Utah state officials this week filed murder charges against a man for a fire that killed his girlfriend — a fire that county officials last year ruled a “tragic accident.”
The Utah Attorney General’s Office filed a charge of murder — or in the alternative, manslaughter — against Alexander Paul Wardell, 33, in the death of 27-year-old Morgan Kay Harris, KSL reported.
Wardell also faces charges of kidnapping and animal cruelty, with penalty enhancements of domestic violence and being a habitual offender if he is convicted.
Harris and Wardell were living in a storage unit in Salt Lake City with Harris’s dog on February 18, 2023, when a fire was reported in the facility. Firefighters found a padlock on the unit door, slowing their entrance. When they were able to get in, they found Harris and her dog dead inside.
Wardell was arrested at the time for negligent homicide and kidnapping after he admitted locking Harris and her dog inside before he left.
Following an extensive investigation, however, the Salt Lake County District Attorney’s Office determined it was “unlikely” that Wardell intentionally set the fire and dropped the homicide charge. District Attorney Sim Gill also dropped the kidnapping charge, saying the padlock on the outside of the door, which could not be opened from the inside, was simply how the couple kept the door closed.
“How do I prove she did not consent to that? With what evidence do I do that? Who do I put on the stand?” he said at the time. “We found no evidence going through her phone, his phone, all the material that we could gather, that led us to get to any of that point … we looked. We scoured, we looked if there was any humanly possible way to articulate to meet those elements for the purpose of filing charges. We could not get there.”
Charging documents filed in court on Thursday said that the state medical examiner determined Harris died from smoke inhalation and thermal injuries, but the manner of death was undetermined. Inside a duffel bag initially collected as evidence, investigators found blood — belonging to Harris — and burn marks on a shirt.
Investigators said that Harris was unconscious and sitting in a lawn chair when the fire started.
“While (Harris) sat unconscious, her buttocks area and left side caught on fire. A person who was conscious while this was occurring would have sought to evade the pain of fire, which (Harris) did not immediately do,” the charging documents said.
Gill dropped the charges last year after consulting with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, but the federal agency did not exclude an intentional fire set by Wardell.
Prosecutors also said there was evidence the couple had been fighting less than an hour before Wardell locked Harris in the unit, and he admitted that Harris was “super” mad at him that day.
Ten days before her death, she sent him a Facebook message saying “Guess I’m gonna apply to live by myself at an apartment you won’t know about so you can’t (expletive) abuse or kill me,” the charging document says.
Wardell is serving time in the Utah State Prison following a conviction on domestic violence charges against another girlfriend.
“He strangled the victim in (one case) and hit her with a golf club in (the other case),” the charges say.
Gill said Thursday that he stands by his office’s decision not to charge Wardell, but, he said, he supports state officials’ if they believe they can get a conviction.
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[Featured image: Alexander Paul Wardell/Utah Department of Corrections and Morgan Kay Harris/family handout]
