove off ‘like the clappers’ and never returned. Understandably, she abandoned her enquiries. Since then, the family has heard nothing. Eileen died in 2005 without even receiving a copy of Philip’s death certificate.

Hilda has been labelled by some media as the ‘British Karen Silkwood’. In 1974 Silkwood, a 27-year-old American union activist at an Oklahoma plutonium processing plant, had compiled a damning dossier of violations of safety regulations involving workers exposed to dangerous levels of radiation and denied protective clothing. She arranged to hand over her evidence to a New York Times journalist, but the meeting never took place. She was found dead at the wheel of her car, which had left the road and crashed into a concrete culvert. Tyre tracks indicated she had been forced off by another vehicle; the dossier was missing; and her home was found to have been deliberately contaminated with plutonium.

Although Hilda never spoke to me about Silkwood’s death, she had kept the issue of the Ecologist magazine featuring her case.

Shortly before her murder, Hilda sent a donation to support the work of American Catholic nun and researcher for the National Cancer Institute, Dr Rosalie Bertell. Like some other whistleblowers against the nuclear industry, there were attempts on Bertell’s life.

In 1977 Bertell discovered that radiation in the atmosphere, even at low levels accepted as safe, was responsible for increased incidence of leukaemia – and also diabetes, hardening of the arteries, cataracts and coronary disease. This had serious implications not only for people working in military and civil nuclear plants but also for anyone living in neighbouring communities.

When we first met in 1994, Bertell told me: ‘The retaliation began. It was a surprise – mail opened; a nasty article in the local paper; a fuss at work led by a man whose research was funded by the Defence Department.’ As she became more widely known as a speaker, she found herself being met at airports by strangers who addressed her by name and offered to take her to her hotel. On one occasion she allowed a man, posing as an airport official, to lead her to her flight: she missed it and her speaking engagement. She also suffered mysterious cases of sudden and severe illnesses at gatherings where no one else got sick.

In 1978 Bertell was openly threatened after she performed better in a TV debate than a physicist from a local nuclear power plant. Afterwards an executive from the power company angrily warned her: ‘Stay out of the Rochester area or we’ll get you.’ Ten months later she returned, a week after the power plant had malfunctioned attracting major publicity. Having given a presentation in the local hospital, she set off home along a three-lane expressway to Buffalo.

Suddenly, a car following her came up on her left side and tried to force her to crash into a car in the slow right-hand lane. As she braked to avoid a collision, the lone male driver accelerated ahead of her and dropped a metal object out of his window. It landed directly in front of her car and was sharp enough to puncture a brand-new, steel-belted radial tyre, and heavy enough to bend the wheel rim. Bertell’s car veered left across the fast lane. By some miracle, the cars following avoided her. She regained enough control to come to rest on the median strip.

As she was inspecting the damage, a brown car with ‘Sheriff’ written on the side and two blue lights on the roof stopped. The two male occupants were not wearing uniforms, and did not get out. They were only interested in whether she had noted the licence number of the car that had caused the damage, and whether she retrieved the object. When she said no, they told her the Rochester police would come, and took off. The police never came. On reporting the incident, the sheriff’s department confirmed there were no brown cars in the department fleet, and regulations required officers to stay with a disabled vehicle until help arrived. They also failed to investigate the incident. Later she learned her assailant was probably an employee of the security agency at the nuclear power plant.

Bertell moved to Toronto in Canada, where she later founded the International Institute of Concern for Public Health. On 19 November 1981, as she and three fellow nuns were going to bed, four shots were fired through the fourth-floor bedroom windows at the back of their convent. No bullets were recovered; however, from the bullet holes in the windows, the police believed the shots were fired from over 50 yards away – so the bullets were from at least a .22 calibre rifle. The harassment stopped after that incident. According to Bertell, ‘the Jesuits talked with the Secret Service and put a stop to it’.

