Original subtitles

Tonight David Morris

is starting four life sentences behind bars.

A police escort led the killer

of Mandy, Katie, Emily, and Doris

away from the court, back to prison.

-My brother's not the real man.

He didn't do these things.

And I just hope that that Mandy's family

can see that they've got the wrong man

and the real killers are walking free.

I just thought, "What's gonna happen to us now?"

We didn't know how people were gonna react.

We didn't know if they were gonna be violent towards us.

But we knew we had to fight for him.

We were so convinced we could get him out.

He's innocent, we can get him out.

20 years later, we're still fighting it.

-You don't just go and murder a family

unless you've got a reason to do it.

And they had a reason.

They had a reason.

Bastards.

This was, and still is,

the biggest murder inquiry ever seen in South Wales.

After months of often frustrating work,

police have now arrested a 38-year-old man

on suspicion of murder.

Back in court amid mid tight security,

David Morris, the man serving at least 32 years behind bars

for the murders of three generations of the same family.

His family were there to support him.

His two daughters, sister, and father,

who've long protested his innocence

of one of the most horrific crimes

in British criminal history.

Today it was claimed that David Hutchinson

should never have represented Morris

because he'd also acted for policeman Stephen Lewis.

He had agreed with David Hutchinson

that he wouldn't be blamed for the murders

at Morris's trial in 2002.

-I didn't quite understand conflict of interest

at the time, but I just thought it was odd.

I remember going in the office and saying to Hutchinson,

"But how can you represent my brother"

"when you've already worked for the Lewises?"

"You know, you were their lawyer."

My brother asked him the same question,

"Can you actually represent me?"

And he said the same thing to my brother, "Of course I can."

"Of course I can."

"I'm the best man for the job."

Right, David, can I just say

the reason for this interview is 'cause you've been arrested

on suspicion of being involved in the murders

of Doris Violet Dawson-

- A lawyer in these circumstances representing,

at one in the same time, competing suspects

is an impossible situation.

For Mandy Power's sisters and brother

it must have been an agonizing journey to the court today.

They believe the man responsible for brutally killing

three generations of their family is behind bars.

But this afternoon they had to listen

to David Morris's barrister explain

why he believed the conviction was unsafe.

-The reason is obvious, that as one of these clients

you're going to be suspecting, "Am I being told everything?"

"Is he keeping stuff back"

"because he's gotta protect these other clients?"

His defense was shackled and one hand

was tied behind the back because you couldn't develop

the case against another suspect.

I mean, you know, if Morris didn't do it, then who did?

But the fact that nobody actually did anything

about the conflict of interest

illustrates the kind of legal claustrophobia

that penetrates South Wales

and has done for a very long time.

-Innocent!

-Fucking innocent, man.

Fucking set up.

I wanted to do the case

because I've done a lot of cases out of South Wales.

The Cardiff Three would spend

four years in jail before being released on appeal.

-M25-

-Fucking justice, man.

Justice.

-The reason why it's so appalling is it demonstrates

a willingness by a large number of police officers

essentially to fit up the wrong people.

Wayne and Paul Darvell,

free men after seven long years in custody

for a murder they didn't commit.

South Wales Police had doctored,

planted, and suppressed evidence,

altering notes of Wayne's confession,

holding back tape recordings

of the men's conversation in custody,

and halting forensic tests

that were inconsistent with the brothers' guilt.

The killing of Cardiff newsagent

Philip Saunders was a brutal one.

He was bludgeoned to death on his doorstep

in the Canton area of the city.

The conviction of three teenagers

was based partly on an alleged confession.

-All three defendants received life sentences.

As he was taken down, O'Brien turned to the public gallery

and shouted, "I didn't do it, Dad."

-If I had not gone through

my 11 years and 43 days of imprisonment,

I probably would've been one of those persons

who think the police would do no wrong.

Michael O'Brien finally stepped out of prison

late this afternoon.

He was immediately surrounded by his family,

who'd been waiting 11 years for this day.

-I don't know what champagne tastes like,

but I'm sure gonna find out.

My stepfather died when I was inside

and my daughter died when I was inside.

I should have been with my wife at the time

and with my child, and I wasn't with 'em.

