Early spring of 1987 would feature the heinous slaughter of a private investigator in England, a crime which still resonates throughout the United Kingdom due to its purported association with blatant police and media corruption.
Thirty-seven-year-old Daniel Morgan, originally born in Singapore to Welsh parents, moved to London with his wife sometime in the late 1970s. Though he had initially studied at an agricultural college with a view to going into farming, in the end, his penchant for investigation and his excellent memory eventually led him to open his own private detective firm, called Southern Investigations, in Thornton Heath, London in 1983.
Daniel’s partner at the agency was another investigator by the name of Jonathan Rees. On the evening of March 10th, 1987, the two men were talking and having a drink at the Golden Lion pub in Syndenham. According to Rees, he exited the pub at quarter to nine, and left Daniel Morgan sitting at a table writing notes on a piece of paper.
Later that night, people leaving the Golden Lion witnessed the aftermath of a grisly attack: the body of Daniel Morgan lay next to his car in the pub’s parking lot. The victim had been savagely smashed in the head several times with an axe; the weapon remained at the scene, still embedded in Daniel’s face. The handle of the implement, chillingly, had been wrapped in adhesive bandages, as though the killer had wanted to make sure of having a reliably firm grip as he swung the axe at his intended target.
Though Daniel’s Rolex watch was discovered to be missing, robbery was almost immediately ruled out as a motive, for about one-thousand pounds in cash was still in the pocket of the victim’s jacket, and his credit cards remained in his wallet. Interestingly, though, a pocket of Daniel’s pants had been torn away, leading some investigators to suspect that something besides money had been stolen, perhaps the notes that Jonathan Rees had claimed Daniel was writing.
From the beginning of the inquiry, though, it definitely appeared as though something was amiss. Jonathan Rees, being Daniel’s business partner as well as the last person to have seen Daniel alive, was an obvious suspect in his brutal murder, and was duly taken to the nearby Catford police station by Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery. But Fillery, as it happened, was close friends with Rees; in fact, both men had been drinking together at the Golden Lion pub on the night prior to Daniel Morgan’s murder, and Fillery, who had been working secretly for Southern Investigations for a time, eventually became Rees’s partner at the agency after retiring from the Metropolitan Police on medical grounds.
Not only that, but Daniel’s brother Alastair later alleged that when he arrived at the Golden Lion on the morning following the homicide, the area had not been secured or cordoned off. Further, it did not appear that officers at the Catford police station made any attempt to seize the vehicle or clothing of supposed suspect Jonathan Rees in order to obtain forensic evidence.
It began to appear as though Daniel had been murdered for knowing too much, and indeed, there was much speculation going around that he had been looking into police involvement in drug trafficking, robbery, and other crimes when he was killed. A few weeks after his death, six men were taken into custody for the alleged murder conspiracy, including Jonathan Rees, Sid Fillery, Rees’s brothers-in-law Glen and Garry Vian, and two Metropolitan police officers.
According to Kevin Lennon, the bookkeeper at Southern Investigations, Jonathan Rees had stated that he wanted to oust Daniel Morgan from the business, and that he was reportedly first talking with police officers in order to have Daniel framed and arrested for drinking and driving. This plot apparently didn’t work out, though, at which point Rees then supposedly began asking about having his partner murdered. Both Rees and Fillery denied any involvement in the slaying of Daniel Morgan, and though Rees and others would eventually be charged, there was insufficient evidence to secure an indictment against anyone.
Over the ensuing years, several more inquiries into the case would be performed that would expose some unbelievably shady dealings between the police and the tabloid media. It eventually came to light, for example, that not only had Jonathan Rees conspired to plant cocaine on a woman involved in a nasty custody battle—a crime for which he served a seven-year prison sentence for perverting the course of justice—but that he had been drawing a salary of approximately one-hundred-fifty-thousand pounds per year from the News of the World tabloid for supplying the editor with scandalous information about politicians, royals, and celebrities obtained from his numerous police connections and criminal informants; much of this information, naturally, had been acquired using illegal means.
After another investigation into the murder collapsed in 2011, an independent inquiry was opened in 2013 by then Home Secretary Theresa May. In 2014, Rees and two other suspects sued the Metropolitan Police for four million pounds, claiming that the continued pursuit of them as conspirators in the murder was essentially harassment. At this hearing, however, officers claimed that they had sufficient reason to believe that Rees had conspired with Sid Fillery to hire Glen and Garry Vian to kill Daniel Morgan to keep him from speaking out about the police corruption he had uncovered. Another man, James Cook, was also named by Metropolitan Police officers as the purported getaway driver.
This lawsuit was settled in 2017, with Sid Fillery receiving twenty-five-thousand pounds in damages, but Rees, Cook, and the Vian brothers receiving nothing. They filed an appeal in 2018, but there has been no further news since that time.
The murder of Daniel Morgan remains officially unsolved, though his brother Alastair has been continuing to press for further probes into the homicide case and the alleged police corruption that engendered it.
Crime Immemorial 