It looked, to the man in the car park of the Golden Lion that dark March
night, as though a smartly dressed drunk, wearing one of those joke ties that
sticks out at right angles from the shirt, had collapsed beside his BMW after a
vodka-and-tonic too far. The man was not moving and something was sticking up
from his head at a crazy angle.
But it was no tie. It was a Chinese-made Diamond Brand axe, one of thousands
imported every year and selling in hardware stores for £4.50. Its handle
was taped with Elastoplast - to hide any traces of fingerprints - and it was
embedded in the skull of a young private detective as far as the blade would go.
More than seven years have passed since the gruesome discovery of Daniel
Morgan’s body. No one has ever been convicted of his murder but now the
extraordinary circumstances surrounding his death are due to come under fresh
scrutiny.
Daniel Morgan was born in Singapore in 1949. His father, an Arnhem veteran, was
an army officer and Daniel grew up in Gwent in Wales. As a child, he spent time
in hospital because of a club foot but it did not prevent him from being an
active young man, a keen rugby player and angler. He attended agricultural
college in Gwent and then worked as a salesman in Denmark. After returning to
England, he found work as a courier for European tourists but it bored him. He
liked excitement. The job that seemed to offer it was that of private detective.
Originally he worked for a large south London firm before setting up his own
company, Southern Investigations, on April 19, 1984, in Thornton Heath High
Street, south London, with another private detective, Jonathon Rees, as his
partner. He loved the work and was aided by a remarkable memory that, for
instance, allowed him to recall a car registration number for weeks or even
months.
Daniel Morgan had his successes: he had tracked down an international fraudster
at the Hilton Hotel for the Bank of Australia. He enjoyed the adrenalin that
came from a job with risks and tensions and he was financially successful,
owning a BMW, an Austin Healey 3000 and a Jaguar and providing for his wife and
two children.
But one tension that was becoming obvious was between him and Jonathon Rees.
Rees had very close contacts with police officers in the area, including a
detective sergeant Sid Fillery. “Rees was one of those people who really wanted
to be a policeman,” said one of his former colleagues, Malcolm Webb, a plain
talker with a bailiff’s build who now runs his own successful bailiff agency in
Croydon. “He dressed like a policeman and he liked going for drinks with them.
Daniel was the opposite, he didn’t think too much of the police, to put it
mildly.”
The work on the bailiff front was regular even in the eighties and there was
also the detective work, mainly domestic in nature. But there were other, more
mundane, jobs. One of these was collecting the takings from the Belmont Car
Auction in Charlton, just south of the river, and depositing them in the bank
night safe.
Now the Belmont Car Auction site is on a bleak stretch of industrial estate. The
firm’s attitude to anyone who tries any funny business is clear. A ‘Smile - you
are on video’ poster is displayed prominently inside the office and outside
another sign suggests ‘Warning: when these premises are closed, dogs are on the
loose’ (to which a local wag has added ‘bollocks’).
The takings one day in 1987 were £18,280. Jonathon Rees had the task of
depositing the cash. As the coroner’s court heard later, he took the money to
the bank only to find the night deposit box jammed shut. He was attacked outside
his home and the cash stolen.
But Southern Investigations soon had something more substantial to concern them.
On the night of March 10, Daniel Morgan and Jonathon Rees met up in the bar of
the Golden Lion, Sydenham, planning to meet a friend of Rees called Paul
Goodridge, a massively built man who had worked as a showbusiness bodyguard.
The Golden Lion is a comfortable family-style pub, no spit-and-sawdust affair,
the kind that does hot meals and is used both by locals and office-workers in
the area. Goodridge never appeared and Rees drove off, making calls on his car
phone as he went.
Daniel Morgan finished his drink, probably a spritzer, and went into the car
park where someone delivered a number of blows to his skull. The first blow
rendered him unconscious, which is why there were no signs of a struggle. A low
wall at the back of the car park affords an easy escape route if the killer did
not want to be seen driving off.