I was taken away from them.

When I was released and I was on the Court of Appeal steps,

you know what I mean, I was quite angry.

I can remember walking up to the microphone saying,

you know, I was gonna be South Wales Police's

worst nightmare for what they did to me.

And I meant every word of it because I had 11 years of hell.

There's no other word for it.

And I would not be able to sleep at night

knowing that an innocent man is in prison

if I didn't get involved and try

and do something to rectify it.

Somebody else could be in the same position

as what I was in, and I am very, very worried

at David Morris's case.

However, I must say-

I was there at the appeal and I met the family,

you know, I met Debra,

and it was clearly something wasn't right here.

There was never no direct link, no DNA evidence

which linked Dai Morris to the crime.

And that's what made me sort of look at it

and think this is a miscarriage of justice.

There's no doubt about it in my mind.

-The Clydach murder case,

which has haunted a Swansea Valley community

for six long years is to be sent for retrial.

Former builder's laborer David Morris

has won his appeal against conviction.

-The court decided that the conflict of interest

was the fatal flaw which pervaded

the entire conduct of the defense.

On that basis, the conviction was quashed.

A retrial will now follow.

-Well, we can go live now to Swansea

and our chief reporter, Penny Roberts.

Penny.

-Thanks Jane.

Well you join me at-

At the first trial I was filing from Swansea Crown Court

at lunchtime, in the evening a report, do a live,

you know, for three months virtually every night.

Now, nearly six years after the murders of their loved ones,

Mandy Power's family face the ordeal of another trial.

All this time had passed and we were back to square one.

-Mansfield, he did a brilliant job.

You know, he was second to none in the court.

We thought, "This is it."

"This is gonna be when he's coming home."

But then Mansfield couldn't stay with us.

He was in the middle of something else.

And so it was massive blow, massive blow, and we lost him.

-He just, he was taken notice of.

He just seemed to have a really big voice

and a big presence.

And you could see that he would've put things across the way

they should have been put across.

But what happened?

-The second trial started

and things just seemed to fall apart.

The second trial

was really a rerun of the first trial.

-Chief Reporter Penny Roberts

has been in court for the retrial

and has followed the story

from the day the murders were discovered.

-But what was very different was a very key moment

as the trial progressed,

when David Morris was giving evidence.

It was, you know, vintage Patrick Harrington.

-David Morris started giving evidence.

He'd been given every opportunity

to tell the truth, and he didn't.

And not only did he lie, he repeated those lies.

He elaborated upon them.

He changed his story time after time.

His account had been that on the Friday

he'd gone to Mandy Power's,

had sex, and left his chain there.

But our scrutiny of telephone records had shown

that there were two telephone calls made from his flat

at the time when he says he'd been with Mandy Power.

This new piece of evidence was a devastating point.

We were able to prove by those phone calls

that his account was simply untrue.

He was like a boxer who'd been punched

and fell back on the ropes.

It demolished him.

-The image of David Morris in the witness box,

you know, he put his head in his hands.

But, you know, you could see the blood drain from his face.

It was very, very significant.

And I think the trial turned on that.

After seven harrowing years

and a three month long retrial, justice again

for those who lost their loved ones

in a senseless act of brutality.

The public gallery erupted with shouts of "Yes."

Mandy Power's family sobbed and embraced.

In the dock, David Morris showed no emotion,

merely turning towards his father

and shrugging his shoulders.

The judge then called him a savage and sadistic killer.

"In your case," he said, "life in prison

"should mean the whole of your life behind bars."

Has he changed even since the last visit?

-Mm.

But you haven't given up hope?

-No, no.

What about you, Adele?

-No, I ain't given up hope.

And how is that,

how do you keep that hope going then?

-I know he didn't do it.

-Just because he's had two trials and been found guilty

still does not make him a guilty man.

Di Morris is in the same prison

where I spent seven years at,

in Long Lartin Prison in Worcestershire.

And I can tell you now you've gotta keep yourself busy.

That's what I did with my time.

I mean, I used to write 70 letters a week, a week.

I wrote to every single member of parliament, 660 MPs.

I wrote to the House of Lords,

members of the European Parliament.

