Over a five-day period commencing on Monday, 29 April, Patrick Harrington continued to mesmerise jurors and spectators alike as the first fifteen witnesses for the prosecution were called to give evidence.
The first of these witnesses was Sandra Jones, the youngest of Mandy Power’s three older sisters. She gave the court details of Mandy’s personal life: her failed marriage to Michael Power; her job as a nursing home care assistant; her friends and colourful lifestyle; sexual affairs with men, several of whom were married; and finally, her relationship with former South Wales policewoman Alison Lewis.
She said that on Saturday, 26 June 1999, she and her husband Ken returned from a week’s holiday in Spain. It was their wedding anniversary and they had arranged to celebrate in Clydach’s Sunnybank Club. Their son Stephen, a West Wales Dyfed Powys police constable, and his wife, Christine Jones, were going too, while Mandy Power minded their children.
Early the following morning Sandra told the court how she had she received a telephone call informing her about the tragedy, following which she and her husband rushed to Kelvin Road. They found the fire services already there. She then learned that her mother, sister and two nieces were all dead. Afterwards, although extremely distressed, she helped the police to identify a number of items recovered from the house, but when she was shown the gold chain, she did not recognise it.
Julie Evans, another of Mandy Power’s older sisters, also told the court in cross-examination that Mandy had described Alison Lewis as ‘possessive and jealous’. She added that she was prone to ‘mood swings and her behaviour would be worse after drinking’. Julie Evans told the court that Alison Lewis could be deliberately hurtful and once said that she would not leave her mother ‘in the care of someone like Mandy because Mandy did not look after her and feed her properly’. Evans had replied that ‘Mandy looked after her mother well’. She added that whenever she went to 9 Kelvin Road and found Alison Lewis there, she would ‘feel uncomfortable’.
Evans told the court that Alison had broken off the relationship when Mandy falsely told her that she had cervical cancer, but they had quickly got back together and ‘seemed very close’. She also knew of Mandy’s intimate relationship with former professional golfer Howard Florence, whom, she had heard, was intending to buy Mandy a ring.
Unfortunately, this latter aspect of her testimony was not expanded upon. How had Evans had come by this information, and, importantly, who else knew about it? All these potentially vital questions were never put to the witness.
Margaret Jewell also knew about her sister Mandy’s relationship with Alison Lewis. She said that on 15 May 1999 Mandy and Alison Lewis had attended the opening of Gallivans Bar in Swansea, which Mrs Jewell ran. She told the court: ‘Mandy and her lesbian lover, Alison Lewis, seemed to be getting on well.’
Police Constable Stephen Jones wept as he gave his evidence in the witness box. He and Mandy were both born in the same year – 1965 – and he said their relationship was more like that of a brother and sister than a nephew and an aunt. A few days before the murders, Stephen had called to 9 Kelvin Road and found Mandy in tears. She told him that she had just received a telephone call from Alison to say that Alison’s husband Stephen knew about the affair and was making Alison choose between them. This evidence, confirming Stephen Lewis’ knowledge of his wife’s affair with Mandy Power, assumed crucial importance later on in the trial.
On the afternoon before the murders, Stephen Jones met Power at his parents’ home in Clydach. She had offered to babysit his two children so that he and his wife, Christine, could attend his parents’ wedding anniversary party in the Sunnybank Club that evening. Later that night, Stephen Jones and his wife returned home by taxi, arriving just before midnight. He paid the driver an extra sum, so that Mandy and her daughters could take the same taxi home. He broke down as he told the court: ‘I kissed Mandy, thanked her for babysitting, and that was the last I saw of her.’
Giving evidence for the prosecution during the second week of the trial, Manon Cherry, a close friend and neighbour of Mandy Power, told the court that ‘Alison Lewis dominated Mandy Power’s life’. Cherry said that Power would often confide in her but had been ‘almost too afraid’ to admit that she was in a relationship with Lewis. She said Mandy called Lewis ‘the love of her life’. However, some weeks before the murders, Power had told her she was ‘sorting her life out’. She had been on a rollercoaster for quite some time but was now looking for a stable base, she said.
Recalling the morning of the murders, Cherry testified that she was awoken at about 4.30 a.m. by people in the street shouting about a fire. She went outside where she saw Alison Lewis standing amongst the crowd outside the house. Lewis spotted her, came over to her and buried her head in Cherry’s shoulder. It was at this point that Cherry noticed that Lewis smelled of soap as if she had recently bathed or showered. ‘She also seemed startled and jumpy’, she told the court.