Private eyes make many enemies. It is the nature of their business that they
encounter people at the sharpest points in their lives. Morgan was, according to
Malcolm Webb, not the most tactful of men and did not back down from a
confrontation. So one obvious line of inquiry was his work and anyone whose cage
he might have rattled.
At the subsequent inquest, Rees said that Morgan made passes at women clients or
wives of clients. He had had at least one affair. Could there be a jealous
husband or boyfriend on the scene? He was also supposedly due to be interviewed
by West Yorkshire police about a fraud he had uncovered. Was there a link there?
Another story, albeit an unsubstantiated one, had it that he had been watching
Colombian cocaine dealers on behalf of a public figure whose daughter had become
dependent on the drug. Had they - if they existed - been unhappy at the
attention? There were stories, too, of enemies he had made in Denmark and Malta.
Then there was a south London gangster from whom Morgan had repossessed a car
and who had apparently phoned the office threatening that his legs would be
broken. Or could it even have been the rather more mundane business of a robber
attacking him for his wallet? The job of carrying out the investigation fell to
Douglas Campbell, an experienced and respected detective. Daniel’s older
brother, Alastair, who had been working at the time as a window cleaner in
Hampshire, went to the investigation headquarters at Sydenham police station
where he was asked by a detective what he had been doing at the time of the
murder: “I told him I had been at a party with about a dozen friends.
Ironically, I had actually been playing Trivial Pursuit at the moment my brother
had been killed. The tone of the interview shocked me. Having barely come to
terms with the fact that my brother was dead, I was totally unprepared for being
treated as a suspect.” It was not the only time that Alastair Morgan was to have
his doubts about the way the inquiry was going. “From the very outset, it seemed
to me that a lot of red herrings had been placed in the path of the murder
squad.”
But gradually the theories were discarded. The mugging was discounted: an axe
was not the typical mugger’s tool and few street robbers advance beyond a poke
in the ribs with a knife when trying to extract money from their victims.
In addition, Daniel Morgan, a tough-looking customer and experienced private
eye, was hardly the typical target. His £800 Rolex watch was missing but
£1,000, which he had collected from clients earlier in the day, was found
in his pocket.
Then in April, just weeks after the body had been found, six people were
arrested for questioning in connection with the murder, three of them police
officers. One was Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery; the others were Alan Purvis
and Peter Foley, who also knew Rees. There were no charges and all six were
released. The investigation continued.
A year later, the inquest was finally held at Southwark coroner’s court. It was
an explosive event as staff from Southern Investigations were called to give
evidence. Kevin Lennon, who had worked there as an accountant, told the inquest
that he had watched the relationship between Rees and Morgan deteriorate.
Rees disliked Morgan, he said, because of his unkempt appearance, his
garrulousness and the fact that he tried to seduce the women clients whose
divorce cases the firm was handling. He claimed at the inquest that Rees had
thought of arranging for Morgan to be arrested by his friends at Catford police
station for drunk driving, which would mean that he would lose his private
investigator’s licence and would have to leave the firm. Lennon told the court
that around six months before the killing, Rees had told him that he had found
the perfect solution to the problem and had said: “My mates . . . are going to
arrange it.”
The inquest was also told by Michael Thorn of Belmont Car Auction that he believed
that the robbery in which Rees had lost the takings was a ‘sham’.
Giving evidence himself, Rees was adamant that he had no knowledge of what had
happened to his erstwhile partner. He hotly disputed Lennon’s allegations. Asked
by his counsel, Julian Nutter, if he murdered Daniel Morgan, he replied: “I did
not.” At the end of the inquest, which returned a verdict of unlawful killing,
the coroner Sir Montague Levine said the case “left lots of room for much
disquiet”.
And he added: “In all the evidence, over the two weeks, it must be said here and
now that there has not been one single forensic shred of evidence to link
anybody who gave evidence in this court with the killing of Daniel Morgan. No
blood, no fibres, no fingerprints.”
