Warning: Graphic content, readers’ discretion advised. This story contains a recollection of crime and can be triggering to some readers discretion advised.
The case of Alexandra Morgan involved her murder by Mark Brown in November 2021. Brown, a builder, also killed another woman, Leah Ware, six months earlier. He met both victims through an escort website and murdered them at a remote farm he rented in Sussex, England
Alexandra Morgan vanished on November 14, 2021, after telling her family she was going on a spa weekend. In reality, she was meeting Mark Brown at Little Bridge Farm. She was reported missing four days later.
Because Morgan was concerned for her safety, she left a “box of clues” for her family to find if she disappeared. This included a phone, cash, and instructions that helped police with their investigation.
After Brown was arrested, police found hundreds of charred bone and tooth fragments identified as Morgan’s inside an oil drum he had dumped at a building site.
While investigating Morgan’s disappearance, police learned that Brown’s girlfriend, Leah Ware, had also vanished in May 2021. Her body was never found..…
On the saturday evening , 13 ,2021 alexandra morgan 34 aka Alex Cranbrook, England dropped her son and dog off at ther parent’s house before she goes on a three -day spa weekend trip in York City the next morning.
But no one, not even Alex ,could imagine how badly the short vacation she was about to take would unfold.
alex did not return by November 18 plus her cell phone had gone off for good, the worries escalated to the point where amissing persons report was filed for her.
Two days later , after initial responders failed to make contact with Alex, the case was transferred to the major crime Unit.
Detectives conduxted a search through alex’s house for clues but nothing appeared to have gone wrong in the life of the single mother.
Still, it had been a week since she was missing , and the one thing detectives needed to kow to move forward was the last location where Alex was seen.
Looking for clues in Cranbrook, cops were able to locate Alex at a local store on the morning she left, when she fueled her Mini Cooper and met her cashier friend.
But the stroy began to take a wild turn from here on,after Alex left the store , the path she followed wasn’t the one shad told people.
She was supposed to go to York, in the north direction but te automatic number plate recognition system trackked Alex’s Mini Cooper going in the opposite direction- the south direction.
Detectives further learned that Alex’s cell phone was on for at least sixteen miles further south , in Sussex.
Through various CCTV cameras in the south , detectives were able to cross- mark the area Alex had passed,until the path ran out of video surveillance..
The chances of trackig Alex further were slim, but the search continued with multiple teams until, November 22 which had a CCTV installed.
Alex’s Mini was seen entering the frame and staying for a few minutes.
The road led to an isolated farmhouse named the little bridge farm. a place that would soon become the central piece in the riddle.
As detectives finally got on a potential track , nine days had passed since Ale disappeared.
Keeping the hopes of finding Alex alive, Kent police raided the little bridge farm on November 23.
Although the primary goal was to locate Alex and her vehicle. the search was not going to be an easy one,as detectives had entered with no prior knowledge of unwanted presence inside.
Half an hour into the search, officers received no response and found no signs of Alex or her car.
However, officers noticed a large red container locked from the outside, but before they could discuss their next move, someone else entered the property .
Who turned out to be the person detectives wanted to meet, someone who might have some crucial answers.
When confronted with the findings, Mark turned out to be the man driving the Jaguar in the CCTV, and he admitted to having met Alexandra that day , under an arranged meeting set up for sex.
Mark cooperated by allowing access to his property and agreed to assist the detectives as needed.
He told the detectives that Alex arrived on the morning of November 12 and left after 45 minutes.
Detectives believed that Alex was still alive somewhere, and her disappearance must have been connected to her secret life.
But,every belief detectives had became short- lived
And began to shatter after detectives sought to cnfirm the time Alex had left the little bridge farm.
Was Mark Brown lying?, Alex vehicle was finally seen coming down the following evening,but the suspicions peaked even grimly as it was not Alex driving the car.- it was someone else.
As substantial lie told by Mark placed him at the center of the investigation,convincing detectives he was not what he seemed to be.
As detectives returned to Mark’s house to arrest him, they had accepted the possiblity that Alex was no longer alive.
It was now a homicide investigation.
Mark did not retaliate to any degree, asked no questions , made no comments, and remained calm , as if there was no shock or surpise.
