When Dai Morris was arrested on 20 March 2001, the police had little enough evidence upon which to hold him, let alone charge him with a multiple murder, and hope to make it stick. All the police knew for certain was what his cousin Eric Williams had told them, and this was circumstantial evidence at best.
Morris’ fingerprints were nowhere to be found in 9 Kelvin Road; neither was his DNA. An indistinct, bloody handprint discovered on the carpet in the living room was checked against his handprint, but two leading experts agreed later that it was not Morris’. The lack of clues left at the scene of what was considered to be a brutal spur-of-the-moment crime was unprecedented. The incredibly thorough clean-up operation to remove fingerprints and destroy DNA, including DNA in the waste traps removed from under the sink and bath, was attributed solely to Morris.
Detectives had deduced that the killer had removed blood-soaked clothes from the crime scene, but a Luminol test can detect traces of blood on clothes after many months – or even years – of repeated washing. Blood finds its way into stitching and into the soles of shoes, materials and fabrics which is virtually impossible to remove. Blood can even be detected in crevices and cracks in floorboards, and inside washing machines. An intensive forensic search of the flat that Morris shared with Jewell found no DNA or traces of blood belonging to any of the Kelvin Road victims.
For months after his arrest, almost up until four days before his trial began, the police were unable to prove that the broken neck-chain found in Mandy Power’s house belonged to Dai Morris. He was asked many times if he owned the gold neck-chain and just as often he denied that he did.
But Morris’ alibi to have spent the night of the murders in bed with Mandy Jewell quickly fell apart. Under intense police questioning, Jewell admitted that she had not, after all, gone home with Morris on the Saturday night before the murders. Neither, she said, did she open the door of her flat for him in the early hours of Sunday morning, countering another statement Morris had made. Finally, she admitted she had let him in that morning, but did not know at what time.
Following Jewell’s admission, Morris gave detectives an account of his movements after leaving the New Inn, which he insisted were true. He said he could not go to the flat he shared with Jewell because of an argument they had had in the pub. She was angry with him and he knew she would not welcome him home. Instead, he had decided to walk to his parents’ home in Gendros to spend the night there. He had a key to the house but had lost it, so that meant he would have to ‘knock his parents up’. But by the time he reached Llangyfelach roundabout, he was ‘getting soaked’ and realised he was in the wrong over the argument with Jewell. He changed his mind about going to his parents’ home, turned around and walked back to Jewell’s flat, arriving some time before 3.00 a.m. This meant that he had no alibi for the time of the murders.
The route Morris had taken, according to the prosecution, involved a 3.2-mile walk from the New Inn to the roundabout at Llangyfelach. A police officer completed the trip on foot in 55 minutes, which was much less than the time Morris said it had taken him to complete his journey.
In fact, neither the distance nor the time involved, as suggested by the police, were accurate. The distance between the New Inn and Jewell’s Rhyddwen Road flat measures 0.3 miles, while the further journey from the flat to the Llangyfelach roundabout adds another 3.2 miles. Adding the return journey back to the flat of 3.2 miles makes a total of 6.7 miles, more than double the distance suggested by the police; therefore, more than double the time. This meant that the police estimate of the time taken by Morris to walk from the New Inn to Llangyfelach roundabout and then back to the flat was grossly underestimated. And unlike the police officer walking the route, Morris was walking in near pitch-darkness and in no particular hurry. He had also consumed perhaps seven pints of lager, which probably would have slowed his progress, and taken shelter from periodic rain showers. As Morris’ defence barrister, Peter Rouch QC, would point out later, Morris had, according to the prosecution case, taken substantial quantities of amphetamines, and these too would also have a slowing effect. What all this meant was that Morris’ claim to have taken almost three hours to walk the distance was much closer to the time he said he had taken than the time the police proposed.
