Her energy and organisational flair proved assets during World War II in her voluntary work for the care and resettlement of refugee children in Shropshire foster homes and schools, making lifelong friends of some of those she helped.
Her fund-raising efforts included arranging recitals in Shrewsbury by such world-famous performers as the pianist Dame Myra Hess and violinist Jelly d'Arányi.
She sold roses to the Queen Mother and the Churchills and helped Vita Sackville-West design her White Garden at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent.
Walking, especially in hill country, was one of Murrell's favourite leisure activities from an early age; and she had a passion for mountaineering and even rock climbing until arthritis limited her in later life.
On her retirement in 1970, the rose business was sold, and she had time and resources to devote to emerging environmental problems and threats to Shrewsbury's rich architectural heritage.
After the 1979 US accident at Three Mile Island, she turned her attention to safety aspects, and homed in on the problem of radioactive waste, the disposal of which she concluded was the industry's Achilles' heel.
Murrell, now in her late 70s, wrote a critique of it, which she developed into her submission "An Ordinary Citizen's View of Radioactive Waste Management" to the first formal planning inquiry into a nuclear power plant in Britain, the Sizewell B Pressurised Water Reactor in Suffolk.
She was abducted in her own car, a white Renault 5, which many witnesses reported seeing being driven erratically through the town and past the police station during the lunch hour.
[3] Hilda was the aunt of Commander Robert Green, Royal Navy (Retired), a former naval intelligence officer who was one of a handful of people privy to details of the sinking of the Argentine ship the General Belgrano, by the nuclear submarine HMS Conqueror during the 1982 Falklands War.
Dalyell raised the issue in the Commons again in June 1985,[6] having originally been prompted to take an interest in the murder by an anonymous phone call asking him to read an article by Judith Cook in the New Statesman of 9 November 1984, which discussed the case.
Her Times obituary, by Charles Sinker, ended: "Her close friends remember her as a fierce but fundamentally gentle warrior, a Bunyan-like soul on a lonely and constant quest for the real path of the spirit.
[9] In court, George admitted participating in the crime, but asserted that he had broken into the house with his brother, who had been responsible for the sexual assault and the killing.
[11] The Daily Telegraph quoted the investigating officer as saying "I told you so", but Tam Dalyell as saying it stretched the imagination to breaking point to suppose that the body, dumped on a Wednesday, could have lain undiscovered until the following Saturday, despite a search of the copse on the Thursday by a farmer and his dog: "The two would have had no problem finding a dead rabbit, let alone the body of Hilda Murrell".
Meanwhile, break-ins to my home in New Zealand and continuing interference with my phone and mail suggest that the British state security authorities fear what I might reveal about the case."
Grace, the 1988 novel by Maggie Gee, implicates the British secret state in its fictional parallel to the murder of Hilda Murrell.
Robert Green's book A Thorn in Their Side: The Hilda Murrell Murder was released in October 2011, which he claims, "provides enough new evidence, known to both prosecution and defence but not put to the jury or Appeal Court judges in 2006, to re-open the coroner's inquest into her death."