The Darkest Secret (7 page)

 

LONELY DEAT
H OF SANDBANKS MILLIONAIRE
 

Dorchester chambermaids find body of tragic Coco's dad in mysterious circumstances
 

Sean Jackson, 62, father of missing toddler Coco Jackson, was found dead on Sunday morning in Mayfair's swanky Dorchester hotel. Jackson, in London on business from his palatial home on the north Devon coast, had failed to check out at the given time and, after attempts to rouse him had failed, hotel staff let themselves in with a room key and discovered his body.

‘He was handcuffed to the bed,' said a source, ‘and had clearly been dead for some hours.'

 

According to the family's solicitor Robert Gavila, husband of celebrity publicist Maria Gavila, property developer Jackson had been in London since Thursday night, attending planning meetings and tying up legal documentation related to a conversion he was planning on Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. ‘We are all devastated,' he said. ‘I have known Sean all my adult life. We grew up together in business and have always been close. His loss is a terrible shock. Our thoughts are with his family.'

‘Yes, he had been staying here since Thursday,' said a source in the hotel. ‘He was a charming man, friendly to all the staff, and quite a regular here, even though we think he kept a flat somewhere in Knightsbridge. I guess he didn't want the trouble of catering for himself and his associates when his wife wasn't with him. He had guests to dinner in our restaurant on Thursday and Friday nights, and ordered room service on Saturday as he said he was making an early start back to Devon the next day. He ordered chateaubriand and two bottles of Dom Perignon champagne. I don't know if he had a guest, but chateaubriand is usually a dish for two people.'

Jackson leaves behind a wife and an infant daughter. He remarried for the fourth time in 2011, after the death of his third wife, Linda. Friends from cabinet ministers to retail billionaires describe him as ‘inspiring', ‘larger than life', ‘a man of boundless energy', ‘charming', ‘a huge loss'. He lived big, spent money like water, was open-handed to his friends, lending houses, dispensing loans, jetting entire parties off to foreign locales, and was a generous donor to Conservative Party coffers.

To the public at large, though, he is best known for the tragedy that overtook his second marriage in 2004, when his three-year-old daughter Coco disappeared from the family's newly renovated holiday home in the Millionaires' Row at the Sandbanks Peninsula, Bournemouth. The family were there celebrating Jackson's 50th birthday, when Coco vanished from the ground-floor bedroom she was sharing with her twin sister, Ruby, in the middle of the night. A hole was discovered in the fence that separated the property from the road outside, and the latch on a sliding window leading to the house's main reception room was found to be broken. None of the many people in the house admitted to hearing a thing in the night, and Ruby slept through the entire incident. Not a trace has been seen of Coco again.

 

The case quickly became a national event. Jackson's then wife, Coco's mother Claire, a former secretary, harnessed a newly discovered talent for publicity to galvanise the Find Coco campaign, appealing repeatedly for members of the public to search for her missing daughter. With its mix of glamorous wealth and celebrity house-guests – present at the house that weekend, as well as the Gavilas, were Shadow Health Minister Charles Clutterbuck and a Harley Street doctor with links to many household names of showbiz – the story became one of the biggest of its era. Maria Gavila, a well-known broker of tabloid tales, started an email chain letter among her rich seam of contacts that quickly proliferated and is thought to be the first ever to have reached over a billion people worldwide. Repeated television appeals, email chains and poster campaigns meant that pretty Coco briefly became one of the best-known faces on the planet.

Public sympathy quickly ebbed away, however, as stories of Claire Jackson's behaviour around the time when her daughter vanished leaked out. It transpired that she had dumped the twins on her husband and house-guests when she returned early to London, and had been seen spending lavishly in designer shops while her daughters awaited her return uncared-for. Former employees and neighbours and former friends described her variously as ‘a harpy', ‘unstable' and ‘a terrible, selfish mother'.

The Jackson marriage did not survive the tragedy. The Jacksons divorced in 2006, and soon after Sean married his ‘dear friend' Linda Innes, who had also been part of the ill-fated weekend party. Innes had been working as a designer for Jackson's construction company, and continued to decorate the interiors of his developments. ‘She comforted me, which was more than my wife was able to do,' he said at the time. ‘I hope that this will be the beginning of a new era of happiness for me.'

