The London socialite. His aristocrat killer. And a mother's search for justice

The brutal, ketamine-fuelled killing of a public schoolboy shocked the world. In our new true-crime podcast, we tell the real story

- KATIE STRICK

Over the decade since Alex Morgan's brutal killing, his mother Katja Faber has struggled to unravel the mystery of what happened to him. She wishes she could pinpoint the moment his killer, the aristocrat Bennet von Vertes, flew into a drug-induced rage and decided to bludgeon him to death — if, in fact, he decided to at all.

“We are the last people on earth,” Alex, 23, is believed to have said to von Vertes, an old university friend and the heir to a Hungarian-German art dynasty, as they walked through the snowy streets of Zurich, Switzerland, on the night of the killing on December 30, 2014. At some point in the hours that followed, von Vertes — a 6ft 5in kickboxer and art gallery founder who peddled works by Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol — is understood to have thrown Alex against a glass coffee table in his parents’ ski chalet and beaten him to death with a 3ft candlestick, which he then rammed down his victim's throat.

Alex — a handsome public schoolboy who'd just started his first job in commercial property in London and was known for partying alongside the likes of Cara Delevingne — was born in Islington and grew up in Putney in south-west London. His father, Benedict Morgan, 63, is a Scottish financier and former director at Commerzbank in London who once worked as a banker in Moscow and is believed to own a £1 million apartment overlooking the Solent in Southampton. His mother Katja, 60, is a former criminal barrister and BBC researcher who owns an avocado farm in Andalucía in southern Spain.