#6 CCRC reject the application for David Morris and the Clydach murder: Almost beyond belief
9 Kelvin Road, Clydach
On 2 July 2026, we lodged an application with the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) requesting that they investigate the case of convicted murderer David George Morris, and refer it to the Court of Criminal Appeal for his conviction to be set aside as unsafe.
The application was reproduced in full and is publicly available to view at the following website under the Empowering the Innocent (ETI) umbrella: https://empowerinnocent.wixsite.com/davidmorris, where all communications with the CCRC relating to this application are and will continue to be placed.
On 25 August our application was refused on rarely-before-heard grounds:
We didn’t have permission to make the application. In fact, we did. We had Morris’s daughter, Janiene O’Sullivan’s written authorisation to make the application.
The courts were too busy to consider the case, they had too much to do – not our problem and none of the case law they cited was relevant to this case.
It wasn’t in the public interest for them to consider the case – Since when is it not in the public interest to expose crooked cops and a crooked police force which had sent at least twenty innocent people to prison for crimes they didn’t commit, and unnecessarily expended tens of millions of pounds of public funds in the process which would have been better spent elsewhere.
Now, we have written back to the CCRC suggesting that they think again. This is our response; https://empowerinnocent.wixsite.com/davidmorris
On the night of Saturday and Sunday 26/27 June 1999, one of the worst and most brutal murders in British criminal history took place in an ordinary three-bedroom semi at 9 Kelvin Road in Clydach, a small Welsh village in the lower Swansea valley.
Three generations of one family, Doris Dawson, an 80-year-old disabled grandmother, her daughter, attractive divorcee Mandy Power, 34, and Mandy’s two young daughters, Katie, 10 and Emily, 8, were beaten to death with a savagery that defies imagination.
Early on Saturday evening, Mandy and her daughters went out to a family gathering, and returned home just before midnight. Doris Dawson had been left in bed on her own.
Curiously, death certificates obtained very much later revealed that Doris Dawson died on the Saturday, while Mandy and her daughters died on the Sunday.
After the murders, the house was set on fire in an apparent attempt to destroy any fingerprints and DNA evidence that may have been left behind. However, the house was saved from annihilation when the fire department arrived in good time and extinguished the blaze. It was then that the four bodies were discovered inside the house. Mandy Power’s and her daughters’ bodies were brought out of the house and laid on the front lawn. Mandy was naked and a sex aid had been pushed into her vagina. The body of Doris Dawson was left in bed where her body was found.
Almost from the word go, things took an odd turn when South Wales Police Inspector Stuart Lewis arrived on the scene. He went into the house, remained inside for just a few minutes, and when he came out, he ordered the firemen to douse the house again. They refused. Had they acted on Lewis’s instructions, any DNA and fingerprint evidence in the house would likely have been destroyed. Then, against all police protocols and procedures, after just 7 minutes Lewis abandoned the crime scene, leaving a junior WPC in charge.
When Lewis returned to police headquarters, he reported the fire to his superior but not the murders. Then he went home, said nothing to his partner and went to bed.
It was about three hours later when, almost by accident, news of the murders reached the ears of Detective Superintendent Martyn Lloyd-Evans. He would lead the murder investigation.
It quickly came to light that murder victim Mandy Power had been involved in a lesbian relationship with Alison Lewis. She was married to Sergeant Stephen Lewis, Inspector Stuart Lewis’s identical twin brother.
When detectives turned up at the crime scene, they were mobbed by friends of Mandy Power, all telling them the same thing: That three weeks earlier, Stephen Lewis had threatened to kill Mandy Power because of her lesbian affair with his wife, Alison. But Stephen Lewis was a fellow police officer, so none of the detectives made a note of this accusation, and it went unrecorded.
On Monday 28 June, teenager Louise Pugh, Mandy Power’s best friend, gave a statement to detectives. Amongst other things, she told them that Mandy Power had been sexually involved with a local builder’s labourer, David Morris, who had left his broken gold neck chain in the house when he called on the Friday morning before the murders to have sex with her; she told them Mandy had gone to Kwiksave supermarket on Saturday afternoon to buy a bottle of wine for Alison Lewis who Mandy expected at 9 Kelvin Road that night; she told them that Stephen Lewis had threatened to kill Mandy Power; and, she also told them that at about 7.30 pm on the Saturday evening, she pushed the video, Armageddon, in its case through the letter box of 9 Kelvin Road. This statement has never seen the light of day.
However, the following day, almost certainly on the basis of Louise Pugh’s statement, a 6-day forensic search was carried out at the home of Stephen and Alison Lewis in West Crossways, Pontardawe, just a mile or so away from Clydach. Numerous items were taken from the house for forensic analysis, including the couple’s washing machine. This was also when the video Armageddon was found, minus its case, with Mandy Power’s blood on it. Incredibly, South Wales Police denied for an entire year that a forensic search had taken place – even though it was confirmed by numerous neighbours and reported in a national newspaper.
A year later in June 2000, Louise Pugh was ordered by Det. Supt. Martyn Lloyd-Evans to make a statement. Louise initially resisted, saying she already told detectives everything she knew in her statement of 28 June 1999. Nevertheless, they persisted, and Louise was forced to give a new statement which, she says, was virtually the same as her earlier statement.
