UK :Crime.

After BA pilot persuades court 'stress' made him kill his wealthy wife, her family ask: 'How could any jury believe our Jo wasn't murdered?'

By BETH HALE

Last updated at 1:32 PM on 28th May 2011

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Killed: Joanna, in a picture from the family's private collection

Had it not been for the half-term holiday, events might have unfolded differently that day.

Had Joanna Brown’s children not had a break with their father, she would have had no need to open the security gates of her lovingly restored mock Tudor cottage, allowing her killer to drive in with the youngsters in the back of his car.

These are the thoughts — the ‘what-ifs’ — that torment Joanna’s anguished family every day.

After an increasingly bitter three-year divorce wrangle, Jo was so terrified of her husband Robert that she had taken the precaution of installing a hidden camera in her home in Ascot, Berkshire, and forbidden him from entering the house.

But that day her defences were down, with her thoughts only of welcoming home her children.

‘The day he killed her was the only time she was on her own,’ says Jo’s mother Diana Parkes, 72. 

‘Every other time we’d made sure someone was with her when he dropped off the children, but that day her friend was delayed.’

What happened on October 31, 2010, at Tun Cottage is almost too horrific to describe.

Events could not have unfolded more perfectly for Brown, who arrived with a camping mallet, length of plastic sheeting and the type of white paper suit worn by police forensics officers to prevent contamination.

An argument flared and Brown picked up the mallet and hit his wife not once, but at least 14 times, around the head while his children — a girl aged nine and boy aged 11 — cowered out of sight in their playroom.

When Joanna was dead (her body bore no sign of defence injuries; she didn’t stand a chance), he wrapped her in the plastic sheeting, put a binliner over her head to avoid leaving bloodstains on the carpet and placed her in the boot of his Volvo 4x4.

He put the children into the back seat and drove off, later burying his wife in a crate inside a grave he had already dug in Windsor Great Park.

A more coolly calculated crime it would be hard to imagine. And in the minds of most reasonable people, you might think, more than sufficient for Brown, 47, to be convicted of murder.

Except that this week a jury acquitted him  of that charge and instead found him guilty  of manslaughter.

Doubts: Joanna, pictured with her brother James, had misgivings about her husband Robert on their honeymoon

They accepted his tale — implausible as it might seem to some — that he was suffering a little known mental abnormality caused by stress.

The judge’s views on this lesser verdict by the jury were perhaps made plain when he sentenced Brown to 26 years in prison — one of the stiffest possible sentences for manslaughter, which Brown had admitted to, no doubt in the hope of a more lenient tariff.

The jury’s majority verdict has heaped fresh agony on Jo’s grieving family, for whom only a conviction of murder and a life sentence would have brought some form of solace.

‘An enormous miscarriage of justice has occurred,’ says Jo’s mother, who lives on the Isle of Man. 

‘Robert Brown is a highly intelligent man and he’s had all this time in jail contriving a plan to work out how he’s going to get off this, and he seems to have succeeded.’

Anguished: Diana Parkes and James Simpson - Joanna's mother and brother - arrive at court for the hearing

Jo’s brother James adds: ‘We have no idea how the jury could have sat  in the courtroom with us and reached the decision they did. It beggars belief. The only saving grace is that the judge saw through him and gave him the sentence he did.’

Speaking at length for the first time since the case at Reading Crown Court, mother and son are still stunned by how the case ended, but also grieving anew for the loss of their beautiful Jo.

‘No child should die before their parents, but for my daughter to lose her life in this appalling way is difficult to bear,’ says Diana, who is now bringing up her grandchildren.

‘Jo always tried to make the best of her life. She had an unbelievable number of friends — people were just drawn to her.

‘She was a wonderful, radiant, caring, lively, intelligent, beautiful, loving and generous woman. I miss so much all the mother and daughter times we shared together. We spoke every day without fail.’

So how did a life of such promise end like this? As is so often the case, at the heart of this tragedy lies money.

