We’ve been robbed of the truth
Charlotte was hurled to her death from a speedboat in 2015. Today her killer is on the run — too cowardly to face justice. Here her devastated parents say the law is helping HIM, not them
AS She arrived at the Old Bailey, Roz Wickens felt a glimmer of tentative hope pierce the debilitating grief she had been living with ever since her daughter, Charlotte, died more than two-and-a-half years earlier.
The trial of the man charged with killing her was about to start — and Roz believed she might finally learn the truth of what had happened in Charlotte’s final hours, giving some sort of closure to help her cope with her crippling loss.
The stricken look on her family liaison officer’s face as he approached her outside the court was the first sign she might not get it, and his subsequent explanation one that Roz could scarcely have anticipated.
Jack Shepherd, 30, had been charged with manslaughter by gross negligence after taking 24-year- old Charlotte on his speedboat on their first date. Drunk, he drove the vessel erratically along the Thames in the dark before handing control to Charlotte, who died when the boat hit an obstacle and capsized.
Now, rather than face justice, Roz learned he had gone on the run. And as she grappled with this devastating news, it became clear his decision to abscond was by no means the extent of his audacity.
After the court decided the trial should go ahead in his absence, Shepherd, a selfproclaimed Casanova who had bought his speedboat with the sole purpose of seducing women, kept in regular contact with his defence team.
Though in hiding, he sent messages to his solicitor which she replied to on her laptop from court, updating her client as she sat within spitting distance of the family whose lives he had destroyed.
‘I was shocked and appalled,’ says Roz, 53, a council careline operator. ‘I kept thinking: “Is this allowed?”’
Charlotte’s father Graham Brown, a civil servant, adds: ‘We were looking at each other in disbelief. he seemed to be afforded more rights being absent than if he were there.’
Nonetheless, the evidence against him was such that last month, after a four-week trial, the website designer — who has married and fathered a child since Charlotte’s death in December 2015 — was convicted in his absence and sentenced to six years.
Today, with a warrant taken out for his arrest and a global manhunt under way to find him, Shepherd is still a free man — and Roz, Graham and their two elder daughters, Vicky, 31, and Katie, 29, are left floundering for answers.
TALKING to the Mail from her home in Clacton, essex, Roz’s grief is palpable: ‘ No one can ever understand my anguish and heartache. We wanted Shepherd to be there, so he could see us grieving and get a measure of what he did.
‘And we still don’t know the truth. All we have is a tiny portion of his version of events from the witness statement that was played in court.
‘I would ask him to find it in his heart to at least tell us what happened.’
In an age of smartphones and digital surveillance, and with Shepherd going so far as to telephone his solicitors for daily updates after being charged with manslaughter, how on earth has he managed to remain a fugitive?
Charlotte Brown — Charli to her friends — had met Shepherd on a dating website a month before their ill-fated date. A sensible english literature graduate, she had only ever had one serious boyfriend, says her mother, and was more interested in her promising new job as a business development consultant than pursuing an eventful love life.
Shepherd, meanwhile, despite his successful career and well-spoken demeanour, was a serial dater who, given that he is now married with a two-year-old child, had quite probably already got his wife pregnant by the time of his date with Charlotte.
he lived on a houseboat on the Thames in West london, where his Fletcher Arrowflyte GTO speedboat, bought on Gumtree a few months earlier to ‘pull women’ — as he put it to police — was moored.
Before his date with Charlotte, he’d already taken some ten women out in it and had twice been stopped by marine police for exceeding the 12- knot limit and not wearing life jackets.
On December 8, 2015, he and Charlotte had dinner at a restaurant in The Shard, drinking two bottles of wine, before Shepherd suggested they take a taxi back to his home to go on a late-night ride on his speedboat. he also bought more wine to drink on board.
haunting video footage retrieved from Charlotte’s smartphone shows the flickering lights of the capital reflected in the murky water as they sped along at twice the 12-knot limit. She can be heard shouting over the thrum of the engine, ‘Oh my God, you’re going so fast!’
Shepherd, who grew up in Devon, where his divorced parents still live, said that after he tore past the houses of Parliament, he handed control of the 14ft boat to Charlotte. It’s a claim accepted in court, but one Roz, now divorced from Graham and married to Mark, 57, an ambulance serviceman, disputes.
‘I think Shepherd made that up to throw the scent off himself,’ she says. ‘I just don’t think Charlotte would have agreed to drive the boat. She’d never even been on the back of a motorbike, let alone in a speedboat, and she wasn’t the type to take that sort of risk.’
Roz stresses, too, that her daughter wasn’t anywhere near as intoxicated as Shepherd, who has said he has no recollection of the boat capsizing: ‘Messages she wrote to her sister that evening were coherent. It was he who was completely drunk.’
At 11.45 pm, the boat hit a submerged log shortly before Wandsworth Bridge and capsized, flinging both of them into the water.
After Shepherd shouted for help, the police marine unit found him clinging to the upturned boat, but it wasn’t until 12.10 am that rescuers located Charlotte. She was rushed to St George’s hospital in Tooting, South london, but never regained consciousness. She was pronounced dead of cold- water immersion at 1.55 am on December 9.
Still drunk, Shepherd was not able even to give police his date’s name. Roz says: ‘Apparently he was still slurring his words for hours afterwards, and police had to find out who she was from photographs on his Facebook page.’
ROZ learned of her daughter’s death at 10.45 am, when two officers turned up at her door. ‘Being told was horrendous,’ she says, her voice dropping. ‘I struggled to take in what had happened, and fainted when I went to the hospital to identify her body. It’s something I still have flashbacks about.’
