
Shelley Morgan's intention on the day she disappeared in early June, 1984, was to first take her two young children to school and then go to Leigh Woods (just across the Avon Gorge from Bristol via the Clifton Suspension Bridge) to make some sketches and probably also take photographs, for which purpose she took her Olympus OM20 camera with her. As an artist, the photographs might have served as her aide-memoir for the colours in the landscape. Afterwards, she should have returned in good time to collect her children from school and the alarm was raised when she failed to do this. There was a big search in and around Leigh Woods and the investigation continues to this day, but no real trace of Shelley was found until a boy came across her remains in a quite different wooded area in October 1984. She had been stabbed, in the back, more than a dozen times. The camera has never been found but it would have some collector value these days, so the police are still hopeful.
The location where the body was found is still in the Bristol area, but it's not where Shelley intended to go and it's not easy to see how she got there from Leigh Woods without being transported in some vehicle other than a local bus or taxi, whose drivers would certainly have been interviewed at the time. And the fact that her possessions weren't anywhere near the body suggests that's not where she was first attacked.
So the initial search and subsequent investigation put a lot of effort in Leigh Woods and nearby places where Shelley might have gone or her killer might have come from. This would have included Foye House at the time.
And two years later the police returned to arrest John Canaan in his flat at Foye House for the murder of Shirley Banks, who he was convicted of kidnapping, raping and unlawfully imprisoning in his flat before other residents heard a woman screaming in woodlands close to Foye House. Shirley's body, however, was found at a different and fairly distant location. It would have been impossible for anyone who knew about Shelley's case not to think "is there some sort of link here? We searched those woods to oblivion not long ago!"
But, of course, John Canaan was still in prison for an earlier rape when Shelley disappeared in 1984. So it couldn't have been him who took her, even if so much else about Shelley's disappearance prefigured what happened to (was DONE to!) Shirley Banks. Medawar is neither arrogant enough nor patronising enough to suppose that police thoughts about a possible link actually stopped at that point, because "wrong offender" did not necessarily mean "not anything to do with this flat" and John Canaan was not a lone criminal: he was a cog in the organised crime machine and his role to was to provide more important criminals with cars that couldn't be traced to those important criminals but were not so unregistered as to generate an immediate police stop and search if driven on the Queen's Highway.
The police would have looked into the ownership and occupancy of that flat of Caanan's probably all the way back to when it was built, which would only have been a decade or two at that time, to see if any like-minded associate of Canaan's might have had a tenancy or at least access whilst he was still in prison. But, Medawar would suggest that if anyone still working on the Shelley Morgan case reads this article, they should carry on to study the idea presented below, and then go back to any relevant notes from the previous Morgan/Banks investigations to do with Foye House, to see if some once meaningless detail pops out in a new way.
Before we get to the concept of "selection criteria" it's worth noting that the obvious reason why John Canaan moved Shirley Banks's body from the woods where she was killed and Shelley was last known to be, to somewhere else, is because Leigh Woods was where he lived. Many years later, Vincent Tabak would move the body of Joanna Yeats from Bristol to Failands in North Somerset (he almost certainly drove past Foye House in the process!) precisely because he had killed her in the flat next to his own. But whoever killed the Christian folk singer Glenis Carruthers in the Clifton area of Bristol in 1974 (and we still don't know who that was) saw no need to do anything with her dead body except walk away from it and vanish into the shadows. Which might suggest that it was not on his doorstep and he didn't expect to be in Bristol again for quite a while, if at all.
Abductor's selection criteria and Foye House
Foye House is a four-storey residential building just off Bridge Road in Leigh Woods, which is a community and beauty spot just across the Avon Gorge from the city of Bristol, Clifton and Clifton Downs. Foye House itself stands beside the highway which crosses the Clifton Suspension Bridge to and from Bristol and is therefore well situated for many purposes, albeit some distance from the nightlife of the city centre. (The other side of that coin being far better levels of privacy and environmental tranquillity.) It is not “skid row” by any reasonable definition.
