‘Don’t let killer husband go free’: Family of mother Joanna Simpson make plea over her BA pilot husband who dug a grave then bludgeoned her to death with a hammer… and is set to be released after serving just 13 year
- Mother begged the Justice Secretary to keep her daughter’s killer behind bars
- Robert Brown battered estranged wife Joanna Simpson to death with hammer
A grieving mother begged the Justice Secretary to keep her daughter’s killer behind bars.
Airline pilot Robert Brown battered his estranged wife Joanna Simpson to death with a claw hammer within earshot of their two young children.
He is due for automatic release this year after serving just 13 years of a 26-year sentence for manslaughter. Mrs Simpson’s mother Diana Parkes fears Brown still poses a risk to her family and to the public, and has called on Dominic Raab to block his release. She has learned Brown will be classed as a ‘critical public protection case’, meaning he has been assessed as posing a very high risk of serious harm.
Such offenders require high levels of monitoring after their release, but the Probation Service has warned it is struggling to cope with ‘unmanageable workloads’. His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Probation, Justin Russell, said this month that staff shortages were ‘severely’ affecting the service’s ability to manage offenders, including ‘those who pose a serious threat to the public’.
Mrs Parkes, 84, fears former British Airways pilot Brown could threaten her family, and that he may pose a continued danger to women if he is released. She is seeking an urgent meeting with Mr Raab, and has urged Daily Mail readers to petition their local MPs for Brown to remain behind bars.
Airline pilot Robert Brown battered his estranged wife Joanna Simpson to death with a claw hammer within earshot of their two young children. Pictured: Joanna Simpson with her children Katie and Alex
Mrs Simpson’s mother Diana Parkes (pictured) fears Brown still poses a risk to her family and to the public, and has called on Dominic Raab to block his release.
Robert Brown (pictured) is due for automatic release this year after serving just 13 years of a 26-year sentence for manslaughter
She said: ‘Mr Raab has the power to review this case and help prevent the release of Brown in November. It is surely so clear that this would be the right thing to do. I hope and pray he will see sense and help me and my family.’
Former lord chancellor and solicitor general Sir Robert Buckland KC said he was ‘deeply concerned’ about the case, and called on the Ministry of Justice to protect the public from dangerous offenders.
Mrs Simpson, 46, had filed for divorce from Brown after enduring years of abuse, harassment and intimidation. In October 2010, Brown drove to her home in Ascot, Berkshire, armed with a hammer and bludgeoned her at least 14 times, before wrapping her body in plastic sheeting and burying it in a grave he had previously dug in woodland in Windsor Great Park.
He was charged with murder and prosecutors argued the killing was a premeditated attack, but Brown said he had been suffering from ‘severe stress’ and ‘abnormality of mental function’ which had impaired his self-control.
The jury at Reading Crown Court acquitted him of murder and he was given a 26-year sentence for manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility, which he had already admitted.
Mrs Simpson, 46, had filed for divorce from Brown after enduring years of abuse, harassment and intimidation
In October 2010, Brown drove to her home in Ascot, Berkshire, armed with a hammer and bludgeoned her at least 14 times, before wrapping her body in plastic sheeting and burying it in a grave he had previously dug in woodland in Windsor Great Park
Mrs Parkes, who raised her daughter’s children, called for Brown, 59, to serve the full 26 years. She said: ‘There is a chronic shortage of probation officers, so how can he possibly be allowed out when no one can guarantee how he’ll be monitored? The reoffending statistics are alarming.
‘I am calling on our Justice Secretary, Dominic Raab, to do everything in his power to prevent yet a further injustice by releasing Robert Brown early.’ Mrs Simpson’s friend Hetti Barkworth-Nanton, who chairs the charity Refuge, which supports survivors of domestic abuse, also called for Brown’s release to be blocked.
She said: ‘This man is a dangerous misogynist who has shown no evidence of remorse. He subjected Jo to years of abuse, stalking and coercive control before he killed her. Dominic Raab has the power to stop this release.’
A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: ‘This was an appalling crime and our thoughts remain with Joanna Simpson’s family and friends.
‘Mr Raab will do everything in his power to keep the most dangerous offenders behind bars and has pledged to give this case his closest personal attention.’
Mrs Parkes and Mrs Barkworth-Nanton set up the Joanna Simpson Foundation to help children affected by domestic violence. The charity has received support from the Queen Consort, who has campaigned to highlight the threat of domestic abuse.
