Murder of Patsy Morris

On 16 June 1980, Patricia "Patsy" Morris, a fourteen-year old schoolgirl from Feltham, London, was murdered by strangulation.[2] She disappeared after leaving her school during her lunch break, and was found dead in undergrowth on Hounslow Heath near her home two days later. Despite repeated appeals for information by police, her murder remains unsolved.

Patricia Joyce Morris
Morris, c. spring 1980
Born
Patricia Joyce Morris

(1966-01-10)10 January 1966
Eton, Berkshire, England[1]
Died16 June 1980(1980-06-16) (aged 14)
Hounslow Heath, London
Cause of deathLigature strangulation
Known forVictim of unsolved child murder

The murder was brought to public attention again in 2008, when it was discovered that she had been a childhood girlfriend of west London serial killer Levi Bellfield. Police investigated links between her murder and Bellfield, but he was never formally charged over her death.

Murder of Patsy Morris
Hounslow Heath, where Morris was found dead
Date16 June 1980
LocationHounslow Heath, London
Coordinates51.45820648957538°N 0.3928801137227636°W / 51.45820648957538; -0.3928801137227636
CauseStrangulation
The bus stop opposite the Hussar Pub on Staines Road, Hounslow, where Morris may have last been seen. She was found dead on Hounslow Heath to the left of this image.

Background

Patricia Morris (10 January 1966 – 16 June 1980) was a blonde 14-year-old schoolgirl born to George Morris, a retired army chief, and Marjorie Morris.[3][2] She had moved with her family from Birmingham to Isleworth, South West London, in 1979. She attended Feltham Comprehensive School with her sister and two brothers.[3]

Disappearance
The Hussar pub on Staines Road, opposite the bus stop where Morris was possibly last seen.

On 16 June 1980, Morris disappeared, having been seen leaving her school during her lunch break.[2][3] It was believed Morris left school because she had forgotten her rain coat that morning, choosing to return home to change into dry clothes.[4] This is reportedly what she told her friends she was going to do, and a family friend and neighbour confirmed that she had not taken her coat to school and had gotten soaked as a result.[5][4] The neighbour stated that she had probably tried to come home without realising that she had left her key at home, and when she realised that she would be unable to get in had probably tried to walk over the heath to Calvary Barracks where her parents worked so she could get a key from them.[5] One source instead states that she had a double history lesson scheduled for that afternoon which she often avoided attending, and so she bunked off the rest of the school day, although it is not clear what evidence there is for this claim.[6]

A witness recalled seeing Morris soon after noon near her home.[6] Another witness recalled seeing a girl who may have been Morris crouching at a bus stop on the Hounslow Heath side of Staines Road, just west of the Hussar public house between 12:20 p.m. and 12:40 p.m.[6] These were the last sightings of her alive.[6]

After she was reported missing a large search operation was launched to find her, involving hundreds of police officers, helicopters and members of the public who had volunteered to help.[4][7]

Discovery of body

Two days later, on the evening of 18 June, Morris's body was found by a police dog handler on Hounslow Heath. She was discovered face down in a copse beside a path on the edge of the Heath, at a location a quarter of a mile from her home in Cygnet Avenue.[8][9][7][10][6][11] The place she was found was just a five minute walk from her home, and was on the route between her home and her father's workplace at Calvary Barracks.[8][12] She was found fully-clothed.[10][12][5] She had been found ten yards from a path through one of the small woods.[6] She had been strangled with a ligature.[2][10] For an unknown reason, police found that she had been wearing two pairs of knickers that day.[6] There were no signs of sexual assault.[13][10]

Police investigations

Police released a public statement after the death, warning parents in west London not to let their children cross Hounslow Heath alone.[7] Morris' mother said that she had no reason to be on Hounslow Heath, stating to the press: "We can't understand what she was doing on the heath. She was always told not to go there and never disobeyed our orders".[14] Attacks on women and even deaths were not unknown in the area, but previous attacks had invariably involved the full rape of the victim.[15]

The police questioned Morris's classmates in an attempt to find out what her final movements had been.[8] On 22 June, 4 days after she was found dead, a detective on the investigative team told the press that they felt another youngster playing truant could hold key information on the murder.[16]

Soon after Morris was found dead, her father received a phoned death threat from an unidentified teenage boy.[17] The call was from a local caller with a local sounding voice.[17][3]

