Mother of murdered millionairess knew landmark judgement had sealed daughter's fate

In an exclusive interview with The Daily Telegraph, Diana Parkes said: “Looking back, that ruling was my own daughter’s death sentence.

“On the day it came through I remember us all feeling so jubilant and so relieved for Jo. We thought it was a new start for her and the children.

“What we didn’t realise was that it finally made Rob decide to kill her – and that 11 days later we would have lost her”.

Sitting in the lounge of her daughter’s beloved mock-Tudor home, Tun Cottage, in Ascot, Berkshire, Mrs Parkes, 72, spoke at length about her “wonderful, radiant” daughter and of her loathing for the British Airways pilot she chose to marry.

Pausing sometimes to regain her composure, Mrs Parkes revealed her shock at learning that Robert Brown, 47, had begun planning what he intended to be “the perfect murder” many months earlier.

In his mind, she said, the plan became irreversible on October 20 last year – the day the Supreme Court found Katrin Radmacher’s agreement with her former husband to be legally binding.

Brown, who had previously rejected his wife’s offer of £500,000 out of hand, suddenly realised that having signed a similar document in February 1999 he was financially doomed.

“The irony is that he’d been warned by the judge in the divorce proceedings in April 2010,” said Mrs Parkes.

“Judge Mostyn had been the barrister for Katrin Radmacher’s husband, and at one stage he turned to Rob and suggested that he settle because an enormous amount of money had already been spent by both sides.

“He told him: `Mr Brown, if I lose, you lose”. And that’s exactly what happened”.

Mrs Parkes said her early misgivings about Brown were confirmed as he subjected her daughter to a life of unrelenting loneliness, abuse and contempt.

He had married her only for money and from the outset resented being asked to sign the prenuptial agreement that Jo’s late father, Chris Simpson, a self-made property developer, had insisted upon.

By the same token, Jo realised while on her honeymoon in South Africa that she had married the wrong man.

Brown was so cold towards his new wife that he was never seen kissing or hugging her in public. Jo tried to make excuses for him, even though his boorish, arrogant behaviour upset both her family and wide circle of friends.

“She should have left him years ago,” said her mother. “When you looked at the two of them, it just didn’t compute. She was just so unbelievably warm, and so completely the opposite to him. I think she fell for the stripes he wore as a pilot.

“In the early days I tried to like him because I realised Jo had made a choice. But he was so uncommunicative and always seemed so resentful. I wouldn’t say I hated him from the start, but Jo’s father did. That’s why he insisted on the prenuptial agreement – he thought it would protect her.

“At the time Rob asked for clarification on one point and then signed the agreement and disclosed his assets willingly.”

Mrs Parkes, who lives with her husband, Fred, on the Isle of Man, recalled how on visits to Tun Cottage Brown would emerge from his office under sufferance and then return again at the end of a meal.

His wife loved to host dinner parties, but he would never lift a finger to help. Once guests arrived he was habitually rude to them and derogatory towards her.

“Looking back, I don’t think he ever loved her. He just wanted her for her money and her lifestyle. He bullied her and subjected her to the loneliest of marriages. It was mental torture.

“The only conversation he ever had was about flying or running. If you couldn’t talk about those, you’d have no conversation at all.”

For years Jo stayed with Brown only because of the children. But despite her devotion, the couple’s marriage finally unravelled in July 2007 when he held a knife to her chest.

“She only survived then because she looked into his eyes and asked what would happen to the children if he killed her.

“But the next day I had a premonition of what would happen in the park four years later. I told a friend as much, but then dismissed the thought. I’ve tortured myself with it since, though everyone assures me I could never have been there every hour of every day. As her mother, I just wish I had been.

“I worried about Jo all the time after that, but she herself was ok. She just knew she could never live with him again and so she told him to leave.

“She should have gone to the police, but she didn’t want the children to know what their father had done to her. How tragic is that!”

Mrs Parkes and the rest of her family were so concerned that they hired a bodyguard and tried to make sure Jo was never alone.

Having moved out to a four-bedroom rented detached house a few miles away, Brown took to harassing his estranged wife by driving or running slowly past. He took note of new security cameras and at one stage bought surveillance “spyware” capable of tracking her car.

At one stage Jo considered taking out a non-molestation order against him. But she held back when he gave an undertaking not to enter the grounds of Tun Cottage.

Mrs Parkes went on: “Towards the end we knew he was in a relationship with Stephanie Bellemere and with a baby on the way, and she said: `Ma, Stephanie’s pregnant - he won’t do anything`. Two weeks before the killing she actually told me she felt sorry for him.

“We had so many happy memories of her last summer, and then we found out that all that time he had been going to the park so he could dig her grave.

“It’s horrific to think that the day he killed her was the only time she’d been on her own. Every other time we’d made sure someone was with her when he dropped the children off.”

Jo’s brother, James, is convinced that Brown planned to carry out the murder a week or so earlier. However, he was forced to back off after realising she had a party of bed and breakfast guests from Cornwall.

The family are incensed that during his trial Brown claimed he had been “stitched up” over the impending divorce.

“All he ever put into it was £200,000,” said Mrs Parkes. “Yet in 2008, nine months after their separation, Jo offered him £500,000 to settle. In order to do that she had to ask for £300,000 from the sale of her grandmother’s house and a £200,000 addition to her mortgage. His response was to send back a text saying: `Got your offer. Didn’t half make me laugh!’”

Jo’s son, 11, and daughter, nine, were taken by friends and family to see where their mother had been buried. They knew the area where they were, they said, because they had built a den with their father not far away.

Today they are beginning to thrive despite the traumas they have endured. “My grand-daughter writes about Jo in her diary, and all three of us talk about her whenever we’re together,” said Mrs Parkes.

She herself cannot get over the devastation she feels if ever the telephone rings at 7.10pm - Jo’s normal time of ringing after feeding the children and allowing them to relax before bath and bed.

“We had two memorial services for her, one in Ascot and the other on the Isle of Man, and on both occasions we had a picture of her in church because we didn’t want the children to see a coffin.

“The picture is in my dining room now, and I will go there to talk to her.

“After we’d lost her I found it comforting to be at Tun Cottage and to touch her things. I also slept in her bed.

“I hope that as the years pass it will become easier, but it will never be the same as when Jo was here with us.

“She was such a radiant, loving and generous woman, and I hope we are playing our part in helping her children to grow up as she would have wanted them to.”

Jo is buried in the grounds of her mother’s home on the Isle of Man, in a plot that looks out onto Scotland, the Lake District and the mountains of Mourne in Northern Ireland.

“It’s just perfect,” said her mother.

Like her son, Mrs Parkes resents the fact that Jo was killed just as she was forging a new life for herself.

“For her it wasn’t about winning the divorce settlement, it was about moving on. But Rob was obsessed by the money and obsessed by this house. He wanted her out of it, but he pushed it too hard. He played poker and lost. Greed overtook him.”

She added: “I hope to God he will never see the children again. They hate him, and so do I. I feel such deep anger that I know I will never forgive him.

“My only consolation is that if Jo had died from an incurable disease or a motor accident the children would have been in the care of their father. As it is, they are safe – and such a great credit to her. Her memory lives on in them.”

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