Jo was a wealthy woman, though not, her family insist, a millionairess as she has been described in the  court coverage

.

Her father, Christopher, was a successful property developer and she grew up in comfort on the Isle of Man, before taking a business degree at Bath University and working her way up the career ladder as a marketing manager.

She bought Tun Cottage for £350,000 while married to her first husband, Nigel Hancock.

‘It was almost derelict and the back garden was a swamp,’ says Diana. ‘Jo was going off to work all day and then coming back in the evening and getting straight to work stripping wallpaper and plastering.

‘She worked her guts out on that house for five years. It was her house and she loved it.’

 'She had doubts about him, even on honeymoon'

When Jo’s first marriage failed in 1997, she kept the house. A year later, she met Robert Brown, a strapping Scot who undoubtedly cut a dash in his British Airways pilot’s uniform.

‘She was feeling a bit low and a friend who was a BA steward wanted to cheer her up, so he invited her out to Cape Town on a trip,’ says James. ‘She flew out and met Rob on her last night there. Everything took off from there. He had his officer’s stripes and I’m sure he could charm big time.

‘She was excited, in the first flush of love and everything was a whirlwind.’

Brown sold his flat in Edinburgh and moved to Tun Cottage, which is close to Heathrow. Within ten months of meeting the couple were married .

But even at the wedding — a small, rather stiff affair for 25 close family and friends at the Royal Berkshire Hotel, followed by a big party (organised, predictably, by Jo) — the bride’s family had reservations about the groom.

Dream home: Tun Cottage - in Ascot, Berkshire - was lovingly renovated by Jo and she turned it into a bed and breakfast

‘The first time I met him I thought he was shy because he wouldn’t talk,’ says Diana. ‘But I soon realised  he wasn’t shy — he was just rude, arrogant and abrasive. Jo obviously loved him, but I always felt he didn’t love her in the same way.

‘He was the type who, if you passed on the stairs, would just plough past regardless. She apologised for him all the time.

‘I know she had doubts about him on the honeymoon in South Africa. But she was pregnant within a month of the wedding. Once the children arrived, that was it. She stayed because of the children.’

When he was at home in between long-haul flights for BA, Rob would barely speak to his wife, instead going running or sitting in his study.

 'Why did he do it? Greed, greed, greed.'

‘Jo was very lonely,’ says Diana.  ‘She used to say to me: “Ma, I’ve made a mistake in my marriage,  but I’ve got two beautiful children.” She felt she had to try to make it work for their sake.’ Why didn’t Diana voice her worries to her daughter? The answer is one that will be familiar to mothers everywhere.

‘It’s very difficult to say to a grown woman who seemed so happy: ‘‘What are you doing?’’ ’ she says.

‘Later, I found it incredibly difficult, because on one hand I wanted the children to have two parents, but on the other I wanted Jo to be happy.’

However, matters would escalate in the most terrifying way imaginable, when in 2007, Brown held a knife to his wife’s chest.

‘She survived only because she looked into his eyes and asked what would happen to the children if he killed her,’ says Diana.

‘I can remember it as if it was yesterday. Jo rang at 7am and whispered: “Rob’s attacked me with a knife.” I was gripped by sheer terror.’

Loving mother: Joanna with her daughter, who cannot be identified for legal reasons

In a panic, Jo, who didn’t want to involve the police for sake of the children, retreated to the Isle of Man and told Brown the marriage was over.

But there was to be no relief for her increasingly anxious family as an acrimonious divorce battle flared.

Her father had always suspected Brown’s motives and had insisted there should be a pre-nuptial agreement to protect the house his daughter loved so dearly.

(When he died of cancer in 2001, his daughter also inherited a modest income from a trust fund).

In court, Brown claimed he had not really understood what he was doing when he signed this agreement. However, Jo’s brother James laughs bitterly at this claim.

