As the Channel 4 true-crime series finishes, Byline Times looks at the extraordinary five police investigations into the only Metropolitan Police officer the Morgan family ever trusted
The recent Channel 4 series Murder in the Car Park has reawakened interest in one of the UK’s biggest-ever murder investigations.
Thirty-three years after his death, the family of Daniel Morgan has given up hoping that anyone will ever be brought to justice. But they are now also beginning to despair that even the Government’s own official inquiry will get anywhere.
The Daniel Morgan Panel was set up by Theresa May in 2013. A panel fell short of the judicial inquiry with the power to hear witnesses under oath that the family wanted, but they were assured that the panel would be given “exceptional and full disclosure” and would report “within 12 months of documents being made available”.
But sources close to the panel now say that “it was stillborn” and “they never got access to the information they needed”. It is no surprise that the panel’s work has been subject to repeated delay.
In December 2015, The Independent reported that the inquiry would be completed “late next year”. Late next year came and went and, in January 2017, the BBC said that it was “now unlikely to finish before autumn 2017”.
By November 2017, things were slipping further and the Morgan family were told that the panel would “finally present its findings next year”. In May 2018, the line had changed to: “The panel hopes to complete drafting its report in 2018 before submitting it to the Home Secretary in 2019.”
Last week, we were told that the Metropolitan Police had just discovered a further 580 crates of evidence and that the report’s delivery date would now be spring 2021. By then, it will be eight years and counting since the panel was set up.
Failures of Disclosure
Daniel Morgan was the partner of a man called Jonathan Rees in Southern Investigations detective agency in south London.
They made a good living by, amongst other things, selling tip-offs and crime stories from local police to Fleet Street newspapers – with the News of the World soon to become their biggest client.
A year after Morgan’s murder in March 1987, his position at the agency was taken by recently retired police officer Sid Fillery.
In April 2008, Rees, Glenn Vian, Garry Vian and Jimmy Cook were charged with Morgan’s murder, whilst Fillery was charged with perverting the course of justice. Within a year, the case began to run into the sand as, one by one, key supergrass witnesses were discredited.
Daniel Morgan Murder No Closer to Justice But Corruption Continues its Poisonous Spread
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The prosecution was finally abandoned in March 2011 when boxes of additional evidence were discovered in Met Police storerooms.
There had been clear failures of police disclosure and the judge ruled that the suspects no longer had any prospect of a fair trial. Senior Met officers apologised to the Morgan family for “the repeated failure by the MPS over many years… to accept that corruption played a major part in failing to bring those responsible to justice”.
The family believes that it was fear about the extent of corruption that might be revealed which explains the Met’s apparent reluctance to disclose material to either the court case or the panel.
The Silence of Dave Cook
However, the Met certainly haven’t been idle in other respects.
The Senior Investigating Officer in the case, ex-Detective Chief Superintendent Dave Cook, was the only Metropolitan Police officer the Morgan family felt able to trust – and the police have investigated him five times over his handling of the Morgan inquiry.
Each time he has been cleared, but the Morgan family wonders whether those investigations were part of an attempt to make him a scapegoat, keep him quiet, cover-up the Met corruption, delay publication of the panel’s report or a combination of all four.
Certainly, the numerous inquiries into Cook raised questions from the off. His house was raided by the police in January 2012 – on the very day that he was due to be granted ‘core participant’ status in the Leveson Inquiry into illegal activity by the press. Leveson heard extensive evidence about the questionable relationship between News International (now News UK) and both Southern Investigations and the Metropolitan Police. As a criminal suspect, Cook was denied core status but Jacqui Hames, his wife at the time, delivered powerful testimony that she and Cook had been spied upon by people using vans linked to News International.
When confronted about why the couple was apparently under surveillance, the former News of the World Editor Rebekah Brooks offered the rather lame explanation that the newspaper believed the pair were having an affair. They were, of course, having rather more than an affair – they had been married for four years by then and had two children.
Hames’ own analysis was rather more incisive. She told the inquiry: “I believe that the real reason for the News of the World placing us under surveillance was that suspects in the Daniel Morgan murder inquiry were using their association with a powerful and well-resourced newspaper to try to intimidate us and so attempt to subvert the investigation.”
Hames also revealed that, in July 2002 – a week or so before the News of the World vans began appearing outside her family home – phone hacker Glenn Mulcaire had managed to obtain personal and professional details and phone numbers for both her and her husband. What’s worse, the Met had known about this since 2006 but somehow failed to tell her until 2011.
It may have come as something of a relief to both News International and the Met that, without core participant status, Cook wasn’t able to give evidence to the Leveson Inquiry to back-up his wife’s testimony. It is also worth remembering that Cook was only arreste