It will be 30 years next year since Gracia Morton disappeared.

A devoted mother of one, the virtuoso violinist had everything to live for. And yet, since November 12 1997, not a trace of her has ever been found.

After she went missing police suspected foul play. The likely culprit? Her husband, Michael Morton, a wealthy, womanising architect who she was in the process of divorcing.

He always denied any wrongdoing but in 2005, after three police investigations and two trials, a jury at the Old Bailey sensationally found him guilty of killing Gracia, for which he was sentenced to seven years in prison.

But while the case was closed, it was far from fully solved.

Because to this day police have no idea how Morton killed the 40-year-old nor how he covered up the crime.

Morton was eventually jailed after police found CCTV of him strolling into Gracia’s home using her own front door keys. 

But when the investigation was launched, six years after she went missing, they had no forensic evidence and, crucially, no body – and not for want of trying.

Morton’s £1.5m Victorian townhouse in London’s fashionable Notting Hill was searched with sniffer dogs, its drains probed and patio lifted.

Gracia’s car, left outside her husband’s house with her phone inside, was forensically examined – as was his Renault estate car.

As for the couple’s honey-stoned country cottage in the Cotswold village of Stonesfield, detectives searched it from top to bottom, dug bore holes in its garden and probed possible burial sites in a local slate mine and nearby beauty spots.

But even though they found no sign of Gracia, in this quiet corner of England the search for her is far from forgotten.

Because, three decades on, the one person capable of solving the mystery of the missing mother still lives in their midst.

When the Daily Mail visited earlier this month, the now 88-year-old Morton was to be found making the most of the early Spring sunshine, happily pottering around the very same cottage where he was arrested back in 2003.

While somewhat a reclusive figure, villagers say he spends much of his time gardening, even occasionally inviting passers-by in off the street to admire his green-fingered efforts.

Indeed, the white-haired pensioner initially greeted our reporter with a chirpy ‘hello!’. But his warm welcome rapidly cooled as soon as Gracia’s name was mentioned.

Asked whether he will ever admit to killing his wife, he replied: ‘No. I don’t want to talk to you, no.’

When asked if he would ever reveal where the body was hidden, he put his fingers in his ears and began singing: ‘No, no. Nothing.’

He added: ‘I don’t want press reports. If I said one thing and you report that, might be good, might be bad. But I don’t want press reports anyway.’

When Morton later spotted the Daily Mail’s reporter speaking to neighbours, he emerged out of his cottage to walk to his wheelie bin. He questioned why Gracia’s death and his conviction was a ‘story’ – but again refused to comment on where the body is hidden.

He then proclaimed: ‘I am the hermit of Stonesfield. You are not going to find anything out talking to my neighbours because nobody knows me.’

His response does not surprise Hamish Campbell, the now retired Scotland Yard detective chief superintendent responsible for bringing Morton to some sort of justice.

He and his colleagues at the Met became all too familiar with the arrogance of the Cambridge-educated millionaire and self-proclaimed Marxist.

Morton once boasted to friends that he was ‘a genius, smarter than Darwin or Freud and certainly clever enough to outwit policemen.’

As he points out, if Morton really believed his wife was still alive, why hasn’t he made any effort since his release from prison to try to find her?

‘He’s a disgraceful man,’ Mr Campbell told the Daily Mail. ‘His response shows Morton at his worst. Dismissive, unconcerned, and if she is still alive, as he always suggested, he took no opportunity to appeal or state that he hopes she is out there listening.

‘He claims he was wholly uninvolved in her absence. Therefore, as a grieving, anxious husband, you’d think he would be adopting a more concerned approach – both as to Gracia’s whereabouts and for seeking answers for his daughter. But he never did and still does not.’

The belief is that Morton flew into a rage and killed Gracia over her desire to send their four-year-old daughter to private school, which he strongly opposed.

‘He has never admitted what he did,’ adds Mr Campbell. ‘His two properties were searched deeply. The third inquiry investigated Morton extensively, but there was no sign of Gracia.’

Police believe that architect Morton may have used his knowledge of building work to dispose of the body. Another possibility is that he dumped her in the Thames or a reservoir.

‘She was a very slight woman and Morton probably strangled her in a fit of rage,’ says Mr Campbell. ‘She may have been wrapped up. The car was clean. There was nothing to show she had been there.

‘Murderers will either hide bodies in their homes or dismember them and bury them somewhere in the house. Look at Fred and Rose West, for example. Or the killer will quickly get the body out of the property and dump them. That is what I think he did.’

Morton and Gracia Lezama, who was 19 years his junior, met in the mid 1980s while she was on holiday from Argentina.

Despite the age gap, at first glance he appeared to have much to offer.

The son of wealthy parents, Morton was privately educated before studying at Cambridge.

There, in an act of rebellion against his privileged upbringing, he declared himself a communist. Having qualified as an architect he worked for the Greater London Council, building fire stations until his father died and he inherited several million pounds.