In December 1980, the police appealed for a mysterious driver of a blue van with a radio telephone to come forward.[18] The man was seen using a telephone handset in his van near the home of Morris around the time of her murder, and detectives said that he could have seen something that would help the investigation.[18] By this point police had only managed to trace 9 out of 22 people who played golf on the course next to where Morris was found, and detectives also appealed for their help to trace a 5 ft 10 in man who had dark greying hair and who was wearing a dark suit.[18]

Police investigations at the time drew a blank and the murderer was not apprehended.[2]

1996 suspect

In 1996 the case was re-opened when police arrested a man from Hounslow.[19][12] The police were acting on new information on the murder and raided the suspect's house at dawn on 8 July of that year.[12] The man, who was arrested at Hounslow bus depot, was then 33 years old, meaning he would have been 17 at the time of the murder in 1980.[12] He was released on bail but was re-interviewed in August.[12]

In October the man was released from police custody again on bail, and it was reported that police had applied for permission to charge the suspect from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).[20] However, the CPS decided not to prosecute the man.[20]

Peter Tobin as a suspect

In 2007, Morris's murder was one of a number of cases linked in the press to newly discovered Scottish serial killer Peter Tobin, who was found to have killed three women between 1991 and 2006.[21] After hearing of the discovery of two women's bodies buried at Tobin's former Margate home, George Morris said that something inside him "clicked" and that he believed Tobin had also murdered his daughter.[10][22] Her case was reviewed as part of an investigation into other potential victims of Tobin, named Operation Anagram, but Morris's family heard no more from the police and the investigation was wound down in 2011, having found no evidence that conclusively linked Tobin to any other murders.[10][23]

Levi Bellfield as a suspect

In February 2008, police revealed they were investigating a possible confession to the murder made by Levi Bellfield, an Isleworth-born killer who lived nearby at the time and who had just been convicted of two murders and an attempted murder. The attacks had been committed between 2003 and 2004 in the vicinity of the Morris murder site.[17][24] He was said to have been obsessed with the murder when it occurred and remained 'fascinated' by the unsolved killing.[25][26] Bellfield was alleged to have made the confession to a cellmate while on remand.[17][2] It was then revealed that Bellfield had attended Feltham Comprehensive with Morris, and that he was her childhood boyfriend.[2][17][27] Morris's family told the press that they had not known they had known each other, and her sister stated: "We did not know him. It was a shock when we found out they knew each other. Friends told us about it. It is horrendous."[10][28] In 2011, Bellfield was further convicted of the murder of another schoolgirl, Milly Dowler, whom he had abducted and raped in 2002.[24]

Bellfield would have been 12 years old at the time of Morris's murder, which occurred a year before he received his first conviction, for burglary, aged 13.[24] He was known to have repeatedly played truant while at school and was known to often frequent Hounslow Heath when he should have been at school.[4] He was known to have not attended school the day of the murder.[4] Former partners of Bellfield recounted that he had a hatred of blonde women and targeted them for attacks, and it was noted that Morris was herself blonde.[29][24] Some claimed that Morris's death could have been the start of Bellfield's violent obsession with blondes.[29]

After it was revealed that Bellfield was being investigated by police for his daughter's murder, George Morris stated that he was certain that the teenage boy who had given him a death threat in a call at the time was Bellfield, saying: "He's a local man, which is why it could be him. And it's terrifying to think that someone of twelve or thirteen could have done it".[3]

Murder of Patsy Morris is located in London Borough of Hounslow
Murder of Patsy Morris, 1980
Murder of Patsy Morris, 1980
Murder of Lynne Weedon, 1975
Murder of Lynne Weedon, 1975
Murder of Elizabeth Parravincina, 1977
Murder of Elizabeth Parravincina, 1977
Locations of the murders of Lynne Weedon, Elizabeth Parravincina and Patsy Morris in the London Borough of Hounslow
Main article: Murders of Eve Stratford and Lynne Weedon

Immediately after Morris's murder, it was noted in the press that she had been the third girl to be murdered in the area in the previous 5 years, following the murders of 16-year-old fellow schoolgirl Lynne Weedon in 1975 and Elizabeth Parravincina 1 further mile away in 1977.[8] As well as the links between these murders being suggested, Morris's case has also been linked to the murder of Eve Stratford, since the murderer of Weedon has also been proven with DNA to be the killer of Stratford, meaning any links between Weedon's and Morris's murders would necessarily mean the killer killed all three (as well as, possibly, Parravincina).[30] According to a 2015 book by Chris Clark and Tim Tate, Morris was also tied up in a fashion similar to Stratford, with one leg of a pair of tights also being used to tie her hands behind her back and one of the legs being similarly tied around her ankle.[15] Along with the murder of Morris, the Weedon and Parravincina cases remain unsolved, as well as the murder of Stratford.[30]

