The man accused of murdering a Malton woman whose body was found in the River Derwent claims she may have jumped into the water to kill herself.
Vincent Joseph Morgan, 47, stands accused of murdering Lisa Welford, who was 49.
Lisa’s body was pulled out of the river in the centre of Malton, on 24 April 2024.
Prosecutor Craig Hassall KC told a jury at Leeds Crown Court yesterday: “For the last few years of her life, Lisa Welford had been in a relationship with the defendant Vincent Morgan.
“The relationship was not a positive one for Lisa. The defendant was regularly violent towards her, and such was the level and persistence of his violence that police obtained a court order against him.”
The domestic-violence-protection order banned Morgan from having any contact with Ms Welford and being violent to her.
On the day of Ms Weltford’s death, Morgan spent the day with her, “drinking at various locations in North Yorkshire”, in breach of that order.
“And they ended the day together on the bank of the River Derwent in the centre of Malton,” added Mr Hassall.
At around 11.30pm that day, Ms Welford became submerged in the river.
“She appears to have been in the water for about 10 minutes before police arrived, and she was pulled from the river by a police officer and a member of the public,” said Mr Hassall.
“Lisa suffered a cardiac arrest (and there was no) detectable pulse when she was brought out of the water.”
Although paramedics managed to restart her heart, she suffered irreparable brain damage caused by oxygen deprivation and was pronounced dead in the early hours of the following morning.
Post-mortem results
A post-mortem revealed that Ms Welford had suffered a fractured thigh bone. A pathologist said the force required for such an injury would have to be “considerable, the equivalent of a car crash”, but it could also have been caused by an “accelerated fall (down the riverbank)”.
Ms Welford also suffered bruising, cuts and grazes to her forearm and a black eye caused by “at least one impact”.
In addition, a catalogue of past injuries sustained “over a long period of time” included fractures to her neck, arm and neck bone – the latter indicative of strangulation – as well as injuries to her head and face.
“The only person who was with Lisa throughout that day, throughout that evening, and at the time when she ended up in the river, was the defendant,” added Mr Hassall.
Morgan told police he didn’t know how Ms Welford had entered the water but gave various and apparently conflicting accounts of events leading up to her death.
“At the side of the river he gave two different accounts: that Lisa had deliberately jumped into the water in order to take her own life (and) that she had slipped and fallen in,” said Mr Hassall.
“These accounts come from a man with a very established history of deliberate assaults (against) people and indeed on various (former) partners.
“The only credible explanation is that Lisa’s injuries were sustained in the context of yet another deliberate assault on her at the hands of Victor Morgan, and that deliberate assault resulted in her being submerged in the River Derwent where she drowned.”
Morgan, of Chandlers Wharf, Castlegate, was arrested on suspicion of murder but denied the allegation. He was also charged with two counts of assault occasioning actual bodily harm and denied those charges too.
The ABH charges relate to two separate, previous incidents when Morgan is alleged to have pulled a chunk of her hair out and knocked out one of her teeth.
“The defendant and Lisa were both very heavy drinkers,” said Mr Hassall.
“They had been in an on-and-off relationship for many years. The defendant was often violent towards Lisa.”
Leading up to the incident
On April 4, about three weeks before she died, Ms Welford told police about “recent incidents of violence that she had suffered at the hands of the defendant”.
Two days later, York magistrates made the 28-day domestic-violence-protection order when Morgan was registered as having no fixed abode.
On the day of the alleged murder, CCTV footage showed Morgan and Ms Welford getting off a bus at Malton Bus Station just before 8.30pm.
Video footage showed the couple arriving at the riverbank, very close to the bus station, three minutes later.
“They were on the riverbank for some two-and-a-half hours before anyone else became aware of anything being wrong,” said Mr Hassall.
When police searched the area the following day, bottles of alcohol were found close by, including a “largely empty” bottle of vodka. They also found a grey woolly hat by the riverside.
There was a slope down to the river from the footpath along which the couple had been walking and metal steps down to the water, where CCTV from a local pet store showed Morgan, with his hood up, at the top of the steps with Ms Welford.
It was next to these steps, and a wooden bench, where her body was recovered from the water.
“There are no independent witnesses as to how (Ms Welford) suffered the injuries or how she came to be in the river,” added Mr Hassall.
However, one named woman, who knew the couple, had been walking home on the riverside footpath at about 11 pm after finishing her shift at a local pub when she came across the horrifying scene.
She called her former partner, a named man who arrived soon afterwards on his bike and tried to pull Ms Welford out of the river.
The first police officer on the scene went into the river and pulled Ms Morgan out of the water, along with Morgan who was also trying to get her onto the bank.
The female witness said she heard “rustling” in the bushes beside the footpath and saw Morgan with a woman and was initially concerned about, “what they were doing in the bushes”.
“She said she was relieved to see it was (Morgan) and that it was someone she knew,” said Mr Hassall.
“(Morgan) said to her, ‘She’s there’, and pointed towards Lisa.”
The female witness said that Ms Welford was “lying on the ground on the riverbank” and appeared to be conscious. She heard Ms Welford say: “Where am I?”
She told Morgan that Ms Welford was “not safe there” and that “she might roll away into the water” and that he should “go down (the slope) to fetch her”.
She said that Morgan asked Ms Welford “several times not to phone the police” and that when she called her ex-partner for assistance, Morgan “crouched down (and was) dragging Lisa like a sack of potatoes”.
“She said the atmosphere then changed and the defendant shouted, ‘She’s in the river!’”, added Mr Hassall.
Morgan told her to ring the emergency services. As she did so, she noticed Ms Welford was in the river, her head “bobbing in the water”.
The male witness said that when he arrived, Morgan was “up to his neck in water”. Ms Welford was a “good foot under the water”. There was “no sign of breathing”.
Morgan was arrested at the scene and taken to hospital for precautionary checks.
In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, he said that his partner had “jumped into the river to kill herself”. Shortly afterwards, he told police that she had “slipped on the bank and that’s why (she ended up) in the water”.
Alcohol intoxication
A toxicology test revealed that Ms Welford had alcohol levels in her blood commensurate with being four times the drink-drive limit.
“It’s very clear that alcohol intoxication would also have contributed to her inability to save herself (from drowning),” said Mr Hassall.
Medical experts said the broken thigh bone and alcohol intoxication would have “contributed to Lisa’s death but not directly caused it”.
“All the injuries she suffered that day were (by) blunt force,” added Mr Hassall.
A bruise to her lip could have been caused by a punch or falling down the riverbank. Bruising to her arm was “indicative of gripping” but could have been caused by her being pulled out of the river.
The prosecution claimed it was indisputable that Ms Welford had been assaulted “repeatedly over the preceding months and years”.
Neuropathological evidence revealed that Ms Welford had suffered a bleed on the brain two-to-four weeks before her death.
A former partner of Morgan, who will give evidence at the trial, said she had been strangled and punched by the defendant in the past and he had once tried to throw her into the River Derwent from a bridge yards from where Lisa Welford drowned.
In a police interview, Morgan told officers he “heard the noise of someone going into the river”.
“It was like a deep splash,” he said.
“I discovered the noise was Lisa entering the river and I was wading around in an attempt to find her. I came across what felt like Lisa’s legs and called for help.”
The trial continues.