He provided her with a BMW X5.
He paid for liposuction.
He paid for beauty treatments.
He paid for visits to London.
Peter Morgan knew just what he wanted
from Georgina Symonds.
Georgina is a commodity. She's a product.
She's a service to Peter Morgan.
A service over which he wanted complete control.
That meant electronically bugging her.
What could he want the covert device fitted for
save to discover whether she was seeing other people.
Speaking on the day she went missing,
it would become clear he was the last person to see her alive.
Peter Morgan, Georgina Symonds,
the married man and the party girl, what could go wrong?
I could just see this was gonna end in trouble.
The first time Georgina Symonds
and Peter Morgan kissed, it cost him 150 pounds.
They met online but didn't have sex
until the third or fourth date.
This was not the way it had gone before
for Peter with other escorts.
It was his practice up until meeting Georgina
that he would always use a different escort
on each and every occasion and never return.
Georgina was different.
To Peter she was special.
He saw other escorts for only a matter of weeks,
I believe, after he had become besotted with Georgina Symonds.
I think when he referred to his midlife crisis,
he was definitely referring to the women.
Peter Morgan's younger brother, Andy, remembers
being baffled by the turn his sibling's life had taken
from well-off family man with children to playboy.
I don't think he ever wanted to hurt...
Helen and the kids or any of the family. He didn't.
But at the same time, I think he was being selfish
and probably sort of headstrong to a certain degree.
For 40 years of his life, he's a steady son,
husband, father, and business man.
There was no hint of the tragedy Morgan would cause.
He came from a very well-to-do,
very well respected Wales family in the South Wales area.
His father particularly was very eminent
within the country community and had received
the MBE for services to that particular facet of life.
We had quite a close knit family,
obviously a working solid relationship family,
but my mom and dad are a very proud sort of people,
really hard-working.
He was married to a childhood sweetheart,
they had two daughters of late teenaged,
early 20's years of age.
They were ostensibly a happy family unit.
Peter and his wife Helen had met in 1984
and married eight years later.
Together they had built up several successful businesses.
Peter Morgan, in the late 90's,
early 2000's, started a business
where he sold prefabricated chicken huts.
That became exceedingly successful,
and in the late 2000's he sold that for many, many millions,
making him a multimillionaire overnight.
Thereafter the money he used from the sale
of that business he put into property,
and again he became exceedingly successful,
with a large property portfolio in the South Wales area.
Peter and his wife sold the businesses
after working in them started taking its toll on his well-being.
The business had a negative impact upon Peter Morgan.
He was stressed to the point
that he developed stress-induced alopecia.
Was it a coincidence
that around this time Morgan also had his first experience
of paying for sex?
It happened in 2003, with Peter Morgan on a trip
with friends to Amsterdam.
After that he pulled back completely from his work life.
He called it early retirement, and it really shocked me
because he was sort of a role model to me,
and I've always worked very hard,
and my mom and dad have worked incredibly hard.
My sister works unbelievably hard.
We are a hard-working family, I think, in fairness.
When he hit 50, rich,
free from the pressures of the daily grind,
Peter Morgan indulged in his other passion, machines.
He'd always from an early age, he had an interest
in motorbikes and engines and anything like that.
He would buy very expensive motorbikes,
ex-service tanks, helicopters, and so forth,
as well as the usual high-end sports cars
which one would expect to associate with someone
in that facet of their life.
A midlife crisis is a psychological experience
where someone is reflecting upon where they are
in their lives and where they want to be,
and they can have a sense of not being satisfied
or fulfilled with who they are.
Forensic psychologist, Dr. Roberta Babb,
believes these extravagant purchases were just one sign
of Peter Morgan hitting a crossroads in his life,
a fairly common one in middle age.
During this time we may see people
make changes to their wardrobe,
they may buy expensive things.
In an effort to help them feel different,
they may change their clothes, change their hair.
And all of this is in an effort
to actually increase their self esteem
and their self confidence about themselves.
And what better self esteem boost
in Morgan's mind than the company
of beautiful younger women?
