A former British Airways pilot who brutally killed his rich wife over 13 years ago has lost his fight for freedom. Robert Brown assaulted Joanna Simpson, 46, with a claw hammer in their family home, while their two young children hid in a playroom in October 2010.
This vile act was recently featured in the ITV documentary The British Airways Killer. Brown’s challenge to a Government decision preventing his automatic release from jail was dismissed by Mr Justice Ritchie.
Convicted in 2011 and given a 26-year prison sentence, Brown argued that “political motivation” and media backlash influenced the decision to pass his case to the Parole Board. At a hearing earlier this month, his legal team maintained that the referral from Justice Secretary Alex Chalk was unlawful.
Although Brown was acquitted of murder, he confessed to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility due to an “adjustment disorder”, according to a psychiatric report. Aged 47 when sentenced, he felt wronged by a prenuptial agreement and was grappling with stress from his divorce, it was told to the judge.
Planned for release halfway through his term in November last year, pleas from Ms Simpson’s loved ones for Mr Chalk to step in halted these plans.
In October 2023, the minister used new powers to review Brown’s case with the Parole Board, an independent group that checks if prisoners can be safely let out.
Brown’s lawyers said the referral was “an obvious attempt to seek to reverse engineer justification for a decision that was in reality prompted and obtained through conscious or unconscious political bias”.
His legal team said Brown’s risk hadn’t gone up and he had been “subjected to a high-profile campaign through the media and with politicians that has sought to block his release”.
The Ministry of Justice (MOJ) didn’t agree with his claims, saying that Mr Chalk “in no way seeks to ‘go behind’ or ‘disapply’ or ‘fail to respect’ the sentencing court’s decision”.
Lawyers for the department said Mr Chalk thought Brown “would pose a significant risk of serious harm to the public if released on licence”, adding that the offender had “persistently refused to engage in the rehabilitative elements of his sentence”.
Mr Chalk’s referral, made possible through a “power to detain” rule introduced through the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, stopped Brown’s automatic release.
Ms Simpson’s mum, Diana Parkes, has before asked the Parole Board to “keep him in jail” and was given a CBE in December for helping vulnerable children suffering from domestic abuse and domestic homicide.
Brown, previously from Winkfield in Berkshire, received a 24-year sentence for manslaughter and an additional two years for obstructing a coroner in his duty.
He killed Ms Simpson’s a week before their divorce was finalised and left her body in a makeshift coffin in Windsor Great Park.
