On a warm June morning in 1984, a young mother called Shelley Morgan waved her son off to school from the bus stop close to their home.
With her eight-year-old daughter Charlotte also already at school, Shelley had a free day ahead of her which, as she told 11-year-old Liam, she intended to spend taking photographs and sketching for her burgeoning art portfolio.
Planting a farewell kiss on his forehead as he boarded the bus, she told him that she would meet him back there at 4.30pm.
She didn’t show up. Not to the bus stop, or to the family home on the outskirts of Bristol and, despite reports of sightings of 33-year-old Shelley as far afield as Jersey, she had in essence vanished.
That is, until four months later when her body —naked except for a pair of maroon tights twisted round her ankles and brown sandals — was found in woodland close to a village seven miles south-west of her home. She had been sexually assaulted and stabbed 14 times.
Shelley’s brutal murder left behind devastated children, a husband, sister and parents; a heartbreak horribly compounded over the years by the fact that no one has ever been brought to justice over her death.
The killer of Shelley Morgan, who was murdered in 1984, has never been identified
It is a desperate situation that Avon and Somerset Police still hope to resolve.
This month, to mark the 40th anniversary of her disappearance, they made a fresh appeal for information, vowing to catch Shelley’s killer and bring to a close one of the country’s most poignant unsolved mysteries.
Many miles away in Herefordshire, however, Julie Mackay — a now retired former Avon and Somerset detective — believes Shelley’s killer may already be behind bars for another murder that was eerily similar in manner to the young mum’s brutal slaughter.
His name is Christopher Hampton, a quietly spoken former painter and decorator currently serving 22 years for the murder of 17-year-old Bath A-level pupil Melanie Road, whose brutalised body had been found just two days before Shelley went missing.
It was Julie’s tireless work on the cold case investigation into Melanie’s death that finally brought Hampton to justice in 2016, 32 years after her murder. Throughout that investigation, Julie had been struck by the similarities between the deaths not only of Melanie and Shelley, but two other female murder victims in the area: Linda Guest, a 35-year-old mother of three, whose body was found on a bridleway north of Bristol in April 1985; and Helen Fleet, 66, who was found dead in woodland near Weston-super-Mare in March 1987.
Could they have died at the hands of the same man? Julie cannot be sure — but she has her instincts.
‘All four women had been sexually assaulted and stabbed multiple times,’ she told the Mail.
‘When you look at the modus operandi there are a lot of similarities. A remote location, a stranger attack, sexual assault and multiple stab wounds all within a relatively small area of the South West. It is very difficult to think that these would be four separate killers — statistically that is very unlikely.
Retired police detective Julie Mackay believes Christopher Hampton (pictured) – already behind bars for an eerily similar murder – could be Shelley’s killer
Seventeen-year-old Bath A-level pupil Melanie Road’s brutalised body had been found just two days before Shelley went missing
‘The biggest difficulty is the lack of forensic evidence. It is very frustrating, but the families must never lose hope.’
It is not hard to understand her frustration. As the Mail revealed in an interview last year, catching Hampton after he had evaded justice for decades was the case that came to define Julie’s long-standing 30-year career, from which she retired having reached the rank of Detective Superintendent in 2020.
Melanie, a bubbly blonde schoolgirl who was deputy head girl, had failed to return home from a night out in the early hours of Saturday June 9, 1984.
Horrifyingly, Melanie’s parents, who had woken the next morning to find her missing, heard an amplified voice in the street outside from a police loudspeaker, asking: ‘Does anyone know Melanie?’ A milkman on his round had discovered her body that morning, identifiable only by a keyring bearing her name. She had been stabbed 26 times in the chest and sexually assaulted.
In the months afterwards, no fewer than 94 men were arrested — all released without charge — and as the years ticked by, Melanie’s murder looked set to join the ranks of unsolved ‘cold cases’ that haunt every police force.
The tragic loss of a young girl in such desperate circumstances was the subject of headlines across the country, but 12 miles away, at her home in Bristol,
Shelley Morgan had little cause to believe that an equally grim fate awaited her.
Described as chatty, open and curious by her younger sister Holle Brian, now 70, the American-born Shelley, like Melanie a slim and attractive blonde, had been raised in a small college town in Iowa. Following in the footsteps of her art teacher father, she studied for a degree in theatre arts, hoping to become a costume designer.
In a moving statement a few years ago, Holle recalled how her sister had spent much of her childhood drawing, sculpting and, after learning to sew, ‘making all kinds of creations out of fabrics and fibres — elaborate stuffed dolls and animals, as well as designing and making clothes’.
After an internship at an opera house in Rome, Shelley looked for further employment in Europe and in 1972, age 21, landed a job as wardrobe manager for the Liverpool Playhouse where she thrived.
After meeting her husband Nigel, the couple married in 1973 and settled in Brecon, Shelley devoting her time to being a wife and mother to Liam and Charlotte. Locals later described her as a popular figure in the community and a devoted mum.
When Liam was later diagnosed with autism, the family relocated to Bedminster, on the south side of Bristol where special needs provision was better.
Once both children were settled in local schools, Shelley focused on building a portfolio of drawings and photographs, hoping she could finish her arts degree.
It was with this in mind that, on June 11, 1984, with her husband still working in Brecon and preparing their house for sale, she decided to spend the day photographing scenic spots, among them some woodland on the western outskirts of Bristol.
Children playing in a wooded copse off Long Lane in Backwell Hill, near Bristol, discovered Shelley’s remains four months after she went missing
Between 10 and 11am she attended a local sorting office to collect a registered letter containing £35 from Nigel — an amount he sent weekly while working away.
After that, while her movements have never been fully established, police believe she boarded a bus to Bristol bus station then another on to Backwell, carrying a carpet bag containing a distinctive Olympus OM20 camera, a tripod and her sketching materials.