On a trip to a lap dancing club,
a friend introduced him to a whole new world.
One of those in whose company he was
showed him how to use a mobile telephone to arrange escorts,
something he had apparently never done before.
What you really have here is Peter, a man in his mid-50's,
he's buying a woman.
That woman was Georgina Symonds,
for Morgan, a prize escort among escorts.
He did seem different with George, you know,
when he sort of started, when he first sort of
started mentioning her, you could tell he was
sort of taken by her.
The relationship began in late 2011, early 2012.
Thereafter their relationship blossomed
almost as if it were boyfriend and girlfriend,
bearing in mind of course this was always
a commercial relationship.
But Peter Morgan began to integrate himself
into Georgina's life.
I think he sort of...
just felt a bond with her
or felt affection for her rather than
just for the sex, you know?
This was how Peter Morgan, then 50,
felt about 22-year-old Georgina.
They were lovers.
But how did she feel about him?
She did have a certain liking for him,
although I don't know how intense that genuinely was.
The reality is that she's being paid to be there.
Georgina is a commodity, she's a product,
she's a service to Peter Morgan.
He gives her a set amount of money for the things he wants.
The young woman, who had one child,
believed this line of work was a gateway to better things,
and not just for herself.
Georgina wanted the best for her daughter,
which was understandable.
Age 19 she'd had a baby girl
with boyfriend Pete Deem, moving in with him
and his mother in Newport Gwent.
It wasn't the perfect start to family life,
but Georgina had aspirations.
Georgina came from a very modest background.
It would appear to be a loving family.
Her first jobs appeared to have been in telemarketing,
and then she moved on to burlesque dancing.
Her mother was to tell the court that she and her daughter
had been on a course, and Georgina took to it.
We know that Georgina was creative
and actually making the move to dancing the burlesque club
to high-end escort work.
In many ways, for a smart,
vivacious young woman, it was a more attractive prospect
than the nine-to-five job alternatives.
She had been described as someone with a lot of energy.
She was concerned about her image,
and she was a self-confessed party girl.
Like most people, she aspired to do better.
I think it's fair to say that once she was provided
with the finer things in life,
she had a more voracious appetite for it.
We know Georgina Symonds was a creative lady
and the fact that she wanted to better herself
and that she saw high-end escort work
as a way to make a lucrative living.
It's very much seen as living this amazing life and having a load of money,
and having all these designer goods, and being paid for,
but in reality that is what it is.
You're being paid for as a commodity,
as an object, as a service, you know.
Was this why in early 2012
the prospect of having one steady client
looked attractive to Georgina Symonds.
Because after meeting Peter Morgan,
that became the arrangement which suited her,
at a cost of 150 pounds an hour to him.
They would spend time together as a couple,
and also with her young daughter.
On the surface he seemed happy,
but he never seemed necessarily unhappy before.
He just seemed to change a little bit.
His personality changed.
He just seemed, yeah, I think he was just enjoying himself.
Peter was a changed man.
He obviously decided he was gonna lose weight,
and he was gonna have his teeth done, and saw a bit of a makeover.
I mean, in fairness, he looked better for it.
He looked healthier and younger.
Peter later admitted that it was not just sex
that he enjoyed with Georgina Symonds,
he also enjoyed her company,
whether it was riding quad bikes, motorcycles,
or farm machinery around his land,
or going shopping together,
he simply enjoyed being with her.
That's what he told friends.
Over the next three years, Georgina was,
in Morgan's eyes, his steady girlfriend.
But while she was keeping Morgan company,
her real boyfriend, Pete Deem, was holding the fort at home.
Georgina and the father of her child were living together,
and whilst of course he didn't like the idea
of her working as an escort,
he nonetheless appreciated the benefits of it
and effectively turned a blind eye,
as well as carrying on with his own life.
Georgina Symonds and her partner, Pete, led very different lives.
Pete preferred to stay in and liked the quiet life.
Someone who refused to ignore
her partner's infidelity was Morgan's wife, Helen.
Having suspected him of cheating for over two years,
in March 2015 she confronted him.