Twenty-four hours after Dai Morris’ arrest, the police were granted another 12 hours to continue questioning him. While Morris was being interrogated, detectives descended on Morris’ former home in Swansea. The house was searched thoroughly and stripped right back to the bricks and mortar. Carpets and furnishings were all removed for forensic examination. A neighbour, Maria Stephens, said: ‘They’ve stripped most of the house and taken the floorboards up, taken bags of whatever out of the house; they’ve been through the attic and everything.’ A number of black plastic bags containing a variety of items were removed from the house and taken away for forensic examination. Nothing even remotely connecting Dai Morris with the murders was found.
A kilometre away, a similar search was taking place in the home of Dai Morris’ elderly parents, Brian and Shirley. No evidence connecting him with the murders could be found there either, and the hunt moved on to a nearby wood after someone reported that something had been burnt there. The wood was also thoroughly searched. Yet again, nothing whatsoever was found to link Dai Morris to the murders.
Before the 12-hour extension ended on 21 March, the police applied for further time to continue questioning Morris. The roads to Swansea Magistrates Court were sealed off as Morris was again brought before the justices. After an hour-long session, a further period of 24 hours’ detention was granted. Even this extension proved insufficient for the police to gather enough – or any – evidence to charge Morris with the murders, and he was taken before the justices yet again when a further 24-hour detention period was obtained.
On 23 March, despite an almost total lack of evidence against him, David George Morris was formally charged with the murders of Mandy Power, her mother Doris Dawson, and Mandy’s daughters Katie and Emily. The following day, a special committal hearing was scheduled for Swansea Magistrates Court: the first step in sending Dai Morris for trial to Swansea Crown Court. Once again, roads leading to the court building were closed off. Morris arrived at 8.30 a.m. amidst tight security and was placed in a holding cell. Because he was a potential target for a revenge attack, all spectators attending the hearing were searched for weapons as they entered the courtroom.
At 10.00 a.m. sharp, the court proceedings commenced. The chairman of the bench was senior magistrate Howard Morgan JP. The Crown Prosecution Service was represented by solicitor Bryn Hurford, while David Hutchinson represented Morris. The accused was clean-shaven, his dark hair was short and neat; he wore a dark grey open-neck shirt and dark trousers. He spoke just once to confirm his name.
The proceedings lasted for just a few minutes. Morris was committed for trial at Swansea Crown Court and a preliminary hearing was set for 3 April. Reporting restrictions were not lifted. The media could report only basic facts: the accused’s name, address, age, occupation, the charges he faced, the identity of the court, the names of the magistrates, his legal representatives, whether or not bail and legal aid had been granted, and the fact of his committal for trial. After the short hearing, Mandy Power’s family issued a statement, which read: ‘Our family has endured almost twenty-one long and agonising months since the murders of Mam, Mandy, Katie and Emily to hear the news we have received today.’
This was all well and good and partially satisfied the public’s demand for justice, but the extent of the evidence against Morris at this time amounted to this: an uncorroborated statement made by Eric Williams that Morris said he had had sex with Mandy Power two days before the murders when he left in her house his neck-chain, and that he (Williams) had bought him a replacement neck-chain. There was no admission, DNA, fingerprints or any other evidence linking Morris to the crime. Yet all the publicity surrounding his arrest and committal for trial suggested that there was.
On 26 May 2001 it was announced that the trial would begin on 8 April 2002. Several Clydach villagers objected to the delay without realising that South Wales Police had yet to build a case about Morris to be sure of achieving a conviction. On 5 November 2001, the allegations of murder were formally put to Morris at a hearing in Swansea Crown Court to which he assertively replied: ‘Not guilty’.
Even if Morris’ denials about owning the broken neck-chain were proven to be untrue, detectives must have feared that if he genuinely had been intimately involved with Mandy Power, he might be able to come up with a reasonable explanation as to how the neck-chain was found at the crime scene – an explanation that a jury might accept. But South Wales Police detectives were not about to let the small matter of lack of evidence stand in their way. The pressure was on to find hard evidence linking Dai Morris to the crime and the search continued unabated.