On 4 July 2000, within just days of Louise Pugh giving her new statement, all three Lewises were arrested on suspicion of murder. They were held for four days in separate police stations while being questioned. At the start of Stephen Lewis questioning, he denied that he had ever been inside 9 Kelvin Road. But as the interrogation became more intense, and the evidence was put to him, he was forced to change his statement more than 50 times admitting that not only had he been inside the house, but he had been in every room in the house, and had even handled the murder weapon. On the basis of this incriminating evidence, and other evidence in their possession, we argue that Stephen Lewis, could and should have been charged with the murders. But incredibly, this did not happen. Instead he, his wife, Alison, and his brother, Stuart, were all released on bail. Almost seven months later on 22 January 2001, they were all released with no charges brought against them.
Det. Supt. Martyn Lloyd Evans made a strange remark when he said:
“There are a lot of rumours and innuendo about this case, and everyone wants to be an armchair detective, but they don’t know the facts. The facts of this case are almost beyond belief.”
But what are those facts that are almost beyond belief? Lloyd-Evans never said, nor was he asked to clarify his statement, so we have no way of knowing what he was talking about. Now is the time for Lloyd-Evans to step forward and explain himself.
Within two months of the Lewises release, on 20 March 2001, builder’s labourer David Morris was arrested and later charged with murder, even though, after evidence forged by a police officer was withdrawn, there was absolutely no evidence against him. None. Yet strangely, Mr Justice Butterfield permitted Morris’s trial to continue anyway. Ultimately, in a trial where his counsel, Gareth Rees QC, was,arguably, incompetent, failing to produce exculpatory mobile phone evidence that would have cleared him, and failing to recall a lying witness, Stephen Lewis, to the witness stand to reexamine him, and over 500 pieces of evidence hidden away from the defence on the grounds of Public Interest Immunity (PII), Morris was found guilty of the murders and sentenced to four life terms. Up until his death in August 2021 from natural causes, Morris always swore he was innocent.
Just one of the many anomalies that suggests Morris’s innocence is this: Despite this being one of the most brutal multiple murders ever committed in Britain, no DNA or fingerprints belonging to Morris were found anywhere in the house, nor on the murder weapon, a four-foot solid steel bar. Patrick Harrington QC told the jury that “Morris was clever and cunning” and had “wiped them all away.”
But this doesn’t add up because, quite apart from the impossibility of wiping away all his DNA, during the forensic investigation at the murder scene, DNA and fingerprints belonging to Stephen Lewis were found in every room of the house, and his fingerprints were discovered on the murder weapon.
So, how did David Morris manage to wipe his own fingerprints off the murder weapon whilst, at the same time, leaving on it the fingerprints of Stephen Lewis? Perhaps more competent counsel might have asked this pertinent question.
In the 2022 Sky TV documentary, Murder in the Valleys, Det. Supt. Lloyd-Evans told viewers that a year after the murders Louise had come to them with new evidence that he didn’t know before – that Mandy Power had gone to Kwiksave to buy wine, and he showed the video with Mandy in the store which, he claimed, his officers had just recently retrieved from Kwiksave, and that Stephen Lewis had threatened to kill Mandy Power. He said that it was on the basis of this new evidence that he had given the order to arrest the Lewises.
But, this was not true and is easily disproven.
The CCTV at Kwiksave deleted itself after two weeks, so it couldn’t possibly have been retrieved a year later.
Furthermore, the manageress of the store was still there in 2025, and she confirmed that detectives had come to the store within days of the murders and retrieved the CCTV footage then.
The second untruth was that Lloyd-Evans said he did not know, before seeing Louise Pugh’s new statement that Stephen Lewis had threatened to kill Mandy Power. But on the day after the murders, a police informer told a detective of the threat, and the detective lodged a note of their conversation on the HOLMES police computer system. Therefore, the police knew full well on the day after the murders that Stephen Lewis had threatened to kill Mandy Power.
So, we contend that Det. Supt. Martin Lloyd Evans deliberately delayed the Clydach murder investigation for a year, wrongly blaming vulnerable teenage witness Louise Pugh, when the cause of the delay was none other than crooked South Wales Police force cop, Det. Supt. Martyn Lloyd-Evans himself.
We are currently awaiting a reply from the CCRC as to whether or not they will reverse their decision and accept Morris’s case for review.
In the meantime, we invite those concerned with the conviction of David Morris for the Clydach murders and the rejection of the application to try to get to the truth of the murders to make your thoughts and feelings known by posting comments under this article and also sending them to the CCRC at the following email address with "Rejection of David Morris Application" in the subject line:
By John Morris and Paul Dalling
For the application form, the rejection letter from the CCRC and the responses to it see: https://empowerinnocent.wixsite.com/davidmorris
John Morris qualified as a solicitor in England and Wales in 1987 and worked in two leading Swansea criminal law practices before taking over an existing general practice which he ran for 10 years. In 2000, he moved to Ireland where he worked in a Dublin general practice. He took early retirement in 2015 to research and write "The Clydach Murders: A Miscarriage of Justice". He continues his research into the case, He has published several other books, and he also writes for a national magazine.
Paul Dalling has a background in construction and engineering, but he has spent the last twenty six years painstakingly investigating the Clydach murders.
Paul and John are the co-authors of "Force of Evil: Crossing the thin blue line to murder" which exposes the corruption and conspiracy behind the Clydach murders, and the proven imprisonment of David George Morris, an innocent man.
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