This time he confessed,
admitting to the extent of his relationship with Georgina.
Helen asked him to leave.
I don't think he wanted to move out really,
so I think Helen did the right thing
and put her foot down and said, well no,
she wasn't gonna tolerate that.
That to a certain degree was perhaps not in his plans,
so I don't think he was... he didn't intend to move out from the house.
But he seemed happy when he moved out. He seemed okay.
A dangerous scene was set.
The multimillionaire man in a midlife crisis,
the angry wife, the lover paid for by the hour.
Was this a story of love and intrigue
which would end in tears?
It appeared so when the police came calling.
No.
The revelations about Peter Morgan's double life caused
huge upset in the family, but he seemed to believe it was worth it
to be with Georgina.
I think he would have liked to have moved with her
to a new address.
I think that what he wanted ideally
was to set up a new family with her.
In August 2015 he changed the terms
of the arrangement with Georgina.
Peter Morgan required Georgina to be exclusive to him,
foregoing all others.
He actually moved her into a site
that he owned just outside Newport.
He had a bungalow on the site.
It was a Pencoed castle.
And I think at the time the bungalow was empty,
and he moved her into there.
With regular boyfriend, Pete Deem, now sidelined,
Georgina moved into the house
that Morgan had earmarked for redevelopment.
The bungalow in the grounds of his own estate sat alone
on the edge of woodland.
The property that he set Georgina up in was quite remote.
You didn't pass it going anywhere except perhaps
to go to another property he owned beyond it,
which was in a state of disrepair.
And so there was no real chance of her being seen
by accident by a passerby.
So, it was, in a sense, an ideal place for him
for that purpose.
Not necessarily an ideal place for Georgina.
I think you'd probably find that living in that house
is very much like being in a prison
because you're being paid to live there.
She can't have other partners,
she can't have friends around.
Once installed in the bungalow,
Peter Morgan wanted to make sure that Georgina would have
no need for other clients.
He provided her with a BMW X5. He paid for liposuction.
He paid for beauty treatments.
He paid for visits to London, to the Shard, and so forth.
He also took Georgina and her daughter out
on family visits, holidays, trips, and so forth,
as well as paying her round about 7,000 pounds odd a month.
So a fairly substantial income
as well as other fringe benefits.
She wanted to improve her body image
and spent a great deal of his money doing that.
She lived extravagantly on the trips she took, went to London.
And she wanted a nice car, which he gave to her.
Georgina's relationship with Peter Deem,
her boyfriend and the father of her daughter, had ended.
In the meantime, Peter Morgan convinced himself
that he and Georgina were in a genuine relationship
rather than a transactional one.
He did say he had sort of fallen for her.
And to a certain degree, I don't think he was trying to fool himself.
I don't... he would sort of say she probably didn't feel
the same way about him,
but deep down perhaps he thought that she did.
He believes he's in some sort of emotional relationship,
an equal, consensual relationship
where this is something that she's chosen to be in.
The reality is that she's being paid to be there.
Dr. Jessica Taylor believes that messages
between Morgan and Georgina reveal
how differently they saw their arrangement.
The text messages are actually really clear in that
in some of those conversations
Peter is a lot more emotional, almost like he's fed
into his own fantasy that they're in some sort
of relationship where she's supposed
to respect him, trust him, and treat him like an equal.
But her replies remain very sort of non-emotional,
business-like, very financial. It's, you know,
this person's getting more money than me.
When are you gonna send me the money?
This person's getting a car. This person's getting holidays.
It's very much like well, I'm doing these things for you,
you're supposed to be buying these things for me.
Whereas his responses are more about emotions
and relationship and things like that.
It's almost like he has bought his way into her entire life,
and she is still having to deal with that.
Being a commodity, being a service,
she's almost dealing with that in a very transactional way,
whereas he has almost become sort of obsessed with her
and believes there's some sort of emotional connection.
Georgina began to struggle mentally
in the house that Morgan had set her up in.
She's in a house, she's being paid thousands of pounds a month,
she's being given gifts.
