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Peter Jukes, host of the hit Untold: The Daniel Morgan Murder podcast, looks at a recent damages claim and a further twist in this decades-long saga.
The murder of private detective Daniel Morgan in 1987, and the five ensuing murder investigations, has always been mired in a toxic combination of police corruption and media corruption.
In the weeks before he was killed, several witnesses allege that the 37-year-old Welsh private detective was trying to get the British press to publish a story of extensive police corruption involving senior officers in the Metropolitan Police and a major drug importation.
As documented in the book I co-authored with Daniel’s brother Alastair, Who Killed Daniel Morgan, some of those sources suggest he was in conversation with Rupert Murdoch’s bestselling News of the World. One source claimed he was working with DC Alan ‘Taffy’ Holmes on the police corruption story. Since our book was published, a close associate has come forward to say he saw Holmes and Daniel Morgan working together on such a story.
Holmes would die a violent death within six months of Daniel, in an apparent suicide.
In the months and years following the deaths and subsequent inquests, both cases have been subject to troubling misreporting.
With their extensive press connections, the murder suspects targeted the lead detectives on the first murder inquiry by trying to place salacious stories about them in the national newspapers. At the inquest into Daniel’s death in 1988, the coroner heard evidence that they were even considering planting drugs on the deputy senior investigating officer to discredit him.
For the next 20 years, Daniel’s former company, Southern Investigations, became a one-stop shop for the British tabloid press, providing confidential police reports, blagging personal details and hacking computers.
Last week, three of the murder suspects were awarded £414,000 in compensation for malicious prosecution after a key witness at the 2011 trial, Gary Eaton, was ruled to have produced inadmissible evidence. However, the misreporting continues, with the Daily Telegraph proclaiming that the Met Police “must pay three men after corrupt officer tried to frame them for axe murder”.
The Scapegoat
The police officer in question, former Detective Chief Superintendent Dave Cook, was the lead investigator on the last of the two investigations (Abelard 1 and 2) which resulted in the arrests in 2008.
The case eventually collapsed in March 2011 after one of the longest pre-trial hearings in modern history because of the impossibilities of disclosure. New boxes of evidence were continually being discovered and, with over one million exhibits plus two decades of police corruption, the judge concluded that there was no longer the possibility of a fair trial. This was a full year after Eaton’s evidence was excluded.
Meanwhile, Cook himself has been subject to no less than four police investigations that have effectively silenced him for the past seven years.
The charges – subsequently dropped – look like a mutually convenient excuse for both the Met Police and Murdoch to silence Cook before the Leveson Inquiry.
The first investigation was launched in early 2012 just as Cook was due to become a core participant and give crucial evidence to the Leveson Inquiry into press abuses, when News UK dumped thousands of emails on the team investigating phone hacking about payments to public officials.
Included in these emails was correspondence between Dave Cook and Sun crime correspondent Mike Sullivan about writing a book. Sullivan and Cook had worked together several times on the Daniel Morgan investigations with police approval.
The charges – subsequently dropped – look like a mutually convenient excuse for both the Met Police and Murdoch to silence Cook before the Leveson Inquiry. He would have plenty to say about what the former Prime Minister Gordon Brown described as the “criminal media nexus” around private detectives, corrupt police officers and the News of the World.
Of the other three investigations, Operation Megan investigated the claim that Cook coached his witness Gary Eaton to make false allegations. This was subject to a civil trial by Lord Justice Mitting in 2017 which led to last week’s damages award. But – for the same reasons he could not speak out at the Leveson Inquiry because of pending criminal investigations – Cook could not give evidence at that trial either.
In Cook’s absence, the allegations went undefended, despite the fact that the Met’s internal investigations team, the Department of Professional Standards (DPS), had already concluded by November 2016 that there was no evidence Eaton had been coached and judged there was no need for criminal pro