Subsequent events

With Bellfield having not been charged with Morris's murder, it was reported in 2012 that he may have been ruled out as a suspect.[31] However, in 2016 it was reported that links between Bellfield and other crimes had been reinvestigated after new information had been found, and that Morris's case could have been one of around 20 crimes believed to have been committed by Bellfield that police had questioned him on.[32] Police subsequently announced that all lines of enquiry had been exhausted and no evidence had been found to link him to any other unsolved crime.[32]

Morris's murder remains unsolved. Both of her parents have since died.[2][10]

Main article: Chris Clark (writer)

In 2015, crime writers Chris Clark and Tim Tate published a book alleging links between a number of unsolved murders and the infamous "Yorkshire Ripper" serial killer Peter Sutcliffe.[30] In the book, the authors claimed that Morris could have been a victim of Sutcliffe, since he was believed to have been house-sitting nearby in Alperton with his brother at the time, and both were regularly cruising and picking up women in their cars for sex.[33] They also claimed that Morris was found half-naked and that her clothing had been arranged in a typical Yorkshire Ripper-like fashion, with her clothes pushed upwards over the top half of her body.[6] Clark and Tate further alleged that her knickers and her tights had been pulled down over her ankles.[6] A second pair of tights with one leg missing was tied around her leg, they state, and wound upwards until it was knotted four times around her neck, as a form of ligature.[6] According to the writers an identical pair of one-legged tights was also wrapped three times around both her wrists in front of her body and then over her breasts.[6] It was asserted that her body was allegedly also posed in the same fashion as Sutcliffe's known victims.[13]

For Clark and Tate, her knickers being pulled down and her clothing supposedly being organised in the way it was suggested a sexual motive to the killing, and indicated the perpetrator had found sexual stimulation without penetration.[15] Police have apparently never investigated links to Sutcliffe.[15]

Clark and Tate also, however, claimed that the person who killed Morris also killed Eve Stratford, Lynne Weedon and Elizabeth Parravincina, and that this person was Sutcliffe.[30] This is despite the fact that the DNA profile of the killer is known in the Stratford and Weedon cases, and police are known to already have a copy of Sutcliffe's DNA and have been able to rule him out of unsolved murders as a result, such as in the Lesley Molseed case.[34][35][36] Upon Sutcliffe's death in 2020, Clark submitted a Freedom of Information request to the Home Office, asking if Sutcliffe's DNA was on the national DNA database.[37] The Home Office confirmed that it was, indicating that Sutcliffe can be ruled out of unsolved murder cases in which there is existing DNA evidence, such as in the Stratford and Weedon cases.[37] Notably, the murders of Stratford and Weedon, as well as the cases of Parravincina and Morris, subsequently did not feature in the 2022 ITV documentary based on Clark and Tate's book.[38]

Morris's murder has featured in a number of documentaries about Bellfield, such as the 2012 documentary His name is Evil: Levi Bellfield which was shown on Crime + Investigation as part of the Evidence of Evil series.[31] Her murder is also discussed in the 2021 Channel 5 documentary Levi Bellfield: Getting away with Murder?, featuring an interview with Jeff Edwards, the chief crime correspondent at the Daily Mirror at the time.[4]

In 2011, crime writer Geoffrey Wansell released a book on Bellfield that also suggested possible links between him and Morris's murder, titled: The Bus Stop Killer: Milly Dowler, Her Murder and the Full Story of the Sadistic Serial Killer Levi Bellfield.[3] Wansell speculated that the murder could have been as a result of her rejecting Bellfield and him becoming infuriated as a result.[3] Chris Clark and Tim Tate's book which suggested links between Peter Sutcliffe and Morris's death was published by John Blake publishing in 2015.[30] ITV filmed a documentary based on the book titled Yorkshire Ripper: The Secret Murders which was shown in February 2022, although the murder of Morris was notably not featured (alongside the discredited theory linking the murders of Stratford, Weedon and Parravincina to Sutcliffe).[38]

