On August 13, 1981, Carol Morgan was discovered bludgeoned to death in the storeroom of her corner shop in what was initially treated as a burglary gone wrong. Decades later, six pivotal words from a key witness helped bring the true story to light.
It was Carol’s husband, Allen Morgan, who found the 36-year-old mum of two after returning home from the cinema with stepchildren, Dean and Jane, then aged 14 and 12. He contacted the police, attempting to paint a picture of a bereaved husband shocked by the discovery of his wife’s brutal murder. But beneath the surface, nothing was as it seemed.
Morgan had a watertight alibi, but there were whispers in the close-knit community of Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, that he had something to do with Carol’s death. There were also plenty of holes and contradictions in Morgan’s version of events.
Carol’s niece, Julie Welsh, 59, who features in new ITV documentary, The Real Unforgotten, previously told the Mirror: “Times were different back then, without CCTV, but it was hard to believe that no one was ever brought forward. We always had speculations about Morgan. We always felt he must have known something because of the circumstances.”
Just two weeks after the murder, Morgan moved his girlfriend, Margaret Morgan, now 75, into the family home. It’s believed the pair had been carrying on an affair for a year before Carol’s death.
The cold case was reopened in 2018, with officers harbouring suspicions about Morgan’s timeline that “just didn’t make sense”. By the time of the new probe, he and Margaret, who were arrested on three occasions, had married and made a new life for themselves in Brighton.
As the renewed investigations got underway, officers secretly recorded conversations between the couple. In 2019, Margaret was heard saying “Shush”, indicating the pair suspected they were being taped. Morgan was heard saying: “I don’t want to say anything because they might have…” That same year, Morgan wrote Margaret a letter, telling her: “Trust works on both sides. If I didn’t trust you, you wouldn’t be here, and I would not.”
In an interview with the Mirror, Bedfordshire Police Detective Constable Denise Brown shared how she and her team had to consider every possible scenario for approaching the couple, unsure whether or not they would turn against each other. From the outset, Morgan complained he suffered from memory problems, which officers then had to take into account with their line of questioning.
DC Brown recalled: “I did not perceive him to be particularly nervous. He was laughing, he would say ‘I don’t remember’ then answer. He was quite argumentative actually. He wasn’t fearful of that process. When I escorted him to the taxi after custody, he was even quite jovial, whereas Margaret was quite frosty with him.
“He might have been displaying signs of the Swan analogy – where he was just faking it and very nervous underneath it all. You can read when people are anxious, getting a dry mouth, but I didn’t get that with him and they were really long interviews.”
It was while doorknocking that police finally found the answers they were looking for, after arriving at the home of Jane Bunting, now 60. Altough Jane no longer lived there, her mother did, telling officers: “My Jane’s been waiting 40 years”.
Margaret, who had worked as a teacher for expelled students, had mentored Jane, but they soon formed a friendship—so much so that when Margaret’s affair with Morgan came to light, she briefly moved in with the Bunting family.
Jane had been harbouring a dark secret for all these years, and police suspect she had been too afraid to speak out as a then-17-year-old woman in such a tight-knit community. A few months before Carol’s death, Jane overheard a conversation in the pub between Morgan and her ex-boyfriend that struck her as “appalling”.
He’d asked if he knew anyone who could kill, with Morgan saying: “’I hate Carol’, ‘I don’t want to be married to her’, ‘I wish she’d die’, ‘Wouldn’t an accident be nice?’.”
“There wasn’t hard evidence, there wasn’t CCTV, we’d been slowly building a circumstantial case and so when Jane came along, that was the final thing for us. It put that piece of the jigsaw in place,” DC Brown explained.
The Morgans had spiralling debts, and Carol had left everything to her husband in her will. Meanwhile, the shop had a life insurance policy linked to it.
Last summer, following a trial at Luton Crown Court, Morgan was sentenced to life with a minimum of 22 years after being found guilty of conspiring to murder. Margaret Morgan was found not guilty of the same offence. The hitman remains at large, and police continue to appeal for any information that may assist them in the case.
*The first episode of The Real Unforgotten aired 18th February, 9pm on ITV1 & ITVX. Both episodes dropped on ITVX on February 18th. The second episode will air this evening, on ITV1, 25th February.
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