The barrister for a man accused of plotting the murder of his wife over 40 years ago said the prosecution case against his client is "the stuff of Hollywood screenplays, not the Bedfordshire suburbs."

Colin Aylott KC was making a closing speech in the trial of Allen Morgan, 73, who is accused of conspiring with his lover to have his wife Carol murdered in her corner shop in August 1981.

Allen Morgan and 75-year-old Margaret Morgan, whom he married after the alleged murder, have been on trial at Luton Crown Court since April accused of hiring a hitman to kill the Carol.

The couple, of Stanstead Crescent, Woodingdean, Brighton, deny conspiracy to murder.

Carol, a 36-year-old mother-of-two, was found battered to death in her shop, Morgan's Store in Linslade, Bedfordshire, on August 13, 1981. The killer has never been caught.

Carol and Allen, who had met at a single parents’ group in Swindon, had moved to the shop in 1979.

On the night of the killing, Allen had taken Carol’s two children to the cinema, something the prosecution alleged gave him a “cast-iron alibi”.

The jury heard Allen and Margaret, who was then married to Mike Spooner, had at the time of the killing been in a year-old “passionate, but forbidden and adulterous love affair”.

In his closing speech to the seven men and four women on the jury, Mr Aylott said: “An elderly couple into retirement now find themselves in a crown court dock and accused of most serious criminality.

“The crown has laid a narrative, but you have been left feeling short-changed from the billing it was given.”

He said the prosecution had put forward “convoluted and speculative theories based on the most flimsy and tenuous evidence.”

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Mr Aylott added: “The central premise is the bold and dramatic theory that Allen Morgan was so consumed by his love and passion for Margaret that, rather than separate or divorce, he hired a deadly killer and gave inside information and left a weapon for a deadly killer and then brazenly met the killer on Leighton Buzzard high street.

“That is the stuff of Hollywood screenplays not the Bedfordshire suburbs.”

He said there was no evidence of how he recruited the hitman and that the allegation he paid the killer was “no less flimsy.”

The barrister said the prosecution was “pedalling conspiracy theories” with witnesses delivering “gossip, innuendo and rehashed street-corner rumours.”

It was the weakest of circumstantial cases that relied on the evidence of Jane Bunting, the prosecution’s star witness, he said.

He said Ms Bunting had “appeared from nowhere” 40 years after the killing to make a statement in which she said that in the months before the murder Allen Morgan had asked if she knew anyone who could help him kill his wife.

Under cross-examination during the trial, Mr Aylott put it to her that the alleged meeting in the Dolphin pub in Linslade had never taken place.

The trial continues.