Born in colonial Singapore in 1949 to an army officer father, Morgan grew up with an older brother and sister in south Wales, where he spent time in hospital from a club foot which required nine operations to correct. (His father, originally from the Welsh valleys, died aged 41 from emphysema, and his wife Isobel remarried.) After grammar school, Morgan attended agricultural college in Usk before working in Denmark as a salesman. On his return to England in the mid 1970s Morgan became a courier but he yearned for the glamour that went sleuthing. After training at the Madagan detective agency in Croydon he went into business with Rees.
Morgan was a hard-working, self-reliant man with a photographic memory for car number plates and other triva. (“He knew the Guinness Book of Records back to front”, his older brother Alastair recalled.) It was nothing for him to drive from London to the West Country and back all in a day’s sleuthing. Yet all was not well between Morgan and Rees. To his brother Alastair he complained that he was doing all the agency’s work while Rees lounged in south London pubs with his “bent copper” mates.
At the time of his murder Morgan was conducting an affair with Margaret Harrison, a Thornton Heath estate agent with two teenage daughters. There is some suggestion that Margaret may also have been involved with Rees. Allegedly Rees paid for her daughters’ school fees, and was often on the phone to her. Harrison later told an inquest that she had gone out with Rees on the day of the murder, but insisted she slept with Morgan only. She was unable to explain the 60 calls Rees had made to her from his car-phone in the three months prior to the murder.
At 8.00pm on the evening of 9 March, the day before the murder, Morgan met Rees and a police officer friend of his in the Golden Lion, a pub he did not usually frequent. He parked his BMW in the “busy street outside”, according to the podcast, and went in to meet Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery of Catford C.I.D.
Fillery, a serving officer for 23 years (and, like Rees, a freemason), was moonlighting illegally as a security guard for Rees at a car auctions in Charlton south of the river. The previous year, on the evening of 6 March 1986, Rees had allegedly been mugged of £18,000 of Belmont Auctions takings – sprayed with ammonia and coshed after failing to deposit the cash in a Midland Bank nightsafe (which, he claimed, had been superglued shut). Morgan did not believe him. He was certain that Rees had faked the robbery and pocketed the money for himself and his police contacts. Whether from sexual envy or friction within the partnership, relations between him and Rees had now “turned to hatred”, according to Southern’s bookkeeper, Kevin Lennon.
As the evening progressed, a row erupted after Morgan was overheard to shout that he was opposed to hiring officers of Fillery’s sort because they reflected badly on Southern Investigations. Fillery retaliated that he did not care for Morgan’s appearance, his garrulousness or flirtatious way with women. He ought to watch his step. Rees had taken to calling Morgan the “Welsh cripple” due to his childhood club foot. After the quarrel, the men drank together in silence. Morgan agreed to meet Rees in the pub the next day to resume the argument and (it later emerged) meet a former showbiz bodyguard in the pay of Liz Taylor and Bo Derek, called Paul Goodridge.
Morgan’s last moments can be pieced together only sketchily. At 6.30pm on 10 March he briefly met Margaret Harrison at Regan’s Wine Bar on Brigstock Road, Thornton Heath. Margaret recalled that Morgan appeared to be his “normal self” as they chatted over glasses of wine. She and Morgan had been in a “loose relationship” for eighteen months. Some time after 7.00pm, Morgan left to meet Rees at the Sydenham Road boozer. “For some reason he parked his car in the secluded and dark car park round the back”, the podcast relates. “He’d never drive that car again.”