Murders at Little Bridge Farm is a brand-new true crime documentary series that will tell the shocking story of Mark Brown and the double life he led. The self-proclaimed ‘psychopath with a conscience’ was a family man by day but a sadistic killer by night, convicted of murdering Alex Morgan and Leah Ware.
The two-part special reveals how Brown used escort websites to lure his chosen victims to a homemade dungeon at Little Bridge Farm. Murders at Little Bridge Farm concludes Monday, 29th April on Crime + Investigation and is available to stream now on demand and on Crime + Investigation Play.
We look at how the murderous impulses of a self-proclaimed psychopath brought the glare of police and media attention to an unassuming corner of rural East Sussex.
A killer’s lair
Little Bridge Farm. The name couldn’t be more cosy and quaint; it sounds like a location in a nostalgic period drama, or perhaps an idyllic rural nook from a children’s story.
While the reality of Little Bridge Farm isn’t quite so picture-perfect, it is nevertheless a pleasant patch of the Sussex countryside. You get there by way of a narrow, rural road called Rock Lane, which cuts through rich woodland and past lodges and holiday homes. Little Bridge Farm itself is a stretch of greenery dotted with barns, sheds and shipping containers. Not exactly a storybook setting, but not ominous or sinister either.
But this location became an epicentre of police activity in November 2021. Much to the shock and confusion of locals, the farm was completely sealed off from the outside world, with more than 130 officers arriving to scour through every inch of the place. The reason? Little Bridge Farm was very likely the lair of a budding serial killer.
The trail of clues
Little Bridge Farm was a place of interest to detectives searching for Alexandra Morgan, a woman from Kent who’d told her family she was off on a spa trip and then simply vanished.
In fact, the spa trip had been a cover story. Alex Morgan had been meeting men through a website called AdultWork, and one of her longstanding clients, a builder named Mark Brown, had lured her to Little Bridge Farm with the promise of a £100,000 job. Brown had a partner and family life elsewhere, but leased spaces on the farm to use as both a workshop and a place to secretly meet women.
Analysing hundreds of hours of recordings by CCTV and Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras, police were able to track Alex’s final movements on the day she disappeared – how she had refuelled her car in a garage close to her home in Kent, then driven almost 20 miles to Little Bridge Farm.
Here, she’d rendezvoused with someone in another vehicle, with CCTV footage showing the two cars driving into the farm. This evidence was crucial in piecing together just what had become of Alex, but she herself had also stashed clues to be discovered in the event of her disappearance.
Clearly suspicious of Mark Brown’s intentions, Alex had left a note for one of her sons reading, ‘Let’s go rollerblading’. This was a clue to seek out a box containing his rollerblades, along with a bundle of cash and another note: ‘Check postcode TN34 5NY Rock Lane’.
Tragically, Alex’s caution turned out to have been well-founded. Mark Brown killed her soon after she arrived at the farm that day, and callously incinerated her body in an oil drum. But this wasn’t the first time he’d committed an atrocity on Little Bridge Farm.
The farm's first victim
While investigating Alex Morgan’s murder, detectives found evidence that another woman connected to Mark Brown had also vanished. She was Leah Ware, who had substance abuse and mental health issues, and whose personal circumstances made her vulnerable to Brown’s toxic and dominating presence.
As with Alex Morgan, Brown met Leah through AdultWork, but the business arrangement escalated into what he later described as a ‘rollercoaster’ relationship. Leah eventually moved into a converted shipping container on Little Bridge Farm, where she was trapped in a coercive relationship with Brown.
In May 2021, six months before preying on Alex, Brown murdered Leah and disposed of her body so thoroughly that no trace has ever been found. Police did make one discovery though: the remains of Leah’s beloved Pomeranian dog Lady, whose bones and collar were found tethered to a kettlebell in a pond at Little Bridge Farm.
Covering up the horror
In a remarkable twist, it turned out that Brown had described some of his terrible activity on Little Bridge Farm to a childhood friend. Soon after Leah Ware’s murder, he’d texted his friend with a cryptic confession of sorts, describing how he had been ‘disposing of something’. It was, in his words, ‘a very unpleasant thing to do – an old oil drum, five litres of diesel, and hey presto, there’s not very much left. It gets hot, very hot, it glows almost white.’
Although his texts expressed remorse over what he’d done (he described himself as a ‘psychopath with a conscience’), Brown later denied responsibility for their deaths.
He maintained that Leah Ware was still alive somewhere and that Alex Morgan had died accidentally after falling over and hitting her head on farm equipment. When asked in court why he hadn’t called the authorities, Brown shrugged it off saying, ‘I've got a dead escort on my workshop floor, there's blood everywhere, what does it look like? It looked like a murder scene.’
The jury wasn’t swayed and he was jailed for life, with a minimum term of 49 years. As for Little Bridge Farm – this once unremarkable patch of East Sussex will now forever be connected with the dark acts perpetrated by Mark Brown.