Manon Cherry said she knew all about the relationship between Mandy Power and Howard Florence, adding that Power had strong feelings for Florence and used to carry his photograph around with her. Florence often telephoned Mandy but ‘Alison did not want Mandy speaking to Howard, and Mandy had to break off contact with him’. Alison Lewis was ‘possessive and insanely jealous’ of Howard Florence, she said.
Cherry said that Power had told her that when Lewis was premenstrual, she would become ‘unbearable and unstable’, to the extent that the lovers agreed not to see each other at these times because they would inevitably argue. Lewis had given Power a mobile phone so the two of them could keep in touch. Cherry described Lewis as ‘controlling’. When they went to heterosexual functions together, Alison Lewis would become moody and they would always have to leave early. Power also told her that she thought Lewis had taken to spying on her. When she went to functions without Alison Lewis, she felt that Lewis was checking up on her by watching her clandestinely. This allegation was given more credence later in the trial when witness Louise Pugh gave evidence that she had spotted a ‘prowler’ in the lane at the back of 9 Kelvin Road, though who this person might have been was never established.
Speaking with the author, Manon Cherry said Mandy Power was her best friend and that ‘Mandy remembered little details about people which made them feel special.’ She said that ‘Alison Lewis was due to start her period at around the time of the murders.’ At these times, she said, Mandy described her as ‘evil’. Alison, she said, ‘hated Mandy’s children, especially Emily, but it was a mutual thing because Mandy’s children hated Alison.’
Describing Mandy’s relationship with Alison Lewis, Manon Cherry told the author, ‘Alison was clever and obsessively jealous. She and Mandy were happy at first, but Alison drove all Mandy’s friends away. The relationship was exiting for Mandy – it was different. Alison was playing Mandy like a mouse and Mandy was scared of Alison. On occasions I found her crying and shaking with fear.’ Cherry said that Mandy complained that Alison wanted to control her. Sometimes Alison Lewis parked her car outside 9 Kelvin Road so that she could keep a watch on her. Cherry denied that, at this time, Alison Lewis and Mandy Power were the happiest they had ever been, describing Lewis’ claim as ‘completely untrue’.
Both Alison Lewis and Howard Florence wore gold neck-chains, said Cherry, and Lewis knew that Florence wore one. Speculating, she said that if Lewis had discovered a gold neck-chain in Power’s home, she might have thought that it belonged to Florence and this thought would have incensed her.
This vital evidence was never brought up in court. Manon Cherry says she did not believe Dai Morris was guilty, and thought all the evidence pointed elsewhere. During her testimony, she felt she could not give vital evidence in the way she wanted to, or tell the court what she wanted to say. Discussing Dai Morris, Cherry said ‘he was not a nice person,’ and, ‘it was in his nature to lie.’ But she did not accept that he would have been able to clean away all evidence of his being in the house. ‘Dai Morris didn’t have a brain to clean up,’ she said.
Robert Wachowski, who had enjoyed a brief sexual relationship with Mandy Power some months before the murders, told the court about how at 4.20 a.m. on Sunday, 27 June 1999, he heard loud noises and saw smoke coming from 9 Kelvin Road. He discovered the fire and had desperately tried to save Power and her family. After his relationship with Mandy Power had ended, their friendship continued and he learned from her that she had formed a physical relationship with Lewis. He told the court that Mandy had confided in him that ‘Arguments in a gay relationship are worse than those in a heterosexual one.’ In answer to Patrick Harrington’s questioning, Wachowski replied: ‘From all I heard from her, she was one hundred per cent committed to that relationship. She told me she had made her decision that she was gay and she was not interested in a heterosexual relationship when she was with Alison Lewis.’
A second video was played in court for the jury, this time a short interview with a young schoolgirl aged about ten. The judge explained that use of a video-link was standard practice when children gave evidence in criminal proceedings, and the child’s name would not be revealed. The interview concerned the four-foot fibreglass pole – the murder weapon – at 9 Kelvin Road. The child said: ‘I think I might have seen this in Katie and Emily’s home.’ She gave the date she had visited 9 Kelvin Road as some time in April 1999, and she told the detective that the pole had been ‘lying against the wall in the girls’ bedroom’.
