Llanharry murders: Who killed Harry and Megan Tooze?

It was a double murder that shocked a close-knit rural village and intrigued the nation.

It has been 30 years since the blood-stained bodies of Harry and Megan Tooze were discovered under hay bales in the cowshed at their isolated cottage in Llanharry, south Wales.

Who shot the couple dead is still a mystery and the case remains one of Wales’ most notorious unsolved murders.

Retired fruit-wholesaler Harry and his wife Megan led very ordinary and ordered lives.

“We were told they kept themselves to themselves, they were creatures of habit, old-fashioned… didn’t go out ever, didn’t socialise particularly but were perfectly pleasant neighbours,” said former BBC Wales journalist Penny Roberts who reported on the case at the time.

Monday 26 July 1993 began the same as every other – the couple, who were in their 60s – left their farm cottage in the village of Llanharry in Rhondda Cynon Taf and drove their Land Rover to Tesco in nearby Talbot Green to do their weekly food shop, stopping to collect their pensions on the way home.

Just hours later they were dead.

The couple’s only child, Cheryl Tooze, rang her parents every day in the early evening.

On this particular evening she tried calling during the ad break of Coronation Street but got no answer.

She then rang their neighbour Owen Hopkins.

“[She] telephoned me a little bit distressed and confused that she couldn’t get hold of her parents,” he told BBC Radio Wales’ The Murder Files: Harry and Megan Tooze in 2021.

“Cheryl and I weren’t in regular contact or anything but she had our number in case of problems.”

Owen offered to go to the farm to check on Cheryl’s parents.

“It was quiet, we went round and knocked the door and the door was locked so we shouted and called for Harry,” he said.

“I went to the shed, there was nobody about in the yard, I thought maybe he’d fallen over or something.”

He rang Cheryl back and told her her parents were not at home and suggested they call the police.

Cheryl told him her partner Jonathan Jones was making the 200-mile (322 km) drive from their home in Orpington, Kent, and would be there shortly. Cheryl remained at home phoning other neighbours and waiting for news.

At about midnight Owen called 999.

He recalled an officer arriving fairly quickly and carrying out some rudimentary searches of the property, knocking on the cottage’s doors and windows and calling the couple’s names, but getting no response.

More officers and a dog handler turned up and Owen was asked to show the dog handler around the fields.

On returning to the cottage, Owen said he found it open, walked into the hallway and could hear someone upstairs. An officer told him it was Cheryl’s boyfriend Jonathan Jones.

He recalled Jonathan coming downstairs and them saying hello to one another before Jonathan walked into the living room.

The couple’s bodies were eventually found by police in the cowshed the in the early hours of the following morning, prompting South Wales Police to launch a major murder investigation.

The couple had both been shot in the head from behind from a distance of about 3ft (0.9m), covered in carpet and hidden under hay bales.

Neither Harry nor Megan were killed in the cowshed. The bodies were moved there, likely carried.

Penny Roberts was the first reporter on the scene.

“We drove right up… and I could see blood on the hay bales, I could see it very clearly,” she told The Murder Files programme.

Steve Wilkins, a detective for 30 years, visited the couple’s property while making the programme.

“The chances of somebody just passing and selecting it as a potential location to attack appear to be quite remote,” he said.

“One of the first things you’d be asking yourself as an officer leading the case would be ‘what makes Harry and Megan Tooze potential victims? What is the motive for attacking them’?”

Penny recalled the police putting a lot of effort into reassuring the public

“It appeared at that point to be random, totally random and I think people were afraid of that,” she said.

“But actually when you look at it, when you looked at the victimology and what police found and told us what they found in the farm house it became pretty clear that Harry and Megan either knew their killer or it was someone they were expecting.”

Steve said: “If this had been a random killing I would have expected to assist in establishing a clear motive – robbery, sexual element or signs of a violent struggle but none of these were present.

“What you get in actual fact is a couple of things that would lead investigators to think this is somebody Harry and Megan Tooze knew.”

So what did police have to go on back in 1993?

A neighbour told police they had heard two gunshots at about 13:30 that Monday but had assumed Harry was out shooting rabbits – this gave police a likely time of death.

Then there were items in the house that suggested the couple had been expecting a visitor.

