Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (28 page)

Such projects, though, appeared to be doomed. For the first time since her death, a feeling of satiety concerning the princess seemed to be creeping in. Not perhaps among the most obdurate of theorists, but on the part of the general public, whose reading and buying habits, and whose answers to pollsters, had helped to maintain the conspiracy theories for so long.

The Untidiness of Reality

Toward the end of his great work of journalism
In Cold Blood
, Truman Capote noted how the people of the town of Holcomb, Kansas, near where the murder of four members of the Clutter family had taken place, were not entirely satisfied when they discovered the true identity of the killers. “The majority of Holcomb’s population,” wrote Capote, “appeared to feel disappointed at being told the murderer was not someone from among themselves,” but that the killings had been carried out instead by two sociopathic drifters. Capote quoted the formidable sub-postmistress, Myrtle Clare: “Maybe they did it, those two fellows. But there’s more to it than that. Wait. Some day they’ll get to the bottom, and when they do they’ll find the one behind it. The one wanted Clutter out the way. The
brains
.”
⁶⁰

Myrtle Clare’s impulse—the belief that the explanation being offered for an event is in some way deficient—runs through much theorizing. The Clutter murders were the greatest event in that part of Kansas for many years, but the solution to the murders led nowhere. There was no proper motive, and once the killers were caught, all that was left to do was hang them. The lack of an overarching reason for the murders must also have been worrying: apparently, anyone in small-town America was as much a potential target as Herb Clutter and family. To return to Sarah Churchwell’s discussion of Marilyn’s death, “it is only narrative that promises a reason for early death; reality offers no such assurance.”
⁶¹

Even so, it takes a great deal more than the untidiness of reality to launch an entire generation of conspiracy theories. What makes the deaths of JFK, Marilyn Monroe, and Princess Diana so fascinating is the victims’ iconic status and their youth. All were considered beautiful, all were world figures whose images existed inside the homes of billions. Kennedy was forty-six when he died; Monroe had just turned thirty-six, almost exactly the same age as Princess Diana. They were, all of them, whatever their internal demons, exceptionally successful, wealthy, and attractive. Consequently, they drew both admiration and envy, and much of the latter was (and is) unconscious.

Consider for a moment the repressed sadism that seems to lurk behind a lot of assassination conspiracism: the descriptions of the death, the reports from the autopsy, the photographs of the body. The British conspiracy theorist Robin Ramsay, in his small book on assassination literature, writes almost pornographically of “parts of JFK’s skull bounc[ing] onto the boot of the presidential limousine.” Marilyn is injected or has medicines inserted into her anus. Whatever we might have envied in these people, we sure don’t envy them now.

And if we do have such feelings, one way in which we might want to exorcise them is through constructing or accepting a version of history in which they were extinguished by something clearly “other” than ourselves. It was not our thirst for gossip about celebrities that killed Norma Jean or England’s Rose, but the CIA. It wasn’t an ordinary Joe with a rifle who murdered the young president, but the Mafia or the FBI. “What is assassination, after all,” wrote Todd Gitlin, “if not the ultimate reminder of the citizen’s helplessness—or even repressed murderousness?”
⁶²
Conspiracy theory may be one way of reclaiming power and disclaiming responsibility.

5. A VERY BRITISH PLOT

It was a time of ruthlessness in government and of the crushing of enemies.

And everywhere, there was the shadow of the secret state, arrogant and apparently omnipotent.

—NICK DAVIES, ON THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE MURDER OF HILDA MURRELL
¹

Death of a Rose Grower, Part One

It was as though, instead of investigating murders, Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple had been murdered herself. Friends and admirers of the dead woman told of a redoubtable elderly English country spinster whose acute sense of right and wrong, inquiring mind, and independence of spirit had perhaps led her down dangerous paths. And enlightened minds believed the murderer to be, far from an everyday criminal or pervert, the shadowy forces of the secret state itself.

