Haunted Dyfed-Powys Police officers divulge horrifying information about the inquiry and its terrifying results, as well as the emotional toll the case took on them.
April was born preterm and was diagnosed with cerebral palsy from the hip down.
Her mother Coral describes her as “my little Thumbelina – like a little diamond” in the documentary.
You wouldn’t want to let go.
She mentions a miniature wind-up hamster that was April’s favourite toy and that she claimed would “drive them crazy, but was delightful.”
Jazmin, often known as Jazz, described how difficult it was to wake up every day and see all of April’s belongings, which served as a daily reminder of her disappearance.
She continued: “Her teddies were all at the bottom of her bed. Her clothes, toys, DVDs were all over the place. Every morning I’d wake up and in that time before you are completely awake, I’d look over expecting to see her. Unless I looked at the wall, I couldn’t avoid her things.”
She explained how she eventually felt compelled to ask her mother if she might sleep in a different room.
Coral originally declined, wanting to make sure that nothing changed in case tiny April actually did return home. Paul, Jazmin’s father, was able to persuade Coral to change her mind.
“I said: ‘I cannot sleep in this room any more.’ But Mum still thought April might come home and wanted to keep everything as it was,” she explained. “Dad said: ‘We have another daughter, too. We have to do this for Jazz.’”
Jazmin described how her mother’s inability to manage the situation caused life at home to fall apart, leaving her feeling as though she had lost both her mother and her sister.
She said: “When she went, the whole thing just collapsed. Our family was fractured. Things are better now but, from that night, I didn’t have a mother. I had just lost my sister, and then I lost my mother too.
“I had to grow up overnight. I was on my own, really, trying to look after my little brother [who was just ten at the time], trying to help my dad.”
When April was alive, the Jones family would enjoy meals together but this changed as Coral, who Jazmin described as a “brilliant” cook and avid baker, couldn’t face it anymore.
She explained: “She would do us the most amazing roast dinners — not always on a Sunday, but sometimes during the week. I loved her roast dinners. Then, when April went, they stopped. We didn’t eat as a family at all. Mum didn’t cook, couldn’t cook. My mum disappeared, too.”
In October, on the tenth anniversary of the “Welsh Princess’s” disappearance, Detective Sargeant Hayley Heard told the BBC that she thought April’s family originally didn’t realise she wouldn’t be returning home.
The sergeant remembered how the officers prepared to break the heartbreaking news to the family that their young child would never see her again.
