David Jones
The Daily Mail, MailPlus and MailOnline
In June, Jones uncovered the sad details behind the news that one of Britain’s greatest Olympians, Sir Bradley Wiggins, had been declared bankrupt.
His investigation was all the more shocking given Wiggins’s status as one of the ultimate British sporting heroes, the first Briton to win cycling’s Tour de France and Britain’s third most decorated Olympian.
Jones discovered that Wiggins had burned through a fortune of £13million, and uncovered the tragic details of his descent into marital breakdown, homelessness and enormous debts. ‘We must hope he can ride out this crisis with the undying grit that left lesser riders in his wake,’ Jones wrote. ‘The much-loved Olympian might have no home and owe hundreds of thousands. Yet for bringing us that unforgettable summer the nation will be forever in his debt.’
Two months later, Jones revealed that the father of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence had discovered his ex-wife had exhumed their son’s body from his grave in Jamaica and brought it to Britain, without consulting or even telling him.
In an extensive interview with Neville Lawrence, Jones described the grief of a man who had buried his son in Jamaica to avoid desecration by racists connected with those who murdered him at the age of 18 in 1993, and his shock at first seeing Stephen’s empty grave in a video on social media. ‘If his story is true,’ Jones wrote, ‘many might think that — after losing his much-loved son in such an unspeakable manner, then suffering through three decades of police corruption and incompetence — it comes as the final injustice.’ And it was true, Baroness Lawrence was later obliged to say as much.
His powerful writing brings unexpected depth to stories being covered by many others, for example the sensational trial of Frenchman Dominique Pelicot, accused of recruiting 51 men to assault his drugged wife Gisele repeatedly over a decade until his arrest in November 2020.
In one September dispatch, Jones – who had conducted his first investigation into the case in the summer of 2023 - captured the courtroom torment suffered by Gisele, 'an ageing woman being dragged through the bowels of hell’, as she saw her husband for the first time since his arrest.
Describing how he looked ‘more like an avuncular retired bank manager than the architect and videographer of voyeuristic rapes,’ Jones’s skillful pen portrait brought home the suffering of the woman who ‘looked after their grandchildren and pottered about the garden’ all the years that her spouse perpetrated ‘a barely believable act of marital betrayal.’ ‘Over the ensuing months…. his admirably brave wife may at last learn what became of her when supper was over. We must hope she can withstand the anguish that will inevitably accompany the cold truth.’