Speedboat killer freed
Out after just five years... and met with a gushing invitation from the glamorous lawyer he hired on the run in Georgia
SPEEDBOAT killer Jack Shepherd has been released from prison – and invited back to Georgia where ‘people love you’.
On his first day of freedom, the onetime fugitive who fled justice was told by his glamorous lawyer in the former Soviet state that he was ‘a good man’.
Shepherd, 36, was freed halfway through a ten-year sentence for killing Charlotte Brown in his boat and later attacking a barman. Ms Brown, 24, died in December 2015 when self- styled ‘Captain Jack’ Shepherd was showing off on their first date by drunkenly zooming up the Thames in the defective craft he had bought to ‘pull girls’.
On Tuesday, he was whisked out of HMP Dovegate, a category-B jail in Staffordshire, exactly five years after the Daily Mail flushed him out of his hideaway in Georgia.
But yesterday his high-profile lawyer there, Mariam Kublashvili, 38, wrote a nauseating message of congratulations to her client. ‘Dear Jack, I’m so happy to hear you are a free man,’ she said. ‘You paid a very high price, but did so with dignity and your head held high.
‘You were vilified in Britain and I am afraid you will always be known as “the speedboat killer”, but you are very welcome to return to Georgia, where you have friends who would welcome you.
‘One youthful mistake does not have to define you for the rest of your life.’
Released under strict licence conditions, Shepherd would have to seek permission to travel abroad.
Ms Brown’s anguished family are devastated at his release. Her mother Roz Wickens said Shepherd ‘will never know or fully
‘You were vilified in Britain’
understand the true devastation he has caused me and my family’, while her father Graham Brown said last week: ‘In my mind, he murdered my daughter and should be doing a proper life sentence.’
Both had demanded Shepherd reveal what really happened on the night Ms Brown died before being released.
After wining and dining the business consultant in a restaurant at the Shard, Shepherd took her out in his speedboat. When he flipped the 14ft craft, she was thrown into the icy waters in darkness.
Rather than explain his actions, cowardly Shepherd went on the run to Georgia, and was eventually tried in absence in July 2018 – when he was sentenced to six years in prison.
The Mail launched an investigation to find him and successfully did so in January 2019. He was extradited back to Britain from Georgia in April of that year.
Months later, Shepherd was given a further four years for a vicious ‘glassing’ attack on a barman at a Devon hotel.
Last night a Ministry of Justice spokesman said: ‘Offenders released on licence are kept under close supervision and subject to strict conditions for the remainder of their sentence. They face recall to prison if they breach them.’