After taken Mark into custody,the investigating officers returned to the Little bridge farme with a team of 130 officials, with the sole purpose of uncovering what lay hidden in the shadows of this farm.
The farm was surrounded by a railway line, a stream, a pond ,and dense forest in all directions.
If Alex were forcefully kept somewhere , nobody could have heard her screams for help.
Detectives could only imagine Alex’s fate up until now,but it wasn’t until they began their search from the workshop and realized that Alex had made the biggest mistake of her life by coming to this place.
Amidst the peak of clutter everywhere ,some other items began to paint a disturbing picture.
A red shipping container , approximately six by four feet wide was not a standard container.
It was a made- up room , with evidence of someone having lived there and not necessarily Alex, as theter was luggage and other home stuff that must have belonged to someone else.
The Little bridge farm had begun to paint horrendous pictures of abuse, it was difficult to know for sure wheter the person who lived here was living by choice or had been forced to stay.
But the signs surely pointed to something traumatic being going on.
It had become necessary to figure out what kind of a person Mark Brown was and what he was up to.
After an extensive search ,detectives were unable to find anyone ,not even a lead about Alex.
The only way to move forward now was to hear from Mark himself in the interrogation room.
But Mark, who couldn’t gt more suspicious, had already asked for his attorney and knew how much he needed to thell the detectives.
At the farm , detectives also searched the work van Mark had that he used for local errands, allthough nothing unusual was present inside.
detectives discovered a prescription slip address to a woman named Leah Louise Ware, a name that would later add another chilling layer to the story.
Their suspicions heightened once they learned from the Sussex police that Leah , too, had been reported missing for the last few monts.
While Kent officers were already face -to -face with Mark’s fishy character ,Sussex police began a parallel investigtion in an attempt to reach Leah Ware.
Back in custody Mark had shut his mouth for good, and detectives were now bound to look elswhere for the answers.any clue or lead was crucial at this point.
Hence ,detectives revissited Alex’s house for a more thorough search, only this time , a breakthrough was indeed waiting for them.
Lying in front of the TV : a small note that said,” let’s go rollerblading” with a smiley face drawn on one side.
It was one of Alex’s children’s bedrooms,where a mysterious setup held answers to some of the deepest question in the story .
As they opened the rollerblades box , numerous ten and twenty-pound notes were found inside.
Upon digging further , the detectives found a handwritten note in the box, with a single sentence on it:” saved this money for you”
without any name , the message got even more chilling when the same note was flipped,on the other side is the postcode of little bridge farm.
Detectives also found a cell phone in the box, but what stunned them was a four -digit PIN written on the back of the note, as if someone wanted its finder to get into the cellphone.
Detectives had opened a box of mysteries that had enough to put them on a track to uncover the truth behind Alex’s disappearance.
But it also became a strange question mark.
Did Alex have an intuition that she was headed toward something she might not escape from, but still wnet along?
After all, she left behind money for her children,plus the Little bridge farm postal code written on the note cleared one thing for the detectives – that whatever happened to Alex ,ther farmhouse and Mark Brown had a part in it.
Detectives immediately downloaded the cell phone data.
The messages showed conversations between Alexandra and Mark and revealed what really happened under the cover of a SPA weekend.
On June 8,2021 Mark had met Alex for the first time for sex at ther home in Kent, Almost two weeks later , on June 21 he met Alex again , this time at the Little bridge farm.
And they met seven more times in August and September.
however ,what had now transpired had started a month ago, when Mark Brown offered Alex a £100,000 in return for spending three to four nights with a hotel guest.
Alex had accepted the offer immediately, Alex had seen this opportunity as life- changing and it was apparent that she was doing this on a repeated basis.
Only this time, something unforeseen had transpired.
Twelve days had passed without any sign of Alex, until now, detectives had searched everywhere except one place…
…Mark’s own house.
A place for which detectives had all the faith about getting a clear look ininto Mark’s character.
Just when the officers conducting the search began to think it couldn’t get any darker,they came across something that could make anybody go speechless on the spot…
they found carrier bags in the loft with human feces in it .
Mark stayed silent , guarding whatever horror he’d buried .but the clock was ticking.
Detectives had just 96 hours from his arrest to charge him, although they didn’t have a confession, they knew his silence wasn’t empty.