And, you know, I just never stopped.

So you gotta keep hopes alive.

And as long as you keep them hopes alive,

you know, the truth will come out.

-If you find yourself in prison, you can send a letter

to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, and you can say,

"Please investigate my case."

Every year 1,500 people do this.

And every year 99% of those applications are rejected.

Nobody will help them.

And so they come to somebody like me.

12 years ago I got a letter from David Morris

asking for help.

David Morris is probably

the most guilty person you can imagine.

In terms of the legal system, he's as guilty as you can be.

Everybody's looked at this case and everybody says,

"This man is guilty."

And so I was struggling to think, "Where can this go?"

"How can he claim that he's innocent?"

And so I kept reading, really so that I wanted

to sort of satisfy myself that when I said to him,

"Look, there's nothing we can do,"

that at least I could say to him,

"Well, I've read everything."

But the more I read, the more unsettled,

the more uneasy I became.

And the more you kind of pushed against this evidence,

you thought, "Actually, this is not what it seems to be."

"There is something wrong here."

I'm happiest looking through the box of files,

looking through the evidence

with that almost obsessive

sort of searching out for something new.

What I discovered by going through all the files

is that there are effectively two investigations.

The investigation into Morris

is the one that everybody knows about.

It's the one where we know that he has a criminal record.

We know that he lied.

We know about his chain.

But the other investigation, pretty much nobody knows about.

And this is the investigation

into the Lewises that came before.

And these two investigations

sit very uncomfortably together.

The main thing that I keep coming back to

is the fact that Stuart,

the identical twin brother of Stephen,

doesn't know where he was for hours.

On a shift where he's a senior officer.

And offers no explanation why he can't remember,

and then lies repeatedly.

This really stinks there's something very wrong here.

But also normally what happens

is the senior officer in charge of a crime scene

is always called to the court case to tell the jury

about what was happening at the time

and what the scene looked like, and so on.

Stuart Lewis was never called.

And all the information about his behavior on the night

and his possible connection to the E-fit

and these sightings of a car

similar to the car that he was driving that night,

none of that was shown to the jury.

But crucial to any involvement by Stuart and Stephen

in this case is the matter of motive.

Did Stephen Lewis know that Alison and Mandy

were having a relationship?

People say to me, "He must have known."

But I did my best to hide it from him.

And I don't think he did know.

In terms of the court, in terms of the jury,

none of the juries were convinced that he knew.

Well played.

Go for it, Al.

-But the rugby players, the taxi drivers,

neighbors, friends, everybody

was telling the police Stephen knew.

So this is perhaps the most intriguing

piece of evidence of the lot.

This is a document from a police informant.

The informant tells the police that he was in a local pub

and that he overheard a conversation

Mandy was having with two friends.

Mandy told these friends that her and her kids

had been threatened by her current lover's husband,

who was a police officer.

What's extraordinary about this is that you can see

from the date stamp is that this came in within hours

of the murders actually happening.

And yet this informant never gave evidence

in any of the trials

and was never seen as a significant witness.

We investigated that fully.

Of course, couldn't had any meat on that bone.

And there had been a lot of local gossip

that Stephen must have known.

Mandy would spend time at the Lewis' house.

And equally, Alison would sleep over at Mandy's house.

But why would a police officer go and kill four people?

You might think that if somebody's sleeping

with your wife, that might be a motive.

-Does everybody whose wife or husband have an affair

go and murder the family?

Of course they don't.

I mean, I think that's a ludicrous assumption to make.

You don't think that's a motive?

-Not at all.

If you think somebody having a lesbian relationship

and somebody would go out and kill that individual

and then kill four people, where have you seen that ever?

-During the police interviews,

Stephen Lewis starts off at a point saying,

"I was never in the house."

"Never in the house, never touched anything."

Then slowly but surely, incrementally, he says,

"Oh yes, maybe I was in there once or twice."

Then he says, "I was downstairs."

Then he says, "I was upstairs."

To a point where he says he was lighting matches

in the kitchen in order to help Mandy

just make a cup of tea.

But the awkward thing for Stephen Lewis

is that it's an electric cooker.

And then he says, yeah,

he may have even gone into Doris' room.

