Five-year-old April Jones vanished while playing on her bike just yards from her home in the quiet Welsh town of Machynlleth.
What followed was one of the biggest child search operations the UK has ever seen – thousands of volunteers, sniffer dogs, helicopters and a nation holding its breath.
But hope soon turned to heartbreak. April had been abducted and murdered. Her body has never been found.
Almost 14 years on, her older sister Hazel Jones, now 31, is breaking her silence for the first time on the tragedy that tore her family apart to say Mark Bridger the man who killed her should be made to ‘suffer’ as he serves his life sentence.
Hazel Louise Jones with her daughter Amelia-Louise Roxanne Davies and son Ethan-Daniel Richard Davies at April’s grave in Machynlleth cemetery in Wales
Hazel and April Jones (seen left before she vanished) and Hazel and her own daughter Amelia when she was five – the same age as April when she vanished
Last month, Bridger was attacked in prison, for a second time. Hazel said: ‘He deserves everything he’s getting. He literally deserves it all.’
She also supports proposals to chemically castrate sex offenders.
Hazel said: ‘Chemically castrating paedophiles is 100 per cent right. I’m so backing that.
‘I read a lot of the comments on news articles about sex offenders and people are saying it should be the death penalty. But I don’t think so.
‘They should be made to suffer. The death penalty is an easy way out. He didn’t give April an easy way out did he?
‘Make him suffer, make him live every day because he’s not coming out. Make him live in fear.’
Hazel and her father Paul Jones. He died in May last year from a brain disease having never discovered where his daughter was buried by Mark Bridger
Hazel, who was 18 and heavily pregnant at the time of April’s disappearance, says the trauma has shaped her life – and cast a long shadow over her own children’s future.
‘I have never spoken out once,’ she said.
‘Only because I was mourning the loss of my sister and the actual ordeal of what happened.
‘I felt like I was just in a nightmare, ready to wake up. And you just don’t wake up from it.’
April was taken on the evening of October 1, 2012.
She had been playing on her pink bicycle with her friends at the Bryn-y-Gog housing estate near her home when she got into a Land Rover owned by local man Bridger.
Mark Bridger was found guilty in 2013 of the murder of April Jones and has never revealed where he put her bidy
He was later convicted of her abduction and murder, and sentenced to life in prison where he will die behind bars.
Despite an enormous search effort, April’s body was never found. Only fragments of her remains were found in Bridger’s cottage.
Hazel, who shares a father with April, remembers the exact moment she was told her half-sister was missing.
‘I was at my own home in Aberaeron with my mother and my mum came up to me and says “April’s missing”. And I was just like what?
‘And she says it again, “Hazel, April’s missing.” And it just took a couple of seconds that felt like bloody minutes to actually process what the hell she was saying.
‘I was just in shock.’
Fondly recalling her last moments with April, only days earlier, Hazel said: ‘She was in the kitchen, she was with my dad and they were making hot chocolate, and laughing. She was wearing army pyjamas.
‘I don’t know why I remember these little details but I do.
‘But that was the last time I ever saw her. But I wish I knew that was the last time.
‘I wish I knew that was going to be my last ever time having a normal life.’
After hearing the news, Hazel raced to Machynlleth to be with her dad, Paul, and the rest of the family.
‘We couldn’t really help with the search but we were there with the police and the family. It was a bit of a blur.
‘It was an absolute whirlwind, I remember coming home in the early hours of the morning, trying to have a kip and then going back up to be with my Dad and the family.’
An aerial image of the small eerie village of Ceinws, also known as Esgairgeiliog, is where Mark Bridger lived in a rented cottage and where parts of April’s skull and blood were found by police
It wasn’t until the next day that the horror began to sink in.
Hazel said: ‘The next day came and then I think it fully sunk in that oh my god she’s actually really missing isn’t she?
‘She’s not just gone for a little wander, she’s actually really missing.
‘It was so overwhelming the actual thought of it.
‘Because at the time it was a young girl that got into a van and it’s like surely not. This doesn’t happen does it?