And so there's an expectation that she's doing really well,
she's happy, she's empowered,
everything is going really well for her.
But the reality is she had a daughter
that she was trying to bring up at the same time,
she was on her own in a house
that she was being paid to live in.
We don't know what the reality of her life was like.
We don't know what it's like to live
almost this fantasy life by a 55 year old man
who expects you to have sex with him when they want
and give them what they want,
while she's still very young,
trying to live her life, bring a daughter up on her own.
Around the same time,
31-year-old Pete Deem had become deeply depressed.
There were no reports of Mr. Deem notifying friends
or family members or Georgina
of the state of his mental well-being.
Indicative of Georgina's thinking is how she referred
to the father of her child and Peter Morgan.
To others she referred to Peter Morgan as rich Pete,
in respect of the father of her child, poor Pete.
In November 2015, Pete Deem took his own life.
It was the second of two blows for Georgina,
who had been in mourning since spring of that year.
I think it was around April, that sort of time,
that Georgia lost her father.
Pete told me at the time, and I think he had some dogs,
and I think they... Georgia sort of said
Pete had to look after the dogs.
Over the space of just seven months,
the young woman had lost
the two most important men in her life.
She struggled to cope with the double tragedy.
I think it's bound to mark a shift in the relationship
when a tragedy of that sort befalls them.
During the last year or so, her life became pretty reliant
on alcohol and class A drugs, namely cocaine.
Peter Morgan was very concerned about her lifestyle.
I think that's a demonstration of the warmth
of his genuine affection for her,
because he tried to wean her off the substances
and the drink and was partially successful in doing that.
But she was a binge drinker and binge user of cocaine,
and when she started, she found it very difficult to stop.
Her arrangement with Peter Morgan began to unravel.
She would take out her stress on him.
She would belittle him, shout at him, be rude to him,
and really not show any public affection
towards him whatsoever.
Morgan was keen to help,
but Georgina had no interest in letting him inveigle his way
into every part of her life.
Georgina is an escort, but that's not her whole life.
There's gonna be days when she doesn't want to do it.
There's gonna be days where she doesn't want him
coming in the house and demanding sex off her.
She's gonna be ill sometimes, she's gonna be tired,
she's gonna want to spend time with her daughter,
and do things like a normal 24-year-old does.
But the thing is he had so much control over her
that she has to live this job 24 hours a day.
In January 2016, following a period of heavy drug use,
Georgina Symonds ended up in hospital.
He was really concerned about her.
She had initially overdosed,
and he had taken her to the hospital,
and they had let her out.
Whilst there, Peter encouraged Georgina
to open up to a doctor about her substance abuse.
A few days later, she had a call
from the local Safeguarding Authority.
There came a point such was the concern by others
for Georgina's mental state
that the social services were contacted
as regards to the safety of her child.
This she blamed solely upon Peter Morgan,
which perhaps is a little unfair in the circumstances.
Her attitude to him changed markedly
when the social services became involved
with the quality of her care with her child,
and there's no doubt that she blamed Peter Morgan
for an intervention of telling social services
that the child wasn't being looked after properly.
And that was definitely something
that would cause great antipathy towards him by her.
Georgina blamed Morgan
and told him if her child was taken away
it would be his fault.
And I think he thought that by them getting involved
they'd take her daughter off her,
and she would take her life.
And that was the crux of it.
And he was beating himself up over that
and couldn't sleep properly and didn't share it,
but was obviously really struggling with that.
It came out in court later
that Peter Morgan had not alerted the authorities
about Georgina's habits.
Georgina though began planning how to remove herself
from the arrangement with Morgan,
whilst ensuring that she and her little girl
were set up for the future.
Georgina set her sights on getting the house
transferred to her own name
and put pressure on Peter Morgan to do that.
What she wanted out of this, again,
was the title deeds to the property
and to be financially independent of him.
He indicated that in due time
the property would be transferred into her name.
He resisted to a certain extent,
partially because there was a question mark
about whether it was owned singly or jointly.
The problem was that half the property
was in the name of Peter Morgan's estranged wife.
