Fifty-nine year old Nigel Jackson – accused of murdering his partner Brenda Davidson and burying her in the garden of their Alcalar home – is quoted today as denying that he killed her.
According to reports in the UK’s Daily Mirror and Daily Mail, former taxi driver Jackson admits to burying Mrs Davidson’s body, but claims she must have been killed in a “bungled burglary”.
In a letter “seen by the Daily Mirror” and purportedly written by Jackson from his prison cell, he is understood to have claimed that he came home “from a game of golf” to find his 72-year-old partner “lying in a pool of blood on the floor of their villa”.
The letter, entitled ‘LOVE, CARE DEVOTION AND BETRAYAL’, continued: “There was a lot of blood, when I tried to pick her up she was cold so I got clothes and blankets and tried to warm her up. It did not work. I think I knew she was gone but did not accept it. I held her for hours asking her to wake up”.
The Mirror adds: “Jackson claims in the letter that he noticed she had a small cut on her neck and then found a knife in the blood”.
“Brenda had been diagnosed with ovarian and thyroid cancer and he had thought she had killed herself,” wrote the paper.
“The couple had previously agreed that they would be buried with their animals, which they called their “babies”, in the garden of their villa,” wrote the Mirror.
“As I thought it was her choice, I honoured her choice that night to bury her with our babies,” Jackson is understood to have written.
The Mirror adds that Jackson maintains his “only lie” was to have told “everyone” that his partner had “gone away”.
Even so, he “could not live with this lie” and so claims he “went to the consulate and asked them to get the police”.
It is a very different tale to the one given in January when both UK and Portuguese papers reported that police arrived at the couple’s Monte Canelas home following an alert received by Mrs Davidson’s son Dean who had been “trying to get hold of his mother for two months”.
Jackson was reported then as having led police to the woman’s shallow grave, saying he had buried her after she committed suicide.
At the time, Jackson had a younger Portuguese woman living with him in the house.
He is understood to have explained in his letter that Mrs Davidson “did not mind him having other women” as “after the cancer diagnosis, she had told him she understood he still had needs”.
He wrote that he had been having an affair with the Portuguese mother-of-one for three-and-a-half years, and that the affair was “no secret” as the couple met “most days” at a café close to his home.
How Mrs Davidson’s children will react to the news that Jackson is denying murdering their mother remains to be seen.
Up until now, twins Drynda and Debi and sons Daryl and Dean have kept their silence as the latter makes journeys to and from Portugal to help organise his dead mother’s affairs.
Not long after the gruesome murder, thieves ransacked the couple’s home and were reported to have made off with a number of items.
It was this burglary that seems to have prompted Jackson’s confession from Silves’ jail, where he awaits trial for Mrs Davidson’s murder.
The Mirror claims he wrote that “whoever killed Bren” had obviously returned to the house to take the couple’s valuables.
Jackson’s letter appears not to have been specific with dates, but the autopsy performed on his former partner’s body – and the fact that she stopped being seen locally – point to her death at some time last November.
Mrs Davidson’s “severely decomposed” body was unearthed from a makeshift grave under a layer of cement beside the couple’s pool in January.
By NATASHA DONN [email protected]
