Sunday, December 21, 2014
Was man framed to cover up for a rogue British cop?
The official body responsible for putting right miscarriages of justice is to launch an urgent, ‘fast-track’ inquiry into Wales’s worst mass murder following a Mail on Sunday investigation.
A spokesman for the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) last night revealed it has given its highest ‘priority one’ status to the case of David Morris, 52, who is serving four life sentences for the savage killings of Mandy Power, 34, her daughters Katie, ten, and Emily, eight, and her 80-year-old mother, Doris Dawson.
Divorcee Mrs Power was Morris’s occasional lover, but was also in a lesbian relationship with Alison Lewis, a former police officer who was the wife of a serving South Wales sergeant, Stephen Lewis.
Mr and Mrs Lewis were arrested for the murder and interviewed before Morris became a suspect, though not charged.
Stephen’s twin, Inspector Stuart Lewis, was the first senior officer to reach the scene in Clydach, near Swansea, where Mandy and her family were bludgeoned to death.
After lying in wait and slaughtering them with a heavy pole, the killer set fire to their house in an effort to cover his tracks.
Inspector Lewis could not account for his movements at critical times during the night of the killings, June 26, 1999, and went off duty before telling any senior colleagues that this was a case of mass murder and arson. An official inquiry found he had told numerous lies and he was formally disciplined, though not criminally charged.
As this newspaper revealed last month, a dossier compiled for the CCRC by Morris’s lawyers, Maslen Merchant and Francis FitzGibbon QC, contains compelling fresh evidence, uncovered after a five-year investigation by Winchester University journalism lecturer Brian Thornton.
It includes the record of a message received by the murder inquiry incident room, which came from a trusted police informant. It stated that Mandy ‘and her kids had been threatened by her current lover’s husband who was a police officer’.
Also in the dossier are results of forensic tests done before Morris’s trial, which found traces of a man’s DNA on the murder weapon, the matches used to light the fire, and on Mandy’s clothes and watch. Inexplicably, further tests that could have established whether this DNA matched Morris or someone else were never carried out.
Morris has always protested his innocence, and from his cell at Long Lartin prison in Worcestershire, is urging the CCRC to have these further tests conducted as soon as possible.
In the wake of the Mail on Sunday report, several new witnesses have come forward with potentially vital new evidence.
(And don't forget your ration of Wicked Thoughts for today. Now hosted on Wordpress. If you cannot access it, go to the MIRROR SITE, where posts appear as well as on the primary site. I have reposted the archives (past posts) for Wicked Thoughts HERE or HERE or here
The CCRC spokesman confirmed that these statements will also form part of the new inquiry.
Original report here
(And don't forget your ration of Wicked Thoughts for today. Now hosted on Wordpress. If you cannot access it, go to the MIRROR SITE, where posts appear as well as on the primary site. I have reposted the archives (past posts) for Wicked Thoughts HERE or HERE or here
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