A husband who hired a hitman to murder his former wife while he was having an affair has been jailed for life for “conspiracy to murder”. Carol Morgan, 36, was killed inside the shop she ran with her husband Allen Morgan in Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire. Report by Ajagbef. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00The damage was such as to have left parts of her brain and skull scattered around the storeroom floor.
00:08This seems to have been something beyond merely a murder committed in the course of robbery,
00:14although robbery of cash and cigarettes does appear to have taken place,
00:19but was a crime where the primary motivation was Carol's death,
00:25consistent with being part of an agreement or conspiracy in advance,
00:30of which you, Alan Morgan, were the instigator.
00:34Only one person knows the identity of the murderer, and that is you, Mr. Morgan.
00:40That is the secret which you have harboured for the last 40 years.
00:46The law has now caught up with you, and you must pay due punishment for your part in this crime,
00:53but the murderer remains at large, if indeed he is still alive.
00:59Carol was their only child, Dean and Jane were their only grandchildren,
01:05and they, Carol's parents, were understandably devastated by her death.
01:11That devastation was multiplied many-fold by what then happened in relation to their grandchildren.
01:20You, Alan Morgan, took the children away to the north of England,
01:24and, as I find, induced them to write letters to their grandparents,
01:29saying that they had new lives now and didn't want any contact with their grandparents any more.
01:36These were grandparents to whom they were particularly close.
01:41Sorry, as Pamela says, it absolutely broke their hearts.
01:46She says that those letters destroyed what was left of their world.
01:51I quote from her statement.
01:54They had lost their only child, and now they were losing their two grandchildren,
01:59and neither got over their huge loss.
02:02It was just tragic.
02:05It was really wicked of whoever made Dean and Jane write those letters to their grandparents.
02:11Truly wicked.
02:13There's only one truly wicked person who's been in this court, and that is you, Alan Morgan.
02:20As to the first of those, she says that the prolonged reinvestigation into her mother's death of over four years
02:27has had an overwhelming effect on her, her partner, and her daughter.
02:32It has opened up a number of emotional questions surrounding her relationship with her family,
02:39why they moved away, and why she and her brother stopped seeing their grandparents.
02:45She says that the investigation has made her question the truth around her mother's death,
02:51which she thought she knew and understood.
02:54She says, and I quote,
02:56it made me feel as though my life has been a lie,
03:00and that the people that I trusted most in the world may have been capable of a terrible betrayal of that trust.
03:08Those doubts have, of course, been reinforced by the jury's verdict and your conviction.
03:14As Jane says, after Alan was convicted of conspiracy to murder,
03:19it caused me to face up to the fact that a jury had unanimously decided that he was guilty of being involved in my mother's death.
03:28The man that I had spent almost my entire life calling dad has lied to me for my entire life.
03:36I'm struggling to come to terms with the reality of this,
03:40quite simply because it is just too difficult to comprehend that it could be true.
03:47I now have to go through a period of adjustment where I try to piece together what has happened to me
03:53and how I move forward with the rest of my life.
03:57Knowing that Alan is guilty of being involved in such a horrific trial
04:01and how much my mother suffered is very upsetting for me and my family.
04:06It has been an incredibly distressing and confusing period of my life
04:11that has made me doubt everything I knew about my mother and my step-parents.
04:19It is clear from the fact that you continue to deny your involvement in Carol's death,
04:24as described in the pre-sentence report,
04:27that Jane will not get any assistance from you in understanding what happened to her mother
04:33and therefore achieving any kind of closure.
04:38The author of the pre-sentence report says that throughout her interview with you,
04:44there was no regret or remorse demonstrated,
04:48just vigorous assertion of how badly he had been treated by the whole process.
04:58For conspiracy to murder, I sentence you to imprisonment for life.
05:02Taking into account the aggravating and mitigating factors to which I have referred,
05:07the minimum term to be served shall be 22 years.