Joanna Simpson’s family are encouraging people to write to their MP calling for Brown to stay in jail. Details can be found at jsfoundation.org.uk/ call-to-action
‘Katie sat on my knee and told me she heard ‘bang, bang, bang’ as the hammer hit her mummy’s head’… The Mail says to Justice Secretary Dominic Raab: read this interview with victim Joanna’s heroic mother and make sure her killer isn’t freed after just 13 years
BY FRANCES HARDY
You might imagine Diana Parkes has endured enough. In 2010 her adored only daughter Joanna was bludgeoned to death with a claw hammer by her estranged husband, within earshot of their two young children.
Weeks before he killed Joanna, Robert Brown, a BA pilot, had dug her grave in remote woodland at Windsor Great Park, burying there, directly under the Heathrow flight path, a plastic garden box which became his wife’s makeshift coffin.
Brown had — the prosecution argued — planned the killing meticulously but, to Diana’s horror, a jury acquitted him of murder and he was sentenced to 26 years for manslaughter instead.
But this November — after serving just 13 years in prison — Brown, 59, is due for release. The prospect appals Diana and today this newspaper backs her impassioned plea to Justice Secretary Dominic Raab to keep Brown behind bars.
‘I’d beg Mr Raab to thoroughly review this case — which was a gross miscarriage of justice from the start — with the intention of stopping Brown’s release,’ says Diana.
‘Everything points to the fact that he is not safe to be let out of prison. I believe Robert Brown is a psychopath. He’s ruthless, evil. He’s very good at manipulating people.’
She fears for her grandchildren — Joanna’s children Alex, 23 and Katie, 21.
‘I didn’t know how to tell the children he would only serve half his sentence.
‘For years I let them believe he would be 72 when he was released, but once they left school I realised I had to tell them. I tried to say it as casually as possible, not to make an issue of it. I said, ‘You know how hard we’re trying to keep your father in prison because he can come out after 13 years,’ and they’re terrified.
‘Alex and Katie want their father to be locked away forever. I, too, want him to die in prison.’
Brown was charged with murder and prosecutors argued the killing was a premeditated attack, but Brown said he had been suffering from ‘severe stress’ and ‘abnormality of mental function’ which had impaired his self-control. Pictured: Joanne with her brother James
Mrs Simpson’s mother Diana Parkes has urged Daily Mail readers to petition their local MPs for Brown to remain behind bars. Pictured: Joanna Brown
She adds: ‘I’ve called for a meeting with Mr Raab at his earliest convenience. I hope and pray he will see sense and help me and my family.
‘I know Alex — who couldn’t bear to talk about his mum’s death for years — and Katie will be scared for the rest of their lives unless we can keep their father locked up. The reality of him coming out, aged only 59, is terrible.
‘I’ve even said I wish he’d kill me so he’ll be locked away for ever and the rest of the family will be safe. I mean it. I’m 84. I’ve lived my life.’
Diana Parkes is an imposing woman, both in stature and resolve. Brave, principled and warm-hearted, she possesses the stiff upper lip and brisk capability of a woman who had to bury her grief deeply in order to create a happy home life for Alex and Katie after their mother’s death at just 46.
A jury at Reading Crown Court acquitted Brown of murder and he was given a 26-year sentence for manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility, which he had already admitted
They were ten and nine when Joanna was fatally attacked, and went to live on the Isle of Man with Diana and her second husband Fred, 89. Their rambling Victorian home with its rolling acres, sheep, dogs and horses, became a sanctuary; the sea providing some solace that Brown could not easily reach them. ‘Even so, Alex would worry,’ Diana recalls. ‘He used to ask if a plane could land at the little private airfield nearby.’
It is extraordinary to think how ably Diana and Fred, then aged 71 and 76 and enjoying retirement, adapted so readily to their new parenting roles.
‘I couldn’t just crawl into bed when Jo died. I had the grandchildren to look after. I dealt with the grief by cracking on. There’s no other choice,’ says Diana.
‘I had to have an open bed for them so they could come in and snuggle up in the middle of the night if they wanted to, so Fred moved into a spare bedroom.
‘People said it was wonderful, the way I scooped the children up and made their lives safe, but of course it’s been my salvation. A total joy. I love them to bits — they’re part of Jo. She wrote me a letter back in 2002 to say she wanted me to have them if anything ever happened to her. Even then she knew she’d made a grave mistake in marrying Brown.’
Fred adds: ‘If Di hadn’t had the children I don’t know what she’d have done. And I’ve grown to love them as my own.’
Diana recalls: ‘We re-decorated two bedrooms for them, got Xboxes and if we wanted to go out we had to think about a babysitter. Getting up in the morning to get them to school was quite a change. And of course I said, ‘Any time you want to talk about Mummy . . .’
How Raab can stop early release
New powers allow the Justice Secretary to step in when a serious criminal is about to be released from jail after serving part of their sentence.