We're now moving

from the blood stain on the landing

into the rear bedroom downstairs, which is mother's bedroom.

-And then the most remarkable moment is where he says

that he might have touched the murder weapon.

The officers interviewing him are almost stunned by this

because they think, "Well, how could that have happened?"

"Well, because I lifted something out to the shed for Mandy."

"May have touched the murder weapon just by accident."

Situated up the rear of the premises

is a wooden garden shed.

-And they're saying, "What?"

And then eventually he comes up with a tumble dryer.

So this is a man who's never been in the house before,

is suddenly carrying a tumble dryer

out to the shed in Mandy's house.

I mean, it's utterly amazing and bizarre.

Two juries have found David Morris guilty.

Why are you pushing this?

-I can completely understand why somebody

would think that David Morris is guilty.

But if we have misgivings about a case,

the legal system in this country

should be robust enough to sustain difficult questions.

Asking for transparency,

asking for evidence is not an attack.

It's simply asking them to give us confidence

that the system works.

-I think the general public are largely

and justifiably very trusting of the police.

But the suggestion that the police never frame people,

it's really, it's not right.

It happens, it really does happen.

In November 2013, Brian Thornton got in touch.

He said he'd been working on this case for a number of years

and he was kind of dangling the promise

of some positive leads

that kind of as an appealer you get drawn to.

I think there is an element

of sticking your fingers up at authority

and just saying to people at the end of something,

"You know what, you got it wrong."

21 years on from the murders, after two appeals,

two previous CCRC applications, fourth firm of solicitors,

you might think it was a hopeless case.

It's not.

But we have no alternative but to go back to the CCRC.

Only the CCRC can refer a case back to the Court of Appeal.

We've got no choice,

and we've got to get the evidence ourselves.

-It was actually a student of mine

that came up with, sort of, the first big breakthrough.

He was reading about the forensics,

and he said that there's male DNA on this murder weapon.

And after doing a lot of research

we also found that there was male DNA on the sock

that may have been used by the killer as a glove.

Surely, now surely this male DNA

would've been tested and retested.

Turned out they had tested

but couldn't identify who it was.

That's a real problem.

That's a fundamental problem.

And we think that 20 years later

the technology has moved on so much

that a review of that material

will finally establish who that person was.

But the problem with the DNA

is that because it was part of the original case

it can't be considered as fresh evidence.

And the CCRC will only really look at this case again

if we present them with fresh evidence.

So we need to find something new.

-I set up the Facebook group about 11 years ago.

I think we currently have 26,000 members.

I mean, the idea is that the more people

that are aware of Dad's case,

the less likely it is to be forgotten.

You know, we want people to be as outraged

at this case as we are.

-"SWP should hang their heads in shame

"for their handling of this case."

"The work you guys do on here is really commendable."

"I hope we get justice for Dai."

Somebody might be sitting at home right now

with new information thinking, "What do I do?"

And if they can see that people are supportive,

they may feel more willing to come forward.

-I completely understand David Morris' family

fighting for justice for him.

Who would want to believe

that someone in their family is capable of that?

And I completely understand it.

I always understood it.

But that never, what I didn't understand

is why it was always put onto us.

We have over 400 social media threats

from his Free Dai Morris site of abuse.

These people aren't interested in the truth.

All they want to do is slam South Wales Police,

say it's a conspiracy.

And no one has ever said what evidence there is

against me, Stephen, and Stuart,

except for hearsay, gossip, rumors, and lies.

Not one of them has got one piece of evidence.

I've been feeling guilty for the last 20 years.

But I have to protect my family.

This is why I never come forward.

-The suggestion that this is a case

of police looking after him is ludicrous.

Absolutely ludicrous.

People love these conspiracy stories.

They love to build something around it.

And I think that's what's driving this particular case.

The evidence in this case points to one person,

and one person only.

That's David Morris.

Everything fits perfectly.

-I was up to the mountain

about half past four in the morning.

I always keep to the back roads

because I didn't have a driving license.

That night it was dark,

but I had full beam on and it lit up the whole lane.

And when I come around that corner,

he was in the middle of the road.

The person I saw was by here.

