Last summer, Allen Morgan was sentenced to life imprisonment after being found guilty of orchestrating the horrific murder of his wife, Carol Morgan.
However, as detailed in the new ITV documentary The Real Unforgotten, the individual who bludgeoned Carol to death in the storeroom of her corner shop on August 13, 1981, has never been caught and could be “living anywhere”.
Carol, who’d opened Morgan’s Food Fare in Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, with her husband Morgan back in 1979, had suffered a ferocious attack before her death. Wielding a weapon believed to be an axe or a machete, the assailant inflicted between 10 and 15 blows on the mother of two, with officers left haunted by memories of the crime scene.
Speaking previously with the Mirror, Bedfordshire Police Detective Constable Denise Brown, who also features in the ITV documentary, recalled: “Those pictures are imprinted in my memory. There were so many lacerations that her whole head of hair had pretty much been in her hands, it was it was honestly the worst thing I’ve ever seen.
“She was still wearing her slip-on Scholl shoes, which suggests she had been hit and gone straight down. The telephone wires were cut downstairs and the footprints stopped, they didn’t travel through the shop, which suggests the person who killed her was very forensically aware.”
Carol’s murder was initially treated as a robbery gone wrong, with £450 from the till and cigarettes stolen. But with so little reward for such a violent attack, things just didn’t add up,
DC Brown, 49, doesn’t believe the killer were a professional hitman, and thinks they were potentially known to Morgan. “He took out two lots of money from the cash point leading up to this, and our hypothesis is that that money was used to pay the hitman off.”
Morgan, now 74, had built a watertight alibi for the night of Carol’s death. That evening, he’d taken stepchildren, Dean and Jane, then aged 14 and 12, to an Odeon cinema some 25 miles away in Luton, where they’d sat through two films, making sure to keep parking receipts to support his story.
After arriving home at approximately 10.30pm, Morgan told the children to go upstairs and make a coffee, without calling out Carol’s name once. He then rang the police to alert them to the terrible discovery he’d made in the store room.
The case was reopened in 2018, and a harrowing witness testimony helped officers finally bring Morgan to justice. Jane Bunting, who the police encountered while door knocking, finally shared the secret she’d been harbouring for years, having previously been too frightened to speak out as a then-17-year-old woman living in a tight-knit community.
Just a few months before the murder, Jane had overheard an “appalling” conversation in the pub between Morgan and her ex-boyfriend that she’d never forgotten. He’d asked if he knew anyone who could kill, with Morgan stating: “’I hate Carol’, ‘I don’t want to be married to her’, ‘I wish she’d die’, ‘Wouldn’t an accident be nice?’.”
The Morgans had been dealing with spiralling debts, and Carol had bequeathed everything to her husband in her will. The shop also had a life insurance policy linked to it. DC Brown explained: “There wasn’t hard evidence, there wasn’t CCTV, we’d been slowly building a circumstantial case, and so when Jane came along, that was the final thing for us. It put that piece of the jigsaw in place.”
However, although Morgan is now behind bars, the killer who dealt the fatal blows could still be alive, and “living anywhere”. Detectives have now relaunched an appeal to find the murderer, on Crimewatch Live.
Bedfordshire Police Detective Inspector Richard Stott has issued the following plea: “Although we refer to a ‘contract killer’ employed by Allen, Carol’s death was far from professional – it was a gruesome and frenzied attack. This killer, if still alive, could be living anywhere, and may have talked about details in their life which potentially are suspicious.
“Detectives are still interested in finding a man seen leaving the store around the time of the attack after an e-fit was issued as part of the original investigation, but are looking more broadly. No murder case is ever left undetected, and we will pursue any leads – no matter how seemingly small – to ensure that Carol’s killer is apprehended.
“Did you know Carol around the time of her death, or have any involvement with Allen either back then or since? We would also like to hear from people who frequented the numerous pubs around Linslade and Leighton Buzzard in the early 80s, including The Dolphin, The Ship, The Waggon and Horses and The Clay Pipe.”
*The first episode of The Real Unforgotten aired 18th February, 9pm on ITV1 & ITVX. Both episodes dropped on ITVX on February 18th. The second episode will air this evening, on ITV1, 25th February.
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