In 1983, Bertell accepted an invitation from Gerard Morgan-Grenville to speak at the Sizewell Inquiry. Soon after I had presented Hilda’s paper, she presented her latest research into the deaths of low-weight babies, born downwind of nuclear reactors in Wisconsin. This provided further evidence that low-level radiation caused other illnesses apart from cancers and genetic disorders. Hilda had donated £50 towards Bertell’s costs to attend Sizewell and another £50 towards getting her book No Immediate Danger published. Morgan-Grenville then sent Hilda Bertell’s draft submission. This, and another paper on the genetic and other effects of radiation by British Professor Patricia Lindop, were two documents I never found when clearing Hilda’s house. In her early fifties, Lindop suffered a stroke at around the same time Don Arnott had his heart attack.

Bertell told me that only a fraction of the attacks on anti-nuclear campaigners were ever made public. In some cases activists were successfully intimidated into silence; in others, they were effectively eliminated in ‘accidents’. Bertell died in 2012.

In the early 1990s Sellafield, on the Cumbrian coast, was causing increasing concern on the other side of the Irish Sea. The massive Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP) was due to open in the face of opposition from campaign groups and the Irish Labour Party. It was feared more radioactive waste would be blown or washed across the sea. Meanwhile, new evidence was emerging about the impact of the world’s first serious radioactive fire in 1957 at Windscale, which was subsequently renamed Sellafield because of this.

In the 1980s, Irish scientist Dr Patricia Sheehan had discovered a cluster of children born with Down’s syndrome whose mothers had been at a boarding school together in the Irish coastal town of Dundalk in the 1950s. Her study of 157 mothers showed they had eight Down’s syndrome babies, 12 with other birth defects, two stillbirths and one death within six weeks of birth.

A few months before her suspicious death in a car crash in 1994, the Irish papers reported Dr Sheehan’s results of a recent study amongst 319 women who had been at another boarding school on the coast at the same time. She had found that five gave birth to Down’s syndrome babies, and 33 babies were born with other serious conditions including spina bifida, heart defects and deafness. Five mothers had stillbirths, seven babies died within weeks and six more died in childhood. There were also 161 miscarriages and 23 premature births among the 1,086 pregnancies.

British Nuclear Fuels dismissed the Irish concerns about fallout – but someone tampered with the weather records. Dr Chris Busby, an independent expert on the health effects of low-level radiation, tracked down records for Windscale from the Meteorological Office Archives. Pages covering the day of the fire had been removed and replaced with new sheets, in a slightly different colour, which simply stated ‘No record’. However, the Air Ministry meteorological records clearly showed the wind would have blown the cloud of radioactivity towards Ireland.

In June 1994, a few weeks before she was due to present her controversial evidence to an inquiry investigating the birth defects and alleged link with Windscale/Sellafield, Dr Sheehan was killed when driving alone. The Karen Silkwood parallels are striking. Adi Roche, chair of Irish CND, reported to me initially that another car had been involved. Colleagues said research papers she would have been carrying were not found in the car. She had told friends her mail had been opened and she had received death threats to ‘back off’ from her research. The crash was never fully investigated.

The Stop THORP Alliance Dundalk group continued the struggle and was given £350,000 by the Irish Government to pay for ‘technical assistance’, but had to raise funds to take their case to court. In 2004 the Irish High Court ruled it did not have jurisdiction against British Nuclear Fuels. A judgment in favour of the children would have unleashed millions in compensation claims, creating a greater impact on the nuclear industry than any protest by environmentalists or foreign government.

Patsy Dale (formerly Davis) suffered 27 years of abuse and violence because she became a threat to the Royal Navy’s nuclear establishment. Most people cannot believe a law-abiding British citizen could be subjected to such an horrific campaign of intimidation and torture in two ‘democratic’ countries. With police, media, lawyers, MPs and MEPs aware of the ongoing intimidation; death threats to Patsy and me; rapes and many attempts to murder her, it is astounding that it continued until her death in August 2011. Her story deserves a book in its own right – this is a summary.

In March 1990 I was asked to meet Chris Bangert, a British Telecom employee and Quaker giving Patsy support. He explained that, when two men attacked her in her home near Staines in 1987, only notes for her draft book were taken. Her assailants left behind two photocopied pages depicting the police sketches of Hilda’s murderer from Death of a Rose-Grower, with ‘DEATH’ scrawled between them. The message was clear: ‘Shut up or you will end up like Hilda.’ Patsy wondered if the thugs were connected to Hilda’s murder.