In August 1988, Daniel Morgan’s body was finally released for burial at
Beckenham cemetery; cremation was not an option in case the body needed to be
exhumed for forensic examination.
It seemed the murder hunt had gone cold. But Alastair Morgan had decided to
visit the Complaints Investigation Branch of Scotland Yard to express his
concerns. In July 1988, the Police Complaints Authority announced that it was
conducting an inquiry into the handling of the case and the murder
investigation itself. Hampshire police were to handle it. The force had a
reputation for thoroughness. Could they unlock the closed doors?
The investigation, which was to cost more than £1 million and to take more
than 1,600 statements, continued. In February 1989, three people were arrested
for the murder: Paul Goodridge; his then girlfriend, Jean Wisden; and Jonathon
Rees. The Morgan family heard the news on television. A committal date was set
for May. But shortly afterwards all charges were dropped. In April of this year,
the police officers Alan Purvis and Peter Foley received substantial damages in
an out-of-court settlement from the Metropolitan Police for false imprisonment.
“The officers have spent the last seven years living under a cloud since they
were unreasonably accused of killing Daniel Morgan in a vicious attack with an
axe,” said their solicitor, Clive Howard. “Money alone cannot compensate them for
what they have suffered. Every day and every year has been a tortuous trial.”
They have been tortuous times, too, for Morgan's family. “I have to say that I
feel both inquiries have been completely mishandled,” says Alastair Morgan. “The
whole thing has been a black farce. I'm glad that DCs Foley and Purvis have been
vindicated. The police complaints procedure is a joke. The official machinery
has swept an appallingly brutal and cynical crime out of sight. But, despite all
that, I still hope that one day whoever killed Daniel will be brought to
justice.”
Now the case could find itself back in the public eye once again. Rees and
Goodridge are suing Hampshire and the Metropolitan Police in connection with
their arrest. The case is due, according to Hampshire police, to be heard next
spring. Both sides have been preparing their cases.
Pressure for a deeper investigation is coming from other quarters. Last month,
Chris Smith, Alastair Morgan’s MP, wrote to the Home Secetray calling for the
case to be reopened. “There are some very serious question marks over this
case,” said Chris Smith. “I felt it would be best if the Home Secretary cleared
the air.”
June Tweedie, the barrister who represented the Morgan family at the inquest
said yesterday that she too would welcome the re-opening of a case which she
found deeply disturbing.
The police officers who investigated the case, whether from Hampshire or the
Metropolitan Police, are unwilling to discuss it, saying that they cannot
comment because of the civil action. The others who were arrested are similarly
reluctant. Paul Goodridge said: “I didn't know why I was arrested. The real
culprit is laughing somewhere.”
When we telephoned Jonathon Rees, who still works for Southern Investigations, a
man who would not identify himself rang back and told us that we were harassing
him and we would be reported to ‘the Press Council’.
When we visited Southern Investigations’ new offices at 69 Thornton Heath High
Street, a man who would not identify himself came down and handed us a letter
from Rees which read: ‘As you are no doubt aware, a matter which you wish to
discuss is currently before the courts and is in the hands of my solicitor. I
have just contacted them and am advised that it is not in my interest to enter
into any form of discussion with you. I hope this does not cause you too much
inconvenience and it may be at some future date that I can discuss the matter
with you. However, I am sure you will understand that I must follow my
solicitor’s advice.’
At Belmont Car Auction, there is a similar reluctance. Belmont’s Dave Chapman
said: ‘I don't want to hear about it ever again. Ever.’
There are miscarriages of justice that we are familiar with. People locked up
for years for crimes they did not commit. There are other miscarriages where no
one is punished for a crime they did commit. Daniel Morgan’s murder is one such
case and, as has been said in a different context, the dead have no automatic
right of appeal.
Is the real culprit laughing out there somewhere? Or did the joke end when that
‘tie’ turned out to be a bloody axe? The Morgan family have not given up hope
that one day they will know the answer.