In the absence of hard evidence, however, there was another, disarmingly simple option available to the detectives. When used to maximum effect, the technique is potentially shattering since it could make a totally innocent person appear to be guilty of a crime: it is called character assassination, and it was this practice that was used to devastating effect against Dai Morris. In his case the police did not have to prove that he had a bad character; he had already done that for himself by virtue of his long criminal record.
Aside from citing his criminal record, the police had a plethora of character witnesses to choose from. Dai Morris was not well liked in the village where he lived. Several witnesses who had given statements in the early days of the investigation were visited again. This time they were questioned even more closely about their recollections of the events leading up to the murders and, more specifically, about how these involved Dai Morris. By now, any memories about the night of the murders were almost two years old and therefore likely to be hazy. One of these witnesses was Mandy Jewell’s next-door neighbour, Janice Williams.
Janice Williams was a friend of Mandy Jewell and had known Mandy Power since they were teenagers. One of several conflicting statements she gave to investigating detectives provided the police with much of what they needed to build their case against Dai Morris. Williams had spent the afternoon and most of the evening before the murders with Jewell and Morris. Though broadly similar to Jewell’s and Morris’ accounts of their evening at the New Inn, it differed somewhat, and it was those differences that became a root cause of Dai Morris’ problems.
Janice Williams said that on the Saturday afternoon before the murders she and a man called Michael Randerson went to the Masons Arms pub in the small nearby village of Rhydypandy. At some point during the afternoon, Mandy Jewell and Dai Morris joined them there for a drink. Morris and Randerson did not usually get on, but they put up with one another on that day. After a while, Williams and Randerson said they were leaving to go and watch the televised Wales v. South Africa rugby match in the New Inn, Craig Cefn Parc – some mile and a half distant from the Masons Arms. Jewell and Morris spontaneously decided to join them, taking Jewell’s eight-year-old daughter Emma with them. The New Inn was packed with customers when they got there but they managed to find a table at the far end of the busy lounge bar.
Janice Williams told detectives that during the afternoon and evening Morris drank eight pints of lager, though this was almost certainly an exaggerated figure. He was dressed in a white Adidas T-shirt and jeans, or possibly jogging pants, she said. Most damagingly for Morris, she said he was wearing a heavy gold neck-chain similar to the one displayed in the murder publicity posters.
According to Janice Williams, after they had been in the pub for a short time Randerson announced that he was going to fetch his girlfriend, Fay Scott, and bring her back to the New Inn. After he left, Williams told Jewell and Morris that Fay Scott was a bit stuck-up. Morris took this as a challenge and made a bet that he could ‘pull her’, or words to that effect. When Randerson arrived back with his girlfriend, Dai Morris immediately turned on his charm. Morris was deemed to have won his bet when Scott wrote down her telephone number and handed it to him. If Randerson had disliked Morris before, now he truly despised him, and Jewell was humiliated. This humiliation soon turned to anger and a full-scale argument developed between the two men.
Janice Williams claimed in one of her statements that, in the course of their row, Morris began ‘slagging off’ Jewell’s friend Mandy Power, calling her ‘evil’, a ‘cow’ and ‘a bitch’. She said Morris grew increasingly angry whenever anyone, including Mandy Jewell, tried to defend Mandy Power’s character. ‘The more I tried to calm him by saying her good points, the more irate he was getting – so I stopped talking about it.’ She said that Morris’ ‘eyes were bulging and he was furious’. Then Jewell and her daughter Emma left the pub without Dai Morris. By now, it was around 9.00 p.m.
In yet another statement to the police, Janice Williams stated: ‘His eyes were big and wild and manic, and he was very quiet. It was very frightening and I don’t frighten easily.’ Separately, she noted: ‘He did not usually go there [the New Inn pub] and people did not like him there.’
