Mark Bridger: ‘Fantasist’ killer who abducted April Jones

Picture above from Facebook. Warning: You may find details in this report distressing.

Mark Bridger worked hard in the witness box – tearful at times, combative at others – to try to persuade the jury that the death of April Jones had been the result merely of a drunken car accident. The jury of nine women and three men took little time to reject such a blatant lie.

April Jones, the youngest of Paul and Coral Jones’ children, was abducted from the Bryn-y-gog estate in Machynlleth shortly after 7pm on Monday 1 October 2012.

April had been for a swim at the local leisure centre earlier that evening, returned home with her mother Coral, had spaghetti on toast, watched her favourite Disney film Tangle, then pestered her parents to go out.

“She had a little paddy and I suppose we just gave in,” recalled her father Paul in a statement read out to court. “She’s quite stubborn once she gets something in her mind.”

A seven-year-old friend, who was out playing with April at the time, remembered seeing her chatting to a man next to a Land Rover.

As she would later tell the police in a video interview: “She got into the car. The man didn’t put her in the car but she did. She wasn’t crying, she was happy. She got in the back of the van and it just drove off.”

Bridger drove her out of Machynlleth. She would never be seen again.

Read more: Mark Bridger given life for April Jones murder

Her mother’s harrowing 999 call, made minutes later at 7.29pm, would trigger what has been described as the biggest search operation in British policing history.

The town of Machynlleth, with its population of just 2,000, was transformed overnight as hundreds of volunteers poured into the surrounding countryside in a desperate hunt for the five-year-old.

The RAF, coastguard, mountain rescue, fire service and specialist police units were mobilised from across Wales. They trawled the Dyfi river and sent teams into the old mineshafts and quarries in the hills beyond. The searches continued for months, but to no avail.

It was less than 24 hours after April disappeared that the police arrested Mark Bridger. He was walking along a road just outside Machynlleth, not far from the river.

He’d been seen on April’s estate the previous evening, having attended a parent’s evening at the local primary school where two of his children are pupils. His (left-hand drive) Land Rover appeared to match the one reported at the scene.

Read more: ‘How will we ever get over it?’ – April Jones’s mother

‘Drunken panic’

Bridger would concoct a story that he had accidentally run April over and in a drunken panic, fled with her body from the scene.

He gave an account of driving, adrenalin-fuelled, around Machynlleth before being stricken with memory loss as to what happened next.

“I don’t remember a lot after giving my final mouth to mouth to April,” he said.

But as Bridger persisted with his story throughout hours of police interviews, forensic teams would soon uncover vital evidence.

They found traces of April’s blood beneath the carpet in his living room and, among other places, on the shower curtain in his bathroom. Above his woodburning stove they found a charred boning knife and in the fireplace fragments of what they believed was a child’s skull.

His lies were beginning to unravel, even on unrelated matters. He had told the police that his background was in the military, that he’d been posted to Mostar, even been trained by an SAS unit in Burma, and employed as a mercenary in Afghanistan and Cuba.

Yet after checking military records it would soon turn out to be, in the words of prosecuting counsel Elwen Evans QC, a “complex web of lies”.

In reality, Bridger had drifted from job to job: welder, driver, slaughterman, lifeguard, builder, but never a soldier. Originally from Carshalton in Surrey, he moved to Wales in his twenties, to escape what he referred to as “major arguments” with his family.

My view is that Mark Bridger is an evil and manipulative individual. Detective Supt Andy John

He left a girlfriend and young son behind, the first of many failed relationships. He would eventually have six children from four separate relationships (the eldest now in his late 20s, the youngest still at primary school in Machynlleth).

On Facebook, following his arrest, one former partner would post: “To all the people who need to get their facts straight I have one child to Mr Bridger 24 years ago not seen or heard from his since !!!!”. One witness who gave evidence during the trial described him as “charismatic”.

Whatever persona Mark Bridger tried to cultivate for himself, a far more sinister character would soon emerge as the police delved into his personal life. On his computer they would soon discover image after image of the graphic sexual abuse and rape of young children, carefully filed in designated folders.

He had used search phrases such as “naked young five year old girls”, “nudism five year old” and “France British schoolgirl raped and murdered”. It was, said the prosecution, an “all too clear an insight into his interests and mindset”.

Facebook pictures

There were pictures of April Jones on his computer, as well as many other local girls from the area, images harvested off Facebook.

As one police officer involved in the case told Channel 4 News, it is thought he was “sequencing” the images, viewing a graphic sexual abuse image next to a Facebook photo of a girl he knew. This revelation, in particular, has compounded the distress of many in Machynlleth.

One father whose young children regularly came into contact with Mark Bridger told Channel 4 News: “I feel absolutely sick. When I found out it was him, things started plotting in my head. Has he touched them? Has he taken photos? My children have been interviewed by the police. From a parent’s point of view, it’s been really difficult. It’s been the worst six to eight months of our lives.”

The police are convinced Bridger’s motivation in abducting April Jones that night was sexual.

Detective Superintendent Andy John, leading the investigation for Dyfed Powys Police, believes it was only a matter of time before he selected a child: “I do not believe that April Jones was a specific target. I believe that on the night in question April Jones was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

It’s thought Bridger murdered her in his rented cottage in Ceinws, a few miles from Machynlleth, within hours of abducting her, in the most horrific manner.

“Based on the findings in the house and particularly the remains, we believe April may well have been dismembered in the house, and then parts of her remains may have been disposed of at various locations,” said Detective Superintendent John.

Superintendent Ian John, closely involved in the search operation, has told Channel 4 News that he thinks it unlikely that April’s body was placed in the river: “I think if he had put her in the river we would have had a very good chance of finding her, even though the river was in flood at the time. All of the experts were telling us that the chances of a body getting snagged or coming back on the tide was quite high.”

So where did Mark Bridger leave April Jones? There is always a possibility, says Ian John, that “there’s a shallow grave out there somewhere or a pre-prepared grave… I think he will have wrapped her in some kind of material which would have frustrated our efforts to gain scent and I believe he has possibly buried that in a location that we haven’t found.”

The question now is whether the guilty verdicts will prompt April Jones’s murderer, Mark Bridger, to finally come clean and allow the five-year-old’s parents a chance to recover her remains.