Man reveals moment he knew brother abducted and murdered schoolgirl after he ‘couldn’t look him in the eye’
A MAN has revealed the moment he knew his brother had abducted and murdered a schoolgirl, saying "he couldn't look me in the eye".
Alix Sharkey was asked by police to speak to Stuart Campbell about 15-year-old Danielle Jones, who had vanished from her home in East Tilbury, Essex, 45 days earlier.
He was urged not to confront him in a meeting set up by cops, in the hope that Stuart would instead lead them to Danielle, reports.
Alix said of the 2001 meeting: “If I was the guy accused of doing something like this, what would I say to my brother? I’m going to say, ‘This is bulls**t. It’s outrageous’.
“If he were innocent, he would have started at exactly the same place.
“So I knew immediately. I thought, you are lying to me by omission. He couldn’t look me in the eye."
He added: "Inside 10 minutes I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt: you abducted that girl. And either you’ve got her locked up somewhere now or you’ve killed her already.”
Builder Campbell, then 44, was found guilty of Danielle's abduction and murder in December 2002 - 18 months after she rushed out of school and never returned.
Danielle was his wife’s niece. Her body has never been found and Campbell has never confessed.
But during the trial, sickening evidence of his relationship with Danielle emerged.
White stockings with Danielle’s DNA on them were found at his home.
And text messages sent from her phone after her disappearance were traced to Campbell’s house.
Campbell's history of stalking and photographing young girls was also exposed.
He was sent to Wakefield prison and for almost 20 years, his brother Alix distanced himself from his horror actions.
Now, Alix has written a book about his younger brother Stuart, revealing their bond during a brutal childhood before life took them in different directions.
Alix, 64, says: “I had to remember things in detail, put myself in the place of a frightened child watching my mother being beaten by my father, an alcoholic thug and a coward.
“I had to focus on those to show why hurting women was not unnatural to my brother."
Alix said his brother was "was constantly in and out of trouble with the law", which he believed at the time was just rascality.
But his prison terms were for abduction of a minor and sexual assault.
In 1985 Alix had helped him secure a flat in London after yet another spell in jail.
Campbell used the flat to take indecent pictures of young girls he’d preyed on outside schools, promising they could become models.
He had shown his brother’s name in magazines as proof he was legit.
And the revelations stunned Alix.
He says: “As a teenager, whenever I heard stories about Stuart bending girls’ arms behind their backs if they rejected him, he’d grunt, make some excuse or say they’d been taunting him. Or he’d deny he did it.
“We didn’t see it as an emergent problem. But with hindsight you realise it’s a pattern being established.
“When you’ve seen your father hammering your mother, repeatedly, you kind of feel slapping, pulling hair or twisting an arm is naughty but you don’t think of it as... a sinister pattern.”
Campbell does not give any answers in his letters sent from prison and Alix does not answer them.
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Does Alix still love his brother?
“How can I love him? Look what he did. I could love him, perhaps, if he confessed, if he was contrite and expressed remorse, begged for forgiveness and gave the Jones family the only thing they’ve ever asked for, which is to know, ‘What did you do with our daughter?’”
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Danielle’s parents Linda and Tony have promised not to block his parole if he reveals where their daughter is.