In so-called ‘determinate’ sentences, a criminal can be released either halfway or two-thirds through their sentence, depending on the offence they committed.
Under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, the Justice Secretary was granted powers to prevent automatic release, and require the case to be considered by the Parole Board. The law says the action can be taken ‘if the Secretary of State believes on reasonable grounds that the prisoner would, if released, pose a significant risk to members of the public of serious harm’. It can be applied in a range of serious offences, including manslaughter – the offence for which Robert Brown was convicted.
If Justice Secretary Dominic Raab heeds Diana Parkes’s plea and intervenes in the case, he could deploy these powers to ensure Brown faces a Parole Board hearing.
‘They’ve been no trouble at all, so well-adjusted. It’s all down to Jo. The early years are so important and she gave them so much love.’
Joanna, her many friends agree, was a wonderful mum. Fun, attractive, hospitable — not to mention a skilled cook and gardener — she was also the consummate hostess.
She welcomed all to her smart home in Ascot, Berkshire, where she also ran a five-star B&B.
‘She was so easy, so lovely,’ says Fred. ‘What happened to her is horrendous. I still can’t believe it really.’
This sense of disbelief persists: how did Joanna, beautiful and accomplished, fall prey to Brown, a man Joanna’s close friend Hetti Barkworth-Nanton describes as ‘a misogynist who gets his kicks from power and control over women’?
Jo met him in 1998 while flying to South Africa for a holiday: he had been piloting the plane and they were introduced by the purser, a friend of Joanna’s. The dashing BA captain possessed the aura of a young Sean Connery. Joanna was smitten.
But Diana remembers an early family meeting when alarm bells rang. ‘Brown was rude, arrogant, obnoxious,’ she recalls. ‘I remember him breaking a little French tureen that had been in Fred’s family for generations. He brushed past it, knocked it on to the floor and it smashed. He didn’t even stop or turn round, much less apologise. Jo was apologising for him.’
So concerned was Joanna’s late father Chris Simpson, a successful property developer — he died from cancer eight years before his daughter and although he and Diana divorced after 25 years of marriage they remained good friends — that he asked Brown to sign a pre-nuptial agreement.
In the event of a divorce, neither he nor Joanna would take more from the marriage than they put into it.
At the trial Diana testified that immediately after their wedding, in 1999, Brown’s facade slipped.
‘Jo rang me from their honeymoon and said, ‘Ma, I’ve made a terrible mistake. He’s so rude,’ recalls Diana.
‘But then she became pregnant a month later and she was old-fashioned. You stayed together until the children grew up.’
But Brown became progressively more coercive and controlling. Diana says he installed a spy tracking device on Joanna’s car and isolated her from her friends and family. ‘Meanwhile he was flying round the world having affairs,’ says Diana.
Diana told the court that in July 2007 he threatened Joanna with a kitchen knife. ‘He put one hand round the back of her neck and put the knife to her throat,’ says Diana. ‘Jo was terrified. She said, ‘What will happen to the children if you kill me?’ He said, ‘I’ll be put in prison and you’ll be dead.’
Joanna managed to talk him down and rang her mother early the next morning.
‘I urged her to fly over to the Isle of Man with the children, which she did.’
While the awful incident prompted their separation, Brown still contrived to intimidate and harass Joanna, telling her if she mentioned the knife threat to the police it would be ‘the worse’ for her. She was too scared to report it.
He stalked her in his car, skulked in her garden, jammed his foot in the doorway on access visits.
In October 2010, a fortnight before Joanna’s divorce was due to be finalised, Diana and Joanna spent the half-term week together with the children.
‘I remember kissing Jo and she looked so glamorous and lovely,’ recalls Diana. ‘I said, ‘You take care, Jo’ and that was the last time I saw her alive.
‘Then on the day he killed her — Halloween evening — Jo and I had been chatting on the phone earlier about her recipe for fish pie. She told me Rob, who’d had the children for an access visit, wanted to bring them back an hour later than planned.
‘But she’d insisted they come home at 4pm, as arranged, as Katie had homework to do.’
Diana’s rational mind knows Joanna (pictured) is dead, but sometimes, even now, she imagines she’s alive. ‘I’d wake at 3am and think, ‘This is a dream. This just hasn’t happened. How could it have happened to my beautiful daughter?’
Diana now wonders if Brown wanted it to be dark when he returned them, the better to carry out his plan undetected. ‘Fred and I were due to go on a cruise around South America but I got a phone call from one of Jo’s friends — it was about 9.30am on November 1 — telling me there were police at Jo’s house and yellow tape around it.
‘I called Jo on her phone but of course there was no reply. I was shouting down the phone, ‘Please pick up, Jo.’ I phoned my son James. I said, ‘Something awful has happened. He’s killed her.’ Nobody had told me, but I knew she’d gone. It was horrendous.