Treated at first as a witness rather than a suspect, Shepherd tearfully admitted to police that neither he nor Charlotte had been wearing life jackets, that he did not tell Charlotte where the jackets were kept and ‘ did not even ask if she could swim’.
Not long after, Shepherd moved from his houseboat into a West london flat with the girl he had got pregnant — a childhood sweetheart whom he married a month after Charlotte’s death. The couple later moved to Wales, where his wife has relatives.
Shepherd’s efforts to distance himself, literally and figuratively, from the tragedy were perhaps an attempt to block out his involvement in Charlotte’s death.
Nonetheless, he admitted suffering ‘ nightmares and flashbacks’, and he struggled to find work because of his association with the case.
Charlotte’s father, meanwhile, grew increasingly convinced his daughter’s demise was more than an accident.
‘When we learned Shepherd had been drinking and speeding but that no offences had been committed, we felt utter disbelief,’ he says.
On the waterways, there is no equivalent charge to dangerous driving. Due to the complexities of the case, the investigation was passed from Wandsworth CID to Scotland Yard’s homicide and Serious Crime Command.
It wasn’t until last September that Shepherd was charged with Charlotte’s death. he denied manslaughter by gross negligence and was given unconditional bail.
But in March this year, after attending three preliminary hearings, his defiance appeared to buckle and he disappeared. his website and Facebook account were deleted, his phone discon-
nected and even contact with his mother severed.
However, Shepherd remained in communication with his lawyers and apparently told them in midMay that he was not planning to attend his trial. The Crown Prosecution Service learned this only a week before Shepherd was due before the Old Bailey — and Charlotte’s distraught parents knew nothing until July 2 — the morning the trial started.
‘ We were devastated,’ says Graham. ‘ Part of the healing process is to understand what has happened. He robbed us of that.’
Roz says that from the start of the trial, she noticed Shepherd’s solicitor typing at her laptop in court, but assumed she was taking notes. It was the third week before police told her that she had in fact been conversing with her client.
‘I was flabbergasted,’ says Roz. ‘Our family liaison officer, Gavin Seeley, told us that this contact had compromised the trial and we weren’t allowed in the court for a few hours while the judge decided if it was acceptable.’ When the Mail invited Shepherd’s solicitors to comment on the claim they had been sending messages to Shepherd from court, a spokesman said: ‘I can confirm that we were in touch with the client throughout the trial process and we informed the court of this before the trial started. This was entirely legitimate and appropriate and in no way compromised proceedings. I cannot see how it can be suggested otherwise.’
Indeed, astonishing as it might sound, they have done nothing untoward. ‘Advising a client to abscond would amount to professional misconduct,’ says Andrew Katzen, a partner at criminal law firm Hickman & Rose.
‘However, lawyers have professional duties of confidentiality to clients which prevent them revealing a client’s whereabouts in circumstances where the client wants this information to remain secret.’
As the trial continued, a portrait grew of Shepherd as a self-serving miscreant. His boat, the jury heard, exhibited ‘general deterioration’, a ‘poorly maintained’ kill cord to stop the vessel in the event of emergency, and faulty steering.
Witness Amy Warner, whom Shepherd had met through a dating app, revealed she had been uncomfortable in Shepherd’s boat because of the speed at which he drove it, and that she had asked him to ‘slow down’.
Even Shepherd’s legal team struggled to paint him as a respectable member of society. ‘Part of his team’s defence was that he had a two-year-old child to look after,’ says Roz. ‘We can’t be sure that his wife was already pregnant when Charlotte died, but it seems highly likely.’
Shepherd’s barrister, Stephen vullo QC, said ‘cowardice’ meant Shepherd simply couldn’t face seeing Charlotte’s family from the dock — an excuse that Roz finds hard to swallow. ‘ He had already seen us at earlier hearings so it doesn’t make sense,’ she says.
‘Before sentencing, his defence handed the judge a four-page letter from him. We weren’t allowed to see the letter but I suspect it said something to the effect of: “Please don’t give me a bad sentence because I’m already suffering.”’
If that was the case, the judge wasn’t swayed, declaring that Shepherd had a ‘totally cavalier attitude to safety’, that he ‘should never have allowed Charlotte to drive the boat at any time’ and ‘ must have known the river potentially contained hazards’.
Graham considers Shepherd’s sentence ‘fair and reasonable’.
Roz, determined her daughter should not have died in vain, is lobbying the Government for the introduction of ‘Charlotte’s Law’, which would force pleasure boats to be subject to approved safety measures. The family posted a petition on the Government website at the weekend calling for the introduction of speed and drink- drive limits, compulsory wearing of life jackets jackets, safety training and vessel safety standards on waterways.
‘The police want this legislation introduced because the waterways aren’t policeable,’ she says. ‘There are minimal bylaws and manslaughter through gross negligence — and nothing in between.’
She says she has yet to hear a shred of remorse from Shepherd. ‘The police are in contact with his mum and his wife, who has said she had a phone call from him the day before the trial but hasn’t spoken to him since. That’s all we know.’
even now that he is a convicted man, his solicitors are not obliged to disclose information that might lead to his capture.
‘A lawyer’s obligation to maintain confidentiality will almost always override any sense of civic duty in assisting the police,’ says Katzen.
How long Shepherd will manage to stay hidden remains to be seen.
Graham Brown beseeches anyone with information that could lead to his capture to contact the police. ‘ Our beautiful daughter’s life has been taken by the actions of a selfish, negligent man,’ he says. ‘Jack Shepherd needs to be brought back to justice and atone for what he has done.’