Speedboat killer admits violent attack on woman

Speedboat killer Jack Shepherd has admitted violently assaulting a woman, including hitting her on the chest with a set of barbecue tongs.

Earlier at Isleworth Crown Court, the 38-year-old pleaded guilty over a prison video link to two counts of assault occasioning actual bodily harm and damaging property.

The assaults happened in February and June last year, and sparked Shepherd's recall to prison.

He was originally jailed for 10 years for manslaughter in 2018 over the death of 24-year-old Charlotte Brown when his speedboat crashed during a first date.

Shepherd skipped his Old Bailey trial while on the run in Georgia, before he was eventually extradited back to the UK to serve his sentence.

He was set free on licence in January 2024, but faced recall to prison in September last year after he was accused of violence towards a woman.

During the hearing on Tuesday, Shepherd pleaded guilty to three offences.

He admitted pinning down the woman and punching her in February 2025, striking her in the chest with barbecue tongs in June 2025, and damaging her keys in that same month.

Prosecutors agreed to drop two other allegations of controlling or coercive behaviour and intentional suffocation.

Shepherd will be sentenced on 4 September.

Judge Martin Edmunds said the law did not allow him to add any more time to the term Shepherd is already serving, which will see him released in January 2029.

Brown, from Clacton, Essex, was fatally thrown from his speedboat boat on the River Thames, when it hit a submerged tree trunk, in December 2015.

Shepherd and Brown had been drinking champagne before he took her on the ill-fated boat trip past the Palace of Westminster.

He was plucked from the Thames alive, but Brown was found unconscious and unresponsive and died later in hospital.

Shepherd, originally from Exeter, then went on the run, and was convicted of manslaughter by gross negligence in his absence after an Old Bailey trial in 2018.

He eventually handed himself in to police in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 2019, and was brought back to the UK where he was also handed a four-year-jail term for attacking a barman, to run at the same time as his six-year sentence.

Shepherd was released in January 2024 and then returned to prison in September 2025, over what was reported at the time as a breach of his licence conditions.

News of his latest crimes first emerged last month in a Parole Board report about his recall to prison.

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