He ran across here like this,

and he looked directly at me.

And I had perfect view of that person.

Perfect view.

And I know for a fact it was that person,

the man in question.

Sergeant Stephen Lewis.

He had a green kitbag under his arm

and he went into the darkness.

Why didn't you come forward

to the police with what you knew?

-Who would've believed me?

I've done wrong in my life, taking cars and stuff like that.

Silly things.

I knew the inspector was his brother.

If I had gone and said, "Oh, by the way",

"I saw your brother up the mountain road,"

my feet wouldn't touch the floor.

I don't trust him at all.

But because the condition I'm in now, then enough's enough.

You know what I mean?

I want justice for Mandy Power's family.

I want justice for the community of Clydach.

And I want justice for Dai Morris' family.

I feel now I've done the right thing.

Least if I do die, I might go to a better place

than where I was planning to go to.

Do you know what I mean?

-John Allen's new testimony is important

and it's significant

because moving away from 9 Kelvin Road,

out of the northern edge of Clydach Village,

up Gellionnen Road, leads to a path.

As the crow flies, it's a straight line

to a village called Pontardawe.

And Stephen Lewis lived at an address

in Pontardawe at that time.

So the sighting by John, the new witness,

supports the original evidence

from the police investigation and from the trial.

That of Nicola Williams.

He was quite tall, dark cropped hair.

I saw him just here under the lamppost,

and he was carrying a bundle under his arm,

quite a large kitbag.

-An E-fit was generated,

which is pretty much a picture of Stephen or Stuart Lewis.

Nicola Williams' evidence

was supported in turn by Rosemary Jones,

who lived opposite 9 Kelvin Road,

who heard a distinctive diesel vehicle,

saw somebody get out.

Who do you think that person was?

-I really don't know, but whoever came back that time

must have come back to set the house on fire.

-And Stuart Lewis was driving a diesel red Peugeot vehicle.

So all these sightings combined, geographically,

sequentially support the proposition

that Stephen Lewis was at the scene of the murder.

And Stuart Lewis was there very quickly afterwards.

There is not one similar sighting of David Morris,

and there never has been.

South Wales Police have said a forensic review

is to be carried out on the evidence

which helped convict a Swansea Valley man

for the murders of three generations of the same family.

-People have been led to believe

that actually there are questions

in relation to David Morris' conviction.

If we haven't got trust in the community,

then that's really damaging.

So we are willing to listen.

But we needed another force to do this

because it would be like marking our own homework.

You know, let's face it, would the public believe us?

They're questioning us already.

-Daddy's been asking for these forensics

to be done for years.

A guilty man doesn't ask for forensics to be done again.

I mean, a guilty man asking for forensics to be done again,

where's the sense in that?

-They can't push it off.

-They can't. -I hope not.

-No, there's...

-I just want him home.

I just want him home.

Do you know what I dream of?

Just walking up to the prison, right?

Then us just...

-Hm. -Mm.

-You know, just being there and he's free, he's a free man.

Just a free man, like.

-I don't trust them.

As simple as that.

I know, babe.

Before we move on,

I have some breaking news for you this evening.

David Morris, the man who was serving four life sentences

for the murders of a Swansea family, has died in prison.

The Ministry of Justice

has not confirmed the cause of his death.

-I still can't believe this is our life.

20 years, 20-odd years,

and I still can't believe this is our life.

I'd give anything for it not to be, but it is.

It's just, I can't explain it.

I just feel so angry.

I just feel so angry.

Who'd you feel angry towards?

-The police.

I'm squarely on the police and their actions

and everything they did to get a conviction.

They went to such lengths to get a conviction

and they took my brother's life away

and they changed ours, they changed ours completely.

They took everything away from him,

but they took it away from us as well.

Just because he's gone doesn't mean we've given up on him.

You know, he's my big brother.

-You know, Dad can't be gone

and still be legally a murderer.

There's no way that we could allow that to happen.

If we didn't carry on fighting,

then that's like us walking away from him then.

And I could never do that to him.

-South Wales Police has shown a commitment

to providing evidence-based answers

to the issues which have been raised about this case.

This commitment has now resulted

in a forensic link to the convicted killer.

