“The story of Daniel Morgan’s killing moves from back streets of London, through the highest echelons of Scotland Yard, to the offices of Rupert Murdoch’s best selling newspapers, to the doors of Number Ten Downing Street. If you haven’t heard this story, ask yourself, why?”
Untold: The Daniel Morgan Murder is not a podcast to reassure a listener who has lost faith in their country’s institutions.
It doesn’t have any kind of happy ending, either. There is no closure for the victim’s family, by way of a conviction of the killer, or killers. Nor does it have any of the shenanigans that went on behind the scenes to cover it up.
Morgan, a private investigator who it later emerged happened to be on the verge of selling a major story about police corruption to a tabloid newspaper, was murdered in the most brutal way (with an axe) in a South London pub car park in 1987.
The intervening 34 years have seen a number of official inquiries into the role of the police in the investigation and the suspects publicly named on numerous occasions, only for a prosecution to be abandoned in 2011.
Since the podcast concluded in October 2018 there have been some major developments, including an Independent Panel Report, which came to the conclusion that the investigating force, The Metropolitan Police in London, is “institutionally corrupt”.
Yet, still, the killer(s) remains at large and the fight for justice continues by the Morgan family.
Step forward, Peter Jukes, a screenwriter who produced Untold alongside Deeivya Meir and produced what is probably the definitive account of Morgan’s backstory and the investigations.
In this episode of MetaPod, Jukes joins us to give his perspective on the case to date and, of equal importance, what such complex connections between the police, the suspects, organized crime, the press and government mean for society.
Show notes:
About Peter Jukes
Peter Jukes is an author and dramatist. He is the executive editor and co-founder of Byline Times, an independent news and opinion platform focussed on “what the papers don’t say”. In addition to presenting the story of the Daniel Morgan murder in the podcast Untold: The Daniel Morgan Murder, Peter co-authored with Alastair Morgan the book Untold: Exposing The Truth About The Daniel Morgan Murder.