Cheated lover who drowned ex-partner in bath is jailed for 13 years

A MAN who drowned his former partner in her bath after discovering she had been having an affair has been jailed for life and ordered to serve a minimum of 13 years in prison.

Michael Morrison went to Sharon Brown’s home to collect their toddler son to take him to see Santa Claus, but he killed her when she said the boy had started calling her new boyfriend “Dada”. Police found the boy’s older brother wandering around the flat. He said: “Mummy is asleep in the bath”.

Morrison, 27, of Knightswood, Glasgow, admitted murdering Ms Brown, 27, on 12 December last year in Clydebank.

He stabbed her in the neck, before submerging her head.

At the High Court in Edinburgh yesterday, the judge, Lord Mackay, described the murder as “an evil act”. He told Morrison: “Whatever the background … the violence you used will have lasting consequences for all members of Sharon Brown’s family, in particular her two young children.”

The minimum term would have been 16 years but would be discounted because Morrison pleaded guilty, added Lord Mackay.

Morrison and Ms Brown had been in a relationship for two years until it ended on 3 December last year. Before they separated, Ms Brown had been seeing another man. Morrison told friends: “They two are laughing at me. They’ve got to be punished. I could kill her for what she’s put me through.”

On the day of the killing, the new boyfriend left Ms Brown’s house, knowing that Morrison was to call to pick up his 18-month-old son.

In text messages, Ms Brown told him she was in the bath, and that the door to the flat would be unlocked.

A short time later, Morrison knocked at the door of a neighbour and asked for an ambulance because his partner had been killed. He said: “Tommy D killed my girlfriend.”

Paramedics found Ms Brown’s body in bloodstained water in the bath. Morrison said: “Tommy D told me to do it”.

Police were quickly on the scene, and Ms Brown’s other child, aged three, said: “Mummy is asleep in the bath”.

After Morrison had been detained, his mother visited him and he told her he had stabbed Ms Brown and then had held her under the water.

In a letter to his aunt, he said: “We were laughing away … she was splashing me and telling me what she was getting me and the kids for Xmas. Then she changed the conversation and started talking about him. She said, ‘I’ve been seeing Raymond on and off for six months, I love him’.”

He added: “She was cutting her hard skin with a wee knife. I grabbed it off her and meant to give her a fright but it went right in her neck. I’ve never panicked so much in my life.”

Advocate-depute Kath Harper said Morrison was seen by a psychiatrist and told him that he had made up the character Tommy D.