Love triangle that’s dramatic revelation in infamous unsolved axe-murder case
Strolling together in this exclusive picture, they’re the couple whose alleged affair was part of probe into death of a private detective. Now, as a new TV series re-examines the case, a Mail dossier lays bare the twists and turns
On March 10, 1987, estate agent Margaret harrison had a very busy social diary. First, she attended a lunch party near her office in the company of a burly private investigator called Jonathan rees. Then, in the early evening, she shared a tete-a-tete bottle of plonk at a local wine bar with another private eye called Daniel Morgan.
This romantic rivalry was more than a little awkward. rees and Morgan were business partners at a local firm called Southern Investigations. Both were married with children to women other than the ‘petite and good looking’ — and also married — Mrs harrison. Their alleged menage-a-trois would not survive the night at 9.40pm, Daniel Morgan would be found dead in a pool of blood in the car park of the Golden Lion pub in Sydenham, South London. he had the fatal weapon — an axe — still embedded in his skull. a roll of banknotes — £1,000 — remained undisturbed in one of his pockets.
Jonathan rees soon emerged as a prime suspect.
This put Mrs harrison in a rather tricky spot. her extra-marital activities were suddenly of interest to a police murder investigation. But it was an investigation which would prove to be puzzlingly ineffectual.
In fact, after 33 years and five separate criminal inquiries — at an estimated cost to the taxpayer of £30 million — no one has been convicted of playing any kind of role in Morgan’s grisly ‘assassination’.
his killing has been described as ‘the most investigated unsolved murder in the history of the Metropolitan Police’. It is also perhaps the most shaming.
Six years ago, we published an investigation into allegations of corruption in the Met’s detective force in South-East London.
Our series of pieces linked — through the involvement of overlapping personnel and their underworld contacts — the failed first investigation into the Morgan death with the similarly fruitless first investigation into the racist murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in nearby Eltham, six years later.
Others have since followed a similar trail. This week saw the broadcast of the first episode of a new channel 4 drama- documentary examining the Morgan case, called Murder In The car Park.
Meanwhile, the report of an independent panel into the police handling of the Morgan case over the years is nearing publication.
The Mail understands that a ‘significant’ number of former police officers are set to receive letters from the panel warning them that they will be criticised in its report.
Morgan’s family, and, in particular, his brother alastair, have campaigned for justice for more than three decades. They believe Daniel was killed because he was about to expose corrupt cID officers.
Other motives have been aired. Morgan had made a number of enemies in his job, which sometimes involved bailiff work. But there was another angle. as we shall see, both channel 4 and previously unpublished material from our own police corruption investigation in 2014 uncovered a startling twist.
Today — aided by a transcript of the inquest into the private eye’s death, police statements and documents from previous inquiries and an exclusive photograph of two of the main characters — we can tell the story of the suburban ‘love triangle’ which was a backdrop to one of Britain’s most notorious murder investigations. and how one of those relationships prospers to this day.
At Daniel Morgan’s inquest in april 1988, the coroner heard a series of sensational allegations; of plots to kill, faked robberies and the dubious relationship between the local cID and Jonathan rees.
Morgan and rees had founded Southern Investigations private detective agency in 1984. Welshman Morgan was the son of a colonial army officer, while rees was a blunt Yorkshireman. Both had strong personalities and, by the time of the murder, the partnership was under strain.
One alleged bone of contention — which it must be stressed has been strenuously denied by rees — was Margaret harrison.
She was the manager of Furmston’s estate agency across the road from Southern Investigations, on Thornton heath high Street in South London.
In 1985, a local law firm threw a christmas party to which important clients were invited. among them were Margaret harrison and Daniel Morgan.
harrison was then the mother of two teenagers, and had been married for 18 years to a chauffeur working for British Gas. at the party she was introduced to Morgan, then 36.
Exactly what happened next, and when, remains a matter of dispute. What is clear — and seems to have been common knowledge in their circle — was that Morgan and Mrs harrison began an affair.
Morgan was quite indiscreet. his brother alastair recalled to the Mail how uncomfortable he felt when, in a pub exactly one month before Daniel was killed, his brother pointed to Mrs harrison and said: ‘ That’s my girlfriend.’
a police detective sergeant called alec Leighton would also give a witness statement to one of the murder investigations, in which he said two weeks before the murder r he had attended a lunch at a restaurant, with Morgan and harrison both also present.
‘I recall having a conversation n with Daniel Morgan,’ said the e policeman. ‘ he indicated d Margaret harrison and said he e was having an affair with her.’
In short, it was not a closelyguarded ys secret on Morgan’s part. Margaret harrison was a good deal more circumspect, t, not least when she gave evidence ce at Morgan’s inquest.
In fact, her answers were so vague and evasive that the he famously flamboyant coroner Sir Montague Levine twice stopped cross- examinations to ask her if she had been ‘got at . . . with regard to what you should say at court’. Mrs harrison denied she had been.
