What happened
On 23 November 1998, Jenny Morrison went to the Thurleigh Road hostel in Balham, south London, to tell Anthony Joseph, 27, that he was being re-admitted to Springfield Psychiatric Hospital. She was a social worker for Wandsworth Borough Council. Joseph had paranoid schizophrenia and had been transferred to the hostel in June 1998 on her recommendation. He believed Combat 18 was after him. He had stopped taking his medication and was drinking heavily.
Morrison was due to see him with the hostel manager and the deputy manager. Her car was in the garage and she arrived first, so she decided to see him alone. He attacked her with a knife in the hostel lounge, which had no panic alarm and no easy way out. She died at the scene.
The outcome
The press reporting used here records that Joseph was convicted of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility and detained at Broadmoor indefinitely. Our own case record says he was convicted of murder at the Old Bailey in 1999. The two disagree and this page does not settle it.
An independent inquiry chaired by the barrister Peter Herbert found serious management and systems failures by the council and by the local mental health trust.
What went wrong
The inquiry found that the risks Joseph posed had been “systematically underestimated”. Morrison was not told that he had a conviction for carrying a knife, that he had threatened mental hospital staff, that he slept with a machete under his pillow, or that he had threatened his mother with a knife. Hostel staff were not told about threatening calls he had made to two Maudsley nurses.
He had no written care plan, no risk assessment under the Care Programme Approach, no monitoring of his medication and no out-patient follow-up. There was a three-week delay before Morrison was told that his condition had deteriorated.
The hostel was staffed below the council’s own rule on the day. One member of staff was on duty, against a two-person minimum.
What it teaches
The failure came before her choice. A worker who has not been told about a knife conviction, a machete under a pillow and two threatening phone calls has nothing to weigh when she decides whether to wait. Risk information that stays in another agency’s file is not a control.
The room is the second control and the employer owns it. An isolated lounge with no alarm and one exit gives a lone worker nothing to use once the door is closed. A two-person minimum that is written down and not staffed is a sentence in a policy, not a rule.
Questions for the room
- You arrive early for a meeting with a client and two colleagues. Do you wait outside, or go in? What would make you wait?
- What do you need to know about a person before you give them bad news, and who reads it back to you on the day?
- If your service has a two-person rule, who checks that it is met on your shift?
- Whose job is it to make sure a warning from another agency reaches the person who knocks on the door?
Evidence and limits
Confidence: confirmed. Three sources were read: BBC News in July 1999, the Independent in July 1999 and the Guardian in December 2000. The Herbert inquiry report was not read, so its findings are taken from that press coverage. The sources and our case record disagree on the conviction and on her age, given as 51 and 50, so no age is printed.
Our lone working training covers the decision to enter a room alone.
Sources
- BBC News, July 1999 · http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/388466.stm
- The Independent, July 1999 · https://www.independent.co.uk/news/frenzied-attack-on-social-worker-1104939.html
- The Guardian, December 2000 · https://www.theguardian.com/society/2000/dec/20/socialcare.publicsectorcareers
Reviewed 20 October 2026.