It was covering something far worse,desperate for leads, detecctives combed through every detail when something caught their eye- a further movement in the CCTV footage from the scrapyard.
In the dead of the night, Alex ‘s Mini Cooper finally showed itself driven by someone anonymous and folloeing Mark’s van downwards.
Detectives immediately reviewed Mark’s phone records and found someone he had contacted – man named Darren Ripley.
They were able to bring him in for questioning and told him about the murder chrges Mark was facing.
Cornered with the CCTV evidence ,Darren quickly admitted that Mark had asked for a lift to move the Mini Cooper.
He also revealed where it had been parked,this was something substantial for the detectives,locating Alex’s Mini could mean one step closer to their victim,officers then rushed to the location Ripley gave them,hoping Alex might still be inside the Mini Cooper or that it would finally offer solid clues.
What felt like progress quickly crubled- Alex wasn’t in the car.
No DNA , no clues … nothing to help them move forward and jsut like that ,detectives were back to square one.
Fourteen days in , detectives had followed every lead they ccould- every location, every trace,but nothing had stuck.
with the clock running out on Mark’s custody,there was just one move left: look deeper into mark’s daily life.
Mark ws a construction worker with a building company , and at the time of his arrest,he was working on a house-building site in the area.
When the detectives visited the site, they discovered that it ws still in its foundation stage, and had undergone recent groundwork – something ecactly what the detectives were hoping to find.
Detectives could sense that the answers they ere seeking were buried deep under the freshly laid concrete ground in fron of them.
The team of officers soon gathered at the site to start digging, but just in time, the news reached the site supervisor,who refused to permit the deconstruction of the foundatuion until officers were affirmative about what they suspected.
Detectives were not yet sure, s to confirm any suspicious activity at the site over the past couple of weeks , they spoke to another construction worker.
However , racing against time ,the search advisor and detectives agreed on a complete change in plans, deciding to searcch te other parts of the site first – something that wouldnt end in disappointment anymore.
On the morning of November 30 , 2021,before the search began,the search advisor heard about Brown while speaking with the landowner.
The officers approached the skip and noticed an old , dented ,scorched, and blackened oil drum,it appeared to have been exposed to intense heat ,and inside, they found a carrier bag containing a hairdryer and several women’s toiletries.
In a case already raising red flags, this strange discovery only depened the mystery.
The items recovered from the oil drum were the nsent for forensic testing.
Three days later , the results left everyone awestruck with a grisly truth, forensic confirmed Alex’s DNA on both the hairdryer and straighteners. suddenly the drum wasn’t just suspicious,it was a silent witness , one that had been hiding evidence in plain sight.
As they examined the oil drum further ,several small, brittle , pale white fragments surfaced inside , on closer inspection . it didn’t take long for the examiner to determine they weren’t just debirs- they were bones.
It was a discovery that shifted everything.
What began as a strange find was now beginning to connect some disturbing dots.
However , as the search went deeper , investigators uncovered something they hadn’t expected: small , jagged shapes buried deep within the debris.
At first glance ,they seemed insignificant, but what forensic experts revealed nexxt would stop everyne cold.
These weren’t just fragments , they were pieces of human teeth, burned , broken, and left behind like scraps.
Upon digging further among the ashes , somethinhg else surfaced : a burnt warped metal band ,presumed to be a ring, something that had the potential to be a damning piece of evidence, but it was too far destroyed to retrieve DNA.
Hence , investigators turned to the one thing fire cannont destoy-teeth ,which do not lose their properties.
When the detnal records came back, all previous theories were eliminated, suddenly , it wasn’t just a missing persons’ case anymore ; it was a murder with its first real proof.
This wasn’t a quick attempt to destroy evidence,it meant hours of fire , intent , and hours of someone watching her disappear into ash.
Mark brown didn’t just want Alex gone ; he wanted her erased.
The mystery was over ,althoug without Mark’s confession , and detectives were ready to charge him with murder,But just when they thought they had solved the riddle, something pulled them back…
…another thread in the story.
Leah’s prescription, the one found crumpled in Mark Brown’s van, had already been sent to Sussex police ,where her missing person’s report had quietly remained open.
Now, it wasn’t just a clue, it was the echo of another woman at risk and with that , all attention shifted to Leah Ware.
with her fate still unknown, Sussex police took the reins, determined to trace every step, every shadow , and uncover what happened to her.
