Daniel Morgan was murdered. Now it seems justice is dead too
After five police investigations, the latest of which has just ground to a halt, a case awash with clues and motives is no nearer being solved
It will be 20 years tomorrow since the release, following their successful appeal at the Old Bailey, of the Birmingham Six, the victims of one of the gravest of miscarriage of justice cases of our times. But another scandalous miscarriage of justice case, also stretching over nearly a quarter of a century, reached its conclusion in the same court last Friday and it did not involve anyone serving a single day of a jail sentence.
Why was Daniel Morgan killed?
The defence, had the case ever gone to trial, would have suggested that there were many people with a motive to bump off a busy private eye.
But his brother believes very strongly that it was not because of anything Daniel Morgan had done, but because of something much more significant that he was about to do. "Daniel died because he had found out about, and was going to expose, an incident of serious police corruption," wrote Alastair in a letter to his MP back in the early 1990s as he grew increasingly angry at the way his efforts to keep the investigation alive were being swatted aside. He complained about the response he received to his requests for action: "The Metropolitan police were silent, evasive, dishonest, arrogant, nonchalant, patronising and insolent towards both myself and my mother as we expressed our profound alarm at what was becoming clear to us." His fears proved all too prescient. Why were they not taken seriously at the time?
There is little doubt that the detectives involved in the final investigation desperately wanted to solve the case. For a while the inquiry headquarters was abuzz with optimism and diligence. It appeared that members of the criminal underworld were coming up with vital information that would lead the police to the murderers. Six people were eventually charged. But over the past two years the case has gradually fallen apart.
On Friday, after the collapse of the case, Detective Chief Superintendent Hamish Campbell expressed his regrets to the Morgan family. The outcome was "wholly regrettable," he said. "This current investigation has identified, ever more clearly, how the initial inquiry failed the family and wider public. It is quite apparent that police corruption was a debilitating factor in that investigation...Significant changes have occurred since that time; nevertheless, there are important issues which we need to examine now in order to understand what led to today's decision." There are indeed.
At the end of the session, a woman from the audience introduced herself to me. She turned out to be Jane Royds, the sister of Daniel Morgan. She and her family felt that same sense of horror as the relatives of those wrongly convicted. A death of justice.
So was this just a case of a bungled investigation, the product of a police force still emerging from its dark and dodgy era?
No.
There were subsequent failures to follow leads – failures, too, by the Police Complaints Authority (now the Independent Police Complaints Commission) whose job it was to investigate those whom Daniel Morgan was seeking to expose. There will always be unsolved murders, but here was a case crying out for a proper investigation the moment a passer-by spotted Daniel Morgan's body on the ground.
Everyone talks after disasters such as this of "lessons to be learned". I asked Alastair Morgan what he thought those lessons were. "Right at the start," he said, "written in huge letters, as it were, was 'Corruption Here', yet no one would accept it, no one would listen, there was this blanket of denial." And because the police refused to accept that there were lies and cover-ups in train, the vital moments passed. It was the arrogance of power, written in huge letters.
Alastair Morgan remarked laconically on Friday that the only hope now for the murderers to end up in jail would be if one of them "finds God".
No investigation of a murder which was bursting with clues and motives should ever need divine intervention..
A young, energetic private eye called Daniel Morgan was found with an axe embedded to the hilt in the side of his face in the car park of a south London pub on 10 March, 1987. Since then there have been no fewer than five police investigations into his death but no one has ever been convicted of his murder.
The fifth of those inquiries juddered to a halt in court 14 of the Old Bailey on Friday morning when the judge accepted the admission of prosecution counsel, Nicholas Hilliard QC, that to proceed with the trial of the three men charged with the murder would be "oppressive" and "unfair."
In the place where the jury normally sits were members of Morgan's family: his elderly mother, his widow, his daughter, his sister and his brother, Alastair. They watched in silence and in resignation as the judge, Mr Justice Maddison, listened to the formal discontinuation of the case.
The defence, had the case ever gone to trial, would have suggested that there were many people with a motive to bump off a busy private eye.
But his brother believes very strongly that it was not because of anything Daniel Morgan had done, but because of something much more significant that he was about to do. "Daniel died because he had found out about, and was going to expose, an incident of serious police corruption," wrote Alastair in a letter to his MP back in the early 1990s as he grew increasingly angry at the way his efforts to keep the investigation alive were being swatted aside. He complained about the response he received to his requests for action: "The Metropolitan police were silent, evasive, dishonest, arrogant, nonchalant, patronising and insolent towards both myself and my mother as we expressed our profound alarm at what was becoming clear to us." His fears proved all too prescient. Why were they not taken seriously at the time?
Alastair Morgan went on snapping at the heels of the authorities and was rewarded, on some occasions, with an honourable response from politicians and police officers. Hope was kindled. Flick through the press cuttings over the years and you will see a dozen false dawns.
Cold cases get neatly solved in television series.
As the detectives who have tried to nail the killers of Stephen Lawrence have discovered over the years, in real life it is never quite so simple. During the past few months the grim unravelling of the case has been taking place unreported because of contempt orders within the Old Bailey. It has been painfully slow.
A couple of years ago at the literary festival in Hay-on-Wye I was interviewing the victim of a more conventional miscarriage of justice, Michael O'Brien, who had written a book about being falsely imprisoned for the murder of a Cardiff newsagent.
The foreword to the book was written by the lawyer Gareth Peirce, who has worked on countless such cases. In it she said: "I used to find the words 'miscarriage of justice' inadequate to describe the horror of wrongful conviction. The phrase implied to me an accident, and wrongful convictions can never be written off as accidental.Later, however, I realised that the description, of course, meant 'death', and this is exactly right – a total death of justice."
So was this just a case of a bungled investigation, the product of a police force still emerging from its dark and dodgy era?
No.
There were subsequent failures to follow leads – failures, too, by the Police Complaints Authority (now the Independent Police Complaints Commission) whose job it was to investigate those whom Daniel Morgan was seeking to expose. There will always be unsolved murders, but here was a case crying out for a proper investigation the moment a passer-by spotted Daniel Morgan's body on the ground.
Everyone talks after disasters such as this of "lessons to be learned". I asked Alastair Morgan what he thought those lessons were. "Right at the start," he said, "written in huge letters, as it were, was 'Corruption Here', yet no one would accept it, no one would listen, there was this blanket of denial." And because the police refused to accept that there were lies and cover-ups in train, the vital moments passed. It was the arrogance of power, written in huge letters.
Earlier this month in Coleraine crown court, another murder case reached its conlusion. It involved a couple, Colin Howell and Hazel Stewart, who had murdered their partners and tried to make it look like suicide. For 19 years Howell lived with what he had done but, eventually, was so tormented by it that he confessed.
No investigation of a murder which was bursting with clues and motives should ever need divine intervention..