She told the inquest that having met Morgan, they had enjoyed no more than ‘a fairly friendly relationship for the first couple of weeks and then it fizzled out’.
The phrase ‘fairly friendly’ was what she preferred to use as an euphemism for sex.
In other words, by her own account, she and Morgan were lovers for only a short time after the 1985 christmas party. She said they only once met in the evening, and never covertly. at lunches, they would almost always be in the company of other people.
This was not well received. Mrs harrison suffered what the coroner suggested were ‘ incredible’ memory lapses. She also appeared to play down the frequency of her contact with Morgan. asked why Morgan would describe her as his ‘girlfriend’ in February 1987 — two years after they met — Mrs harrison replied: ‘I cannot answer for Daniel Morgan.’ So what of her contact with
Jonathan Rees? He was married to a divorcee called Sharon, with whom he had two children. Sharon Rees had two brothers called Garry and Glenn Vian, described in a later Crown Prosecution Service document which we have seen, as ‘part of the criminal fraternity’.
The Vian brothers were employed by Rees at Southern Investigations as security guards, alongside moonlighting officers from Catford CID, including one Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery.
In her witness statement read to the inquest, Margaret Harrison had claimed: ‘[Rees] has rung me at home about three or four times. We have never had a sexual relationship but, when I have been in his company, I got the impression he was chatting me up.’ Giving evidence at the inquest, Mrs Harrison maintained that position. She admitted that Daniel Morgan told her that after their meeting at a wine bar early on the night he was killed, he was going to rendezvous with Rees (at the Golden Lion pub outside which he would be later found dead).
‘Your relationship with Jon Rees was perhaps a little more complex than it was with Danny?’ asked the coroner. ‘No,’ said Mrs Harrison. ‘Did you go out with Jon Rees?’ ‘He used to be in some of the groups whenever we went round to the pub and luncheon clubs,’ she said .
‘Are you telling me you never went out with Jon Rees on his own?’ pursued the coroner.
‘ Not at that time, no,’ said Mrs Harrison.
‘I did not say at that time, at any time,’ persisted the coroner.
‘No, not on my own,’ insisted the witness.
In her witness statement, Mrs Harrison had claimed she ‘was frightened of my family and his [Rees’s] family finding out’.
‘Finding out what?’ she was asked at the inquest. But she could not recall. Nor could she remember where or when she had last met Rees prior to the inquest.
The coroner asked her one last question: ‘Do you know of any antipathy that existed between both of them [Rees and Morgan] because of your having a relationship with both of them?’ ‘No,’ replied Mrs Harrison. Rees denied murdering Morgan. And, like Mrs Harrison, there was much he could not recall.
Cross-examined by the Morgan family’s barrister, Rees said: ‘There wasn’t any relationship with Margaret Harrison. I would not like to discuss that further.’
But he was then asked to explain the 64 calls made from his car phone to Mrs Harrison’s office over a period of months.
Rees claimed that Daniel Morgan sometimes used his car phone, and that he couldn’t recall having made phone calls to Mrs Harrison’s home, as she admitted he had.
Asked if he knew Morgan was having an affair with Mrs
Harrison, he replied: ‘I did not know for a fact.’
‘ How often did you see Margaret Harrison at the time?’ the barrister asked. ‘Occasionally.’ The coroner interjected, asking the Morgan family’s barrister: ‘Are you suggesting that they were both annoyed with each other because they were seeing the same woman?’
‘ That was the suggestion,’ replied the barrister.
Rees was then asked to explain why he had given Mrs Harrison as much as £800 for her daughter to attend a secretarial course. He said it was for the benefit of the Southern Investigations typing pool.
He said that he now saw Mrs Harrison only ‘very occasionally’. His evidence was undermined by David Bray, who also worked at Southern Investigations. Bray was asked whether he thought Rees and Margaret Harrison were having a relationship. ‘ Possibly just after, or around about the time’ of Daniel’s death, he replied.
Another employee recalled seeing Jonathan Rees with a hotel room key. ‘ Rees admitted to everyone present that he had been at the hotel earlier in the day with Margaret Harrison and that he hoped to attend there again with her that evening,’ the court heard.
Rees’ wife Sharon was so upset by these accounts of her husband’s alleged infidelity that she failed to appear to give evidence.
At the end of the inquest — which focused on a number of issues other than the ‘love triangle’ — the jury returned a verdict of ‘unlawful killing’. And yet police were no nearer catching the killer.
The INITIAL police murder investigation team which, extraordinarily, had included Rees’s close friend and part-time employee, DS Fillery, got nowhere.
Fillery had even taken Rees’s statement of evidence in which the private eye claimed that Morgan had confided in him about the number of extra-marital relationships he had engaged in.
Three weeks after the killing, Rees, Fillery, Rees’ brothers-in-law Garry and Glenn Vian, and two other CID officers were arrested on suspicion of murder, but all were later released without charge.
