On Monday, 22 April 2002, the prosecution made its opening statement to the jury. Patrick Harrington QC painted a picture of the domestic bliss that Mandy Power and her family lived in, and then described with emotion how they were subjected to the most grotesque injuries at the hands of Dai Morris, who, he said, had bludgeoned them to death. The jurors would have to ‘subdue their emotions’ and prepare to be ‘shocked and appalled’ by the details of the killings. A vital clue – a broken gold neck-chain – was left at the scene of the crime where the most extreme violence had taken place. Harrington described how in numerous police interviews Morris had repeatedly denied that the chain was his, but, eventually, in the face of incontrovertible evidence, he had accepted that it probably was.
Harrington told the court about Mandy Power’s relationship with married ex-policewoman Alison Lewis since late 1998, and how Lewis had ‘tried to commit suicide’ on hearing about the murders. But, in order to get the jurors on his side, Harrington was about to play his trump card – his description of the video footage of the crime scene taken immediately after the murders, which, the jurors were repeatedly reminded, was attributable solely to Dai Morris.
He recounted with passion and in graphic detail how ‘the whole family had been slaughtered in their home, having been attacked with a long heavy pole.’ The injuries ‘were simply awful’, Harrington said, pausing momentarily for the jury to take it all in. ‘This was not merely murder, this was a massacre,’ he told the visibly shocked men and women of the jury.
‘For more than a year,’ he said, ‘the finger of suspicion pointed at three people – Alison Lewis, her police sergeant husband Stephen Lewis and his twin brother Stuart Lewis, a police inspector.’ He then briefly explained why the police investigation had centred on the Lewises, and concluded with an apology: ‘It was a matter of profound regret that a false finger of suspicion had been pointed [at the Lewises], especially in circumstances of a case such as this.’
The reason for this apology to the Lewises in open court was subsequently explained to the author by solicitor Simon Jowett, who acted for Dai Morris at a later date. He said that when prosecuting a murder case, it is vital that you do not allow any doubt to creep in. The prosecution’s problem was that the police had investigated the Lewises for eighteen months, and then suddenly dropped the case owing to an insufficiency of evidence. The decision to drop the case was allegedly based on senior counsel’s advice, even though Alison Lewis’ DNA was found on Mandy Power’s inner thigh and on a vibrator, and Nicola Williams, an eyewitness who had placed Stephen Lewis near the crime scene at the time of the murders. Simon Jowett said: ‘We requested a copy of that advice numerous times, but it was never forthcoming. We assume it said there was not enough evidence to be sure of a conviction. If they’d been fair, they’d have explained it properly to the jury. But that would have made the Lewises suspects, allowing doubt to creep in, and the pros-ecution couldn’t risk that happening. When Dai Morris appeared on the scene, he was an easier target altogether. They decided he was guilty and the entire focus of the case shifted to him. They built a case around him, even though his DNA and fingerprints were nowhere to be found in the house. After a year-long investigation, they were still unable to find any hard evidence against him. It was an intellectually dishonest prosecution, based on purely circumstantial evidence.’
In other words, the prosecution almost certainly apologised to the Lewises at the start of the trial, not because they believed they were innocent, but simply because they did not have sufficient evidence to be sure of convicting them. This simple ploy by Patrick Harrington QC left just one other possible candidate for the murders: Dai Morris.
Moving on to the investigation, Patrick Harrington explained how the police came to believe that Mandy Power was central to the crimes. After her divorce, he told them, she had enjoyed a number of sexual affairs with men, though at the time of her death she was in what he described as a ‘settled and loving relationship’ with former South Wales Police officer, rugby-playing Alison Lewis.
The stage being thus set and the principal characters introduced, Harrington then told the jury about the discovery of a broken gold neck-chain, covered in blood, which had been found on a bedroom floor where most of the violence had taken place. The police, he said, did not immediately realise the signifi-cance of the chain, but when the owner could not be identified, they reasoned that it must belong to the killer. Dai Morris had initially denied that the chain was his, admitting only that ‘it probably was his’, just four days before the trial, when faced with undeniable forensic evidence. In a simple message delivered to the jury with a logic that denied the possibility of an alternative, innocent explanation, Harrington said: ‘Find the owner of the chain and you will find the killer.’
