Overview
The two deaths are usually discussed together, and the pairing is itself part of the argument. Hilda Murrell was seventy-eight, a rose grower and a careful amateur researcher on radioactive waste. Willie MacRae was a solicitor and a senior figure in the Scottish National Party. Both were preparing to give evidence about the nuclear industry. Both died within a year of each other, in circumstances their families have never accepted as fully explained.
Whether the pairing is meaningful or coincidental is the question, and it has been argued for four decades without resolution.
Hilda Murrell
Murrell was abducted from her home in Shrewsbury in March 1984 and left in a copse outside the town, where she died of hypothermia after being stabbed. She had written a paper for the Sizewell B inquiry, the first British public inquiry into a new nuclear station, and was days from submitting it.
The suspicion that followed had two strands. The first was that papers relating to the nuclear industry appeared to be missing from her house. The second was her nephew, Robert Green, a former Royal Navy commander who had held a role connected to the Falklands conflict — which pulled in a separate and much-repeated theory involving the sinking of the General Belgrano.
In 2005 a local man, Andrew George, was convicted of her murder on DNA evidence. That is where most accounts of the case end, and where the disagreement begins. Green has continued to argue that the conviction does not fit the evidence and that the security services were involved, and has published a book to that effect. Others regard the conviction as the answer and the theory as a family's understandable refusal of a squalid explanation.
Willie MacRae
MacRae was found in April 1985 slumped in his car, which had left the road in the Highlands. He had a gunshot wound to the head. He died the following day without regaining consciousness.
The official conclusion was suicide. No fatal accident inquiry was held, which in Scotland is discretionary but which in a case involving a firearm and a public figure struck many as an omission rather than a decision.
The details raised at the time have never been fully accounted for in public. His pistol was recovered some distance from the vehicle. Papers were reported scattered away from the car. His watch was found broken. He had been an outspoken opponent of nuclear waste dumping in Scotland and had publicly criticised the handling of the Murrell investigation. A former police officer confirmed in 2010 that MacRae had been under Special Branch surveillance.
What was said in Parliament, and what the conviction rests on
The Belgrano strand did not stay in pamphlets. In December 1984 the MP Tam Dalyell told the House of Commons that Special Branch officers had searched Murrell's house looking not for valuables but for documents relating to the sinking of the General Belgrano, the Argentine cruiser torpedoed during the Falklands conflict. Robert Green, her nephew, had been a Royal Navy commander with access to signals intelligence, and Dalyell's claim was that the search sought material Green might have passed to her.
The conviction has its own specifics, and they cut both ways. A 2003 police review of retained material produced a DNA and fingerprint match to Andrew George, who at the time of the murder was a sixteen-year-old absconder from a local children's home. He was convicted in May 2005; at trial he accepted having been in the house and denied the killing. He could not drive — and Murrell's car was seen being driven erratically out of Shrewsbury. That detail is the reason the case did not close for everyone when the verdict came in.
In MacRae's case there is no equivalent finding to argue over. The Crown Office has reviewed the file more than once and declined to order a fatal accident inquiry, and the records relating to the death are not fully public.
The competing accounts
The suspicion in both cases rests on convergence: two anti-nuclear campaigners, both about to give evidence, both dying in circumstances with loose ends, in a period when the British state was demonstrably surveilling such people.
The sceptical account takes each case on its own terms. Murrell's death has a convicted killer and physical evidence; the theory requires that conviction to be wrong. MacRae was a man under considerable personal strain, and suicide by firearm is not rare; the scattered items are consistent with a car leaving the road at speed. On this view the link between the cases is one people made afterwards, and surveillance of campaigners — which is documented — is a long way from killing them.
The response from the other side is that the sceptical account requires two separate coincidences and a good deal of official incuriosity: no inquest in one case, and in the other a conviction the victim's own family has spent decades disputing.
What would settle it
For MacRae, a fatal accident inquiry, which campaigners have requested repeatedly and which has never been granted, together with release of the Special Branch file. For Murrell, an answer to whether anything was taken from the house, and a full account of what the original investigation examined and set aside.
Until then the honest summary is that one case has a legal answer that a family rejects, the other has an official conclusion reached without the hearing that would normally test it, and the connection between them is an inference rather than a finding.