In the summer of 1988, Hampshire police were called in to reinvestigate. We understand Margaret Harrison admitted to their murder team that she had been having an affair with Rees — but it started only after Morgan’s death.
The detectives felt she might have been reluctant to admit simultaneous affairs. Rees and Harrison were observed by investigating officers ‘kissing and cuddling’ in her car.
Detective Sergeant Alec Leighton, a long time friend of Rees, also gave a fresh statement in which he recalled discussing
Morgan’s claim he was having an affair with Mrs Harrison.
Rees had allegedly replied: ‘He’s not the only one.’ Leighton said that he assumed Rees ‘meant he had also been seeing (her)’.
Rees was arrested again and charged with murder in February 1989, but the charge was soon dropped for lack of evidence.
Alec Leighton and Jonathan Rees were still talking about Margaret Harrison a decade later.
In 1999, a police surveillance bug planted in the Southern Investigation offices recorded a discussion between them about ‘Maggie’, and how Hampshire police had pursued ‘the love triangle’ angle.
Further criminal inquiries were equally unproductive.
The most recent saw Rees, the Vian brothers and another man arrested and charged for the murder of Daniel Morgan, in April 2008. Fillery was also arrested for perverting the course of justice.
The case collapsed in 2011 before the facts could be put before a jury, after an extensive legal argument about evidence gathering and the failure to disclose all of the relevant police documents to the defence. ‘Not guilty’ verdicts were formally entered against the defendants.
That is not to say all the actors in this drama have prospered unscathed these past four decades.
Thanks to the bugged office, the police uncovered a plot by Jonathan Rees to frame a client’s wife as a drug dealer. He was jailed for seven years in 2000.
Sid Fillery, who retired from the Met on the grounds of ill health and almost immediately became Rees’s partner at Southern Investigations, was subsequently convicted of child porn offences. And Alec Leighton was suspended on suspicion of corruption over another matter, and left the police before disciplinary action took place. He has always denied any wrongdoing.
Meanwhile, Garry Vian, Rees’s brother-in-law and a Southern Investigations ‘security guard’, was jailed for 14 years in 2005 for drugs smuggling.
And Margaret Harrison? In 2014, the Mail found her and Rees were living together in a property they co-own in a gated community in the Surrey stockbroker belt.
Records suggested that they had been co- habiting since Rees emerged from prison ten years before. They live there to this day.
When approached by the Mail in 2014, Mrs Harrison said: ‘You’re wasting your time. I’m never going to talk. Not in a million years.’
Mr Rees’s solicitor said his client and Mrs Harrison had ‘tried to assist the police’ and had ‘offered’ the ‘Daniel Morgan Independent Inquiry Panel’ their assistance.
In a statement to the Mail, he said: ‘Mr Rees has always denied any involvement in this murder and has been acquitted.
‘They both lost a friend when Mr Morgan was killed, and Mr Rees lost a valued business partner. The original murder investigation has already been the subject of independent examination by Hampshire Police, who described it as “pathetic” but unaffected in any way by police misconduct.’
Mr Rees and Mrs Harrison, now 65 and 61, declined to comment further yesterday.
But they did co-operate with the new Channel 4 series about the murder. It might have something to do with the £155,000 damages that Rees received last July from the Metropolitan Police after he sued the force for malicious prosecution. A high court judge ruled a similar sum be awarded to Glenn Vian. Garry Vian was awarded £104,000.
Rees, Fillery and Glenn Vian have all given interviews for the Murder In The Car Park series, in which they continue to protest their innocence. Margaret Harrison also speaks, albeit in silhouette.
She blamed her erratic performance as a witness at the inquest on ‘ sheer fear, fear from my husband finding out . . . I thought it would destroy my family, so I went blank.’
Rees told Channel 4 it was ‘only a year or two years later (after the murder) that we got together ... but certainly at the time it was nothing to do with her at all.’
His argument was at odds with the most explosive allegation made in Murder In The Car Park.
Former Met constable Dean Vian, nephew of Garry and Glenn, tearfully told the programme makers that his mother had told him who killed Morgan and why. ‘My mum told me that Glenn had killed him and he was paid by Jonathan Rees to do that,’ he said on camera.
Asked what motive his mother had given, a tearful Dean Vian said: ‘Jonathan Rees and Daniel Morgan had a falling out because they were both with the same woman, or seeing the same woman.’
Glenn Vian vehemently denied he had murdered Morgan in the pub car park.
He told the documentary: ‘If in theory . . . you wanted to kill Danny Morgan, why go somewhere else you don’t know or are not familiar with, you don’t know who’s there?
‘Danny Morgan’s car was in his garage, 20 seconds from where I live. All I had to do was wait for him, do him [sic] and leave him in there, if I had a grievance against Danny. [I] wasn’t there, didn’t do it.’
Meanwhile, Alastair Morgan told the programme he absolutely didn’t believe the ‘ love triangle’ had anything to do with the murder.
The quest for justice for the Morgan family continues.