I still cry every single day I can’t sleep. I don’t eat. Everywhere I look in the house I see my little April
The murdered five-year-old’s parents give a searing account of their grief
APRIL Jones treasured her small pink bicycle. She had cerebral palsy and the pain she suffered made walking difficult. So the bike came to represent her freedom. Actually, it liberated her. ‘She was a bright little button, full of mischief and energy; lovable, bubbly; a little devil or diawl bach as they say in Welsh,’ her father Paul recalls. ‘She’d dance in puddles in her pink wellies; she’d slide downstairs on a sleeping bag. As soon as she woke up in the morning, boing! she was off.
‘We used to walk up the hill together and take a picnic. Then, when April got tired, her left foot would drag and I’d carry her on my shoulders.
‘But she was a happy girl, even when she was in pain. And she was full-on, always chit-chatting about her day and singing. She used to love wearing jeans, but all of a sudden she went all pink and girly. We bought her a little pink bike which she loved, and when she got the hang of riding it, the whole world opened up for her.’
Poignantly, it was this bike that April was riding on October 1, 2012, the day paedophile Mark Bridger snatched her. The bike that had symbolised April’s independence came to embody her tragedy. April went out on it and never came back.
Paul and his wife Coral have now disposed of it, so painful were the memories. Now, in their first in- depth interview, they talk about the raw anguish they endure daily. ‘Some of April’s things we’ll always keep,’ says Paul. ‘Her Jack and Jill house, her favourite teddies; the cuddly dolphin she won at a theme park. But we didn’t want the bike. All the happy memories we had of it were obliterated when she went missing.’
It i s now eight months since Bridger, a pathological liar and paedophile, was sentenced to a whole life term in prison for the abduction and murder of five-year-old April.
The crime united the public in revulsion and shock. Bridger, it emerged, was obsessed with violent child pornography.
He hoarded 400 disgusting images on his computer and watched a horrific rape scene in a film before killing April.
Bridger’s depravity and evil were matched by his duplicity: he failed to admit to his crime, lying that he had killed April by running her over in his car. He has also steadfastly refused to say what he did with her body. As a result, Paul and Coral have been denied the scant solace of burying their little girl.
‘Mark Bridger is behind bars, but we are trapped in our own prison, too,’ says Coral. ‘We’ll carry our pain for the rest of our lives. We’ll never be free from it.
‘I cry every day. I don’t sleep. Sometimes I don’t eat for three days at a time. The weight has fallen off me. I’ve lost two-and-a-half stone since April went. On the blackest days I say, “The cloud has come” and I don’t want to live any more.
‘It’s only Paul and our other two children that keep me here. Everywhere I look in the house, there’s something of April’s: bobbles for her ponytail with strands of her hair still in them; her crayons, her books, her teddies.
‘But she is gone. And he still has life: three meals a day. He’s fed and watered. ‘Killing him would be too easy, though: I want him to suffer pain as we do; as our family does, as our town does.
‘He has taken our child, and yet for six months I couldn’t believe April was never coming back. I used to leave the back door open all night, just in case she came home.
‘And there are still days when I put out her little pink dish at mealtimes and Paul has to remind me, “It’s only the four of us now”.
‘It was almost a year before we were allowed to bury the tiny fragments of bone and ash that were the only bits of April police recovered from Bridger’s house, and now I have so much anger in me I don’t know where it comes from. Sometimes it just flies out.
‘There are no words to describe him. He’s the most evil coward. He has no morals of any sort.
‘I think he believes he has won some form of victory by withholding the truth about what he did to April. The only thing left to him is to play these mind games with us. But nothing can be worse than what we imagine he did.’ Her voice trails off.
‘He took April,’ adds Paul. ‘He killed her, then destroyed her body. It was so cruel, so inhumane; there was something worse than animalistic about it. We don’t think we’ll ever find her remains or know exactly what happened to her.
‘So I try not to think back, because if I do, I find myself spiralling downwards until I hit rock bottom. I try instead to look back on happy memories.’