Patsy had been married to a sonar operator serving in HMS Resolution, the Royal Navy’s first submarine armed with Polaris nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles. In 1968 their first son was born perfectly healthy. Five years later Stephen was born with a harelip and a cleft palate, damage to the front temporal lobe of his brain and a defect in his right eye. She had suffered four miscarriages and a daughter, Rosanne, was prematurely stillborn.

Her research, done without her husband’s support, uncovered another five deformed children born within 26 months whose fathers were junior ratings in HMS Resolution, four of them with harelip and cleft palate – an incidence rate of one in 28. Some children had hydrocephalus and spina bifida.

Patsy’s ordeal began when she agreed to be interviewed in a 1985 Yorkshire Television documentary called Inside Britain’s Bomb about radiation leaks in Polaris submarines. Other affected parents were frightened off by threats over jobs, pensions and the Official Secrets Act. In October 1985 Patsy received four calls warning she would be killed if she persisted with the interview. Threats followed from a suited man with short, fair, curly hair and a pockmarked face in a black VW Scirocco as she walked to work with a friend. Other malicious callers listed personal details of her elder son and his friends and their daily schedule, confirming they were all under surveillance.

Yorkshire Television contracted former MI5 agent Gary Murray to investigate. When he met Staines Police on Patsy’s behalf, they said the Navy had told them Patsy was trying to extract compensation from the Ministry of Defence. Murray advised her to make a sworn affidavit in case she was killed, and later published it in his book Enemies of the State. He experienced sabotage to his car while investigating another case about civilian workers on nuclear submarines. Confirming Patsy’s phone was bugged, he showed her how to record all incoming conversations. He then received threatening calls from the same people who had threatened her. Her interview was subsequently broadcast on Yorkshire TV in December 1985. Soon afterwards she found her front and back doors wide open, footprints in the snow, the tape recorder whirring and conversations erased.

In February 1987, two men introducing themselves as police officers knocked on her door at 11.30pm. One was tall and broad wearing a trench coat and tortoise-shell spectacles; the shorter one had long greasy hair and was wearing jeans and a donkey jacket. She quickly recognised the pockmarks and voice of the taller man as the Scirocco driver whom she nicknamed Crater Face. They burst in and slammed her back into a door. As she screamed, Crater Face tried to throttle her, warned her to stay quiet, and kicked the dog while the other man ransacked a nearby room. They stole her draft chapters, tapes recording phone calls and the phone numbers of affected families. This was when she found two pages from Death of a Rose-Grower with ‘DEATH’ written across it. On reporting this to the police, they dismissed her as a nuisance.

The death threats continued at home and work, despite changing her ex-directory number four times. In February 1989, Patsy armed herself with a friend’s truncheon, which she used when an intruder wielding a thin-bladed knife tried to strangle her. Her neighbour made a police statement after another man jumped over the garden fence having cut her Citizens’ Band (CB) radio aerial lead.

One CB radio friend was Gordon Dale, a former British soldier who had served in Ulster and been a Vietnam mercenary in support of US Special Forces. When he started taking her phone calls and demanding the caller’s name, his London flat was burgled and her papers and tapes stolen. After they married in October 1989 two ‘police officers’ questioned Gordon’s sister, Patsy’s papers and notes left with her were stolen, and Gordon’s car was nearly forced off a motorway flyover by a black Scirocco.

Early in 1990 Paul Foot published details of Patsy’s campaign and persecution in his Daily Mirror column. Embarrassed into action, Staines Police Detective Inspector Bruton fingerprinted the house and swept it for bugs, but nothing came of it.

Since 1984, Chris Bangert had lobbied five Labour MPs, including Tam Dalyell, to ask parliamentary questions and stir media interest. He also sought legal and police support, without success. Bangert and I met Patsy in June 1990, just before she fled in desperation to her 84-year-old mother in Ennis in western Ireland to escape her tormentors. Patsy impressed me deeply as an honest, articulate and tenacious woman, and a devoted mother. I promised to try to persuade a lawyer to take up Stephen’s case, and do some research through my naval contacts.

