April Jones was five when she was abducted and murdered by Mark Bridger
The father of April Jones has forgotten her name and her murder after being left brain damaged by illness, his wife has revealed.
Paul Jones, 49, from Powys in Mid Wales, ‘broke down’ when he was forced to re-live what happened to five-year-old April, six years ago.
Mr Jones suffered memory loss due to the trauma of a brain condition called encephalitis.
His wife Coral, 46, April’s mother, told the Sunday People: ‘It was an awful conversation because he was so emotional and it was so hard for me to speak about it.
‘I couldn’t go on, I just couldn’t tell him any more. It was like reliving it all over again.’
April was abducted and killed by paedophile Mark Bridger in October 2012.
Bridger was convicted of her murder and jailed for life after the youngster’s blood and 17 fragments of skull were discovered in his house, Ceinws, not far from Machynlleth, where April lived with her family.
Mr Jones was training for a triathlon to raise money for the Missing People charity when he developed a cold sore and started to develop flu-like symptoms.
Doctors took two weeks to diagnose encephalitis, which leads to the brain swelling.
His wife said the condition has led to substantial memory loss in her husband and he can no longer recall events from the past decade.
She said: ‘Paul is so frustrated by his condition and that fills me with fear. He asked, ”What happened to April?”
‘I had to tell him she was no longer with us and that she’d been killed.
‘He broke down.’
Coral and Paul Jones with their son Harley at April’s funeral. He broke down when she told him what had happened to their daughter
Coral Jones said she has held back the details of what happened so as not to upset her husband
‘He’s been through enough. Learning the awful details of how April died once is horrendous enough. He loved her so much I can’t let him go through that again.
‘I don’t know what he’d do if he knew the truth of what had happened to our little girl. Yet I know everything could come flooding back further down the line and I worry it will drive him even deeper depression.
‘How much more can my family take? I’ve already lost my daughter and now I have lost my soulmate and my rock and I feel so alone.
‘Paul is the only person who can truly understand the pain I have felt over losing April. People said we’d split after she died but we beat the odds and it was us against the world.’
Mr Jones recognised their children Jazmin, now 22, and Harley, 16, but has forgotten events such as their wedding and family holidays.
‘He used to love walking his dogs on the hills around Machynlleth. This gave him so much comfort after April was taken.
When Paul Jones used to walk in the hills near their home he used to tie a ribbon a gate in her memory, said Mrs Jones
Mark Bridger (left) watched porn and rape scene on television before abducting April, whose disappearance led to a massive hunt (right)
‘For a long time, he’d walk up into the hills every day and tie a pink ribbon around a gate in her memory.
‘But now, he wouldn’t even know how to get there. His memory is so bad that he would be lost as soon as he walked out of the front door.’
She also revealed that while he was being cared for in a hospital in Machynlleth he began to believe he was in jail.
‘He felt really trapped there. On Christmas Day he tried to escape. He was allowed to come home for dinner but he ran off halfway through.
‘We had to phone the police. We spent nearly three hours searching. Eventually, he called me because he had no idea where he was. He wasn’t far from the house. I told him to wait and the police picked him up. That was terrifying.’
After viewing child pornography and a rape scene on television at home, Bridger decided to abduct April, whose disappearance led to one of the biggest searches in British history.
He snatched and murdered her on the Bryn-Y-Gog estate, before ‘lying through his teeth’ by claiming he accidentally hit her with his car and was so drunk he did not know what happened to the body.
After a five-week trial it took the jury just four hours to decide father-of-six Bridger was a fantasist, obsessed with child murder and child pornography.