She, once becoming aware of the situation,
was obviously not going to comply
with passing it to 'a potential love rival'.
As Morgan tried and failed
to get onto a better footing with Georgina,
she began looking elsewhere for comfort.
At the funeral of Peter Deem,
she rejuvenated a friendship with a close friend of his
called Thomas Ballenger.
And thereafter Mr. Ballenger and Georgina became close
and became involved intimately.
Peter Morgan had abandoned
his previously comfortable life for a woman he now saw
as increasingly erratic
and who was becoming close to another man.
I could just see this was gonna end in trouble.
I just thought what have you given up here for...
to end up with this?
I begged him to sort of get out of there
and sort of leave her at that point really,
and he just said, "I can't leave her, I can't..."
Effectively in his eyes that was where he thought
she needed him more than ever really.
Blinded by his passion,
Morgan embarked on a strategy
of tracking Georgina's every move, literally.
Peter Morgan was concerned about something he didn't know,
and he went to the extent of putting listening devices
in the house that she lived in.
Morgan bought a listening device
costing 45 pounds, which appears to be no more
than a plug adapter.
Whatever Georgina says or gets up to in the house
given to her by Peter Morgan, he would now hear.
And he becomes jealous.
He becomes obsessive, he stalks her,
he puts listening devices in her house.
He's gotten to the point where he's actually really controlling.
Extreme behavior from Peter Morgan.
How far would his obsession take him?
He said to me, he said,
"When blackmail starts, where does it stop?"
In an isolated house on the estate of a multimillionaire,
an innocent looking plug adaptor.
In fact it contained facilities for putting in a sim card,
which when dialed into would activate a microphone,
which in turn would allow the person
at the other end of the phone dialing in to hear
what was going on in the immediate vicinity
to where that plug was situated.
Peter Morgan regularly dialed into the device.
The plug was placed in the living room of Georgina's home,
and he was able to hear either ambient goings on
within the premises themselves, or for example,
one side of a telephone conversation she was having.
Morgan would later claim
that he took the extreme steps
because he was worried about her drug habits,
a position supported by his brother.
He did that not in a, well, in a controlling manner,
but not in a controlling manner, not in a bad controlling manner
in the sense that he wanted to make sure
that she didn't overdose, or was trying to avoid...
trying to keep her off drugs and alcohol.
Not everyone agrees that his actions
were motivated by affection or concern.
This was the action of a man who couldn't bear
to be out of his mistresses' life.
Peter Morgan suspected that there were other men
in Georgina's life, and he took steps
to either satisfy himself that was the case, or otherwise.
Even Morgan's own lawyer was never entirely sure
why he bugged Georgina's home.
We never really got to the bottom
of why he planted a listening device in the property.
It's obviously some sense of insecurity on his part
that he wanted to monitor her behavior.
But it came about in quite a strange way,
because he wasn't objecting to her carrying on
seeing other men,
and yet what did he want the covert device fitted for
save to discover whether she was seeing other people.
So there was a certain paradox there that
I was never able to get to the bottom of.
What is clear though is that Morgan
quickly became obsessive about monitoring the device.
In court, phone records were introduced into evidence
that showed that he had called the device 514 times
over a ten-week period in the winter of 2015 to 2016.
He rang in over 250 times during December.
It's not just the frequency of the call, it's the duration.
He describes the listening device
in his own mobile telephone for many, many hours,
often into the middle of the night.
On January 10, 2016,
Morgan listened in and heard something,
in fact several things, that made his blood run cold.
He overheard this conversation,
and she had sort of let on in that conversation
that she'd lied to Pete about the social services.
Georgina had been telling Morgan
that she still didn't know if they were going
to take custody of her daughter,
accusing Morgan of causing her all of that distress.
In fact, the bugged conversation revealed
that she had known for days that the authorities
had no concerns about her daughter's well-being.
And there was no doubt that she was putting
a lot of pressure on him, demanding stuff
and being horrible to him.
And he learned in that conversation
that she was obviously lying to him.
If Morgan was horrified
at Georgina's manipulations, there was far worse to come.
