Three men charged with the 1987 murder of the private detective Daniel Morgan have lost their case that police maliciously tried to get them convicted. A fourth man has won part of his claim for damages.
The Morgan case is mired in claims of police and media corruption.
Morgan’s former business partner, Jonathan Rees, and his brothers-in-law, Garry and Glenn Vian, were tried for murder but the case collapsed in 2011. Sid Fillery was charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice but eventually the crown dropped the case against him.
In the civil case the four sued the Metropolitan police, alleging that officers were so determined to see them convicted that the force’s pursuit became malicious.
On Friday at the high court in central London, Mr Justice Mitting ruled against Rees and the Vians while Fillery won part of his claim. A claim of misfeasance in public office went in Fillery’s favour because the only witness against him was deemed unreliable and had been mishandled by the detective leading the case.
Fillery was awarded £25,000 in interim damages. The judge said the final sum would be higher and would be decided later.
Morgan was killed outside the Golden Lion pub in Sydenham, south London, on 10 March 1987, aged 37. He was found with an axe embedded in his head.
![Daniel Morgan.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170219192938im_/https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/f184a9e4563e200cb34aa598e8e078136db0d533/40_223_1118_670/master/1118.jpg?w=300&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&s=15e7e8dfe2a1c8f154cfc16fc08e3aff)
The high court heard allegations from lawyers acting for the police that Rees paid Glenn Vian to carry out the killing, and that Vian struck two blows with the axe. The court also heard allegations Morgan had been looking into claims involving the drugs trade; it was claimed that one of the alleged killers said: “Morgan knew too much.”
Fillery was a former Met police officer, a friend of Rees. After Morgan’s killing he replaced him in the detective agency Southern Investigations, where Morgan had been a partner.
The News of the World and other media used Southern Investigations, and police suspected it was involved with corrupt officers selling information.
The civil claim centred on the police investigation into the murder that collapsed in 2011 led by DCS David Cook, now retired. Lawyers for the men suing the Met attacked Cook’s ethics. Nicholas Bowen QC said Cook may have been driven to see Rees and the other men convicted because he “became convinced and resentful that Rees and Southern Investigations had fixed up a surveillance operation of his own activities with the active cooperation of the News of the World”.
In the high court Mitting said Cook’s actions “amounted to the crime of doing an act tending and intended to pervert the course of justice”.
Cook is alleged to have coached a key witness, Gary Eaton. The high court ruling said Cook did this not to get Eaton to give false evidence, but probably because he believed Eaton had been present at the murder and its aftermath but was too scared to say so.
The ruling found Cook “did deliberately breach both guidelines and express instructions from his superiors which he knew would be likely to undermine the integrity of the evidence of the potential witness Eaton”.
There was enough other evidence, other than from Eaton, for the charges against Rees and the Vian brothers to be brought, the ruling said. But Eaton was the only potential witness against Fillery and without that testimony the suspect would not have been prosecuted.
The Met’s case was that witness after witness named the same suspects in connection with the Morgan murder. The criminal case collapsed mainly because it relied on informants whose testimony was ruled as inadmissible.
Ultimately prosecutors decided to offer no evidence, citing problems with the legal process of discovery, by which the prosecution gives relevant documents to the defence.
Bowen told the court: “The impropriety is not limited to the former DCS Cook. The Met police attitude to this case from the beginning was blinkered, and a mindset developed which propelled the various investigations towards the goal of seeking the conviction of our clients irrespective of the fact there was no credible evidence against them.”
Daniel’s brother, Alastair Morgan, said: “Whatever the conclusions of this judgment, we consider that it would be a travesty of justice if David Cook is allowed to become the scapegoat for the failures of the Metropolitan police over the decades in failing to confront the police corruption that lay at the heart of this case.”
Morgan said he still had many unanswered questions about the death of his brother and the failure to bring his killers to justice: “Why did those at the highest levels of the Metropolitan police repeatedly fail to confront the police corruption that stared them in the face in relation to this case over the decades?
“Like us, the public at large can see how the sickness of such police corruption has been allowed to fester and spread through the ranks, and that is the real mischief for which the Metropolitan police must be held to account.”
The suspects were subjected to bugging, with one recording capturing Rees revealing he could use his corrupt police contacts to access top-secret information, including whether police working on the Morgan inquiry were monitoring him and any of the other suspects.
During the hearings, Jeremy Johnson QC for the Met told the court the murder and the alleged corruption in shielding the killers had “shocked the conscience of the nation”. He said Theresa May, while she was home secretary, had ordered an inquiry into the corruption claims. A panel is investigating and its report is due out this year.
The Met police assistant commissioner Martin Hewitt said: “We strongly believed that it was right and justifiable to pursue these men as part of the investigation into Daniel Morgan’s murder. The judge has found in our favour in relation to the three men that were charged with Daniel’s murder.
“In relation to Sidney Fillery we acknowledge the judge’s findings and what he said about ex-detective chief superintendent Cook. We are considering the appropriate next step to take.
“Whilst we welcome this judgment, I am mindful that the work of the Daniel Morgan independent panel is ongoing, and we continue to work with them as they seek to fully examine the circumstances of Daniel’s murder, and the handling of the case since 1987.”