Our daughter Jade’s murderer is still terrorising us with cruel behaviour – thank God new laws are coming in to stop him
DEVASTATED parents Karen Robinson and Paul Ward have faced years of torment at the hands of their daughter’s killer.
They watched helplessly as evil Russell Marsh controlled their daughter Jade.
And a week after she left him, the brute murdered her while their four sons slept in the next room.
Just as the family began to piece together the remnants of their broken lives, sick Marsh began exploiting a legal loophole to control Jade’s children from behind bars.
Killers keep parental rights over their kids, allowing them to drag families through the courts by demanding school reports, pictures and medical records. They can even block passports.
Today that loophole is a step closer to being closed after The Sun got behind the family’s campaign.
Justice Secretary Alex Chalk backed our call in the strongest signal yet that the law will change.
Last night Jade’s dad Paul said: “We are blown away by this news. We feel very humbled.
“Jade would have been so proud. We just don’t want other families to go through what we’ve faced.
“We’re so grateful to The Sun for getting involved.”
The family have been to hell and back since Marsh brutally killed Jade at her mum Karen’s home in Shotton, Flintshire, in August 2021.
After sitting through hours of courtroom lies as her daughter Jade’s jealous ex tried to deny her murder, Karen, 52 will never forget the sight of her daughter’s bloodied feet.
‘I didn’t get to hold her hand or stroke her cheek’
Struggling to fight back tears, she says: “Jade’s injuries were shown to the jury and were heavily pixelated but there was one photo where I could see the bottom of her feet, where she’d walked through her own blood. That really got to me.”
Marsh was jailed for 25 years but retained parental rights over the couple’s four boys — demanding Jade’s family hand over recent pictures and school attendance reports.
Musician Paul, 56, and Karen, 52, said Marsh has hung “like a spectre over our lives.”
Karen knows her 27-year-old daughter suffered a terrifying, brutal death as Marsh slashed, stabbed and strangled her. But almost two years on she still tries to convince herself that her daughter was unconscious through the attack.
She says: “The boys heard three bangs from their mum’s room, and Jade didn’t have loads of defence wounds, so I try to tell myself she was unconscious through lots of the attack.
“But I know the reality. She was pinned down by March and she must have been so frightened.
“She used to have nightmares about being stabbed to death and leaving her children. Marsh knew that was her worst fear. Her last thoughts would have been for her boys who were everything to her.”
Karen and Paul have revealed how Marsh, now 30, heaped even more misery on the family by demanding a second autopsy on Jade, which delayed her burial by five weeks and denied them the chance of holding their daughter one last time.
Karen says: “At first we couldn’t touch her body because of police protocol and then Marsh demanded a second autopsy.
“Nature took its course and the undertaker told us that we couldn’t wash Jade’s hair or put her make-up on or even dress her in her own clothes because she was so fragile.
“I didn’t get to hold her hand — Jade had beautiful hands — and stroke her cheek and tell her it was OK because ‘Mummy is here now’.
“We just wanted to pick her up and take her home. Marsh stopped me from having my last hug with my little girl.
“A few days after Jade’s death we were told he still had full parental rights and we were gobsmacked.
“My daughter lost her rights. He made sure that her rights to those boys were gone so it’s difficult to understand why he can sit in a prison cell and still pull the strings.
“He can’t control Jade anymore, so he wants to control the boys and her family.”
Jade’s four children are living with her relatives who are keen to take them on holiday to Gran Canaria to help them get over their trauma, but Karen claims Marsh is dragging his feet on signing their passports. He controlled Jade throughout their ten-year relationship which started when Jade accidentally fell pregnant at 16.
Her dad Paul says: “They’d only been going out a couple of weeks after meeting at a party before they split up and Jade didn’t want to tell him about the pregnancy because he’d been acting weird since she ended it.”
Karen adds: “He creeped Jade out because he was driving up and down our street for hours. Eventually she told me to tell him never to knock on the door again.
“But after she had their first child, she felt differently and called Marsh to tell him he was a dad and they got together.”
Both Karen and Paul say they believed Marsh was an “odd, weird” character who “wasn’t fond of our family because he thought we were common”, but said they did not notice signs of cohesive control until the couple married in March 2019.
Paul recalls: “Jade didn’t even look happy on her wedding day. I don’t think she wanted to get married.
“It was put on her because Marsh told the kids that mummy and daddy were getting married before he asked Jade. The children were excited and she wouldn’t have wanted to let them down because they were her life.
“I remember after the ceremony, Marsh turned to Jade and said, ‘Now you’re mine’. That means something different now.”
Karen’s first major red flag came when her daughter said power plant worker Marsh pretended to go to work one day but Jade found him hiding behind their curtains at home. Karen says: “When I look back Marsh had been controlling since the start, buying Jade clothes and jewellery she never wanted and didn’t like. I think he wanted to make her something she wasn’t.
‘The kids have lost a mum in a million’
“When she told me he’d been hiding behind the curtains I was worried and asked her if she thought the boys were safe. She said he would never hurt the boys but then turned her back on me to go into the kitchen.
“I wish I’d followed her and asked her what she meant by that.”
Jade and Marsh had split several times before her murder, which the trial judge labelled “savage and merciless.” On the night she was killed, Jade was staying at her mum’s house while Karen cared for her elderly mother.
Marsh was meant to be at work but sneaked away by telling his employers his brother was in hospital after a heroin overdose.
When three of Jade’s friends left the house, Marsh let himself in with a key he’d had copied and attacked Jade in the box room while their children slept in the room next door. He covered her body with piles of clothes.
Karen remembers: “That same night I was walking mum’s dog and passed the house and heard Jade laughing. I thought, ‘I haven’t heard that laugh in a long time’.
“I popped in and Jade threw out her arms, saying, ‘I’m free’. She was so happy. The next day I was at my mum’s when the phone rang and a friend told me there were loads of police outside my house, which was only a few streets away.
“I went straight round and, as I got near, I could hear a scream and thought, ‘That sounds like my sister Laverne’.
“As I rounded the corner Laverne saw me and fell to the floor. I just knew then.”
In court, Jade’s family were taunted by Marsh as he rattled out a bizarre string of excuses for the killing which included claims she died in a sex game gone wrong.
Two of their four young children, who were all under ten at the time, had to give evidence.
Now they face going back and forward to family courts for hearings every time Marsh demands details about his children.
Karen said: “It’s just all so wrong. We’ve been told relatives looking after the boys could apply for special guardianship which gives them more autonomy over the kids, but it means Marsh could deal with us direct and we don’t want letters or contact with him.
“Every day I look at those boys and think, how could someone deny them a mother and father?
“They have lost a mum in a million and she’s all they talk about. When we go to see Jade’s grave we sit and we talk about her and they blow her kisses. They never ask about Marsh.
“To us, he stopped having any rights as a parent the day he killed our daughter.”