There are other constructive moves Coral, 42, and Paul, 45 are making to keep April’s memory alive. They’re campaigning to purge the internet of child porn.
ALREADY they have met the British prime minister David Cameron and they hope to institute April’s Law, legislation to prevent depraved images and videos coming up on any internet search engines. They are also supporting campaigns to block online porn. Two months ago, Google agreed to introduce changes which will prevent indecent images from appearing in response to more than 100,000 word searches.
‘We know that Mark Bridger keyed in such words as “naked five-year-olds” to search for images,’ says Paul.
‘He downloaded indecent images of children and they fed his obsession. He sourced photos of children that should never be accessible online because they’re an open invitation to paedophiles and perverts.
‘I believe these images were partially responsible for what happened to April, so they need to be eradicated. Full stop. The internet search engines are the weak link. They should all be compelled to stop facilitating this. That’s why we’re campaigning in April’s memory. Hundreds of thousands of parents have pledged to support us.’
Daily, however, they must live with the ineradicable knowledge that April died horrifically at the hands of a pervert who lived among them, in a village just a few miles from their own tight-knit community in Wales.
Coral and Paul have two other children, Jazmin, 18, and Harley, 12, both of whom felt a protective love for the baby sister who was born seven weeks prematurely, weighing just 4lb 2oz, on April 4, 2007.
April fought for her life as a tiny baby — she spent two weeks in intensive care — and cerebral palsy affected her left side. ‘She wore a special suit, very tight, and boots to correct the misaligned bones,’ says Paul.
It is Paul who talks through the events of the last morning he and Coral ever spent with April. ‘I got up at 6.30 to walk our springer spaniels Autumn and Storm. Then, at about 7.45am, I called April,’ he remembers. ‘She was lying asleep snuggled up with her teddies and she stirred, brighteyed, and greeted me with a smile.’
He adds: ‘I popped her into our bed with Coral and brought them both breakfast, as I often did. Then Coral helped April into her little suit.
‘We had a routine. April would cycle round the back of the house, then we’d meet at the gable end and I’d take her to school. I kissed her that morning then wheeled her bike back home as usual.’
Coral and Paul then met April’s teacher at a parents’ meeting after school. ‘We were really chuffed because she was coming along a treat,’ says Coral. ‘She was speaking fluently in Wellsh; the teacher showed us her little
drawings, her work. She said she was proud of how well she was doing.’
The evening went on happily. Coral took April to a swimming lesson. Back home, Paul had made April and a friend spaghetti hoops on toast for tea before letting them watch a bit of April’s favourite Disney film, Tangled.
Then April asked if she could take her friend back home. ‘She lived about 200 metres from our front door,’ Paul remembers. ‘April took her bike. We said, “Come straight back”. It was 7pm; nearly bedtime. Fifteen minutes passed and April hadn’t come back, so we sent Harley to get her.’
‘Then the nightmare began,’ says Coral, her voice dull with grief.
Paul continues: ‘Harley came back screaming. It was an awful, primal scream and it made every hair on my body stand on end. I can still hear it. His face was contorted with pain. He shouted, “She’s been taken”. Then he fell on to his knees.
‘I tried to make sense of it. Harley said April’s friend had told him she’d got into a van. We reckon she’d only been gone minutes.
‘We phoned the police and a friend put a message on Facebook saying what had happened.
‘By 7.30pm there were 20 people outside our house. By 8pm there were 50 and by 9pm the whole green was covered in people. They’d all come to help search.’
PAUL and Coral cast around for words to encompass the sheer scale of their panic and fear. ‘You feel as if you’re out of your body looking down on yourself,’ says Coral.
‘People are running round, talking, but you can’t think straight. Nothing is normal.
‘That night I went out with a neighbour, a good friend of Paul’s, and we searched. We drove down side roads; we knocked on car windows, we upturned bins. We even went into graveyards.’ Paul manned the phones and waited at home, pacing at the f ront gate, i n the desperate hope that April might reappear.
Sleep eluded them for days. Coral made a public plea for help and information bringing volunteers flooding into town to join the professional search. The hunt for little April was the biggest in UK police history.