Flat numbers in Foye House, as determined from estate agent's adverts online, run from 1 to 24.
There are three habitable floors in each of four sections of the building, the ground floor being garages and presumably utility areas. That seems to translate into two stacks of three flats for each section, and the ones advertised have two bedrooms. The feature which makes Foye House different from most other blocks of flats, not only in Bristol but in many other towns and cities in England, is that each stack has up to three separate garages on the ground floor which, barring private sub-letting agreements, probably translates to one per flat.
{This arrangement does present fire-risks, but it also contains them quite well and in a way conducive to maintaining privacy and security of tenant's property. In almost all circumstances, privacy and security are good things and help protect victims from criminals. There are rare exceptions, though.}
More usual arrangements might be:
A sort of communal basement car-park on one or more levels, as in some office buildings. These provide sheltered (from weather and the view of passers-by) access from where the car is parked to any given flat, but any other resident might see a resident loading or unloading objects from their car, never mind decanting a person who didn't want to be there and might try to attract the attention of any witness.
Open-air parking areas and/or a group of lock-up single garages a safe distance (from the fire-officer's point of view) from the residential block itself. The journey from car to flat is neither sheltered, nor is it in any way private. A captive person might even have a chance to break free. Foye House has extra open air parking spaces, directly visible from the flats. Much less private than the garages!
Most of these blocks have more floors than Foye House and this creates an imperative to use the lift, which might stop at any floor and suddenly open the doors on a potential witness.
On-street parking (often the case with town houses converted to flats) where no resident is really guaranteed a specific place to park, but they probably have resident's sticker which increases their chance of being able to find a different place each time within a parking zone allotted by the local council. This yields zero chance of getting anything substantial (let alone a person) in or out of a flat without risk of being seen. This also applies to a high proportion of all the Victorian and Edwardian terraced houses in England, and is beginning to be reapplied to new-builds in order to discourage car-ownership. This is not relevant to historical cases still to be solved, but is worth bearing in mind for more recent cases.
Really high-end apartment blocks, even in the 1980s, tended towards secure underground parking with a guard, never mind CCTV. About the only person who could get an abductee up to a flat from one of those parking areas without being noticed, would be the guard. A totally private lift or staircase would be rare.
Whilst Foye House clearly does not have separate entrances for each flat, only a quarter of the residents (six households?) use any one entrance and the level of privacy in the individual garage would allow a resident to predict and then verify when it was safe to transfer an abductee or other contraband upwards from a car in that garage to their flat, or to make the return journey with whatever was left.
Foye House is situated on Bridge Road, a natural route from the city of Bristol to North Somerset and the city of Bath, even if a 21st-century Satnav system might direct a motorist to more major roads. Certainly residents of Foye House and Leigh Woods enjoy fairly direct access to both cities without really being in either. Even today, the flats are not prohibitively expensive for the level of privacy they provide (none of the flats really overlooks another) and in the nineteen eighties they would have been quite affordable for anyone with a reasonable income. Some nearby houses are expensive though.
Bridge Road is on the X4 and B2 bus routes, which are used both by locals and by tourists to access the nearby woods and locations with scenic views of the Avon Gorge and the landmark Clifton Suspension Bridge. It is an understandably popular place to walk and make use of the outdoors, and a quiet place with people strolling about would be one of the things an abductor might well be seeking. On weekends, there might be chattering crowds, but during the working week occasional visitors might be more contemplative, self-absorbed (or concentrating on artistic work) and around for longer. And an abductor might realise and appreciate that.
The other selection criterion, and this is most important, is availability! As soon as one thinks past "did this have anything to do with John Canaan" to "perhaps it was someone with the same intent making similar choices" then, although one loses the direct mental association which detectives like and which journalists can't really function without, one gains a twenty-fourfold improvement in probability, because any of the flats in Foye House would be equally suitable! And that means there might have been rather more than one chance in any given year for an offender to score a tenancy in an optimal location for that sort of crime.