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.
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