A British Airways pilot who battered his wife to death wanted to crash a jumbo jet full of passengers and crew the day after the frenzied attack to ‘make a statement’. Robert Brown, who was due to command a flight from Heathrow to Lagos the day after his wife’s death, told a jury that he contemplated crashing the jet killing himself and everyone else on board.
The 47-year-old also said he had considered completing the journey to the Nigerian city and then hanging himself in a hotel room.
Speaking from the witness stand during his trial for murdering estranged wife Joanna, he said: ‘I didn’t want to be another husband who kills his wife and then himself and nobody cares.’ However, just hours before he was due to start his flight shift, Brown called in sick to BA’s flight operations unit, following a night of phone calls with his family – who were concerned something had happened to his wife. He was arrested after his brother Kenneth contacted police and another pilot was called out to take the flight.
Speaking at Reading Crown Court, the Scotsman said he wanted people to know how much he had been ‘harassed’ by lawyers – and so by crashing the plane and causing an atrocity it would come out in a public inquiry. Brown wept as he apologised to his wife’s relatives for battering her to death in a vicious hammer attack, which he claims he cannot remember. Slumped over in the witness stand, he held his head in his hands as he said an anguished ‘sorry’ to the family of the millionairess, who were watching from the public gallery.
Mrs Brown, 46, died in the hammer attack while her son and daughter were in a next-door room. Brown later buried her in a prepared grave in Windsor Great Park, part of the Queen’s Crown Estate.