A former girlfriend of an alleged killer has claimed he tried to throw her over a bridge into a river.

“I was clinging onto the railing for dear life. Luckily for me, there was people about,” she alleged.

She alleged three men waiting for a taxi in Malton saw what was happening, came to her aid and chased her then boyfriend Vincent Morgan off.

She was giving evidence at Leeds Crown Court at the murder trial of Morgan who is accused of killing his final partner Lisa Welford, 49, by drowning her in the River Derwent close to the same bridge.

“When he was drinking, he was evil,” alleged the former girlfriend.

She alleged that during their 10-year relationship Morgan was repeatedly violent towards her including twice putting his hands round her throat and strangling her without killing her, he broke her wrist, and kicked her knee so badly she thought it was broken. He also put a pillow over her face, took it off and put it back on her face, the court heard.

She claimed he had been very angry when he found her in a flat taking heroin with other people in 2006. He had dragged her out by her hair and out onto the Railway Street  bridge in Malton over the River Derwent.

“That is when he threatened to throw me over the railings,” she alleged.

A friend of Lisa’s, Julia Robinson, alleged the dead woman was regularly assaulted by Morgan.

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“I have seen her with a bruised face, broken shoulder bone, I have seen her with bruises all over her body,” she alleged.

Lisa was scared of Morgan, the court heard.

“He was awful to her, but she would never admit it,” she alleged. “He was nasty, just nasty. He was nasty and nice. One minute he would be ‘I love you’ and the next minute he was cruel.”

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Morgan, 47, of no fixed address, denies murder and two charges of causing actual bodily harm to Lisa. 

The jury heard he had pleaded guilty in 2007 to causing actual bodily harm by breaking the former girlfriend’s wrist in an incident where he grabbed her hair and tried to pull her into a house. She ran away, but he followed her, kicking her and causing her to fall and then pushing her down as she tried to get up.

The former girlfriend alleged that was a different incident to the one on the bridge.  

She denied a defence suggestion that she was making up the accounts of Morgan threatening to throw her off the bridge and all the violent incidents apart from the one to which Morgan pleaded guilty.

She claimed she stayed in the relationship because she didn’t have anywhere else to go.

In 2016 she did end the relationship. “His violence was getting more worse, more aggressive. I couldn’t cope any more. I had to leave,” she alleged.

The trial continues.