A British Airways pilot killed his wealthy wife and buried her body in a pre-prepared grave because he thought he had been ‘stitched up’ by a prenuptial agreement, a court heard yesterday.Robert Brown, 47, battered his estranged wife over the head with a camping mallet as their young children cowered in a room off the hallway of their £3million mansion and buried her at Windsor Great Park, it was alleged.
Brown believed millionairess Joanna, 46, ‘deliberately concealed the extent of her wealth’ and convinced himself their marriage had been a ‘sham’.
During the attack in the Ascot mansion, the couple’s frightened children – a boy of nine and an 11-year-old girl – could hear the blows.
Brown wrapped his wife’s body in plastic sheeting and bundled it into the boot of his 4x4 Volvo, it was said.
The long-haul pilot then put his tearful children into the car and drove to his rented home in nearby Winkfield.
He asked his French girlfriend, Stephanie Bellemere, a BA stewardess, to look after the children before driving to a remote part of Windsor Great Park, the court heard.
There the defendant allegedly lowered Mrs Brown’s body into a large plastic crate which had been buried in a grave ‘a matter of weeks earlier’.
The spot where her body was found is near Legoland theme park and a few hundred yards from the £800,000 house that Brown had been renting.
At Reading Crown Court yesterday, Brown admitted manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility but denied murder.
Opening the case, prosecutor Graham Reeds QC said the pre-nuptial agreement Brown signed when the couple married in 1999 caused ‘continuing resentment’.
By 2007, their relationship had fallen apart and ‘divorce proceedings were, by any standard, acrimonious and bitterly contested’, he said.
The prenuptial agreement meant Brown had no claim on the ownership of Tun Cottage, the £3million marital home, even though he invested £200,000 to turn it into an upmarket bed-and-breakfast hotel.
The agreement also gave him no claim to the millions his wife had inherited when her property-developer father died. Read More
