Allen Morgan, the defendant, had been having an affair when his then-wife Carol was found dead on 13 August 1981, at the convenience store that they both ran in Linslade, Leighton Buzzard.
Mr Morgan was having an affair with Margaret Spooner who was also married at the time. He was unable to divorce his wife, the victim Carol Morgan due to crippling debts and because the family assets belonged to her. Shortly after the murder he set up home with Mrs Spooner and they married the following year.
The case relied on a large quantity of circumstantial evidence including evidence of unexplained cash withdrawals, evidence from television interviews given by Mr Morgan in archive news footage from the original reporting of the murder and accounts from witnesses who died long ago and whose evidence was adduced under the modern day hearsay provisions as well as several witnesses who recollected events from over 40 years ago. These included a witness who was 17 years old in 1981 and described being asked by Mr Morgan to find a hit-man prepared to commit the murder.
Mr Morgan was unanimously convicted by the jury of conspiracy to murder.
At the time of Carol’s death in 1981 the focus of the police investigation was in finding the killer, who is still at large. The cold-case police team at Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire Constabulary instead focused on identifying evidence that showed that Allen Morgan had conspired to murder his wife and built a powerful case demonstrating that he had planned and paid for her to be killed.
On 29 July, the defendant was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of 22 years.
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