The prosecution case centred on the following assumptions: on three consecutive days leading up to the murders, Dai Morris, a violent thug, had bought drugs from a local dealer, Terrence Williams, in the form of amphetamines, popularly referred to as speed. These drugs, he said, make a person psychotic. On the afternoon of Saturday, 26 June and in the hours leading up to the murders, Morris was in the New Inn with his girlfriend, Mandy Jewell, her young daughter Emma, Janice Williams and Michael Randerson; later in the evening they were joined by Randerson’s girlfriend, Fay Scott. By closing time, he had drunk at least seven pints of strong lager. Mr Harrington said the combined effect of the drugs and alcohol had made Morris angry and violent. In fact, in the pub he came close to violence in an argument with Adrian Davies, a local man also known as Sage.
While he was in the pub, Morris was allegedly heard openly expressing hostility to Mandy Power. Following an argument with his girlfriend, Mandy Jewell, she walked out on him and went home taking Emma with her. Sometime between 11.15 p.m. and 11.30 p.m., high on drink and drugs, Morris left the pub ‘looking angry’. A man matching his description wearing a white V-neck T-shirt and blue jeans was seen walking towards Kelvin Road by witness Anthony Evans, who was looking out of his daughter’s upstairs bedroom window. (Anthony Evans saw a man wearing jeans who looked like Morris, but Morris was wearing a track suit bottom.) Morris went to Mandy Power’s home at 9 Kelvin Road, hoping to have sex with her. She refused and this incensed him, causing him to explode in a violent rage. He attacked her with a fibreglass pole, battering her to death. Doris Dawson, Emily and Katie witnessed the attack. They knew Dai Morris and could identify him, so he killed them too.
When Mandy Power was dead, Patrick Harrington told the jury, her body was stripped naked and, ‘as a final act of desecration and humiliation’, a vibrator was pushed into her vagina. He omitted to mention other anomalies such as the silver wrist watch placed on Mandy Power’s wrist, the partially burned photograph of the children, and the engagement ring found on her dead mother’s torso – perhaps because these acts did not support the theory of a raging drink- and drug-fuelled killer.
Afterwards, intending to avoid detection, Morris cleaned up the house, wiping away his fingerprints and DNA, removing all evidence that placed him at the crime scene. He then washed blood from his clothing in the upstairs bathroom, and either showered or had a bath to remove blood from his body. Finally, in an attempt to obliterate any remaining evidence, he set fire to the house.
But despite all Morris’ efforts to forensically sanitise the crime scene, he inadvertently left behind something that revealed his identity. A heavy gold neck-chain with a broken clasp discovered on the bedroom floor at the spot where the most violent attack had taken place. It was the prosecution’s case that, during the vicious attack, Mandy Power had pulled the chain from the murderer’s neck. The chain belonged to Dai Morris and, the prosecution argued, it placed him at the crime scene at the time the murders were committed. Patrick Harrington described finding the neck-chain at the crime scene as ‘a clinching piece of evidence’. After the murders, Harrington asserted, Morris realised that he had left the gold chain behind. Media publicity about the murders prompted him to obtain a similar gold chain which was bought for him. He deliberately hit it with a hammer and put it in a cement mixer, to make it look like his old one.
The accused’s original story, Harrington said, was that, after leaving the pub, he had walked in the direction of his parents’ home in Gendros, but then had ‘wandered the lanes in the rain for the next four and a half hours’ before returning to the flat he shared with Mandy Jewell.
Harrington then outlined the story that Mandy Power had made up about having cervical cancer – a story that was discovered to be a lie – and how this lie had spoiled her friendship with Mandy Jewell. Former South Wales policewoman Alison Lewis, Harrington told the court, lived under a cloud of suspicion, but she had an alibi, confirmed by her husband Stephen; that they were in bed together at the time of the murders.