The woman’s name was Hilda Murrell, at the time of her death seventy-eight and retired. The younger Hilda Murrell, an expert on roses and the manager of an old-fashioned rose-growing business, had assisted the writer Vita Sackville-West in creating the White Garden at Sissinghust Castle in Kent, and had supplied roses to the royal family and the Churchills. Three weeks before her death, in the early spring of 1984, she had agreed to have a rose named after her. A medium-to-large fragrant plant with pink blooms, you can still find it in catalogs.

By then, Hilda Murrell was living alone in the suburbs of the Shropshire town of Shrewsbury in a large brick house called Ravenscroft, and taking part in as many activities devoted to conserving the countryside and its habitat as someone of her age and suffering from rheumatism reasonably could. Some of these were not obviously political—the Soil Association and the Council for the Protection of Rural England were both beneficiaries of her activism—but others were more controversial. Hilda was a supporter of the European Nuclear Disarmament group; was involved with the Shropshire Anti-Nuclear Alliance, and, in 1983, had traveled to London for a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) demonstration that was, by the standards of the time, enormous. And Hilda’s aversion to nuclear fission went beyond the manufacturing of bombs: increasingly, it encompassed its use as a source of power. By 1982, she had decided to become a formal objector at the forthcoming public inquiry into whether a new nuclear power station should be built at Sizewell on the coast of East Anglia. For the next year and more, she worked on a paper concerning that abiding problem of the nuclear industry, the management and disposal of radioactive waste. Then she was killed.

On the morning of Wednesday, March 21, 1984, a bright day in early spring, Hilda Murrell drove her white Renault 5 hatchback into central Shrewsbury, shopped at the Safeway store, and drove back. She parked in her gravel driveway and went straight to a neighbor’s to pay sixteen pence owing on a raffle ticket, before returning home. That was the last time she was seen alive. She was due for lunch at her friends’ in the nearby village of Kinnerley but didn’t turn up; later, nearly seventy witnesses were to relate how they saw her small white hatchback being driven fast and badly northeast out of Shrewsbury. One woman was forced to swerve to avoid a collision. She saw the passenger, an elderly woman, “fall across” the driver, who appeared to push her back. A second woman driver, also alarmed about a possible collision, described how the man driving the car was “staring as if he’d lost control.” At just after a quarter past one, a local farmer came across a white car that appeared to have been dumped in Hunkington Lane, a minor road that runs between the village of Withington and the ruins of Haughmond Abbey. Some miles to the west, Miss Murrell’s failure to turn up for lunch had led her friends telephoning her at Ravenscroft, but there was no answer.

The next day, Thursday, was notable only for what didn’t happen. The owner of a small wood off Hunkington Lane, known as the Moat, visited it in order to count the trees. He saw nothing, telling the police later that he had “examined the place so thoroughly I would have seen if there’d been a dead rabbit there, let alone a person.”
²
On Friday, there was more activity. The farmer who had found the car in Hunkington Lane discovered that it was still there, and once again reported it to the police. By the evening, the police had traced the vehicle to Hilda Murrell. Also on the Friday, and significant only in retrospect, a local sex counselor was visited by Shrewsbury police, who asked him if he could “think of anybody who might have a sexual hang-up about elderly ladies.” He subsequently told campaigners inquiring into the Murrell case that he realized only “when I read the first reports in the paper the next evening of the finding of Hilda Murrell’s body that it seemed that the police had been describing the murder.” Also that evening, there were, according to later claims by a person living close to the Moat, “lights and movement” visible among the trees.
³

The body was found on Saturday the twenty-fourth, although not by the first policeman to visit Ravenscroft that day. At eight-thirty a.m., Hilda Murrell’s gardener, Brian George, found an officer about to leave the house. The policeman apparently told him that he had found nothing untoward, although the house was a bit untidy. He hadn’t gone into Hilda’s bedroom, not wanting to disturb her. Once the officer had left, George and two other people decided to look around Ravenscroft themselves. They discovered laundry on the floor, handbags on the scullery table, three days’ worth of newspapers and mail beside the front door, and the telephone—when they tried to use it to call the police—not working. A superintendent arrived sometime before ten-thirty a.m.