Killer: Robert Brown believed he had been 'stitched up' by a prenuptial agreement

‘Greed, greed, greed. He knew what he was doing, but he hoped the  pre-nup wouldn’t have any legal force,’ he says.

‘The money and lifestyle was all  he wanted and when the marriage ended he was relentless. He would not give up.

‘He wanted the money and he wanted Jo out of the house because he knew how much it meant to her.’

Jo offered her husband, who earned £150,000 a year, half a million pounds as a divorce settlement, but he refused, pouring thousands down the drain in legal fees while his desperate wife turned her home into an upmarket guesthouse to support herself and their children.

It is a source of agonising irony  for her heartbroken family that the pre-nuptial agreement that they hoped would protect Jo became her death warrant.

The killing took place just days after a landmark ruling in the Katrin Radmacher divorce case at the Supreme Court in which judges decided a marriage contract was binding. Jo’s pre-nuptial contract would be enforceable in law.

‘The Radmacher ruling was Jo’s death sentence,’ says Diana. ‘Brown knew that he had lost. Would you believe Jo actually felt sorry for him.’

As the autumn half-term arrived, it was a positive Jo, looking forward to a future free from her husband’s demands, who headed to the Isle of Man for a break.

She had long chats with her mother, while the children played on the beach.

‘We had a lovely few days,’ says Diana. ‘Jo was so relieved that finally the battle was nearly over.  At the end of it, I kissed my beautiful, glamorous daughter goodbye and she said: “I’ll ring when we get home.”  Nine days later, she was dead.’

Long before the holiday — perhaps months earlier — Brown had sought out an overgrown corner of Windsor Great Park where he had buried a crate: a makeshift coffin in a prepared grave.

It was to this spot that Brown drove after coolly killing his wife, first leaving his children with his French girlfriend Stephanie Bellemere, who was five months pregnant with his child.

Lasting memory: Diana will continue her fight for justice for her 'beautiful, glamorous daughter'

Police were called by Brown’s brother Kenneth the next day after Jo and Robert’s daughter had told her paternal grandmother ‘something bad’ had happened. It was four days before Brown admitted killing his wife and led police to  her grave.

He claimed that he had been suffering from ‘severe stress’ and an ‘abnormality of mental function’ that ‘substantially impaired his self-control’.

‘He’s an evil man,’ says James. ‘He has shown no remorse, no compassion, despite all the lives he has destroyed.

‘I watched him in court as he wailed to Ma and me: “I feel your pain.” I shouted: “Shame on you.” It was nothing more than an act.’

At the heart of this tragedy are three children — the two children  of the Brown marriage being brought up by their grandmother and Stephanie’s baby boy, who  is growing up in France. He has seen his father only in a prison visiting room.

‘I just hope I live to get my grandchildren old enough to manage without me,’ says Diana. ‘They are attending the same school their mother went to as a little girl.’

Jo is buried on a private plot on a hill behind her family home on the Isle of Man, with views stretching as far as Scotland, the Lake District and the Mountains of Mourne in Northern Ireland.

‘The hardest times for me are thinking of all the special moments she will miss with the children: graduating from university, first love, marriage — everything, the whole of life’s pattern,’ says Diana.  ‘I am so sad when I think how much Jo wanted children and now it is me, not her, who is enjoying them and caring for them.

‘The children are my therapy. Without them I don’t know how I would cope.’

As for Brown, she does not want to contemplate the day when he may walk free.

‘I will fight with every ounce of my life to make sure someone recognises that a horrible miscarriage of justice has taken place.

‘He should never have been found not guilty of murder.

‘Does this mean that the next time a husband says he is a bit stressed he can just kill his wife and then claim diminished responsibility?

‘It’s beyond comprehension. I just hope he never gets out.’

(source: dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1391697/After-BA-pilot-persuades-court-stress-kill-wealthy-wife-family-ask-How-jury-believe-Jo-wasnt-murdered.html#ixzz1NeyBICDF)
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