Forty years on from the tragic murder of Carol Morgan, police have unearthed crucial evidence needed to convict her cruel husband who was the mastermind behind her death.
Carol, who was 36 at the time of her death, was bludgeoned to death on August 13 1981 in the Bedfordshire shop she owned with her husband, Allen Morgan. It was later revealed her husband paid a hitman to kill his wife, reports the Mirror.
Morgan spent years believing he’d evaded justice, and his once-sold alibi crumbled in 2018 when a team of detectives reopened the case.
It took the relentless dedication of more than 80 officers who worked around the clock for six years to uncover the truth. After a crucial witness statement, Morgan, now 74, was sentenced to life in prison last summer, with a minimum term of 22 years.#
Within the major crime unit, cold cases are reviewed by a dedicated team every few years. When a detective came across Carol’s heartbreaking case, he immediately “knew it was a runner”, according to DC Denise Brown. She added: “We could see from Allen’s timeline that there were holes and that it just didn’t make sense. It needed to be explored. We needed contradictions that went against what Allen said.”
As seen in ITV’s The Real Unforgotten, DC Brown, who appears in the new documentary, spearheaded the interview strategy, which saw them question both Morgan and his new wife Margaret Morgan, 75. It is believed the two were having an affair for a year before Carol’s brutal death, and just two weeks after her murder, his lover had moved in.
Authorities returned to every house they originally door knocked during the 1981 investigation in hope of finding new evidence. The force found what they were looking for when they landed at Jane Bunting’s home.
Despite no longer living there, her mum did, and she answered the door and simply stated: “My Jane’s been waiting 40 years for you to speak to her.” Margaret had previously been a teacher for expelled students and mentored Jane, with the pair forming a friendship – so much so that when Margaret’s affair with Morgan came to light, she briefly moved in with the Bunting family.
Jane, 60, had been keeping a secret for all these years, with police suspecting she was too afraid to speak out as a then-17-year-old woman in such a tight-knit community. A few months before the fatal night, she overheard an “appalling” conversation in the pub between Morgan and her ex-boyfriend that stayed with her.
He’d asked if he knew anyone who could kill, with Morgan saying: “’I hate Carol’, ‘I don’t want to be married to her’, ‘I wish she’d die’, ‘Wouldn’t an accident be nice?’.” The Morgans had spiralling debts, and Carol had left everything to her husband in her will.
Meanwhile, the shop had a life insurance policy linked to it. “There wasn’t hard evidence, there wasn’t CCTV, we’d been slowly building a circumstantial case and so when Jane came along, that was the final thing for us. It put that piece of the jigsaw in place,” DC Brown explained.
Following a trial at Luton Crown Court, Morgan was found guilty of conspiring to murder, but Margaret Morgan was found not guilty of the same offence.
“It’s the truth that gets revealed in these investigations and allowing loved ones to hear that and find some measure of peace and healing in that,” DC Brown, who revealed the team keeps Carol’s photo on a board in their office, said. “It’s easy to remember him, and easy to forget Carol. Our focus is always on her.”
*The Real Unforgotten airs 18th February, 9pm on ITV1 & ITVX. Both episodes will drop on ITVX on February 18th. The second episode will air on ITV1, 25th February.
If you have information on the murder of Carol Morgan, you can call 101 and quote in relation to ‘Operation Markdown.’