Morris vehemently denied these damning claims about his aggressive manner that evening. Neither was Williams’ account corroborated by anyone else sitting at their table, or by any of the many customers in the lounge bar. Michael Randerson said he did not see Morris behave in the way Williams described, nor did Fay Scott. Mandy Jewell agreed that his demeanour was nothing like that described by Williams. Pub landlord Glyn Hopkin said he did not notice unpleasantness of any sort, and nor did his wife, Jayne. Jeff Jewell, Mandy Jewell’s father-in-law, who was also in the pub and gave Mandy and Emma a lift home, made a statement in which he said Morris most certainly did not behave in the manner Janice Williams had described. Nevertheless, her statements subsequently formed a key part of the prosecution case during the murder trial: that Morris had exhibited a strong – even manic – hatred of Mandy Power shortly before her death.
Janice Williams’ unfavourable, often contradictory, statements about Morris continued and were used by the police to build their circumstantial case. She said that soon after 7.00 a.m. on the morning of the murders, she was woken by a distraught Mandy Jewell who told her about the deaths of Mandy Power and her family. Williams said she comforted Jewell in her garden and, while there, she noticed Morris drinking lager in the garden, which she thought was unusual for that time of the day. She said he usually wore a short-sleeved shirt or went bare-chested, but on this day, even though it was quite warm, he was wearing a lumber-jacket style long-sleeved shirt. She also claimed that she saw a scratch on his nose which had not been there the previous evening.
By way of explanation, Morris described Janice Williams to the author as an alcoholic, addicted to prescription drugs and sex, and someone who possessed a vivid imagination. There may be more than a grain of truth in this. Williams gave several statements to detectives in which she described Morris’ character differently each time. Had all her statements been read out, the inconsistencies would have been obvious. In one statement given to detectives when she was sober, she described him as a ‘regular guy’ and said she could not remember whether or not he was wearing his heavy gold neck-chain in the New Inn. When in drink, Williams told detectives an entirely different story; that Morris ‘definitely’ was wearing a gold neck-chain on the night of the murders. Yet the prosecution relied upon only the incriminating statements in court.
While giving her evidence during the trial, Janice Williams swayed in the witness box and slurred her words, giving every appearance that she was drunk. In a television interview immediately after she had given her evidence, subtitles had to be added, because she was incoherent.
If it were not for the incriminating statements Janice Williams gave to the police – statements not corroborated by anyone else – the prosecution would have been unable to show that Morris was angry enough with Mandy Power to wish to harm her. The prosecution needed statements of the type Williams provided in order to make its case against Morris. But other conflicting statements Janice Williams gave to detectives, which were not used, confirm that she had perjured herself in the witness box and given false evidence against Morris.
Why Janice Williams should have given false testimony to the police incriminating Morris in the murders was explained by Dai Morris in a letter to the author. As an alcoholic, he wrote, Williams was susceptible to police pressure and would have told them anything she thought they wanted to hear. Statements she gave them while in drink differed significantly from those she gave when she was sober. Furthermore, Williams, he said, had developed a fondness for him that he did not reciprocate. Morris said that on several occasions after Jewell had left for work in the mornings, Williams called to the flat and would try to initiate sexual relations with him. When he refused to become physically involved with her, he believes she became embittered towards him and this was her way of taking revenge.
Shortly after Morris’ arrest, ‘Mr A’, an old friend, came forward offering his support to the Morris family. He became their confidant, accompanying them everywhere, including the various jails where Morris was being held on remand. ‘Mr A’ stayed close to the family during the two Crown Court trials in 2002 and 2006, and listened closely while Morris talked to his nearest and dearest.
‘Mr A’ was a crook with a long criminal record, mainly for drug-dealing. He had recently been caught with a stash of drugs imported from Amsterdam in the boot of a car he had hired. Normally, owing to his extensive criminal record, he would have faced prosecution followed by a long stretch in prison but, strangely, this did not happen. Other things did however. Snippets of conversations that Morris and members of his family had made during prison visits where ‘Mr A’ had been present were later repeated to Morris by the police in an attempt to force him to confess his ‘guilt’. ‘A’ was almost certainly a police spy. It was an unusual technique which had worked well in the past and had led to convictions in difficult cases. But these efforts to elicit incriminating evidence failed. Throughout the entire police investigation and two Crown Court trials, ‘Mr A’ was never able to report anything to his police handlers that the prosecution needed in order to strengthen its case. Nothing he heard, and inevitably passed on, ever amounted to a confession or implicated Morris in the crime. In one letter Morris wrote to me, he said quite simply, ‘There was nothing to confess.’
