Boat killer: ‘I was planning to wed first date victim’
SPEEDBOAT killer Jack Shepherd claims he had thought of marrying his victim Charlotte Brown and even starting a family with her.
The self-confessed womaniser was only on his first date with the 24-year-old when she drowned after he took her out for a drunken ride on the Thames in 2015.
Shepherd went on the run when his trial was due to start and was convicted of manslaughter in his absence.
The 31-year-old dramatically surrendered in Tbilisi, Georgia, last month.
Speaking from jail in Georgia, Shepherd, who wed his long-term girlfriend just two months after Charlotte’s death and had entertained up to 10 other women on his badly maintained boat, has now claimed he was “serious” about her.
Reacting to his claims yesterday, Charlotte’s father Graham Brown, 55, said his daughter was “too smart” to ever have a serious relationship with him.
In what some will consider a cynical bid to downplay her client’s reputation as an adulterous Casanova, Shepherd’s celebrity lawyer Mariam Kublashvili said: “He said to me ‘I wanted a future with this girl, a family and maybe she will be my wife’.
“He said it was new and was the first date but ‘we had communication before and I saw it as serious’. He said: ‘We had feelings for each other and then she died’.”
Despite previously saying he was too scared to face them in court, Shepherd, 31, also wants to meet Charlotte’s devastated parents Roz Wickens, 53, and Graham, in a bid to prove his innocence to them – and would even take a lie detector test.
Miss Kublashvili, a former model who starred on the Georgian version of Strictly Come Dancing, said: “If Charlotte’s family call, he will answer it. I asked him
CLAIMS: Lawyer Mariam Kublashvili
if he would be willing to meet her family and he said ‘yes’. He wants to look in their eyes and he wants them to understand and for him to tell them how sorry he is. He wants to prove that he is innocent and he had no hand in their daughter’s death.” She added: “I asked him if he was ready to speak to psychologists and to take a lie detector test and he said ‘yes, absolutely’.” Reacting to Shepherd’s comments, Graham, of Sidcup, Kent, said: “Jack Shepherd was so serious about my daughter that he went out and married another woman.
“My daughter would have soon got the measure of him. It was a first date, my daughter had been in a long-term relationship for four years. She was too smart and would have seen through him. “He needs to come back and serve his sentence and represent himself at his appeal, rather than try to frustrate the British legal system from Georgia.
“He’s trying everything to avoid the fact he’s got a six-year sentence waiting for him in the UK. He has put up barriers to frustrate the legal process. I’ll ask the British public to make up their own minds from the facts of the case.” Refusing to accept an apology from him, Mr Brown said: “My view is that he could have apologised at the trial. That’s where he should have been saying all these things.
“But he chose to abscond. That was his decision and that was the time to apologise. I don’t welcome his apology now.
“The fact that he married two months after the death of my daughter; that he absconded to Georgia and hasn’t seen his wife and baby for the best part of a year... I’ll leave the public to draw their conclusion.”
Speaking about Shepherd staying in Georgia for the next nine months, Mr Brown said: “Yes, it could be nine months. But I understand that this won’t be taken from his sentence in the UK.”
The web designer, who is now hoping to fight extradition and serve his sentence for Charlotte’s manslaughter in Georgia, fled there shortly after his wife threw him out of the family home for cheating on her.
He spent 10 months there, living in basic accommodation, before handing himself in to police on January 23, after becoming “afraid he would be seized like an animal” according to his lawyer.
The judiciary in Tbilisi is under pressure to send him back to Britain to serve his sentence but Shepherd has blocked attempts to extradite him quickly.
Police in the UK also want to speak to him in relation to claims that he glassed a barman with a bottle at a pub in Devon.