Elias Morgan’s choice to wear an orange hi-vis when he murdered Lenny Scott was a striking parallel to one of Merseyside’s most infamous murders
Elias Morgan, wearing a hi-vis jacket, approaches Lenny Scott outside the gym before shooting him(Image: Lancashire Police)
When killer Elias Morgan decided to wear a high-visibility jacket to carry out the cold-blooded murder of a former prison officer, it came as a surprise to many. But, it bore a striking resemblance to a number of other fatal shootings in the north west.
The fluorescent orange high-vis might appear initially counter-intuitive, as normally criminals would want to avoid as much attention as possible. Yet, witnesses in the case of Morgan remembered how the murderer wore an orange hi-vis jacket and mask, while CCTV recovered from the scene of the shooting backed up their accounts.
However, the choice of clothing actually has been used as a cunning decoy tactic to confuse potential witnesses. Detective chief inspector Lee Wilson led Lancashire Constabulary’s investigations into the murder of ex-Altcourse prison officer and dad-of-three Lenny Scott, the Liverpool ECHO reports.
Mr Scott was gunned down after finding a phone which revealed Morgan, 35, was in a sexual relationship with a female prison officer. Morgan, from Edge Hill, Liverpool, first tried to bribe Mr Scott, at the time working at HMP Altcourse, Merseyside, offering him £1,500 to not report the find.
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But when he refused and reported the phone, the court heard how Morgan then threatened his victim’s family before vowing revenge, telling Mr Scott, “I’ll bide my time” and making a gun gesture.
Almost four years later, after Morgan had served his sentence and Mr Scott, from Prescott, Merseyside, had left the Prison Service, he carried out the threat. Mr Scott was leaving a gym in Skelmersdale, Lancashire, on the evening of February 8 last year.
Morgan shot Mr Scott with a 9mm handgun once in the head and five times in the body, before fleeing on an electric scooter. He was arrested after detectives from Lancashire Police began investigating and uncovered the threats Morgan had made.
Lenny Scott(Image: PA)
He denied any involvement but was convicted of murder following a nine-week trial.
Speaking to the ECHO, DCI Wilson said: “Wearing the jacket is hiding in plain sight. It gives the criminal an opportunity to change their appearance quickly. It almost draws the witness’s attention so it is fixed in their mind.
“The jacket proved to be a problem for the team because we were looking for the hi-vis. You have to remember, it was also in an industrial area, there was a lot of hi-vis, so it would have been difficult for witnesses.”
The wearing of the hi-vis would automatically suggest a gunman or other criminal might be a construction worker, parcel courier or road sweeper. To an extent, it means the criminal blends in as you assume he has a legitimate reason for wearing the jacket, and therefore a legitimate reason to be where they are.
The hi-vis jacket would also be a key detail in any witness appeal. If a gunman or criminal discarded the hi-vis after the crime, a key identifying feature is quickly lost. If a witness comes across a suspicious-looking person, they might automatically dismiss them as a possible suspect if they hear a key attribute of the police appeal is a hi-vis piece of clothing.
Elias Morgan(Image: PA)
The Lenny Scott murder trial heard Morgan had “meticulously planned” the shooting and had a van used to store an e-bike which he used to travel to the kill point on a nearby estate. Around an hour before the shooting, he rode from the Skelmersdale housing estate to the industrial area where he knew Mr Scott was training in a gym.
This was seen as a dummy run, with Morgan wearing dark-coloured clothes. After seeing Mr Scott’s car was still parked outside the gym, he quickly left, before returning, this time wearing the hi-vis jacket.
A police appeal released in the days after the shooting showed a blurred CCTV image with the description that the gunman was wearing “black clothing with an orange hi-vis jacket”.
Meanwhile during the trial, an eyewitness who had been at the gym on the night of the shooting recalled the gunman “was wearing an orange hi-vis and looked like he had thick layers on”. He added: “He was wearing a black balaclava over his head and a mask over his eyes”.
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The tactic of wearing the hi-vis was a striking parallel to one of the most infamous shootings in the north west in recent years. John Kinsella, a gangland fixer once called in to help Steven Gerrard deal with underworld threats. He was walking his dog in the countryside close to the Rainhill Stoops junction of the M62 when he was shot in May 2018.
The assassin, Mark “The Iceman” Fellows, was riding a mountain bike and wearing a green hi-vis tabard, when he carried out the shooting. It was the second fatal hit Fellows had carried out, after he murdered Salford’s “Mr Big” and associate of Mr Kinsella Paul Massey three years earlier.
Kinsella was sentenced to a whole life order meaning he will almost certainly never be released from prison. Morgan narrowly avoided the same fate, with the presiding judge telling him that if Mr Scott had still been a serving prison officer then a whole life order would have been the sentence.
Morgan was said to be an “incredibly twisted, dark and malevolent soul with a very strong sense of values, but they are values that no sane person would recognise as normal”. He will be at least 80 before he can be considered for release from prison.