It seemed like the perfect wedding. Handsome British Airways pilot Robert Brown lavishing praise on his beautiful bride Joanna Simpson. Eight years later, he would bludgeon her to death with a claw hammer, apparently furious he had been ‘stitched up’ by a prenuptial agreement.
New footage has emerged today from the pair’s wedding day where Brown is captured saying: “I have to sort of thank my mum and father. I’m sure you never thought you’d see the day when I’d get married, but I can’t help being choosy. You have to go for what’s perfect.”
But what followed was a short-lived marriage and an acrimonious divorce that ended in tragedy.
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He initially called police the morning after the mother-of-two disappeared from their house in an affluent area of Ascot on Halloween night in 2010 to report a domestic issue.
British Airways captain Robert Brown bludgeoned his 46-year-old wife Joanna to death with the hammer in their family home in October, 2010, as their two young children cowered in a playroom. He dumped her body in a makeshift coffin in Windsor Great Park.
Brown was acquitted of murder by a jury at Reading Crown Court in May 2011. He had previously admitted manslaughter on the ground of diminished responsibility. Brown, formerly of North Street, Winkfield, Berkshire, was sentenced to 24 years for manslaughter and a further two years for an offence of obstructing a coroner in the execution of his duty.
The footage of their wedding day, and the ‘no comment’ interviews he gave to police following his arrested, are being revealed tonight in an ITV documentary The British Airways Killer which airs at 9pm.
When he handed himself in after killing her, Brown initially refused to help police with their missing persons investigation. Eventually Brown confessed that he had killed Joanna and told officers where to find the body in woods in Windsor Great Park.
Joanna’s friend Hetti Barkworth-Nanton revealed how, during the couple’s relationship, Joanna had said Brown had held a knife to her chest.
“She said to me, and I’ve heard it from so many victims subsequently, that ‘his eyes went dark, almost black, cold, dark, black eyes’. And he said, ‘I’m going to do it’ .So she was saying, you know, ‘what will happen to the children?’ He didn’t care about what would happen to the children,” Hetti told the documentary.
Brown has denied that he had threatened Joanna.
After Joanna told him she could no longer be with him, Ms Barkworth-Nanton told the documentary her friend believed he would kill her: “She genuinely believed that he was going to kill her, she was of no doubt whatsoever.”
Joanna’s mother Diana Parkes described the moment she was alerted to something amiss at her daughter’s house, saying: “A friend rang and said ‘have you spoken to Jo this morning?’ and I said no, and he said ‘I’ve had a worrying call…’ I was told there’s police tape around the house, and I just said ‘he’s killed her.’ I just said that straight away. ‘He’s killed her.'”
At his trial, the court was told Brown suffered from an adjustment disorder – and he was cleared of murder. He admitted the charge of manslaughter by diminished responsibility.
The documentary reveals Brown’s reaction when he was played his initial call to the police.
When Det Con Melanie Ward asks him if the other person involved in the incident doesn’t need medical attention because they are dead, he replies: “No comment.”
The officer told the documentary: “What ‘no comment’ says to me, it’s control. It’s easy to hide behind it but I don’t think Robert was hiding behind no comment, I think he was, that was his element of control.”
The Simpson family are terrified at the prospect that Brown could be released from prison imminently as he reaches the half-way point of his sentence when he becomes eligible for release on licence. The Justice Secretary has asked the Parole Board to review his automatic release but this is now the subject of a judicial review.
In a statement provided to the documentary, Brown said that he was sentenced by the court after careful examination of whether or not he was dangerous, and the court found that he was not.
Brown’s trial heard how in the summer of 2007, the couple’s marriage had broken down and they began a bitter and acrimonious divorce. Brown had put £200,000 of his own money into Joanna’s bed and breakfast business in Buckhurst Road.
The pair fell out over her business in the divorce settlement, BerkshireLive reported at the time.
On the day she died, Brown arrived home with their two children. He told the court he had intended to discuss his unhappiness at her plans for the children’s future education with her, but concealed a hammer inside his children’s schoolbags.
He attacked her, hitting her 14 times on the head with the hammer, with his children in a room two doors away.
In front of their two children, he then put her body in his car and drove to Windsor Great Park. He placed her body in a box lined with plastic sheets buried in a hole he had dug more than a year before his wife’s death. He also buried the hammer and other items used in the killing.
He then returned to the house and removed the CCTV recorder which would have had footage of him putting his wife’s body in the car and buried it in another area of the park. During the trial, he told the court he had wanted to commit suicide after realising he had killed his wife.
The jury took 14 hours and 46 minutes to make its decision.
In his summary before sentencing, prosecution counsel Graham Reeds said Joanna’s family had been deeply affected by the incident.
In the defence summary, counsel John Whitfield, said Brown had expressed ‘shame and sorrow’ as soon as the verdict had been given and said the ‘crocodile tears’ suggested by the prosecution during the trial had not been the case.
There were tears and gasps of astonishment as the verdict was given in court. Joanna Brown’s family could not disguise their disappointment at the not guilty verdict for murder, describing the decision as a ‘miscarriage of justice’ on the court steps later that day.
This morning (February 26) Joanna’s mum Di Parkes told GMB hosts Susanna Reid and Richard Madeley: “We fear his release because he’s dangerous and it certainly wasn’t manslaughter, it was premeditated all the way through. He dug the hole where he put the garden box many months before and it was so carefully planned.”
Richard asked Di what she thinks he might do and she said: “I don’t really know but I hope he comes to kill me first so that all my family and Hetti and Belinda and in fact women in general will be safe because he’s a psychopath in my opinion. Unfortunately, when he took a knife to my daughter in 2007, he told her that he’d hated her family for the eight years they were married.”
Hetti Barkworth-Nanton told the show: “Di and I have talked about this, I totally understand it. It’s where you get to when you are faced with the sheer terror of a man like that, being out and around… we’re terrified and I’d always hoped that terror was a bit inflated.
“But in the court two weeks ago, the Ministry of Justice demonstrated that over the course of the 13 years in prison, he has consistently shown himself with narcissistic behaviours, with superiority over all professionals, he’s never engaged in any rehabilitation programmes, in any healthy relationship programmes. He has instead focused his energy on victim blaming Jo and grievance against Jo’s mother, family, her children and friends.”