Immediately after they arrived in Ireland, the police (Garda) accused them of driving a stolen vehicle. Within weeks Crater Face, in the same VW Scirocco, resumed his harassment. On 11 April 1991, he brutally assaulted Patsy in an Ennis community centre toilet after a Bingo night. As she entered he grabbed her by the throat, threw her against a wall, kicked and punched her to the ground, and plunged a hypodermic needle into her leg. The security guard, Michael Carmody, heard her screams, called the police and took her to Ennis hospital. The doctor, concerned at the seriousness of her injuries, offered to make a police statement. For the next five days she suffered nausea and vomiting 20 times a day – but no toxicology tests were done.

Patsy began sending me copies of her draft chapters, Gordon’s daily log of ongoing harassment, and statements from people who had witnessed the intimidation in Britain. At a 1991 conference on the health effects of low-level radiation, London solicitor Martyn Day agreed to take up Stephen’s case, by trying to sue the Ministry of Defence for damages. I traced and interviewed retired HMS Resolution crew, including Patsy’s former husband. I found no evidence of a radiation leak accident – but did uncover a potentially more serious cause.

When welders were repairing coolant pipes in the reactor compartment of the submarine during HMS Resolution’s first refit in Rosyth in 1971, several of the fathers of deformed children, including Stephen’s, had acted as ‘welding sentries’, standing next to the welders with a fire extinguisher. None of them was ever required to wear even an industrial filter facemask, let alone an anti-gas respirator. They all confirmed this was so they ‘wouldn’t feel nervous’.

Alex Falconer, the European MP for Rosyth and former shop steward for dockyard workers during that refit, confirmed sentries wore white protective overalls, hats, gloves and overshoes – but no face masks. By contrast, each welder was protected by a ventilated suit and visor, and a forced-draught system that blew the fumes away from him – but towards the sentry. Don Arnott confirmed the most likely contamination pathway was inhalation of microscopic radioactive particles containing iron, cobalt or manganese isotopes released when welding stainless steel that had been neutron-activated, or from carcinogenic thorium in the welding arc. The particles would have gone directly into their bloodstream, risking damage to their genes and, consequently, defects in their children.

The problem applied to every nuclear submarine refit from the mid-1960s until the early 1990s, when heavy polythene trunking was finally introduced to draw off the welding fumes. Hundreds of families with deformed children could have been entitled to huge compensation. If established, the health and safety record of British nuclear propulsion would be discredited, and would have implications for the rest of the international nuclear industry. In November 1991, when Stephen was denied legal aid on the grounds of ‘Crown exemption’, Martyn Day reluctantly dropped his case.

My continuing investigations, plus Gordon’s frequent phone calls, probably provoked the next outrage. In January 1992, while Patsy was walking home, Crater Face drove alongside her repeating ‘Keep walking Mrs Dale’, until they reached an empty building site. He got out, pointed a handgun at her, ‘pressed the barrel against my chest and said: “As for you, and your trumped-up solicitor and so-called Commander – this is what you’ll all get.”’ He then drove off. The Garda Detective Chief Superintendent took this seriously, allocating two detectives to tracing him, to no avail.

The media also showed support. I joined Patsy and Alex Falconer on a local radio programme, and a Sunday Press article with the headline ‘Ennis woman will sue Britain over son’s birth defects’ re-ignited interest in her research and intimidation. The next day a folded piece of paper featuring Patsy’s story from James Cutler’s book Britain’s Nuclear Nightmare with ‘DEATH’ scrawled on it was dropped in their letterbox.

The intimidation intensified. Their mail, like mine, was intercepted and tampered with. Patsy was home alone on 15 May 1992 when Crater Face again kicked and injected her, and demanded that she tell the Garda she had been lying. In a signed statement, a neighbour described Crater Face as a ‘white man, approximately six feet tall, wearing spectacles and a great three-quarter length overcoat. His face was heavily pocked.’