“Firstly, there’s a teacup and saucer in the living room, there’s some debate as to whether this is their finest tea set but everyone seems to agree that it wasn’t your everyday tea set,” said Steve.

“Secondly, there was a shirt laid out for Harry in the bedroom upstairs, the sort of thing you might put on if you were expecting company.

“So South Wales Police’s attention turned to people who knew Harry and Megan, people who might stand to benefit from their deaths.”

Two days after her parents were killed, Cheryl Tooze made an appeal to the public with her partner Jonathan sitting alongside her.

“If there’s anyone out there who knows anything in connection with the brutal murder of both my parents please contact the police, please help find the person who has destroyed my life, my mum and dad were my life,” a visibly upset Cheryl told a room full of journalists.

“They may as well have killed me too for all my life is worth now.”

The appeal got people talking.

“Cheryl and Jonathan, and particularly Cheryl, didn’t behave as a bereaved, traumatised daughter – and that doesn’t mean she wasn’t,” said Penny.

“I’ve spoken to her a lot since and she was clearly going through hell.”

A couple of years later, Cheryl gave an interview to the BBC where she tried to explain her behaviour at the time.

“It was all so unreal and I think somewhere, at some stage, I’m not quite sure when it happened, but it was almost as if I split into two,” she said.

“I just watched myself, I became another person watching myself and thinking ‘what should that person do now?’

“I know my parents didn’t deserve to be killed and I can’t cope with the fact that they might have gone through some awful torturing process, you know mental torture, possibly physical torture, I can’t cope with that so I have to find my own means of coping, my own way of surviving.”

Steve said in cases without a clear motive police inevitably look to family members.

“Police look to family members in these cases because without a clear motive the question must be asked ‘who will benefit from their death’?”

Cheryl Tooze was at work the day her parents were killed and her alibi has been corroborated.

“But Jonathan’s alibi appeared to be a lot more flimsy and, as time went on, suspicion turned towards him,” said Steve.

Jonathan Jones, then 35, was self-employed recruitment consultant.

He told police on the day the Tooze’s were killed he took the day off work and went into Orpington to look for office space to rent – but police could not find anybody who had seen him that day.

His partial thumbprint was also found on the cup and saucer that had been found in the couple’s living room.

He was arrested in December – five months after the murders.

In early 1995 he stood trial at Newport Crown Court and that April he was found guilty of Harry and Megan’s murders and sentenced to life in prison.

“The papers said that that he committed the crime for £150,000 inheritance but the prosecution in the court openly admitted that no motive was ever established,” said Steve.

“This was a case built on circumstantial evidence.”

Cheryl stood by her boyfriend, moving in with his family in Caerphilly after his arrest.

A year after his conviction Jonathan Jones was released on appeal – three appeal court judges took just five minutes to reach their decision.

The original trial judge was criticised and it emerged police had failed to seal the crime scene properly.

After walking out of court a free man, Jonathan and Cheryl kissed in from of the waiting media and Cheryl told them: “Obviously I’m delighted. I’ve been confident from day one, I’ve never had any doubts and I was confident that the appeal would be successful.”

The thumbprint was the only evidence that placed Jonathan at the farm cottage. Could Jonathan have inadvertently touched the teacup after arriving at the couple’s house to search for them?

“The fingerprint did not lead to any conclusive conclusion that he was given a cup of tea, I hasten to add that the cup was not examined for DNA. Somebody had it, somebody drank from it,” said Steve.

The programme asked South Wales Police why the cup had not been analysed for DNA and the force said the case has never closed and is still under active consideration.

There have been reviews of the case over the years but none have led police to the answers they were hoping for.

These days the cowshed where the couple were found dead has been converted into a sitting room by the new owner of the house.

Things have also changed in Llanharry.

“There was a fear because we didn’t know who or how many murderers there were out there, it could have been one, it could have been two, it could have been more,” said Owen.

“Fear has subsided but like most people we would like to see justice for Harry and Meg.”

Have too many years now passed for this case to be solved?

“I remain a firm believer that justice can be done in this case and many more like it,” he said.

“I’ve seen it before, the truth is out there somewhere and can be found by those with a will to find it.”

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