With his new-found wealth, the heavy-drinking Morton started dating a string of women, placing small ads in The Guardian Soulmates column posing as a ‘Notting Hill Male who loves Marx and Mozart and is looking for love’.

Woman after woman fell for what one former lover described as his ‘magnetic charm’.

He married and divorced, going on to have five children with four different women, many later telling of the violence they suffered at his hands.

He and Gracia married in 1987 and the first cracks in their relationship showed soon after.

Morton taunted her, calling her ‘a failed Argie violinist’, with friends saying he also began to beat her. On one occasion he was said to have laughed when she was forced to buy a pair of sunglasses to hide her black eyes.

After a string of miscarriages, their daughter was born in 1993 – but the rows between the couple just got worse.

After meeting and falling in love with a local businessman, Gracia worked up the courage to leave Morton, moving into a Kensington flat and filing for divorce on the grounds of physical and mental cruelty.

This infuriated him – police later concluded that by leaving she was immediately in danger because Morton hated the woman to end a relationship.

He told one girlfriend: ‘You must never leave me. Women must never leave me … that’s when the trouble starts.’

On the day she disappeared, Wednesday November 12 1997, the decree nisi was imminent.

She drove to her husband’s house, leaving her breakfast half eaten, her bed unmade and her passport in its usual place at her Kensington flat.

Morton later told police they had argued over her choice of a private school for their daughter.

He claimed she had given him the keys to her flat and car and had then departed – admitting being the last person to see his wife, but saying she left fit and well.

Putting on a bravura act as the distraught husband, Morton reported Gracia missing.

But suspicions were quickly raised by his strange behaviour.

On the Friday night, Gracia’s sister visited from Birmingham, spotting a carpet in the back of Morton’s car.

‘It was just fleeting though’, she later told the Old Bailey of her glimpse of his boot.

Days after the disappearance Morton broke down crying, saying: ‘She’s dead, she’s dead.’

He even built a ‘shrine’ to her at his house, prompting the first search of the property.

But although he was arrested three times, he was not charged with any offence until a third inquiry team reviewed the case in 2003.

They discovered CCTV footage from Gracia’s flat which showed her husband entering the building the day after she disappeared.

He had previously denied knowing where the flat was, let alone visiting it.

Recalling that breakthrough Mr Campbell told the Daily Mail how he had tasked a team of detectives to look back over the past investigations.

‘It was that team that discovered the original CCTV evidence had not been examined as stated,’ he said. ‘This was the error. That undid Morton, since in the interviews I had held with him in 1998, he was adamant he had never been to the house before. And his lies were clear.’

He added: ‘Morton was an arrogant bully. A pompous and arrogant man who always believed he was right. In an interview I remember his solicitor advised him: ‘Don’t speak to Campbell’.

‘But he did. That was his downfall. He thought: ‘I’m better than the Old Bill’.

‘Instead of saying nothing he would say: ‘I need to answer’.

‘So when we presented him with the CCTV evidence that showed he was lying, that’s when he started saying ‘No comment’. That’s when we knew we had him’.

As well as the row over schooling, Mr Campbell believes the fact Gracia was leaving him was critical.

‘There are studies that show it is the closure and ending of relationships with violent, abusive men, that can be a trigger for violence against women,’ he said. ‘He killed her just as she was about to move on with her life.

She had found happiness with a new partner. She had a young daughter.’

Morton was finally jailed in 2005. His first trial in 2004 had ended with a hung jury.

In the re-trial he was convicted of manslaughter but cleared of murder – verdicts that ‘shocked’ Mr Campbell. He says he and his team ‘all believed it was murder’.

As for Morton himself, residents in Stonesfield say they are aware of his past.

They said that upon being released from prison in 2012, Morton returned to his cottage and attempted to integrate himself back into the community. Yet signs of his hair-trigger temper were there for all to see.

As one villager told the Mail: ‘After he came out of prison he wanted to get himself back into the village community and wanted to become a library volunteer. But he was told he was not going to be able to serve as a volunteer because he wouldn’t pass the DBS check. He got angry and jumped up, knocking his chair backwards, and left the meeting. Everyone at the meeting witnessed this.’

Another told how some in the village refer to him as ‘the murderer’ – despite his acquittal on that charge.

‘He is odd,’ said one resident. ‘You hardly see him about at all. Sometimes you see him walking around, limping. It’s the same cottage that was dug up at the time.

‘He’s known around here as “the murderer”. That’s what we call him.’

A third added: ‘He is quite abrasive. People’s interactions with him are usually some kind of dispute in some shape or form. I don’t know if there is any malice in it, it is just his general demeanour.’

So it is that Morton, continues to go about his day-to-day business, enjoying the retirement he so cruelly denied to his wife.

All the time continuing to deny her family – and his child – the closure of knowing what actually happened to her all those years ago.