‘We met dog handlers on their hands and knees sifting through mud,’ says Paul. ‘We had police, lifeboats, mountain rescue; all such lovely people. It gave us hope for humanity.’
Fifteen villages were scoured. Farmland and woods were combed. The search went on for six months but no trace of April was found.
Meanwhile, on October 8, four days after her disappearance, Bridger, 47, a father- of- six who lived in a nearby village, was charged with abduction and murder. Police had arrested him the day after April disappeared, while he was out walking, and had held him for questioning.
‘The police told us they’d found April’s blood, quite a bit of it, in front of his fireplace. There were droplets of her blood splattered in the bathroom and on his washing machine.
‘I asked, “What quantity of blood?” and they said, “A substantial amount”,’ remembers Paul.
‘That was the hardest thing. It was evidence that she had gone. I went upstairs and cried for eight hours.’
Coral then broke the news to their other children: ‘I had to say their sister wasn’t coming home; that Mark Bridger had killed her.
‘Jazmin shared a bedroom with April. She was distraught. And Harley let out such a scream. He howled. Since then, he’s hardly left my side.’
The scale and scope of the family’s grief, their loss and horror, is unimagi- nable. Yet Coral and Paul summoned every vestige of their strength and carried on.
They faced the world with quiet dignity and when Bridger’s trial began last April they resolved to attend every day. ‘I wanted him [Bridger] to know I was there,’ says Coral. ‘I wanted to make sure April had justice.
‘I didn’t cry. I didn’t want him to see me cry. We do all our crying in private. I didn’t want him to have the satisfaction of knowing what he’d done to me.
‘I didn’t want him to think he had one over on me. I wanted to stare him out. I wanted my eyes to burn into his skull. There were times when I felt sick. Some of the images he had looked at were so gross that they turned the screen away from us in court so we couldn’t see them.
‘But I didn’t go out; only when he called my daughter “little April”. That was when I had to walk out. He had no right to call her that!’ Her sudden anger flares.
‘We had to be there for April,’ adds Paul. ‘We’d made a pledge to her to see the trial through to the end no matter how much pain it caused. We had to be seen to be sitting there for her.’
BUT the jury saw through Bridger’s lies. He was given Britain’s severest punishment available; a rare whole life sentence. ‘There’s comfort in knowing he’ll never come out,’ says Coral.
Bridger has, however, still managed to inflict further pain on the couple. A month ago, he declared his intention to appeal against his sentence.
‘I couldn’t believe it,’ says Coral. ‘We were just trying to restore some normality into our lives and it felt as if he was taunting us.’
Then, earlier this month — just 11 days before the hearing was due to take place — Bridger dropped his application to appeal. Coral was at the village school April attended, helping children in the remedial class, when the news came through.
‘I remember shouting, “Yes!” I felt a surge of relief,’ she says. ‘It was as if a lead weight had been lifted. He will come out of prison in his coffin.’
Coral and Paul led contented, ordinary lives until unspeakable tragedy all but destroyed them.
Coral had worked as a cook, then a machinist with Laura Ashley before she had children. Paul used to help his parents run their hardware store.
Today neither works. Coral suffers from depression, agoraphobia and panic attacks. She never leaves the house without Paul, who has Stargardt’s Disease — degenerative and irreversible sight loss — which has accelerated since April’s death. He is now registered blind.
They are a loving, mutually dependent couple; loss has drawn them closer. And they know their mourning will never end. They survive by trying to obliterate Bridger and the atrocities he perpetrated from their memory.
‘I’ve made up my mind not to think about him. It’s giving him something, and I don’t want to do that,’ says Paul. ‘If you go back, it will wreck you. So you go forward; you try to be constructive. This is why we support any moves to eradicate the sort of awful images that fuelled Bridger’s crime from the internet.
‘Our grieving will never end. As our other children grow and pass milestones April will never reach, it gets worse. But if one child can be saved from abuse or worse some good will have come from this evil. And that is the best we can ever hope for.’