RSSConvicted murderer is innocent, family says
Marcus Bebb-Jones
The mother and son of a British poker player who has admitted murdering his wife in western Colorado say they still believe he is innocent of the crime and will always stand by him.
They think that Marcus Bebb-Jones, from Kidderminster, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder to avoid the risk of a life sentence.
“I still think he is innocent. He’s one of the kindest men I’ve ever known,” said Bebb-Jones’ son, Daniel, whose mother, Sabrina, was the victim of the murder.
Daniel, now 19, was just 3 when his mother, then 31, disappeared in September 1997. Her skull was found on Douglas Pass in 2004, after Bebb-Jones had returned to Kidderminster.
His mother, 69-year-old retired district nurse Pamela Weaver, spoke at his house in Merton Close, where she now lives with Daniel, after the admission by Bebb-Jones on Friday that he killed his wife.
“I know he is innocent,” Weaver told the Express and Star. “It’s a big shock to me that he has pleaded guilty. I haven’t yet been able to speak to him or his lawyers but I think he has done it because if he was found guilty of first-degree murder he would have got a life sentence.
“This way they say he could get 10 to 20 years.”
The gray-haired, bespectacled Weaver, who brought up her only child, Bebb-Jones, in the village of Chaddesley Corbett, near Kidderminster, added:
“I won’t talk about the details of the case. I have to think about Sabrina’s family and their feelings. They think that Marcus did it, but I just know he didn’t.
“Daniel and I will always believe in him and be there for him.”
Bebb-Jones, now 49 and in the Garfield County Jail awaiting sentencing on May 1, ran the Melrose Hotel in Grand Junction. He met Sabrina after going to America, originally staying with his aunt in Philadelphia, during the 1980s. The couple married in 1993.
Weaver spoke of how her son, a former Wolverley High School pupil, told her he had been searching for his wife after her disappearance.
“The last few years had been like living in a film or book,” she said. “It feels surreal—one day I will wake up and find it was a nightmare.”
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