Who was Daniel Morgan?
Daniel Morgan, 37, was a private detective based in south London. Together with his business partner Jonathan Rees, he ran an agency called Southern Investigations. Morgan had some police contacts, and his work was mainly low-level. He had a wife and two children.
On 10 March 1987 he went for a drink at the Golden Lion pub in Sydenham, south London. Later he was found dead in the pub car park, with an axe embedded in his head. Two sticky plaster strips had been wrapped around the axe handle to prevent fingerprint evidence from being left behind.
How did the first police investigation go?
The Metropolitan police now accept it was blighted by corruption. One bizarre feature was that a detective called Sid Fillery worked on the first murder investigation. He had close ties to Rees, and he went on to replace Morgan at Southern Investigations.
A report for the Metropolitan Police Authority, the body that used to oversee the Met, said: “In the following months there were rumours and allegations of high-level police corruption and masonic links surrounding the investigation but no charges resulted.”
Was anyone convicted of the murder?
No, despite five police investigations, the last collapsing in 2011.
In 2017 four men targeted by the Met sued the force in the high court alleging malicious prosecution. Among them were Rees and his brothers-in-law, Glenn Vian, and his brother Garry. They denied charges of murder. Those three lost their case against the Met but won an appeal in 2018 and were awarded £414,000 between them. The fourth man, Fillery, accused of perverting the course of justice, won part of his claim. He left the Met in 1988.
Why is the case still in the news?
Morgan’s brother Alastair quickly became suspicious about the police. He has spearheaded what has become a 34-year campaign for the truth. In 2017 he told the Guardian: “I’ve been in the wilderness. It has been horribly frustrating and painful for decades.”
Bit by bit the Met has accepted there were serious problems in the case, so much so that at the 2017 high court hearing the force said: “It is right to acknowledge that the murder, and the associated corruption, has shocked the conscience of the nation from the very top.”
Morgan says the claims of corruption have never been properly looked into and no one has been held to account.
How do News International and the Murdoch empire come into this?
Rees carried out a lot of work for the News of the World (NoW) as well as other media outlets. In one year the NoW paid him £150,000. Rees’s main point of contact was Alex Marunchak, once the Sunday tabloid’s star crime writer, who became an executive. He denies any wrongdoing.
A witness told detectives that Morgan was in discussions with the NoW to sell a story about police corruption shortly before his death.
News UK, the company that owns Murdoch’s British newspapers, declined to comment about its actions or those of people working for it.
Why was Morgan murdered?
Theories have included a business dispute, and in 2007 the Met said the motive was probably that Morgan “was about to expose a south London drugs network possibly involving corrupt police officers”. In 2013 the then home secretary, Theresa May, was concerned about the lingering claims and set up an inquiry.
According to the inquiry panel’s website, it has been examining “police involvement in Daniel Morgan’s murder; the role played by police corruption in protecting those responsible for the murder from being brought to justice; and the failure to confront that corruption”.
It was also looking into “the incidence of connections between private investigators, police officers and journalists at the News of the World and other parts of the media, and alleged corruption involved in the linkages between them”.
Why is there a new row?
Eight years on, the report was expected to be published on Monday 24 May. But the home secretary, Priti Patel, has told the inquiry she must see the report first and review its contents before it can be made public.
The Home Office says Patel has the right to review the report before publication. The Morgan family and the panel say she is wrong and that an agreement signed in 2013 when the panel was set up limit the home secretary’s role to receiving the report and laying it before parliament.
The panel now has to decide whether or not it stands firm. Legal action is possible, but for now the report is delayed again. And those who murdered Morgan remain free.
Could this be any more complicated?
Yes it could. One of Morgan’s police contacts was a detective called Alan Holmes. By the summer of 1987 he was a crucial witness in a corruption investigation into a senior Met officer. Holmes was found shot dead in what was classified as a suicide four months after Morgan’s killing.
• This article was amended on 20 May 2021 to note that Jonathan Rees, Glenn Vian and Garry Vian won an appeal against the 2017 high court ruling and were awarded damages against the Met.