Kimberley Wilson, a long-standing friend of Alison Lewis and also a lesbian, told the court that in June 1999 she had travelled to Ibiza hoping to get work as a barmaid. However, she did not like it there and decided to return home. She arrived back in Clydach two days before the murders, and on the night of Friday, 25 June she had stayed at 9 Kelvin Road. Mandy and the children were out for the night and only Doris Dawson was at home. Wilson slept in Power’s bed and was woken the following morning at 9.00 a.m. when Michael Power dropped off Katie and Emily. A short time later, Mandy Power returned with Alison Lewis. Wilson told the court that Mandy ‘seemed quiet, not her normal self’. Mandy told her that Alison Lewis had ‘flipped’ when she admitted that she had spoken to Howard Florence on her mobile phone.
Another witness called to give evidence by the prosecution was former Clydach resident Patricia Margaret Richards, who knew both the Power and Dawson families. She also knew Mandy Jewell and the defendant, David Morris, having met him when he had first moved to Craig Cefn Parc. About three weeks before the murders, Richards was walking her dogs up Rhyddwen Road when she heard shouting coming from Jewell’s ground floor flat. She told the court that she heard Morris say: ‘I don’t like her – I don’t like you having anything to do with her.’ She said she believed that Morris was shouting at Mandy Jewell – and she thought he was referring to Mandy Power. She said, ‘The whole thing was very angry.’ In truth, Richards did not really know to whom Morris was referring; it could just have easily been next-door neighbour Janice Williams, who, according to Morris, frequently made a nuisance of herself. It was circumstantial evidence at best, put forward by the prosecution purely to establish Morris’ supposed hatred of Mandy Power.
Donald Jones, formerly of Kelvin Road but at the time of the trial living in Llanelli, told the court how on the afternoon before the murders he had called to 9 Kelvin Road at 5 o’clock and had stayed for twenty minutes having a cup of tea with Mandy Power. In reply to his question about how her relationship with Lewis was going, Power said she was ‘happier than she had ever been’. Under cross-examination by Peter Rouch, Jones said that some weeks before the murders he had seen a uniformed police officer leaving Mandy Power’s home and getting into a police car. ‘From the chevron-type markings on his uniform, I believe it was a sergeant.’ He told the court that he thought this was strange because police cars were rarely seen in Kelvin Road.
Alison Sawyer, a Clydach bakery assistant and work colleague of Mandy Jewell, was questioned as to her recollections of a phone call, said to have been taken by her in the bakery on the Friday morning two days before the murders. Sawyer said she was unable to remember taking such a call, or indeed anything else that had happened that morning. Many months later, the story she gave to another court would change considerably.
Janice Williams was a key prosecution witness. She told the court that during the afternoon of the day before the murders, she and Michael Randerson were with Dai Morris and Mandy Jewell in the Masons Arms pub in Rhydypandy. Later they went to the New Inn pub in Craig Cefn Parc where they spent the evening together, sharing a table at the far end of the lounge bar. Shortly after they arrived, they were joined by Randerson’s girlfriend, Fay Scott.
During the course of the evening, an argument broke out between Morris and Jewell and, Janice Williams claimed, it soon turned to the subject of Mandy Power. She had told detectives in yet another statement that ‘Morris’ eyes were wide and bulging’ as he raved and cursed Mandy Power. This contradicted what she had said in other statements that were not put before the court. It was notable that no one else, either at the table or in the pub, mentioned Morris behaving or talking in this way. Janice Williams, it turned out, had given the police several statements, all of them different, and she had an axe to grind with Dai Morris. None of this was revealed to the court.
On Thursday, 2 May 2002, the murder weapon found on the landing in 9 Kelvin Road was shown to the jury for the first time. The four-foot fibreglass pole had been cut in half by forensic scientists so that they could subject it to a series of forensic tests in their search for DNA and trace evidence.
Glyn Hopkin, former landlord of the New Inn in Craig Cefn Parc, told the court that the pole had originally come from his pub and he had given it to his wife to protect herself whenever he was away from home. Contradicting Janice Williams’ evidence given to the court earlier, Hopkin said that ‘David Morris was in good spirits – there was no reason to believe otherwise. I could tell he had had a few pints, but he was in control of himself.’ Hopkin had not heard any argument or raised voices from the group while they were in the pub. As Morris left the premises, he said goodnight to Hopkin. ‘He appeared to be well in control of himself at this time,’ Glyn Hopkin added.
Jayne Hopkin, wife of Glyn Hopkin, told the court that that day was the first time she had seen Morris in the pub. As he was leaving, he walked straight past her: ‘It seemed he kind of marched out,’ she said, adding ‘his face had a menacing look on it’. She agreed, however, that Morris probably did not know who she was and, under cross-examination, she said she had ‘only glimpsed him for a second as he left’.