Did South Wales Police do a deal with ‘Mr A’? It is a question raised by several people. Did they promise to drop all criminal charges against him on the drugs arrest in return for information and for help he might give that would lead to Dai Morris’ conviction for the murders? Whatever the truth of the matter, the fact is that ‘Mr A’ was never prosecuted for the serious drugs offence for which he had been arrested and, if proven, probably would have resulted in a substantial prison sentence.
Detective Superintendent Martyn Lloyd-Evans and his team were confident that even if they were unable to prove that the gold neck-chain belonged to Morris, they would still be able to paint a picture of him as someone who was both violent and capable of committing murder.
An old acquaintance of Morris, ‘Mr B’ was serving a 12-year sentence in Swansea prison and, while Morris was awaiting trial, they shared a cell. As they exchanged stories, Morris told him about his affair with Mandy Power. When detectives interviewed ‘Mr B’ in the prison, he repeated to them what Morris had told him about his relationship with Power. In his statement, he added that Morris was a ‘tidy’ guy, which in South Walian parlance meant he was decent. ‘Morris never looked for trouble but, if pushed, he could handle himself’, detectives were told.
This, however, was not evidence which suited the police. Detectives returned to the prison to interview ‘Mr B’ a second time. On this occasion he said in his statement that Morris was a ‘madman who always carried iron bars in his car and was always looking for trouble’. It was the polar opposite of his first statement. There can be no logical reason why he would have told them this unless the murder squad detectives had offered him a deal. Shortly after giving the police this new statement, ‘Mr B’ was released from prison before his due date. This suggests that such a deal had indeed been struck.
Further confirmation was provided by ‘Mr B’ himself. Immediately after his release, he had a change of heart and rang Morris’ solicitor, David Hutchinson. He asked if he could arrange an appointment to make a new, third statement – basically the same as his first statement – confirming that Morris was not a man who looked for trouble, and that he did not carry iron bars in his car. The evidence ‘Mr B’ could have given in court was crucial to the defence, yet Hutchinson told him that there was no need to make another statement, and anyway it was too late. At this point Morris’ trial had not yet begun and was, in fact, still several months away.
The Morris family believed that their telephones were being bugged after Dai Morris’ arrest. This is routine police practice in cases of serious crime and often results in a suspect unwarily incriminating himself. At no time did Morris make any admissions when using a telephone to call friends and family which implicated him in the crime. During the entire time that Dai Morris was held on remand – from 20 March 2001 to 10 April 2002 when his trial began – he never once admitted responsibility for the Clydach murders. Neither has his stance on the question of his guilt changed since.
Morris had worn a heavy gold neck-chain for ten years. Yet, despite microscopic examination of the gold chain found at the crime scene, no DNA belonging to Morris could be found on it. While he was held in custody, Morris repeatedly insisted that the chain produced by the police did not belong to him, and he swore this on his children’s lives.
In the meantime, as the investigation progressed and the search for hard evidence against Morris continued, the neck-chain was re-examined even more carefully than before. This time, under the blood on the chain, forensic scientists found a particle of brick dust, and a tiny speck of green paint that had adhered to the gold clasp. Returning to the Rhyddwen Road flat, forensic scientists resumed their search for evidence connecting Morris to the crime. Examining the kitchen cupboards more carefully, they found the same green paint that had been discovered on the gold neck-chain.
When confronted with this new evidence, Morris had little choice but to admit that the chain ‘probably was his’. This was just four days away from the start of his trial. He confessed that one of his cousins, Eric Williams, had bought a replacement chain for him in a Swansea second-hand jewellery shop a few days after the murders. It was not even Morris’ idea, he claimed. It was Mandy Jewell who had suggested to Eric Williams that he replace the chain, to avoid suspicion falling on him because Morris had told her he had lost it while he was working on one of Eric Williams’ building sites.
