Bin man accused of murdering Bognor mother recalls night of her death

Wayne Morris, 47, denies murdering Ruth Brown, 52, in her kitchen in Collyer Avenue last year, despite admitting responsibility for her death.

Asked if he accepted causing her death, Mr Morris said: “I do.

“I assume it was me.

“There was nobody else in the house and it was all locked up.

“It’s something I’ll have to deal with for the rest of my life.”

When he was asked why he killed his partner of six years, he said: “I have no recollection, so I don’t know why.”

Mr Morris said he had been furloughed from his job as a bin man by the pandemic.

Ruth Brown, originally from Edinburgh, was very worried about the virus, he said, and she asked him to move in with her for the duration of the lockdown.

He told the court he started drinking heavily with the petite former barmaid during the heatwave at the start of the first national coronavirus lockdown on April 8 last year.

The 47-year-old, originally from Cannock in Staffordshire, told a jury at Brighton Law Courts they had been pottering in the back garden of Ruth Brown’s house in Bognor, West Sussex.

The situation changed when they moved inside to carry on drinking and smoking cannabis, a jury heard.

Mr Morris told police his former partner had kicked off.

Philip Bennetts QC for the Crown asked him: “If you don’t remember an argument, why do you say ‘She just started?’

“Are you saying she started it?”

Mr Morris said: “I assume she started it.

“I haven’t got much of a recollection.”

He carried on drinking heavily after finding her body face down on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood.

The court heard he put his former partner in bed, mopped the kitchen floor and put the broken plastic tray in a wheelie bin before going out to buy more cider.

He spent the day drinking and smoking on his own.

Asked why he did not dial 999 for an ambulance, Mr Morris said: “I panicked, I was devastated.

“I thought...what have I done.

“There was nobody else in the house and it was all locked up.

“I reached down to feel for a pulse and as I picked her arm up, it was stiff.

“I came to the conclusion that she was dead.

“I had panicked and put Ruth to bed, I thought if it’s out of sight, it was out of mind.

“If I was thinking clear, I would have phoned 999.

“I obviously wasn’t thinking at all.”

Mr Morris spent the next day drinking and smoking cannabis with his daughter Skye, 22, before leaving Bognor on Saturday, April 11.

Mr Morris was arrested on Sunday morning after spending the night in a tent on the Isle of Wight, four days after Ruth Brown was killed.

Mr Bennetts asked him: “When the police ask you what you were doing in the kitchen that night, you say ‘Playing tiddlywinks’ and laugh.”

Mr Morris said: “It was a nervous and sarcastic remark.”

“You were being interviewed about killing a woman you loved,” Mr Bennetts said.

“I was under a lot of stress,” Mr Morris replied.

Wayne Morris denies murder.

The trial continues.