Missing Lisa: Judge ends probe into former boyfriend
No charges are brought four years after she disappeared
A SPANISH judge has officially closed an investigation into a man who was suspected of being involved in the disappearance of a missing Scot.
Lisa Brown’s ex-boyfriend Simon Corner was at the centre of a murder investigation after the mother of one went missing nearly four years ago.
Miss Brown’s family had been told no charges were to be brought against him, but last year judges in Spain’s highest court ordered that the probe be reopened. Judge Javier Garcia Ramila did so but then decided not to prosecute Mr Corner, and he has now closed his investigation.
Miss Brown, 32, originally from Alexandria, Dunbartonshire, was reported missing in November 2015 from her home in Guadiaro, near Gibraltar, after failing to collect her son Marco from school.
She had lived in Spain since the age of 18 and shared her home on and off with Corner. Police said a ‘ violent episode’ had taken place there.
Liverpool-born Corner, 37, was put under investigation on suspicion of homicide or unlawful detention. Four British men and a woman faced investigation on suspicion of obstruction of justice but their bail conditions were lifted.
State prosecutors halted the court investigation in April 2017 because it was felt there was insufficient evidence to warrant a trial. But, in an eleventh-hour change of heart, the same lawyers helped secure the reopening of the case by supporting the appeals of Miss Brown’s family.
Yesterday it emerged that Miss Brown’s ex partner Tony Tomillero, father to their 12-year-old son Marco, has not tried to overturn the latest decision with a court in Cadiz, meaning all avenues of appeal have been exhausted.
Mr Garcia Ramila announced he is formally concluding his probe in a short three-page ruling sent to Corner’s lawyers and the others being investigated, as well as Mr Tomillero’s lawyer.
The announcement will have no bearing on the long-running Civil Guard investigation, which will continue. A £ 100,000 reward offered by Miss Brown’s family in 2017 f or i nformation on her whereabouts still stands.
Corner, who was sentenced to three months in prison in Gibraltar in 2014 for possessing an offensive weapon following an altercation, had to be held on two European Arrest Warrants during the long-running court probe.
He vanished after being held in Denmark in April 2016. He was arrested a second time at Heathrow Airport and extradited to Spain in April 2018 before being told days later that the case against him was being shelved. Evidence of a witness living near Miss Brown, who said she saw the missing Scot two days after police believe she was killed, was key to the judge’s initial decision to ‘freeze’ his investigation.
He reopened his probe so he could take into account evidence from a mobile phone police are thought to have recovered from a harbour in Copenhagen following Corner’s 2016 arrest there.
Her family have never wavered in their view that Corner, who insists he has done nothing wrong, has something to answer for.
Speaking in March after the death of Lisa’s mother, Catherine Brown, 74, her brother, Craig Douglas, said: ‘The family is still committed, even more so with my mother’s passing, to getting justice for Lisa.’
‘Getting justice for Lisa’