A British Airways pilot wept on Monday as he apologised to relatives of his wealthy wife for battering her to death in a frenzied attack which he claims he cannot remember.
Robert Brown, 47, slumped over in the witness stand and held his head in his hands to say an anguished “sorry” to members of millionairess Joanna’s family watching his trial for her murder from the public gallery.
He said he “lost it” after his estranged wife made him feel like an idiot when they argued as he dropped their son of nine and their 11 year-old daughter off at her house after they had been staying with him.
Brown claims the attack, during which he hit her at least 14 times with a claw hammer causing 40 injuries, happened in the hallway of her £3 million mansion after he had grown increasingly angry and frustrated over their bitter divorce proceedings, which had dragged on for three years.
He claims he was “stitched up” by a prenuptial agreement, that Joanna “deliberately concealed the extent of her wealth” and that her lawyers were harassing him on an almost daily basis and had “destroyed” his family.
Reliving the attack as he gave evidence at Reading Crown Court on Monday, Brown said he had awoken that day feeling that his troubles were “never going to end”.
He claimed he had picked up the hammer from his shed on impulse and put it in a bag with the children’s homework before driving them to Joanna’s Ascot home in Berkshire. Once there, he explained to her that their son had hurt his eye in an accident and needed some medication but when he went to look for it in the bag it was not there.
Brown told the jury: “She said you better go and get it. It was the way she said it, like you stupid idiot. It stopped me short. I turned round and walked away. That’s when I just lost it. I just burst, that’s it, I just burst. And I can’t remember what I did at that moment.
“I blew and the next thing I remember I’m standing over Jo and she’s bleeding … I just don’t know what happened. That portion is a blank to me.”
He denied going there with the intention of injuring Joanna, 46, then collapsed in tears and said to Joanna’s mother Diana Parks “I’m really sorry,” then to Joanna’s brother James Parks: “I’m sorry, I feel your pain.”
Deep sobbing could be heard from the public gallery, along with a cry of “shut up” directed at Brown. Brown said he ran into the kitchen to get a tea towel to try to stem the blood but it was “obvious Jo was severely injured”.
He carried her to his Volvo 4x4, put her in the boot and wrapped her in plastic sheeting rather than call an ambulance because there was “no logic, no rationale”, he said. “I just wanted to get the children away from there as soon as possible.”
Before leaving to drop his children off at his rented house in nearby Winkfield where his French girlfriend, Stephanie Bellemere, a BA stewardess, was staying, he went back inside to get his wife’s CCTV’s video recorder but claimed: “I was not thinking, I just wanted to get it. I was not covering my tracks.”
Brown said that in the car his son said “something about going to hospital” and he turned to go there but then changed his mind, dropped the children off telling Stephanie only that there had been “an incident” and drove to Windsor Great Park.
He pulled into a garage there and looked at Jo. “I could not believe what I had done. I screamed and screamed,” he said.
Brown told the court he then considered committing suicide by hanging himself or by crashing a plane. He flew 747s for BA at the time.
But he then decided he wanted her lawyers “held accountable” for the way they had treated him and decided instead to put her body in a box that he had buried in the park almost two years earlier.
Keen runner Brown claimed he had buried the box to bury the sham of his marriage and that he found it “therapeutic” to imagine he was throwing her solicitors’ letters in it whenever he ran past it.
Brown, who admits manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility but denies murder, handed himself into police the next morning. The trial continues. - Daily Mail