‘I don’t recall what I did next. I doubt if I slept. The next morning we flew to London on the first available plane and we were met by two police liaison officers who took us to see the children.
‘I said, ‘Please can they be with us?’ One of Jo’s lovely friends invited us all to stay with her.’
Brown admitted killing his wife but it was four days — November 5 — before he agreed to take police to the spot in Windsor Great Park where he’d buried her.
‘I said to the children, ‘I’m really sorry but mummy has been found and she’s not alive.’ I said, ‘I will come and live with you and you can still go to your school,’ but they said, ‘No granny, we want to come to the Isle of Man with you.’ And that was when I became a mummy to two young children again.’
Diana’s restraint is heroic. Her eyes often fill with tears but she blinks them away. She has never allowed herself the indulgence of grieving publicly, but her quiet anger simmers.
At a meeting in 2016 she told Joanna’s story to Camilla, the Queen Consort, who was so moved she pledged to support Diana’s work against domestic violence. She and Joanna’s friend Hetti set up the Joanna Simpson Foundation in her memory.
Bit by bit, Diana learned the full horror of what Katie and Alex experienced.
‘They’d both been in the house when Rob killed their mother,’ she says. ‘Katie sat on my knee and told me she heard, ‘bang, bang, bang’ as the hammer hit her mummy’s head.
‘She went into the hall and Rob told her to go upstairs straight away. Then we discovered that both she and Alex saw their father carry their mum’s body into the car. Alex’s footprint was found in his mother’s blood on the kitchen floor. They were both witnesses to this horror.
‘He’d hit her at least 14 times with a claw hammer he’d hidden in the children’s homework bag.’
With their mother’s dead body in the boot, Brown drove both the children to his pregnant girlfriend’s house.
Diana continues: ‘Alex said, ‘Are you taking mummy to hospital?’ He didn’t answer.
‘Instead, he then drove to Windsor Great Park, to the remote site over a mile from the road, where he’d already dug her grave.
‘It could only be reached in a 4×4 car but the last 159 metres could not be reached by car at all. He obviously had to carry Jo that distance. There were no signs of drag marks.
‘He’d even made the children a den nearby and it’s quite possible they’d played there earlier while he dug their mother’s grave.’
There followed a trial in which, to Diana’s shock, the jury was persuaded by Brown. ‘He portrayed my daughter as a rich, scheming b**** when she was the kindest person imaginable. Everybody loved Jo except her husband.’
He also claimed to have been suffering from ‘adjustment disorder’ — an emotional or behavioural reaction to a stressful event in a person’s life — brought on by the couple’s acrimonious divorce proceedings, testified to by his psychologist and which the jury accepted.
He had previously admitted a charge of manslaughter due to diminished responsibility, something Diana has always felt was ‘a travesty of justice’.
‘When the jury gave its man- slaughter verdict the whole court gasped,’ she says.
Sentencing Brown, the judge told him: ‘You intended to kill, you intended to conceal the body, and to hide the evidence of the killing. There can only be one reason for taking a hammer to the scene. I’m drawn to the conclusion that you went with the intention of hitting her with it.’
Diana says of the verdict: ‘It sounds as if the judge knew he meant to kill Joanna and that is why he handed down such a long sentence.’
Today, Diana’s rational mind knows Joanna is dead, but sometimes, even now, she imagines she’s alive. ‘I’d wake at 3am and think, ‘This is a dream. This just hasn’t happened. How could it have happened to my beautiful daughter?’
Joanna, butchered and abandoned by Brown with such grotesque indignity, now rests in a tranquil spot her mother has chosen.
‘Her grave is here, on our land — at the moment the snowdrops are flowering there — and I go and talk to her.
‘She was keen on gardening and took hydrangea cuttings just before she was killed while staying with me. I planted them near her grave and they look wonderful in the summer.
‘I still have the rug she was killed on in my bedroom. It is the last place where she stood — alive. And I’m terrible about not giving her clothes away. Katie wears her mum’s coats. She loves them.’
And while Brown’s violence left a hole in her family that can never be filled, it’s also family that has sustained Diana.
‘My son James, his wife Sarah and my husband Fred have given me huge support over the past 13 years,’ she says.
‘We’ve tried to keep the children’s lives as normal as possible. It has been a great privilege to love and care for them. That’s what Jo would have wanted me to do.
‘When I go to her grave and chat to her, I always tell her what they’ve done and achieved. And I often think to myself, she’d be so very proud of them.’
Joanna Simpson’s family are encouraging people to write to their MP calling for Robert Brown to stay in jail. Details can be found at www.jsfoundation.org.uk/call-to-action/
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