On January 10, 2016, as he sat late into the night
listening to Georgina Symonds' phone calls,
Peter Morgan hears how she planned to return to her old job.
Georgina wanted the title deeds of Pencoed Farm.
If she were to have that, then her plan was
to extricate herself from her relationship
with Peter Morgan.
She spoke to others of her ambition to go back to escorting,
perhaps to work in the London area,
and pursue a totally separate
and independent life in that regard.
She had been lying,
planning on becoming an escort again,
and then there was what she could do with a video tape
featuring Peter, Georgina, and a third party.
The threesome had been filmed in his former marital home.
One of the women borrowed his wife's clothes.
So Peter's heard on this listening device
that she is potentially thinking about blackmailing him.
She mentioned having something
with which to blackmail him.
In fact, this was a recording.
It was a recording of Georgina
and Peter Morgan engaged in a sex act.
It was just something that he didn't want his daughters seeing.
That was blackmail.
And he said to me, he said, "When blackmail starts,
where does it stop?"
So in his mind he had to stop the blackmail.
There was obviously a great concern in Peter Morgan's mind
of the implications of what he'd been doing
were his wife and children to find out about it,
because he was and had been in a very stable,
steady marriage for many years,
and he had two children that he worshiped.
Peter Morgan was devastated
by what he had heard.
But what had left him more heartbroken,
the idea of his daughters finding out what he had been up to
or the fact that the young woman he believed himself
in love with felt no affection towards him whatsoever.
I believe that what was behind his concern
about the conversation between Georgina
and Thomas Ballenger was that he was afraid
that she was gonna resume the relationship
she'd had transiently with somebody else.
He would have probably felt quite angry,
quite hurt, quite confused, and maybe even a bit of shame.
He's almost molded her into this doll
that he gets to use, abuse, play with.
He has total control over her.
And then when she then threatens that control,
that financial control, and he hears her talking about
maybe I could exploit him, that's when he realizes
that he's losing control of her
because essentially he knows somewhere deep down
that the only control he has over that woman is finance.
So if she takes back that control,
she takes away the financial control,
what does he have left?
He knows she wouldn't be interested in him.
She's not gonna stick around.
It was all Morgan could take.
Over the next 24 hours he ruminated, planned.
Mid-morning on January 12, 2016,
Peter Morgan arrived at Georgina Symonds' home.
He had arranged to drop off some items.
He's offered to get her new tires on the car,
and he took a bath in there.
They took a new bath down and had that delivered.
And I think he was just genuinely hoping
to win her over, you know?
Morgan offered Georgina the house that she wanted
and to take out an insurance policy
which would mean, in the event of his death,
she would get a million pounds.
But he wanted the video tape.
We know that Peter Morgan went to talk to Georgina
about what he had overheard when he was listening in.
However, when he confronted her,
she allegedly didn't back down.
Georgina had no intention
of kissing and making up with Peter Morgan.
Again she threw accusations at him
that he had put her daughter's well-being in jeopardy.
He later told his family that he felt
this was pure manipulation.
He knew from the bugged conversations
that social services had confirmed
they were not concerned about Georgina's parenting.
Peter Morgan had an objective
of trying to get the relationship
back on a sound footing.
And I believe that when he went to her home that day,
it was not his principal intention to commit murder,
but it was a fall back position
that he'd set himself up for were he to discover
that she wasn't going to amenable
to his suggestion of getting back together.
Morgan had indeed come prepared to kill
if he felt he had to.
Up his sleeve was a length of twine
with loops tied at each end,
which he'd hooked around his wrist.
Sitting beside Georgina on the sofa,
he quickly wrapped the string around her neck,
pinning her wrists so she couldn't struggle.
Then he pulled the string and tightened it,
and then he let off, and I think at that point
he expected her to fully say sorry,
and I won't blackmail you.
Strangulation as a form of murder is characterized by power and control.
It's sadistic, and in that moment, the person is aware
that their life hangs in the balance
and is under the control of another person.
Defiant till the last,
Georgina did not apologize nor beg for her life.