In July 1992 I accompanied the Dales to meet Detective Inspector Bruton again at Staines police station. He was impressed when the UK registration number of the Scirocco, E644 EOK, was confirmed false through the national computer. A year later, Gordon reported Crater Face’s new white Citroen car number as J223 NCA, which Bruton also found to be false. While in Britain, another policeman confided that they had been told to stop their enquiries into the case. Meanwhile, Bangert convinced three Irish politicians to try to get police protection, but none eventuated.

In 1993 the family was often disturbed, especially at night, by intermittent tapping on doors and windows, or whistles. Letters spelling ‘DEATH’ were found on the doormat eight times in 15 weeks. Even Stephen, now six feet five inches tall and weighing 16 stone, felt scared after Crater Face pointed a semi-automatic pistol at him. Gordon tried to install a video camera above the front window to catch Crater Face but the first time Patsy switched it on, he ducked out of sight and never approached the house the same way again.

In September 1993 they returned to Gordon’s mother’s London flat. Telephone death threats persisted for five weeks, and solicitor’s letters and photographs of Patsy’s injuries were stolen. So Bangert, who had recently found a publisher for Patsy’s book, hosted them for a couple of weeks. Phone problems started immediately, followed by visits by ‘police officers’. Within three months he died suddenly, allegedly from a known heart condition, aged 48. Patsy sent all his papers about her case to us in New Zealand.

I encouraged the Dales to write to MI5’s new woman Director General, Stella Rimington. Within ten days all intimidation stopped for 16 months. In November 1995 the incessant window tapping resumed. Sometimes Gordon recorded over 200 different taps only minutes apart. After Gordon reported this to the Garda, Crater Face again threatened Patsy with a gun. Gordon wrote twice more to Rimington threatening to initiate a case at the European Court of Justice. A reply enclosed a leaflet advising him to apply to the Security Service Tribunal.

Concerned about my safety, Kate kept copies of all documents in New Zealand and established an international support group. Crater Face warned Patsy not to correspond with Kate, and interference with our mail and phone intensified. After the Irish Daily Star highlighted their case, Crater Face beat Patsy with an iron bar across her neck and upper arm. Despite her leaving the bar for testing with the Garda, and offering to do a lie detector test, nothing happened. Following an interview for a documentary, a copy of Judith Cook’s 1994 Guardian article ‘True Lies’ about Hilda was found on Patsy’s bed with the words ‘Your [sic] dead’ scrawled across it. Kate began a letter-writing campaign to citizen organizations such as Irish CND and Amnesty International, leading politicians including Irish Foreign Minister Dick Spring, and MPs in New Zealand and Australia. Spring’s response was that ‘all complaints/incidents reported by the Dale family have been investigated with negative results’.

Gordon’s car then became a target. The air pressure in the tyres was deliberately inflated to a dangerous 60 psi; a new tyre was slashed with spikes normally only used by police; the clutch cable and the steering malfunctioned while overtaking a slow-moving vehicle. A local mechanic who inspected the car offered to speak out publicly about the sabotage if anything happened to the family.

After two Irish women Green MEPs began asking questions about Patsy’s case, all intimidation stopped for five weeks. When the window taps resumed they were witnessed by Irish CND’s Eoin Dinan and a visiting Maori elder from New Zealand. A few weeks after Kate and I were married in January 1997, I returned to the UK for six months. Patsy was badly beaten about the head with a brick, and Gordon received a phoned death threat saying ‘As for Murrell and Sheehan – tell Rob Green he’s next.’ Three more calls followed in quick succession: ‘Tell Mr Green to watch his grasses’; ‘The grass is greener on the other side’ and, bizarrely, ‘The Green, Green, Grass of Home’.

Kate kept up the pressure from New Zealand by sending photographs and affidavits from witnesses to the Irish Justice Minister and others. This prompted another telephoned taunt from Crater Face: ‘Katie is my darling, my darling.’ That same month carving knives were found on the back doormat four times, and Crater Face again half-strangled Patsy. He always knew when Patsy was alone, pouncing within minutes – confirming a comprehensive surveillance system was in use.