‘I just thought this doesn’t happen around here and it wouldn’t happen to us of all people. Like what the hell?
‘And it did, and it was us, and it did happen.’
In the days that followed, Hazel says she tried to shield herself from the media frenzy, focusing instead on her pregnancy and clinging to the hope that April would be found.
She said: ‘The media attention was really bloody horrible, especially those first few months.
‘I would wake up and there would just be press outside my door. I was being followed, messaged, and called 24/7.
‘I would wake up, open the curtains and there would be people outside my door wanting to talk to me. I never did. I chose not to.
‘I never spoke out because at the end of the day that was our sister who had not only passed away but had been brutally murdered and kidnapped so what a process to have to go through.’
Aerial images of the Bryn-Y-Gog estate in the quiet Welsh town of Machynlleth, where five-year-old April Jones vanished while playing on her bike on October 1, 2012
When Hazel found out the news of what truly happened to April, she was ‘petrified’.
‘I was so scared because I was carrying my daughter at the time and I was so scared to bring her into this world knowing that there was people like that on our doorstep,’ Hazel added.
‘It really puts it into perspective that you can’t trust anyone. I just couldn’t get over how this could have happened.
‘I was just so devastated, and devastated for my Dad, Coral [April’s mother] and the family.
‘We had all just lost a five-year-old little girl.
‘She had a rough start in life. She was born early with cerebral palsy too. I was so taken aback I couldn’t process it.
‘She was just so, so young.’
Only a few weeks later, Hazel gave birth to her daughter Amelia – a moment that should have been filled with joy, but was instead tangled in grief and disbelief.
She said: ‘It was surreal because when Dad and Coral came to see her in the hospital when she was first born, they were just shocked because she looked like April.
‘It was so difficult because I had just lost my sister and just given birth. I was trying to mourn my sister but also love my new daughter.’
Now a mother of three – with Amelia 12, Ethan, 9, and Hefin, six, Hazel says the anxiety has never fully gone away.
‘My daughter is coming to the age of 13, she’ll be going into year eight this year and she wants to go and do stuff with her friends,’ she said.
‘I don’t know how I’m meant to let her grow up. Because I am quite scared of who is even around, who can you actually trust?
‘Is there anyone watching you? Is there anyone following you? And it’s scary. The world we live in is literally so scary.
‘After April I’m petrified to let my kids go out and grow up and start having their own lives.
‘When my daughter was younger, when she was at the age of five, I was like oh my god this is the age April was when she went.’
Hazel added that April had a striking resemblance to her daughter at that age – something that made the grief even harder to bear.
‘She had only been on this earth for five years and I remember looking at her thinking you have not even experienced life yet, and that was taken away from April,’ Hazel said.
‘I do want my daughter to see the world and have everything that April couldn’t.’
She’s been honest with her children about what happened to April, keeping a box of memories and newspaper clippings they can look at when they’re ready.
Hazel Louise Jones with her daughter Amelia-Louise Roxanne Davies and son Ethan-Daniel Richard Davies at April’s grave
Hazel said: ‘I have never hid it away from my kids and I won’t hide it away.
‘At the end of the day it’s real life, it has happened and I want them to be wary of their own selves.’
Earlier this year, the family suffered another loss. Hazel’s father, Paul died on May 14, without ever knowing where April was.
Paul Jones was diagnosed with a brain disease in 2018, six years after the death of his little girl.
‘My dad was never right after April,’ Hazel said.
‘Once April went, a part of him went completely and he never came back from that.
‘All I think is that he is now back with April and back to a peaceful life. Him passing was just like a part of me went too. I fought for him for so long.’
The tragedy also left deep scars on the wider family.
In the years that followed, relationships fractured and today, some relatives no longer speak – a reflection of how such a tragedy can tear a family apart.
Even now, more than a decade later, she says what happened to her sister still doesn’t feel real.
Hazel said: ‘It’s been 13 years now and it’s still not actually sunk in.
‘I still don’t believe it. I don’t know whether I don’t want to believe it but I just don’t believe it happened to us.
‘I’m still waiting to wake up from this nightmare.’
