Body-in-the-river killer Vincent Morgan is facing life behind bars after he was convicted of murdering his partner.
Morgan, who was branded “evil”, drowned his girlfriend Lisa Welford, 49, in the River Derwent in Malton after they had been drinking on the riverbank, a jury at Leeds Crown Court heard.
Morgan, 47, had given police various, “inconsistent” accounts to police about how Ms Welford ended up in the river and denied murder.
But today, following a long deliberation after a trial which ended last week, a jury found him guilty as charged.
Prosecutor Craig Hassall KC said that none of Morgan’s accounts of events, including one that Ms Welford had jumped into the river to end her life, stood up to scrutiny.
Her body was pulled from the river in the centre of Malton on April 24 by a police officer who arrived quickly on the scene after being called by a passer-by.
Mr Hassall said it was at about 11.30pm that day that Ms Welford became submerged in the river and drowned.
“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,” he added.
“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.
A post-mortem revealed that Ms Welford had suffered a fractured thigh bone before entering the river. A pathologist said the force required for such an injury would have to be “considerable, the equivalent of a car crash”.
She also suffered bruising, cuts and grazes to her forearm and a black eye caused by “at least one impact”. Bruising to her lip could have been caused by a punch.
Mr Hassall told the jury: “For the last few years of her life, Lisa Welford had been in a relationship with the defendant Vincent Morgan.
“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.”
Catalogue of injuries
The domestic-violence-protection order banned Morgan from having any contact with Ms Welford and being violent to her.
But on April 24, the day of the murder, 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.
In addition to the broken thigh bone, the pathologist also discovered a catalogue of past injuries which Ms Welford sustained “over a long period of time” including fractures to her neck, arm and neck bone – the latter indicative of strangulation – as well as injuries to her head and face.
There was a total of eight fractures to her body, virtually all of which were old injuries.
Morgan’s conflicting accounts to police included claims that Ms Welford had jumped into the river to take her own life and that she had slipped and fallen in accidentally.
“These accounts come from a man with a very established history of deliberate assaults (against) people and indeed on various (former) partners,” said Mr Hassall.
“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.”
A woman who saw Morgan and Ms Welford at the riverside shortly before the murder said she heard “rustling” in the bushes beside the footpath and saw Morgan with Ms Welford who 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 woman rang her ex-partner who arrived at the riverbank to find Morgan “up to his neck in water”.
He said Ms Welford was a “good foot under the water” and there was “no sign of breathing”.
He went into the river to try to pull Ms Welford back onto the riverbank but said that Morgan “wasn’t helping at all”, but rather “hindering” his attempts to save her. A police officer then arrived and pulled Ms Welford and Morgan out of the river.
Mr Hassall said it was evident that Morgan had assaulted Ms Welford on the riverbank and “pushed her into the river where she drowned”.
‘Drink made him evil’
Morgan, of Chandlers Wharf, Castlegate, Malton, was arrested at the scene and later told police he didn’t know how Ms Welford had entered the water.
He was also charged with two counts of assaulting Ms Welford on two previous occasions, causing actual bodily harm, but denied those allegations too, namely pulling a chunk of her hair out and knocking out one of her teeth.
“The defendant and Lisa were both vey heavy drinkers,” said Mr Hassall.
“They had been in an on-and-off relationship for many years. The defendant was often violent towards Lisa.”
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 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.
In 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.”
A former partner of Morgan’s, who gave evidence at the trial, said he had strangled, punched and kicked her in the past and claimed he had once tried to throw her into the River Derwent from a bridge “just yards from where Lisa Welford drowned”.
She said they were both using drugs after meeting in the late 1980s and became partners in about 2006.
She said he was once imprisoned for an assault in 2007 in which she suffered a broken wrist. She claimed that he “charmed his way back” into her life after leaving prison even though she had fitted a panic alarm at her home.
She said they had split up in about 2016 because she could no longer cope with his violence which had been exacerbated by his “drinking spirits, which made him evil”.
One male witness who knew both Morgan and Ms Welford said he had “warned Lisa about (Morgan) but she wouldn’t listen”.
He said he often saw her with “bruising and black eyes” and she would say that she had asked Morgan to leave her home “but he wouldn’t”.
One of Ms Welford’s close friends, a woman who also gave evidence, said that Morgan was “awful to Lisa but she wouldn’t leave him”.
She said that she didn’t like Morgan “because of the way he treated Lisa.” She too had seen Ms Welford with a “bruised face and broken shoulder, with bruises all over her body”.
She said that Ms Welford was having a “tough time but she wasn’t suicidal”.
Another friend said that Ms Welford was “petrified of (Morgan) but loved him”. She said there were “almost daily dramas” at Ms Welford’s house.
The jury found Morgan guilty of murder with a majority of 11-to-one. He was found guilty of the two counts of ABH by unanimous verdict.
He will be sentenced on Wednesday.