Met Police apologises for ‘corruption and incompetence’ over Daniel Morgan murder
The Metropolitan Police has apologised to the family of Daniel Morgan, a private detective whose murder in 1987 remains unsolved.
Morgan, 37, was found with an axe in his head in Sydenham, south-east London.
His family have long believed that Morgan was about to expose police corruption to the press and his death, to campaign groups, has come to symbolise this.
London’s police force today admitted that the decades-long investigation was ‘marred by a cycle of corruption, professional incompetence and defensivenes’.
In his apology, Met commissioner Sir Mark Rowley confessed the Met ‘prioritised its reputation at the expense of transparency and effectiveness’.
‘No words can do justice to the pain and suffering that has been a feature of the family’s lives for more than three decades as they have fought for justice, a fight which no family should have to endure,’ he said.
‘Their tenacious campaigning has exposed multiple and systemic failings in this organisation.’
The commissioner said he has met with Morgan’s loved ones and listened to their ‘vivid and moving accounts of the devastating impact those failings have had on their lives’.
‘They have explained how their trust in policing has been eroded,’ he added.
‘The personal commitment I made to tackling corruption in this organisation when I took over as Commissioner has never been stronger.’
On Monday, the Met reportedly hashed out a settlement of around £2,000,000 with Morgan’s family.
Morgan’s family was set to sue Sir Mark but the two sides struck a deal through formal mediation earlier this month.
For the Met, the commissioner’s statement is the latest in a long line of apologies for police failings, both decades-old and recent.
A series of crises has seized the Met in recent years, with issues around the Met’s handling of Morgan’s death being among them.
His death’s grisly and baffling details – how papers he had on him were stolen but his wallet was left or a suspect being an investigator who worked on Morgan’s murder case – have kept the pressure high for answers.
The Met’s approach raised serious questions about the quality of policing, exasperated by Morgan’s own investigation into the Met in the weeks before his death.
Morgan and his business partner at the time of his death, Jonathan Rees, ran an investigation agency called Southern Investigation that carried out work for the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid News of the World.
In 2007, the Met said the motive for Morgan’s murder was likely that he ‘was about to expose a south London drugs network possibly involving corrupt police officers’.
What happened to Daniel Morgan?
Daniel Morgan, 37, was a private detective living in south London.
The father-of-two worked for a company called Southern Investigations, which he had set up with his business partner Jonathan Rees.
He was found with an axe embedded in his skull in the dimply-lit car park outside the Golden Lion pub in Sydenham on March 10, 1987.
That night, he had met with Rees for a drink before leaving together at 9pm – Daniel, however, was found stabbed 40 minutes later.
He had been struck four to five times with the Chinese-made axe.
His watch and notes he had written earlier that day had been swiped but his wallet and money were untouched.
Rees, his brothers-in-law Glenn and Garry Vian and Met Officer Sid Fillery, who knew Rees and had previously moonlighted for the agency were arrested a month later before the charges were dropped.
Fillery had actually been assigned to investigate Daniel’s death but was later removed just days later.
No one has ever been brought to justice for Daniel’s killing, even after five police probes between 1988 and 2006 and an inquest.
Charges would come and go before being dropped, often due to a lack of evidence.
Many theories about why Daniel was murdered have been thrown around.
His family say Daniel was on the brink of exposing police corruption, with a Sunday paper offering him £250,000 for it.
Another pointed to how Daniel had worked as a bailiff and, the day before, handed a court summons to a man with previous violent convictions.
The final police investigation saw four people – including Rees, Glenn and Garry Vian, as well as builder James Cook – arrested in 2008.
However, prosecutors dropped the case in 2011 due to a lack of evidence.
Then-Home Secretary Theresa May launched a probe into the killing and the quality of policing in 2013.
Rees and the Vian brothers would win a case against the Met for malicious arrest in 2019, being awarded £400,000 in damages, five years later.
His family filed a civil suit over allegations of misfeasance in office and violations of the Human Rights Act on the part of the Met in December 2021.
The legal claim stretches back to 1987, cataloguing what the family see as alleged wrongdoing and shortcomings.
Five investigations and an inquest costing some £40,000,000 failed to find Morgan’s killer, with no suspects ever convicted.
Two probes into the investigation – one from the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel report and another by Hampshire Constabulary – accused the met of ‘a form of institutional corruption’.
‘Concealing or denying failings for the sake of the organisation’s public image is dishonesty on the part of the organisation for reputational benefit and constitutes a form of institutional corruption,’ the panel wrote in 2021.
‘The multiple police failures over many years, the death of witnesses and the passage of time, mean that it is most unlikely,’ the report added, ‘there will be a successful prosecution for Daniel Morgan’s murder.’
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.