The move paid off; after the prison governor read the letter aloud, Mark finally spike up ,Mark admitted to a relationship with Leah.
His statement led detectives to dig into AdultWork,which appeared to be the platform where their paths might have first crossed.
And soon , that suspicion turned into certainty.
On March 25th, 2018 , Mark Brown reached out to Leah for the first time at Adultwork ,but when it came to what happened next …
…Mark offered nothing.
Despite Mark’s silence ,pieces of his life were speaking volumes,detectives soon discovered that Mark Brown had purchased a static caravan and placed it at the farm, which Leah later converted into her home and started living there with her pets.
Back at Little bridge farm, forensic teams continued combing through every inch , and what they found revealed they hadn’t seen the worst of Mark yet.
Detectives believed Mark had tied the animals down with weights and left them outside, abandoned ,starving , and slowly dying in agony.
It painted a harrowing picture, one where cruelty wasn’t limited to humans,even the animals had endured the horrors od that torture house.
Mark had rented Little bridge farm for a few years, but unfortunately , the landowners, didn’t give permission for the static caravan to be on the farm,so they were told to get rid of it.
Instead of selling it or moving it onto a legitimate site, Mark decided to set fire to the caravan.
After the caravan was burned Mark mvoed Leah into- a cold, bare shipping container locked from the outside, the locked container was a reflection of Mark’s disturbed psyche.
To trace how far it went, detectives turned to Mark brown’s search history something that let them have a peek into his world of obsession ,violence, and depravity.
From his online searches ,detectives were able to see that he looked for things like forced sex, raped , he ‘d search for things like father fucks daugher,he’d searched for kidnapped, all these really depraved things were obviously something that he was very aroused by.
And when detectives traced Leah’s phone data, it helped them piece together what really happened at Little bridge farm on the night of May 7.
And what we were able to show was that Leah’s phone and Mark’ phone were bot at Little bridge farm,both of the phones drop off the network, and what we say that means is that they were both inside the shipping container with the door closed.
He comes back the following day at 2:38 Leah’s phone is turned off,it’s never switched back on again”
Detectives were able to connect all the dots one by one and put together Mark’s horrifying and eerie series of acts with innocent women lurend into his trap,the mystery of the Little bridge farm , a torture farmhouse of this cold-blooded man, was now nearing its end.
Detectives couldn’t shake a darker thought,that Mark’s trail of tortured victims might not have neded with just these two .
As soon as detectives found Beth’s name in Mark’s messages , they were able to locate her right away,Beth turned out to be a crucial witness in the story as what she told detectives came as a surprise.
The man detectives accused of two brutal murders wasn’t a stranger to her;he was her old classmate from school,Beth flipped a switch whe nshe shared she knew about Leah from Mark.
She further revealed the things Mark happened to have told her about Leah that were nothing short of being a turning point in the case.
Was truly stunned detectives next were the messages between Beth and Mark, as she read them out loud , the case blew wide open.
Beth unknowingly handed detectives a confession hidden in plain sight.
“… five litres of diesel,hey presto,nothing much left, but it gets hot,very hot old seum glowa almost white”
He’s opening up here to Beth, it is a confession.
With the evidence laid bare , there was no doubt about Mark Brown’s guilt, he had no way out .but would he finally break his silence, or did the case have more to go through before trials?
Despite the mounting evidence , he stayed silent,but the silence couldn’t save him anymore, detectives had built the case piece by piece, and it was strong enough to stand on its own.
On February 1, 2022, Mark brown was officially charged with te murder of Leah Ware, and this time, the silence he’d clung to for so long would no longer protect him,because detectives had more than just timelines and theories to work with
While examining Alex’s phone ,they had come across a picture taken on the last morning she was seen alive,one that showed her wearing a ring, that picture became crucial for the prosecution , becaues it turned out that the warped metal band found earlier i nthe oil drum was the very same ring.
Charred , misshapen, but not enough to hide what it once was.
And then, finally , after months of tireless investigation, the trial of Mark Brown began on October 17 ,2022, in the trials , after ten and a half hours of jury deliberation , Mark was found guilty of both murderes.
Alexandra Morgan and Leah Ware.
He was sentence to 98 years in prison , 49 for each life he took.