For a brief moment it must have appeared to the detectives that they had Morris nailed. The chain, which he now accepted was probably his, seemed to place him at the scene of the murders on the night of the attack. It was evidence of the highest possible value, but the detectives’ delight must have quickly turned sour when Morris gave them an explanation for its presence in the house. It was the same explanation he had given to Eric Williams on the day after the murders: he had left the chain at Power’s home when he had had sex with her on the morning of Friday, 25 June.
Morris had begun working for Eric Williams on Monday, 28 June, the day after the murders, and had told him that he had ‘screwed’ Mandy Power the day before she was killed. This was a mistake on Morris’ part because Friday 25 June was two days before the crime.
Williams had replied, ‘You must be fucking joking’. Morris also told Williams that he had left his neck-chain at Mandy Power’s home on a kitchen worktop by way of a promise to her that he would come back the following day. He said he could not tell the police this because his live-in girlfriend, Mandy Jewell, did not know anything about the relationship, and would cut his balls off if she did. How the neck-chain was later found on a bedroom floor at 9 Kelvin Road Morris could not explain. Eric Williams had bought him a new chain, and Morris had roughed it up in a cement mixer, hit it with a hammer and broken the clasp, to make it look as much as possible like his old chain.
Morris, however, also gave the police a revised version of events in another statement he made a day or so later, though it was broadly similar to his first statement. He told them he had been at 9 Kelvin Road the day before the murders. He claimed that he had gone to Mandy Power’s home in the morning unbeknownst to his girlfriend. He had been fiddling with the broken clasp of the chain in the kitchen when Power had called him upstairs to her bedroom. He had placed the broken chain on a kitchen worktop before going upstairs. He said they had sex against the partition wall that separated her bedroom from her mother’s double bedroom. This, he claimed, gave Power a ‘buzz’. It was only afterwards – as he made his way by bus to his parents’ home in Gendros – that he realised he had left the chain in Power’s kitchen. At that point, it was too late to go back and retrieve it. At his parents’ house, he found another gold chain which he also owned, and he put that on instead. He said it was smaller than the one he had left at Mandy Power’s. Known as a Figaro-style chain, the design featured a recurring pattern of small, circular links and one elongated oval link. It was, Morris maintained, the chain he had worn in the New Inn on the night before the murders.
This presented the police with something of a dilemma. Morris had now given them two slightly differing accounts of how he had left his neck-chain in 9 Kelvin Road. But the differences were small and might be explained by lack of a clear memory owing to the passage of time, or for some other reason. The detectives must have been concerned that the sum total of evidence they possessed would be sufficient to take the case to trial, let alone secure a conviction. Thus, there was a serious possibility that, for a second time, a suspect for the murders would be freed. This was not a humiliation that South Wales Police was prepared to contemplate.
Any arguments raised by the defence about the quality of the police evidence would have to be demolished if Morris was to be convicted, and this was where Patrick Harrington QC, counsel for the prosecution, would come into his own. Described as ‘a top silk’ in Chambers Guide to the Legal Profession, Harrington was admired for achieving difficult convictions in high-profile cases. During his career, he had successfully prosecuted several complex murder cases and had earned a reputation for being a shrewd, competent and determined Crown prosecutor.
In R v. David George Morris, much of the prosecution’s case rested on a most peculiar, but entirely legitimate, trial strategy which only a skilful and ingenious counsel could devise, let alone hope to pull off. It involved having to convince the jury that Dai Morris had never been involved in a sexual relationship with Mandy Power, when his confession to his cousin Eric Williams that he had been was what had got him into trouble in the first place.
If anyone could guarantee South Wales Police its conviction and weave a convincing case for the jury from so much innuendo and so little evidence – a broken gold neck-chain, various lies and no alibi – it was Patrick Harrington QC.