See also

References
  1. "FreeBMD: Births: March 1966". freebmd.org.uk. 19 September 2001. Retrieved 12 February 2022.
  2. Evans, Holly (19 December 2021). "Mysterious death of Patsy Morris, 14, on Hounslow Heath remains unsolved after four decades". My London. Retrieved 5 February 2022.
  3. Wansell 2011.
  4. "Levi Bellfield: Getting Away with Murder?" (Television documentary). My5. Channel 5. 2021. Retrieved 5 February 2022.
  5. "Patsy broke rule - never walk alone on heath". Liverpool Echo. 19 June 1980. p. 3.
  6. Clark & Tate 2015, p. 289.
  7. "Body found". The Guardian. 19 June 1980. p. 26.
  8. "Murdered girl's friends quizzed". Reading Evening Post. 20 June 1980. p. 1.
  9. "Girl's Body is Found on Heath". The Telegraph. 19 June 1980.
  10. Darbyshire, Robin (9 May 2019). "Brutal murder of Hounslow girl Patsy Morris remains a mystery almost 40 years on". MyLondon. Retrieved 5 February 2022.
  11. "Horror Killing on the Heath". Daily Mirror. 19 June 1980. p. 5.
  12. Hatter, Anthony (11 July 1996). "Who did kill Patsy?". Middlesex Chronicle. p. 1.
  13. Clark & Tate 2015, pp. 289–290.
  14. "Murder warning". The Guardian. 20 June 1980.
  15. Clark & Tate 2015, p. 290.
  16. "Murder hunt cops in plea to truants". The People. 22 June 1980. p. 4.
  17. Edwards, Richard (28 February 2008). "Bouncer 'Confessed to Murder of Schoolgirl'". The Telegraph.
  18. "Calling the radio man". Sunday Mirror. 7 December 1980. p. 21.
  19. "Murder arrest". The Times. 9 July 1996.
  20. "Unsolved 16 year murder: Suspect is released". Middlesex Chronicle. 3 October 1996. p. 11.
  21. Edwards, Richard (19 November 2007). "Has Tobin Left More Bodies Waiting to Be Found?". The Telegraph.
  22. Britten, Nick; Adams, Stephen (16 November 2007). "Father's Anger Erupts as Drifter Faces Court over Daughter's …". The Telegraph.
  23. "Peter Tobin police probe Operation Anagram 'wound down'". BBC News. 9 June 2011. Retrieved 5 February 2022.
  24. Davies, Caroline (24 June 2011). "Levi Bellfield: obsessed with schoolgirls and sexual violence". The Guardian. Retrieved 5 February 2022.
  25. Hamilton, Fiona; Simpson, John (28 January 2016). "Milly's killer has been 'singing like a canary'". The Times. Retrieved 9 July 2022.
  26. Appleyard, Nick (2009). "Chapter 5". Life Means Life. Jailed Forever: True Stories of Britain's Most Evil Killers. John Blake. ISBN 9781843589617.
  27. "Milly calls uncover 97 new leads". BBC News. 28 February 2008. Retrieved 5 February 2022.
  28. Moore-Bridger, Benedict (12 April 2012). "Was Patsy his first victim when she was just 12?". Evening Standard. Retrieved 5 February 2022.
  29. Mansoor, Sarfraz (30 January 2009). "The murderer in our midst". The Guardian. Retrieved 5 February 2022.
  30. Clark & Tate 2015.
  31. Evil Up Close (2012). His name is Evil: Levi Bellfield. Crime+ Investigation.
  32. "Levi Bellfield: Police find 'no link' to other crimes". BBC News. 9 November 2016. Retrieved 5 February 2022.
  33. Clark & Tate 2015, p. 288.
  34. "Man held over 1975 child murder". BBC News. 6 November 2006. Retrieved 15 March 2022.
  35. Fletcher, James (17 December 1997). "Ripper Sutcliffe is DNA tested". Daily Record.
  36. Brannen, K. "Other Yorkshire Ripper Victims?". Yorkshire Ripper website. Retrieved 14 March 2022.
  37. "DNA of Peter Sutcliffe Deceased" (Freedom of Information request). WhatDoTheyKnow. 2020. Retrieved 27 March 2022.
  38. "Yorkshire Ripper: The Secret Murders". ITV Hub. ITV. 23 February 2022. Retrieved 13 March 2022.

Sources
  • Clark, Chris; Tate, Tim (2015). Yorkshire Ripper: The Secret Murders, the True Story of how Peter Sutcliffe's Terrible Reign of Terror Claimed at Least Twenty-Two More Lives. London: John Blake. ISBN 978-1-78418-418-6.
  • Wansell, Geoffrey (2011). The Bus Stop Killer: Milly Dowler, Her Murder and the Full Story of the Sadistic Serial Killer Levi Bellfield. UK: Penguin. ISBN 978-0241952818.
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