In October 1997, after pressure from members of the British Patsy Dale Support Group, Garda Detective Superintendent Kelly met the family and assured them he did not believe Gordon or Stephen were the perpetrators of all this harassment. Outrageously, local Garda had previously suggested this was the explanation. Telephone monitoring equipment was finally installed, whereupon the family had peace for nearly a month.

We kept Superintendent Kelly updated regularly, and in March 1998 we met him in Ennis. He revealed that one night, when he and his wife were driving home from the cinema, they had been followed by a car with no lights on. It sped up behind, raced past and then slammed its brakes on in front, causing him to stop suddenly. He felt the incident was linked to the Patsy case. Immediately after we left Ireland, Crater Face tried stabbing Patsy in the chest, but the knife was deflected by some jewellery. The knife was found on the back door mat and given to the Garda. Within hours he taunted: ‘Aren’t I a clever little boy? I can get away with murder – sorry, attempted murder – and I’m not that little.’ When the Garda turned off the telephone monitoring equipment because there had been no offensive calls for seven weeks, the calls resumed.

In June 1999 Patsy gave up her life-threatening struggle. She had endured 14 years of threats, abuse and assault – and had just been beaten again, this time by a younger, tall, dark-haired man. She had already spent much of the year in hospital and was physically and emotionally worn down. Gordon posted copies of all original documents to us and they moved to a country cottage where they lived safely and happily for nearly seven years.

This all changed after we visited them in June 2006 to check a draft of their story for this book. Aged 61, Patsy was on oxygen 16 hours a day – she had been diagnosed with lung cancer. On phoning them from Heathrow airport a week later, we learned they had received two death threats. We feared our visit had revealed their whereabouts and provoked the threats. One day in August, when Patsy was alone in the garden while Gordon and Stephen were out, a young man wearing a black jacket attacked her, injecting her twice in the thigh. Later, while Gordon took Stephen to the doctor, the same assailant broke into Patsy’s bedroom, beat her up and cut the phone wire, oxygen tube, and radio power cord. The farmer landlord found her cowering behind the spare bed. We phoned the Garda repeatedly insisting that they take immediate action. They set up a monitor on the phones that prevented abusive calls for a few weeks until it was removed in late November.

The following day, while Gordon and Stephen were briefly in town with Patsy locked inside the house, her young tormentor returned. He tried strangling her with the phone cord, beat her with a baseball bat that he also used in an anal rape, raped her vaginally and orally and left her unconscious. The attack was carefully planned: the landlord was working in fields and his wife was out all day. Tragically, the Garda took three hours to respond to Gordon’s emergency call. If they had sent an ambulance immediately, DNA from the blood and semen could have been retrieved before Gordon showered her and washed her clothes. Amazingly, Patsy recovered slowly with rape counselling and daily calls from us.

Six months later, just before they moved to Kilrush, Patsy was sitting alone in the locked car in the supermarket car park for a few minutes. Her assailant brazenly walked over and bragged to her through the window: ‘I’ve got away with rapes in Scotland; I’ve got away with rapes in Ireland, and now I’ve got a six-month posting in Wales.’

Over the next year things were reasonably quiet apart from a couple more serious assaults. We believe this final, utterly incredible phase of Patsy’s suffering was used to try to stop us publishing her story. So, to take pressure off them, we told the family over the phone that we were not going to include it in this book. From then on they were largely left in peace. However, Patsy did not live to read this, nor to see some justice for Stephen and herself. After weeks in intensive care with chronic breathing and other problems, she died in Limerick hospital on 17 August 2011.

Although there were many attempts to murder her, Patsy probably survived them because, unlike other victims such as Dr Patricia Sheehan and Hilda Murrell, she lived in a house with two large, fearless, supportive men who have witnessed the consequences of attacks by her highly skilled, well resourced and informed assailants. With an indomitable spirit, Patsy also had a group of supporters and politicians who knew about the case, and a media profile that might have made her a martyr.

Nonetheless, the fact that her tormentors were never apprehended leads to a disturbing suspicion of pressure on the police in both England and Ireland. Only the Security Services associated with the British government and nuclear industry were capable of this. Was their primary objective to break her psychologically as an example of what can be done to those who dare to oppose the British State?

