Shelley Morgan

Shelley Morgan was last seen alive near her home in Bristol on 11 June 1984.

Her naked body was found four months later in a shallow grave in a wood off Long Lane in Backwell Hill on 14 October 1984.

She had been stabbed to death.

She had gone out to spend the day sketching and taking photographs at Leigh Woods near Ashton Court and Cliton Suspension Bridge. She had taken her camera with her, but it was never recovered. It was an Olympus OM20 35mm camera, with the serial number 1032853 and the police are still appealing for anyone that might come across it to contact them, it being noted that it is a camera that is still popular amongst collectors to this day.

Shelley Morgan had lived at 67 Dunkery Road, Windmill Hill, Bristol.

She had had two children and had dropped them off at Victoria Park primary school in Bedminster at about 8.30am on 11 June 1984 before going to the wood to paint and take photographs, but failed to pick them up and was never seen alive again.

When she left she had been carrying a distinctive multi-coloured carpet bag containing a camera tripod and other items which was never traced.

She was said to have been wearing a scarlet/bright red coloured top, a white skirt, and maroon-coloured tights, as well as her distinctive red glasses. Her clothes were never found.

She had been 5ft 1in tall, slim, with long fair hair and blue eyes.

When she left it was thought that she had taken a bus from East Street in Bedminster before 10.20am to the bus station from where she took a 359 country service to Portishead.

It was known that she had collected a registered letter containing £35 cash from a post office in Kent Street, Bristol, between 10am and 11am. It was also thought that she might have been seen outside Ashton court Lodge in Bristol. However, there were no other confirmed sightings for her and it was not known for certain at all what she had done or where she had gone that day.

It was noted that a medium had called the police stating that they thought that Shelley Morgan would be found in a watery grave, which led the police to search a number of waterbodies. However, it was noted that she was in fact found in a shallow grave at Water Catch Farm at Backwell Hill, two days later, which was about 8 miles from where it was thought she had gone to take photographs.

Shelley Morgan was American, being bornin Illinois, and had come to England in 1972 and had initially worked in the wardrobe department of the Liverpool Playhouse. She had been in the UK for 12 years, but had only been in the Bristol area for 12 months before her murder. At the time of her murder she was described as a freelance artist and amateur photographer.

She and her husband had had a second home in the Brecon Beacons, Wales, where her husband had been at the time she vanished.

It was thought that she had been kidnapped and raped before being dumped at Backwell Hill. The police said that they were considering similarities between her murder and two rapes in the Weston-super-Mare area the previous year.

When she was found she was naked, except for a pair of maroon tights twisted around her ankles and a pair of sandals.

The police said that they thought that her murderer had had a car and possibly had work connections with either the Ashton Court area or Backwell area.

Her body was so decomposed that it had to be identified by dental records.

Her postmortem found that she had been stabbed 14 times in the back and that there was evidence that the attack had been sexually motivated.

It was thought she had been murdered on the day she vanished. However, the police said that they didn't think she had been killed at the copse where she was found, and that they found no signs of a struggle there.

None of her clothes or possessions were ever found.

The police investigation found a couple of postcards that had come from a Bristol Hospice charity sold in the 1980s or 1990s that depicted the River Avon and St Andrew's Church and asked for anyone that had bought the calendar or who had kept the tear-off postcards with those images to come forward. The postcards were not mentioned by the police until June 2019 and even then their significance was not fully explained. However, the two photos detailed, firstly the place where Shelley Morgan had been intending to go that day, Bower Ashton, near to Leigh Woods, Ashton Court and Cliton Suspension Bridge, and secondly, Backwell, where her body was found.

However, in June 2024 the police said that they had since ruled out any significance of the two tear-off postcards.

Detectives were said to have investigated similarities between Shelley Morgan's murder and that of 17-year-old Melanie Road who was sexually assaulted and stabbed to death whilst going home from a nightclub in Bath on 9 June 1984. Melanie Road's murder was similarly unsolved until 2016 when a man was convicted of murdering her. However, it was not thought that the two cases were connected.