Despite his former wife's soured reputation, Jackson surprised the public when he did not apply for custody of Ruby. Not long before the divorce, Claire dropped off the radar. Increasingly unhappy at the negative press she had received, she left London with Ruby, and seemed to vanish from view like her daughter before her. It was widely believed that she had left the country and was living in an ex-pat community where she was not known. The
Mail
can now reveal that she is in fact renting a smallholding in rural Sussex, and has been living quietly in the three-bedroom house with her surviving daughter, largely unnoticed by those around them. When our reporters called to seek a reaction to her former husband's death, she refused to answer the door and Ruby was nowhere to be seen. A statement relayed via Maria Gavila read: ‘I am deeply saddened by the death of my former husband. We had not been in contact for some time, but we shared a devotion to our two daughters that never waned for either of us. My surviving daughter is devastated by the loss of her father, and both she and I would be grateful to be left in peace to digest this sad development.'

Neighbours were unwilling to discuss her. ‘I don't know her,' said Norman Colbeck, whose farm borders on to the two fields in which she keeps a ragged collection of pigs, chickens and goats. ‘She doesn't mix. I don't think you'll find anyone much around here who'll have anything to say to you.' In the nearby village of Mills Barton, residents were equally unforthcoming. ‘Yes, they come to the church from time to time,' said vicar Ruth Miller. ‘Nice people, but quiet. They don't mix a huge amount, but they are always willing to contribute to church events and fundraising efforts.' No one at the school would comment. ‘She isn't a pupil here,' said head teacher Daniel Bevan. ‘We don't know them. Though obviously our thoughts are with them both.'

So the mystery of Claire Jackson's vanishing act is finally solved, but the mystery of Coco lives on. Many people believed at the time that Claire knew more about her daughter's disappearance than she was admitting. Cross-questioning would bring about a robotic shutting-down and a repetition of stock phrases and stories, as though she didn't trust herself to go off-message even for a moment. As the
Mail
columnist Dawn Hamblett said just before she dropped out of the limelight, ‘It was as though Coco Jackson was an escapee from Stepford rather than a much-loved child.'

The death of Sean Jackson is far from the only disaster to strike the lives of the Jackson Associates, as the guests at the kidnap house were quickly dubbed in the days after the event. Jackson faced more heartbreak when his third wife, Linda, was found at the bottom of a flight of marble stairs in a house whose interior she was designing in Leyton, Essex, in 2010. She had suffered a fractured skull and died soon afterwards.

Her former partner, Dr James Orizio, was found guilty of malpractice and struck off in the summer of 2008 after one Miranda Chace, singer with hip-hop band Ton Ton Macoutes
,
died as a result of painkilling drugs he had prescribed on tour earlier that year without carrying out necessary health checks. The subsequent police investigation revealed a raft of prescriptions for painkillers such as Vicodin and the ‘Hillbilly heroin', OxyContin, plus a number of other metabolism-enhancing drugs which had been, at the very least, handed out too casually. He was jailed in 2009 and released in 2012.

Charles Clutterbuck, once a rising Tory star, found himself sidelined to the back benches after the party came to power in 2010. After an early career in which he had been tipped for stardom and a Cabinet position at the very least, it wasn't hard to infer that his involvement in the ill-fated weekend might have had some influence over this exclusion. Clutterbuck himself blamed it on having attended ‘the wrong school', a swipe at David Cameron's preference for surrounding himself with his fellow Etonians. In 2013 he gave up his safe Tory seat and defected to the newly formed Britain Together, an anti-immigration, Eurosceptic party, and failed to win it back at the ensuing by-election. His LinkedIn profile currently lists him as a ‘consultant', although the
Mail
was unable to trace any companies using his services. Clutterbuck and his wife, Imogen, currently live on the Dalmatian coast, where the parliamentary pension, as a waggish former colleague put it, ‘goes a lot further if you don't mind drinking local'.

As his reappearance on our televisions on the 10th anniversary of his daughter's disappearance made clear, Sean Jackson never lost hope that one day his daughter might be found. With his death, and with his second wife reluctant to engage with the outside world, the possibility of a solution to the mystery of what happened to Coco recedes that little bit further. Yesterday, gates leading to the Jacksons' Queen Anne manor house near Bideford remained closed, Robert and Maria Gavila the only visitors given access. No funeral is planned as yet, as the body awaits release by the coroner. But, with another gravestone soon to join the others in a green English graveyard, now perhaps might be the time to consider adding a further memorial to its carved granite surface.