Another suspicious death was that of a leading radical Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) lawyer and anti-nuclear campaigner, Willie MacRae. He was openly critical of the investigation into Hilda’s case. On 5 April 1985, a week after the first anniversary of her murder, MacRae left for his holiday home in the Western Highlands. He never arrived. The next morning, tourists found him unconscious and covered in blood at the wheel of his car, crashed off the road in an isolated spot. It was treated as an accident until a gunshot wound was found behind his right ear when he was examined in the hospital. He died 36 hours later without regaining consciousness. No formal inquest was held, and cause of death was officially recorded as suicide. However, papers and his smashed wristwatch were found about 20 yards from his car; and the gun, with no fingerprints on it, was in a stream even further away.

His close friend, Mary Johnston, said on an investigative TV programme, Scottish Eye, on 5 April 2011: ‘He wouldn’t have done it [suicide]. Everything was going well for Willie: he had so many plans.’ She outlined several parallels with Hilda’s case. Like her, MacRae was preparing to give evidence at an inquiry into the nuclear industry, in Scotland. Apparently he told Mary that ‘now he had something they couldn’t wriggle out of… Also, his holiday home was broken into – but nothing vital was taken. He was quite gleeful: they didn’t get what they were looking for.’

Because of this, MacRae told friends he knew he was under surveillance by Special Branch, his phone was tapped and mail opened, and was on a ‘hit list’. A car followed him to his home a few days before his death. On 6 April 1985, a group of walkers near where MacRae’s car crashed reported that, during the afternoon, a man drove up the road, parked, got out and fired some shots in their direction as if to warn them not to approach. His car was a red Ford Escort. Two years after MacRae’s death, Hamish Watt, a former SNP MP and councillor in Grampian, told the Aberdeen Press & Journal that a nurse working at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, where MacRae was taken, had told him that two bullet wounds were found in his brain – which clearly ruled out suicide.

During the last few years of her life, Hilda corresponded with and telephoned leading Scottish anti-nuclear campaigners, including MacRae. Shortly before she died she sent them packages of papers outlining corruption in the nuclear industry. Like Hilda, MacRae was fearlessly opposed to the deep geological disposal of nuclear waste. Don Arnott had advised him at the Mullwharchar Inquiry in 1980, which overturned plans for such disposal in the Ayrshire hills in southern Scotland. Gary Murray, in his book Enemies of the State, described MacRae as ‘probably the nuclear industry’s most formidable opponent in Scotland’. Murray also wrote that, during World War Two, MacRae had served in the Royal Indian Navy in Naval Intelligence. While there, he joined the Indian Congress Party, at the time an illegal organisation opposed to British occupation. This first brought him to the attention of the British Security Services who, Murray claimed, kept him under surveillance for the rest of his life.

On 7 December 2010, The Scotsman newspaper reported that, 25 years on, new evidence had emerged about MacRae’s mysterious death. Member of the Scottish Parliament and former policeman John Finnie, now the SNP group leader on the Highland Council, called for his case to be re-opened after receiving new information from several different sources pointing to a more sinister motive. Apparently, police removed the car from the scene, only to return it when it became known that aspects of MacRae’s death were suspicious. Another former police officer turned private investigator claimed he was asked by an anonymous client to place MacRae under surveillance three weeks before he died; days before his death his office was broken into.

On 23 October 2007, a prominent article appeared in The Times headed ‘A weapons expert, a rose grower and a fantasist’. In it David Aaronovitch rubbished a sensational new book by Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker, The Strange Death of David Kelly. Over the previous few days, the right-wing Daily Mail had surprisingly serialised extensive highlights. Baker exposed anomalies in the police investigation of the apparent suicide on 18 July 2003 of the chemical weapons expert and member of the United Nations inspection team in Iraq since 1991, who had fallen foul of the Blair government over the ‘sexed up’, ‘dodgy’ dossier justifying the 2003 invasion.