Meanwhile, a PC Robert Eades had been investigating the abandoned Renault. Along with a local farmer and her Labrador dogs, Eades went to the Moat copse, the nearest bit of cover, and at ten-thirty a.m. found a body lying in a shallow depression. It was that of Hilda Murrell. She was lying on her front, was naked from the waist down, and her skirt lay nearby. Her knees were abraded and bloody; there was bruising to her hip and shoulder, a cut under her right eye, another to her hand; her collarbone was fractured; and there were nonfatal stab wounds to her arm and abdomen, one of which had slightly penetrated the liver. The police pathologist who examined her later decided that none of these injuries was responsible for her death, which had probably occurred between five and ten hours after her injuries as the result of hypothermia. The corpse had not, he thought, been moved after death; Hilda Murrell had died at the Moat. In a nearby hedge were found the old lady’s hat, spectacles, and a weapon—an eight-inch cook’s knife later identified as having come from Ravenscroft. Her car keys were in the pocket of her coat. A closer inspection of the house itself now revealed signs of a struggle in a back bedroom, clothes scattered over the floor and a stair banister knocked out. The telephone had been disconnected. Subsequent forensic tests established that tissues found in the bedroom carried traces of semen, as did Miss Murrell’s clothing.

The crime appeared, as the police admitted, rather bizarre. If it was, as seemed most likely at first sight, a burglary gone wrong, it involved an atypical criminal. Burglars tend to be opportunists who try to escape at the first sign of interruption, but this one had stayed in the house after Miss Murrell had parked her car in the drive and ignored the opportunity to escape provided by her short visit to her neighbor. After she had come back home and, presumably, found him, the burglar had assaulted her, physically and sexually, then taken her outside in broad daylight, placed her in her own car, and driven her through Shrewsbury. Crashing into a ditch in Hunkington Lane, he had abandoned the car and lifted or dragged Miss Murrell a hundred yards or so into an obscure copse, where he had left her to her fate. The criminal, if working alone, had then been forced to leave the site, again in daylight, on foot.

And, embarrassingly, this strange and surely incompetent burglar was nowhere to be found. Neighbors said that they had noticed a “young man in jeans and a pipe [
sic
]” loitering in the area some days before the break-in, one suggesting that this man “had a military look about him.”
⁴
On the morning of the murder, someone else had seen a man jump over a low wall and walk toward Ravenscroft. This man wasn’t traced. A “jogging man” aged between twenty-five and forty was recalled by several witnesses running alongside the road in the area of Hunkington Lane and into Shrewsbury. And a red Escort car was reported to have been seen in several locations: in Sutton Lane, passing Ravenscroft on the morning of Hilda Murrell’s death, and also near Haughmond, where her Renault was found.

Then, one week after the murder and with no one either arrested or charged, the local newspaper, the
Shropshire Star
, ran a story on the Murrell case with the intriguing headline “Murder Victim Left an Unfinished Report.” Miss Murrell, the
Star
revealed, had been writing a paper on the dangers of nuclear waste, which had been close to completion at the time she was killed. With this news, a gentle exhalation was heard in many parts of liberal Britain. In Eliza Doolittle’s words, the suspicion now was that “they done the old woman in.” It was, after all, 1984.

THE ENEMY WITHIN

If ever a death had a context, Hilda Murrell’s did. Though 1984 might not have dawned on the total dystopia of Orwell’s fantasy, it was nevertheless a tense and unpleasant year, especially for those of a progressive or nervous cast of mind. In the weeks before the murder, news watchers had heard or read about a formal Russian protest concerning alleged American arms-control violations and a subsequent Soviet nuclear test in eastern Kazakhstan, events that were mere wraparounds for the news that on February 9, the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, Yuri Andropov, had died after only fifteen months on the job and been replaced by another Politburo geriatric, Konstantin Chernenko. On the day of the murder itself, March 21, a Soviet submarine crashed into an American warship off the coast of Japan.