Book on the Hilda Murrell case published in Britain

In October of last year I blogged that Rob Green had written a book about the murder of his aunt Hilda Murrell. I suspect the book was available only in New Zealand then, but A Thorn in Their Side has now been published in Britain.

On Sunday the Observer reported that Michael Mansfield has "demanded a fresh police inquiry to establish what the British intelligence services knew about the murder of a prominent anti-nuclear campaigner".

And now there is an article on the Guardian website by Mansfield himself:

In the official version of her murder, Murrell was the victim of a demeaning and callous assault, abduction and murder by a young adolescent, on his own, without obvious motivation. 

The police version of the sequence of events is bizarre. On one and the same day, Hilda - having been assaulted in her home - is forced into her own car, driven through Shrewsbury in broad daylight past the police station and a number of witnesses, to a country lane some miles away. The car crashes into a verge with the driver's door jammed. The driver then exits via the passenger seat and takes Hilda with him, but not before she has retrieved the car keys and put them in her pocket. He assaults her again in a field, where she loses her hat and spectacles. She is then either dragged or pushed across a ploughed field over a fence into a copse where she is stabbed,although not fatally, and left to die of hypothermia. Her body was not found for two days. 

While DNA from the convicted man shows he was in Hilda's house, there are a huge number of other evidential matters that Rob Green has assembled which challenge the manner of this killing. Although many of them are not new, most have not been assembled in an intelligible format until now, and some have never been presented in court proceedings.

He concludes that until an independent inquiry takes place, the reader must be the judge.