40 years after the brutal murder of Carol Morgan, police finally found the missing piece to the puzzle needed to take down her evil husband who orchestrated her tragic demise. But justice hasn’t entirely been served, with the hitman still unidentified and at large. Carol, 36, had been a key member of the community in Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire after she and Allen Morgan opened a corner shop - Morgan's Food Fare - on a council estate in 1979.
It was in the storeroom that Carol’s bludgeoned body was found by Morgan less than two years later, on August 13, 1981. There were whisperings about his involvement in his wife’s death at the time, but he seemingly got away with the plot thanks to his cast-iron alibi. In numerous TV interviews, he told how he had taken his stepchildren, Dean and Jane, then aged 14 and 12 respectively, to an Odeon cinema 25 miles away in Luton, where he made them sit through two films. He even kept receipts of his parking.
Once home at around 10.30pm, he told the children to go upstairs and make a coffee, without calling Carol’s name once. He then rang the police to inform them of the grim discovery. After years of thinking he’d gotten away with it, his once-robust story finally collapsed after a team of investigators reopened the case in 2018. It took more than 80 officers to work round the clock for six years to work out what really happened and following a breakthrough witness statement, Morgan, 74, was last summer sentenced to life with a minimum of 22 years.
Carol’s beloved niece, Julie Welsh, 59, who features in a new ITV documentary about the harrowing cold case, The Real Unforgotten, hopes Morgan rots in jail. “I really think he should be one of those where you lock him up and throw away the key, that’s how I feel,” Julie told the Mirror. “It’s so hard to say his name. My whole family feel like that. He is, in my eyes, a monster.”. Carol met Morgan following her divorce from her first husband, Richard, with whom she shared her two children. Richard’s sister Joan Sutton, Julie’s mother, remained like a sister to Carol despite no longer being in-laws, with the pair and their children spending weekends together at parties.
As they both navigated their new lives as single mums, they relied on each other for support. They joined a social club called The Gingerbread Group, where Carol met her future husband. After marrying in a small ceremony at the registry office, the pair embarked on a fresh start in Bedfordshire, and it was from this point that Julie never saw her aunt again as they cut off all contact. Speaking about her first impressions of Morgan, Julie, who was 16 when her aunt was murdered, said: “He was not what you call a close person in the family and wasn’t supportive like Carol and my mum were.
“He wasn't there to be a new member of the family like my stepfather was. He just didn't give the impression of being, well, a kind person. I can't say that he was a nasty person because he was never like that towards me but he had that aura about him.”. Julie and her mother found out about Carol’s sudden death when watching the six o’clock news. It was an immense shock for the family, who were left perplexed over who could have committed such an awful crime to a kind and well-loved woman.
“I have many fond memories of being with them [Carol, Dean and Jane] as children enjoying things, I was really close to them when we were young,” Julie began. “And the next thing I'm hearing is my aunt Carol had been murdered. “Why would someone do something to a woman who's so lovely with not a bad bone in her body? We couldn’t believe it. It happened in daylight in a residential area, how could somebody brutally attack an innocent woman and get away with it?.
“Times were different back then, without CCTV, but it was hard to believe that no one was ever brought forward. We always had speculations about Morgan. We always felt he must have known something because of the circumstances.”. Carol’s murder was initially treated as a robbery gone wrong, with £450 from the till and cigarettes stolen. But for such a ferocious attack for little reward, things didn’t add up, with detectives saying the crime scene was one of the worst they’ve ever seen.
The mum-of-two suffered between 10 and 15 blows, with the weapon believed to be an axe or machete. Bedfordshire Police Detective Constable Denise Brown, who also features in the ITV documentary, told the Mirror: “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. “The hypothesis back then was that whoever killed Carol must have known her, just because of the way the crime scene was found. It looked like she was making a cup of tea. They had locked the dog away in the bedroom, where normally that dog would have been roaming free. We know the footprints were a size 7 Dunlop trainer and a young man across the road had seen someone leave the shop in a red car.”.