And he went through with it.
In the mind of Peter Morgan,
he had gone too far to turn back.
Peter would later claim
that as Georgina struggled, he reached for a blanket
to throw over her face.
He couldn't bare to look at her as she died.
He held on to the makeshift ligature nevertheless
until she stopped moving.
In a sign that he had been prepared to kill throughout the attack,
he then collected a metal bar from his car.
The bar was of use in the following way.
He had cut the bar so that it fitted in the back
of his Porsche Cayenne SUV.
Using items he had brought with him,
polythene, ties, slips, and so forth,
he bound the body up in polythene.
He then tied Georgina's hands and feet
to the pole so he could more easily carry out her body.
He then drove the body in the back of his vehicle
to an outhouse.
And whether or not Peter Morgan had forgotten about this,
there was also closed circuit television,
so we're able to see the arrival of Peter Morgan
outside the outhouse.
We see him opening the boot of the vehicle,
take out Georgina's body, carry it into the premises,
and then return a little while later without it.
It was just after midday.
At a quarter past three that afternoon
Georgina's daughter is let out from school,
but her mother is not there to pick her up.
Alerted by teachers, Georgina's friends and family met
at Pencoed Farm to search for her.
She was nowhere to be seen,
and she was not answering her phone.
At around 8:00 the police were called.
They attended and in due course discussed with all present
as to her final movements,
what they had seen of her, what she may be doing,
whether they had been able to contact her phone.
This was recorded on the police officer's body worn video.
Yeah, and I know I saw footage where he lied to the police
when they were looking for her,
because they had reported her missing.
And that was the toughest part for me for sure
for the whole trial and everything
because he obviously lied to the police.
Having taken her phone with him
when he had left the bungalow,
it hadn't occurred to Morgan to switch it off
until he arrived to hide her body.
A police search quickly revealed that it transmitted
its last signal from the farm.
Part of the pretense Peter Morgan had put up
is that he didn't know where her phone was,
but towards the end of the evening
he suddenly announced to those investigating
that he knew where her phone was.
It was in fact in his Porsche motorcar at another location.
He had put it in there apparently
to stop her buying drugs, to stop her harming herself.
As you can imagine, at that point those investigating
became more skeptical with his account
and asked him to accompany them to Maindee Police Station,
which indeed he did.
As the evidence mounted against him,
would Peter Morgan confess?
Shortly after 8:00 Tuesday January the 12th,
and Peter Morgan is in custody in connection
with the murder of his lover, Georgina Symonds.
Confronted with the evidence against him, he confesses.
The confession was extraordinary.
Although it evolved so that not a consistent account
was given in each of the four long interviews,
but I think he came to the conclusion
that the game was up.
That his attempt to conceal the body,
which had been a very amateur, pathetic attempt in truth,
meant that he knew he had been found...
and that therefore he thought the best thing to do
was confess what he had done.
At 4:48 on January 13, 2016, Peter Morgan
was charged with the murder of Georgina Symonds.
At trial 11 months later, he denied that same charge.
He could not, he said, be held responsible
for the murder of his mistress.
Why? Because he had a mental condition.
Whilst accepting he killed Georgina,
Peter Morgan nonetheless pleaded not guilty.
He did so on a legal basis, or a two-fold legal basis.
Firstly that he relied on the defense
of diminished responsibility,
namely that due to his mental condition,
he acted in a way he perhaps would not have done
were it not for that condition.
In support of that he called a very eminent psychologist
and psychiatrist to say
that he was borderline Asperger's syndrome,
which was a contributing factor
to attention deficit disorder,
and this could have caused him to act in the way he did,
though wouldn't be an ultimate defense for killing itself.
It would allow him... the jury to return the verdict of manslaughter.
The defense that he has a mild Asperger's diagnosis
I think, in a way, could be considered irrelevant
when you look at the rest of the evidence and his behavior.
That he very clearly has capacity,
his decision making is clear.
He had successful businesses, he was making large purchases.
He was building property.
He was commissioning trades people.
He was able to control Georgina
for a significant amount of time.