Operation Dolomite has identified a scientific link

between Morris and a sock which is widely accepted

as being used by the offender during the killings.

-In the opinion of the examining scientist

regarding these results, which were obtained

from samples extracted from two separate areas of the sock

at the time of the original forensic examination,

it is more likely that David Morris

contributed DNA to them than if he did not.

-I hope this now provides closure

for those most affected by the murders,

in particular those who lost

three generations of the same family.

So how strong

is the DNA link to David Morris?

-So the link to David Morris

is as strong as we can possibly get at this time.

But we have to accept it's not gonna be as strong

as something that we got from a murder a week ago,

'cause it's 20 years old.

But on the basis that this evidence

did identify similarities with David Morris,

and all the other evidence

that we've had with a conviction previously,

the two of those things together combined

make this a case where we feel the evidence corroborates

the safe conviction of Dave Morris.

-For them to say, "Right, we have found DNA"

"that would likely match your father's,"

and then to expect us to take this lightly

after 20-odd years fighting

and forget all the trust that we had in Dad

and kind of believe they are likely and walk away-

-Yeah, because we're gonna trust them, see,

we're gonna trust them, we're gonna believe them,

police, South Wales Police, I don't think so.

-You know, is it the kind of likely

that would stand up in court

or is it the kind of likely

that wouldn't be able to be used in court as evidence?

We just don't know.

I mean, is there anybody else's DNA there?

We know there's male DNA on the murder weapon.

Whose DNA is that?

Because they haven't said that's likely to be Dad's.

You know, does that mean that that belongs to somebody else,

or does it mean that they haven't tested it?

There's so many questions.

-The police are saying that they have found a link

between the sock and David Morris.

And when we say, "Great, can you show us this evidence?"

"Can we have access to anything?"

And they say, "No."

"No, we're not answering any questions."

"No, we're not gonna release the report."

"Why aren't you gonna release the report?"

"We're not gonna tell you."

But how can we have closure

if we don't know what this evidence is?

Apologies to the police, but we can't take it on trust.

They just haven't earned it.

-We have released the results

from the forensic report into the public.

So there really shouldn't be any question

as to what's been found there.

The physical report itself,

that needs to go to the Criminal Cases Review Commission.

And that's what we've done.

When people talk about the Clydach murders,

other cases from South Wales Police history

keep getting brought up.

A lot of this is about trust, isn't it?

-It's safe to say that we got it wrong on those occasions.

We absolutely got it wrong.

I think it was a very different case when you looked

at some of the previous miscarriages of justice

and the reviews demonstrated huge errors

in the way the investigations were conducted.

We haven't found that on this occasion, not at all.

This is not a miscarriage of justice.

-This all could have been stopped 20 years ago

when, if David Morris had said, "I'm sorry",

"I've committed these crimes,"

and taken responsibility for what he did.

He was quite happy for the general public

to think that other people might have done this

and he was innocent, he was a victim in this.

David Morris was never a victim.

He brought everybody into this fury of disbelief,

and false facts, and misinformation.

He could have been honest with his family.

He could have saved their family

all the torment of this last 21 years,

and he's chose not to do that.

That was his biggest betrayal.

-Dad hated the fact that we had to live our lives

doing campaigning, and fighting,

and being so public, and just,

he would never have allowed us

to do what we've done if he was guilty.

There's no way.

Do you think that he might want you

to move on with your life?

-I think my brother would be thinking,

"Just get on with your life now."

"You fought for long enough."

But that's not gonna happen.

It's just not possible.

We're gonna carry on fighting.

I don't really know where we're gonna go from here,

but we need the report, we're gonna fight for the report,

and we're gonna carry on.

We're gonna carry on.

It's as simple as that.

-I thought the world of Doris.

She was a lovely lady.

Whenever I went down to the house, I'd sit on the settee.

Emily always used to come and sit with me.

Katie used to call me Ali baby.

You know, Mandy was always kind, loving,

tried to do her best all the time,

and enjoyed her life, enjoyed her children.

Mandy had so much to give.

She had so much to live for.

And it hasn't been a day that I haven't missed her.

I loved being with her.

Everything about her made me happy.

---oOo---