Parliament had just adjourned for the long summer recess when Dr Kelly’s body was discovered. In extraordinary haste, Blair had within hours commissioned a non-statutory inquiry by Lord Brian Hutton – a former Chief Justice for Northern Ireland who had presided over many juryless terrorist trials – instead of allowing the Oxfordshire coroner’s inquest to continue. This was the first time Section 17A of the Coroner’s Act had been invoked for a single death. It meant that, unlike at an inquest, evidence was not under oath, witnesses could not be compelled to attend, and could only be cross-examined with Hutton’s permission. The excuse given was to allow witnesses to be examined ‘in a neutral way’.

After an unusually quick inquiry lasting 24 days, with just half a day spent considering the cause of Dr Kelly’s death, Hutton delivered his report, which was published the same day (28 January 2004). Kelly apparently died of haemorrhage from incised wounds to the left wrist, coproxamol ingestion and coronary artery atherosclerosis, after walking from his home in the Oxfordshire village of Southmoor to Harrowdown Hill. Astonishingly, Hutton recommended that all Kelly’s medical records and photographs of his body in situ be kept secret for 70 years ‘for the sake of the family’.

Evidence conflicting with the official cause of death raised many disturbing questions with echoes of Hilda’s case:

Regarding motives for State security involvement in assassinating Dr David Kelly, he was one of only a few people involved in drafting the ‘dodgy dossier’ with its spurious claim not just that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, but that some of them were ‘deployable within 45 minutes of an order to use them’.

Moreover, as probably the most authoritative source on this aspect, he objected to this distortion of intelligence for political purposes. When Kelly’s request for this to be corrected was ignored, he briefed Andrew Gilligan, a reporter on BBC national Radio 4’s Today programme, who went public about it, severely embarrassing the Blair government. For this, Kelly’s name and role were leaked, whereupon he was subjected to a humiliating televised pillorying before the Foreign Affairs Committee.

Baker speculated in his book whether Kelly was assassinated by hitmen hired by British, American or Iraqi State security agencies, and his death made to look like suicide. Baker’s information pointing to foul play included mugging of informants too frightened to give their names. One had apparently been tipped off by a fellow former MI5 colleague that Kelly’s death had been a ‘wet operation, a wet disposal’ – slang for a covert intelligence operation involving assassination, alluding to bloodshed. Three weeks later, in a mysterious burglary, the informant’s computer with all the Kelly material on it was stolen. Also, sensitive files about Kelly disappeared from Baker’s computer in his constituency office in Lewes, East Sussex.

Aaronovitch used Hilda’s case in his 2007 Times article to ridicule Baker’s hypothesis. Having underplayed the nuclear motive and emphasised that Dalyell’s sources were, like Baker’s, anonymous, he continued:

Was this why the State security system was so determined to convict Andrew George and close Hilda’s case?

Aaronovitch’s 2009 book, Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History, featured Hilda’s case prominently. She was in illustrious company as he also briskly debunked conspiracies surrounding the deaths of John F Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana and Kelly.

Yet the Kelly case refused to go away. In a dramatic development, on 5 July 2009 the Daily Express revealed he had been writing a book exposing highly damaging government secrets. Not only had he warned Blair there were no chemical weapons in Iraq, but apparently he had also decided to reveal that, as one of the world’s experts on anthrax, he had secretly helped the apartheid regime in South Africa develop germ warfare agents. He had several discussions with an Oxford publisher, and was seeking advice on how far he could go without breaking the Official Secrets Act. Following his death, his computers were seized and it is not known what happened to the information on them or if any draft was discovered by investigators. British author Gordon Thomas said: ‘I knew David Kelly very well and he called me because he was working on a book. I gained the impression that he was prepared to take the flak as he wanted his story to come out.’

On 5 December 2009, six senior doctors began legal action to force a proper inquest into Kelly’s death, because they had no confidence in the Hutton Inquiry. Their spokesman, David Halpin, revealed to us that emails relating to the case had disappeared from his computer, and correspondence was missing. On 9 June 2011, despite intense media coverage and public support built by evidence uncovered by Baker and the doctors, the new Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, ruled out an inquest.

In December 2011 the High Court refused permission for the doctors to seek a judicial review. In April 2012, they reapplied to the Attorney General in light of fresh evidence, including that Dr Kelly’s body had been moved between first being found and about an hour later.