The accommodation, the finances, the text messages,
there's no evidence there of lack of clarity
or decision making or capacity or anything like that.
It wasn't so bad that it prevented him
from becoming a multimillionaire many times over.
It didn't prevent him from having a fairly happy marriage
up to a point.
It didn't prevent him having friendships,
and it didn't prevent him behaving normally
in front of others.
In his mitigation his family supported him.
They'd seen evidence of the Asperger's.
I don't think the Asperger's, he said,
I don't think it affected him in day to day life,
but when he was cornered, you always say
if I was cornered like a rat...
when he was confronted with that, he was very narrow thinking.
Not, almost not logical.
He may have been illogical,
but could that explain choosing
to take the life of another?
Not according to some analysts.
The exploitation of women,
the fact that he was using prostitutes
whilst he was still married to his wife,
it's more likely that it's to do with his own misogyny
and his entitlement than it's got anything to do with Asperger's at all.
And it's obviously really damaging
for all of the millions of people with Asperger's
who would never commit violent crimes
to then suggest that that might be why he killed Georgina.
Attempting to claim diminished responsibility
would mean if successful, Morgan would be sentenced
for manslaughter, not murder.
The difference in sentencing can be huge.
His defense team added another factor
for the court to consider.
The other defense was
one of loss of control, namely that there was something,
a qualifying trigger as it's called legally,
to cause him to act in the way he did
due to a loss of control due to passion.
Passion Elle in France they call it.
We don't have quite the same here,
but it's the equivalent.
And here it would have been the fact
that he discovered his lady friend had a partner,
and secondly that she was going to blackmail him.
Morgan's defense team argued
that he had loved Georgina,
had lavished her with gifts, had put a roof over her head,
and that she had manipulated, used, and abused him,
all of which combined to cause his lack of control.
He was prone to be manipulated,
and I think that's what happened,
because he was so besotted with her,
whether it was what one would conventionally call love
isn't for me to judge. But he was certainly prone
to that manipulation because she had many cards in her hand
that she could play to her advantage,
and such was his behavior that he let her do it.
The prosecution argued that there had been
no loss of control by Morgan, that, in fact,
the murder had been meticulously planned and executed.
Peter Morgan clearly resolved to kill Georgina.
Either he was going to have her or no one else would.
Indicative of that was a list of items
he typed into his mobile telephone
during the night of the 11th of January.
That included the items polythene...
snips, short for scissors, ties for rope.
Isabel listening device, and bar, which was for an iron bar.
He was a practical man who had a logical mind
when he put his mind to a topic.
And he assembled the necessary things
to take down to the bungalow with the sort of precision
that you would expect a person planning
something important to do.
The jury saw this footage,
Morgan on the day before Georgina's death,
fetching the things that he needed
from his workshop in the barn.
Peter Morgan went along on the morning
of the 12th of January either to kill Georgina or to scare her.
On one view he hoped that they would stay together
and things would return back to normal.
But when it became apparent that would not happen,
he took the decision, the rationale decision to kill her.
The fact that he took along those implements
with which to kill her, with which to transport her body,
clearly indicates an intention to kill
and a planning of some meticulous nature.
Perhaps in his own mind he thought he wasn't going
to go through with it at some point.
Clearly that boundary was crossed,
and sadly Georgina lost her life.
For his family, the killing
of Georgina Symonds began with a clumsy attempt
at reconciliation, and emotions got out of control.
I honestly don't, hand on heart, believe
that at any point that was what he wanted to happen,
but perhaps he was prepared for that.
But I don't think he thought that was gonna happen,
and he definitely didn't want that to happen.
Which version would the jury believe?
The controlling stalker who was enraged
and jealous when he overhead an escort
planning to blackmail him and leave?
Or the man with Asperger's who was overwhelmed
by a loss of control when he was manipulated
and exploited by the girlfriend that he loved?
The jury considered both those defenses
and rejected him, and consequently, convicted him of murder.
On December 21, 2016,
Peter Morgan was found guilty
of murdering 25-year-old mom, Georgina Symonds.