Police will never know at what point or what moment Shelley met her fate, but when she failed to return to meet her children, a neighbour who had taken them in called the police.
By 7.30pm, Shelley had been officially registered as a missing person. A determined manhunt followed, but despite police questioning her friends, and family launching a poster campaign seeking information about her whereabouts, no trace was found.
Sightings of women matching her description in both Jersey and Weymouth were quickly dismissed, while a phone call to Avon and Somerset Police from a man with a Bristolian accent claiming Shelley’s body was in a ‘watery grave’ was declared a hoax after eight police divers searched the spot for days, failing to find a body or any clues.
Then, in mid-October 1984, an unclothed and badly decomposed body was discovered lying face down in a wooded copse by a farm near the village of Backwell by some schoolchildren.
Using dental records sent from the US, pathologists were able to confirm the body was that of Shelley Morgan.
Like Melanie, Shelley had been sexually assaulted, and had 14 separate stab wounds.
Avon and Somerset Police’s missing person inquiry became a murder investigation and a team of 80 detectives was assigned to the case.
Police determined that Shelley was likely murdered on the day she disappeared, her life ending in what Holle later imagined, in a moving impact statement issued in 2019 to mark the 35th anniversary of her death, ‘disgust, and terror and unimaginable pain’.
Despite all their efforts, however, within six months of the discovery of Shelley’s body, only six detectives remained on the case and the incident room was closed down.
Two years later, the family’s hopes were raised when an unnamed man was questioned in relation to her murder and that of Melanie Road. He was later released without charge.
Julie Mackay reveals now that at no point was Hampton ever questioned in relation to the two murders. But then why would he be? His DNA was not on the system, and besides, there was woefully little forensic evidence on Shelley’s body.
Nonetheless, when Julie joined Avon and Somerset’s cold case team in 2009, she linked the two cases.
‘We reviewed it at the time as there were a number of similarities,’ she recalls. And while fresh DNA tests on the scant items on Shelley’s body yielded nothing, Julie’s instincts were supported by a report by a psychiatrist based at Broadmoor Hospital, the high-security psychiatric institution.
The psychiatrist, who was one of the country’s leading experts on sex offenders, compared evidence in the murders and pointed out the unusual ‘rosette’ pattern of stab wounds on both Melanie and Shelley’s bodies.
Linda Guest and Helen Fleet had also been stabbed multiple times in attacks that Julie describes as ‘frenzied’.
‘Most killings with a knife use up to five blows,’ she says. ‘Anything more is unusual.’
It would take years of painstaking detective work for the net to close on Hampton. Melanie’s killer had cut his hand during the attack, leaving a trail of blood as he fled.
But despite applying for a batch of familial DNA work in 2011 — a process of catching offenders by finding their relatives on the national DNA database for another crime — Julie initially had no success finding a match.
Undeterred, she and her officers kept searching and swabbed 4,000 suspects until, in 2015, they arrived at Hampton, who at the time of Melanie’s death had been living in a flat in Bath with his girlfriend.
In a stroke of luck, in 2014 Hampton’s daughter had been arrested in relation to a minor domestic offence and her DNA taken, which led to a ‘hit’ on the national database. On paper, Hampton — by now married to his second wife with whom he had two other children — seemed an unlikely candidate. Described by friends as ‘a quiet bloke who never went to the pub’, he collected war medals and was seen as a devoted family man.
But DNA does not lie, and in June 2015 Hampton was asked to give a swab sample — the supervising officer, Gary Mason, recalls him as ‘extremely calm’ and showing ‘no emotion at all’.
He was emotionless, too, as he was escorted from his terraced house a month later and charged with Melanie’s murder after his swab sample proved a direct match to the blood found near her body.
He subsequently pleaded guilty at Bristol Crown Court in May 2016.
Melanie’s murder had been solved — to the relief of her grief-stricken mother, Jean, who was 81 when she saw Hampton sentenced to 22 years behind bars.
But Julie Mackay would not rest. Convinced Hampton was linked to at least three other murders, she spoke to dozens of witnesses to track his whereabouts around the time of the attacks and found evidence that he was working as a painter and decorator in the same area when Shelley Morgan, Linda Guest and Helen Fleet went missing.
It was compelling, but Julie’s efforts to take matters further were hampered by a lack of forensics, and chaotic incomplete records. ‘The biggest difficulty by far was, and continues to be, the lack of supporting forensic evidence,’ she says now.
None of this detracts from Julie’s sense that the women’s deaths are unlikely to be the work of four separate individuals.
‘Even today, in a city [as big as] London, it would be highly unusual to get four or five different men killing in this way,’ she says.
She points out that police records show that murders involving sexual assault and frenzied knife attacks in the Bristol area stop after 1987 — around the time that Hampton settled down to his new quiet life with his second wife. ‘His circumstances changed,’ she says.
Criminologists too, struggle to see Hampton’s conviction as a one-off, largely because of the severity of the murder.
Dr Jane Monckton-Smith, a leading criminologist, told the Mail in the wake of Hampton’s trial: ‘The fact he managed to go back to normal is a sign that the man is a psychopath.
‘Serial killers typically display such behaviour — an ability to return to normality after doing something dreadful.’
For Melanie’s family, there can be no such resumption of normality. As for Shelley’s relatives, in the aftermath of his wife’s death, a heartbroken Nigel returned to Wales to raise their children.
He never remarried, living quietly at home with Liam, now 51, until his death from cancer in 2018.
Their daughter Charlotte, now 48, remains in Wales, where she is a Labour councillor.
Today Julie Mackay urges them not to lose hope. ‘It’s really sad that they have not found justice so far,’ she says.
‘Sometimes it can just take one little thing, one new witness coming forward.’