Forensic scientists found that DNA from epithelial cells in vaginal fluids on the vibrator matched the DNA of Alison Lewis. They also found that the same DNA on swabs taken from Mandy Power’s thighs, and on the vibrator that had been thrust into her, matched the DNA of Alison Lewis. The two women had been ‘lovers in each other’s arms, exchanging bodily fluids on two occasions shortly before the murders’, Harrington said. The jury could therefore ‘reject any suggestion that Mandy Power would have been interested in a casual fling with Morris. You must ask yourselves if you think it is even remotely possible that this mother of twin girls could have had anything to do with the murder of the woman she loved’, he added.
It was also the prosecution’s contention that Alison Lewis would not have had the slightest reason to wish to harm Mandy Power and her family. In his closing address to the jury, Patrick Harrington said that Dai Morris had lied ‘at every stage and at every opportunity and on every topic. He knew the chain left at Kelvin Road was his, but in his interviews he swore on his children’s lives that it was not.’ The barrister said there would be evidence given by a neighbour in Kelvin Road, who would say that she saw Mandy Power leaving her home in a car driven by Alison Lewis on the morning Morris claimed that he had had sex with her. Alison Lewis’s statement was that she was going to a gym in Pontardawe for a workout session, dropping Power off in Clydach village to do her shopping, which is where Morris claimed he had met her. The homes and cars of the Lewises had been searched and nothing incriminating was found in any of them, Mr Harrington said.
Harrington enumerated the events leading up to the night of the murders. By the time he concluded, he had left the jurors with a very clear image of Dai Morris: a mindless, violent, sex-crazed thug with a long criminal record, who was high on drink and drugs on the night in question, who not only could, but in fact did, commit murder.
As part of the prosecution’s opening, Tuesday, 23 April was chosen as the day the jury would view forty minutes of video footage of the untouched crime scene on the day after the murders. Patrick Harrington warned them that some of the scenes they would see would be ‘very distressing’. He described it as ‘an orgy of savagery that cannot have taken very long’.
Patrick Harrington chose his words carefully and for their emotive effect upon the jury. While the crime was certainly shocking and violent in the extreme, it was important that the jury was given a balanced and fair view of the evidence. The terms ‘massacre’ and ‘orgy of savagery’ perhaps went beyond acceptable terminology and were highly prejudicial to the defendant.
The judge ordered the doors of the court to be locked as a precaution against anyone walking in unexpectedly and causing a distraction. The video opened with shots of Kelvin Road. An ordinary-looking semi-detached house came into view; the walls above the windows smoke-blackened, a blue tarpaulin covering part of the front. At the rear of the house, large white bed sheets on a washing line in the garden blew gently in the breeze. More outdoor views followed, and the camera zoomed in on Mandy Power’s battered body lying under the blue tarpaulin, a resuscitation aid in her mouth. The camera turned to Emily, a resuscitation aid in her mouth also, and then to Katie.
As the camera moved inside the house, more shocking images appeared on screen, and Patrick Harrington’s earlier description of the sickening violence inflicted on the four victims came vividly to life. The words he had used on that occasion had a profound impact on those who heard them: ‘It would not have taken long for a powerful man to quell a woman, two little children and an invalid.’
One of the male jurors repeatedly wiped his hand across his mouth in what might have been a nervous gesture, and glanced from time to time towards the back of the court where the victims’ family was sitting. Other jury members displayed different reactions to the horrifying images unfolding before them and occasionally looked away from the screen or stared into their laps. For one of the jurors, a young man in his twenties, the stark reality was too much. About twenty minutes into the video, he fainted, falling onto a female juror sitting next to him. The judge ordered the video to be stopped. The trial was adjourned and the doors of the courtroom were pushed open. Several spectators in the public gallery abandoned their seats and fled the courtroom in tears. The juror was taken to Singleton Hospital, Swansea. By the following day, he had still not recovered sufficiently to continue as a jury member, and so the entire jury was discharged. The trial could have continued with one jury member less, but the judge decided that it was preferable to start again with a new jury.
On Thursday, 25 April a new jury was sworn in and the case began afresh. Since ten of the original jurors were selected a second time, they were obliged to listen to Patrick Harrington repeating the case for the Crown. They also had to view once again the horrific video that none of them would have wished to see the first time. This time the video ran non-stop for a full forty minutes.