FOR a man whose ex-wife tried six times to hire a hitman to kill him, Rob Parkes seems remarkably relaxed.
His world fell apart when detectives discovered a secret phone recording of his former partner plotting to have him murdered so she could get custody of their teenage daughter, Grace.
Rob says: “She wanted me dead. Gone, erased, deceased— actually, physically and entirely dead.
“I heard the voice I had once loved so much — a smiley voice, a welcoming voice — discussing how I should meet my end.
“Kicked to death in a forest? Or shot? What would be best and what were the prices?”
By an incredible twist of fate, millions of TV viewers actually saw the moment police told sales director Rob that his ex, Victoria Breeden, wanted him dispatched by a hired killer.
And those watching Channel 4documentary 24 Hours In Police Custody: Black Widow were amazed how calmly Rob appeared to take the news of his former wife’s treachery.
But this week he tells The Sun: “On the TV recording, you can see me nod and pause for a couple of seconds.
“I look calm, composed and in control, if a little shocked.
“What no one else realised though was that my brain had decided that right then would be a good time to check out and have a brief holiday. I wasn’t calm, I was vacant.
“I could see the policeman’s mouth moving and I knew he was still talking, but I wasn’t paying attention.
“The whole situation just didn’t seem real. Not remotely real.
‘She told Wayne I was a drug dealer and paedo’
“The mental strain was just too immense and overwhelming for me to cope with.
“Looking back at that footage on 24 Hours In Police Custody, I was sipping a completely empty cup of tea.”
Rob’s mind was flashing back five years to New Year’s Day 2014 when police arrived on his doorstep in Milton Keynes.
The officers had come to check that his family — new wife Jane and daughter Grace, who he had sole custody of after a long court battle with his ex — were OK.
Police had been alerted by a 999 call — supposedly from Rob — reporting a car fire at the house.
It was a hoax. But at 5.30 the following morning, Rob woke to the sound of his car alarm going off followed by a roaring popping, crackling noise.
Someone had set fire to the family’s Audi A3 car.
As flames shattered the front windows of the house and burnt the front door, Rob and Jane, with Grace in her arms, fled for their lives through the back garden.
Rob suspected Victoria and her new husband, ex-soldier Wayne Wood, were behind the attack.
He says: “She convinced Wayne I was a drug dealer and a paedophile and used him as a weapon to get at me and my family.”
Wayne Wood, who made the hoax phone call, was jailed for seven years for arson.
Police freed Rob’s ex because they could not link her to the attack on the car. But Victoria Breeden, now 41, was determined to have her ex-husband murdered and even hid more than £18,500 in cans at her home in Littleport, Cambs, to pay any of the men she could manipulate into attempting to kill Rob.
He says: “There were six guys through the years and some came closer than others.”
Rob was unaware that the woman he had been married to for six years was planning to have him wiped out for good.
In 2019 Victoria was in a new relationship with Graham Wall, who she had met on a dating site.
Graham began to be worried when Victoria asked if he could put her in touch with a hitman.
She told him: “If you can’t do that then you’re no use to me.”
Suspecting she was having an affair, Graham went to work and left his phone hidden under the stairs on record.
The phone picked up a chilling conversation — Breeden asking former drug dealer Earl Gernon if he could arrange to kill her ex-husband.
On the audio recording they discuss having Rob kicked to death in Thetford Forest, Norfolk, or attacking his car to lure him out of the house before smashing him over the head with a brick.
Gernon told her any other method would be “very, very expensive”.
Terrified by what he heard on the audio recording, Graham handed the phone to Cambridgeshire police, where a documentary crew happened to be filming for Channel 4’s 24 Hours In Police Custody.
Amazingly, Victoria walked into Ely police station to try to get Graham’s phone back, along with its incriminating evidence. Detectives then arrested her.
Just before lockdown in early 2020 Victoria Breeden was found guilty of three counts of conspiracy to murder and jailed for nine and a half years.
Gernon was charged with conspiracy to murder but the charges were later dropped.
When the two-part Black Widow documentary was screened the following year, it got the highest viewing figures for any episodes of 24 Hours In Police Custody.
‘It was classic coercive control relationship’
Rob says: “If things had gone another way, if Graham hadn’t put his phone on record, then there but by the grace of God . . .
“I am not going to waste time thinking about what could have happened, but I am enormously thankful he did the right thing.”
During the eight-day trial Rob was not called to give evidence or tell Victoria how her obsession had affected his mind. He says: “I couldn’t go to therapy because of lockdown.
“I had completely refused to accept that I had any mental health issues or had any trouble at all. I simply ignored it all.
“Then I thought I needed to find some way because otherwise I was in real danger of it just consuming me completely. I had to get it out.”
So Rob started writing a letter to Grace, who is now 16, to tell the story of how he had ended up in a toxic relationship with her mother, who is currently held in HMP Peterborough prison and expected to be released within the next two years.
And he had so much to tell that the letter turned into a book, Married To The Black Widow, published next week. In it Rob, now 43, tells how he and Victoria met as teenagers at an amateur drama club at Teeside University. She was needy and he was protective of her.
She played mind games, including feigning being ill all the time — though nothing was ever diagnosed — to get his attention.
He says: “I’m Mr Average. Nobody would look at me and say, ‘There’s a victim. There is a survivor’.
“I was an extension of Victoria, not my own person. I didn’t make any decisions. I didn’t have any decisions.
“I went where she thought would be best. I did what she thought would be best. That is a classic coercive control relationship as we understand it now.”
Despite misgivings, the couple married and a doctor suggested that having a baby might help with her undiagnosed abdominal pain.
Rob even suspected Victoria of hurting their baby to get him to come home from work.
In 2008 he finally realised he had to leave to help Grace, then two, and himself.
Victoria battled him every step of the way as he fought for custody, falsely accusing Rob of being a drug dealer and a paedophile before he was finally given sole custody of Grace, who has not been to see her mother in prison.
Rob says: “I didn’t want the book to be a misery memoir — that is not necessarily my life and it is not the way that I wanted to represent it to Grace.
“It is really important to be open because there were good parts and there were terrible parts and she is going to be Grace’s mum for as long as she is alive.
“If you remember the good bits and acknowledge the bad then you will be a much happier person.
“What I want for Grace is for her to be as happy as she can.”
- Married To The Black Widow, by Rob Parkes, is published by Seven Dials on Thursday. 24 Hours In Police Custody: The Black Widow is on Channel 4 on Monday and Tuesday at 10pm.
HOW IT ALL HAPPENED
OCT-NOV 2013: Victoria Breeden moves to Germany with new soldier husband Wayne Wood. She tells another soldier, Andrew Peebles, that she wants her child back and her ex Rob Parkes dead. She asks: “If I got you a gun, would you do it for us?” He does nothing.
JAN 2, 2014: Wayne Wood says she got him to torch Rob’s Audi A3, which set fire to his home in Milton Keynes, Bucks. He is jailed for seven years.
SUMMER 2014: Now living on a boat in London, Breeden offers Hamish Lowry-Martin £5,000 to give to a “Scottish nutter” to “do her a favour and sort out her ex-husband as he was a b*****d”. He declines.
2015: At an animal rescue centre, she tells fellow volunteer Daniel Proctor: “I want someone killed.” He informs cops but a jury clears her on this charge.
2018-19: Victoria asks her then lover Graham Wall if he knows a hitman. When he says no, she tells him: “You’re no use to me.”
OCT 2019: Graham records Breeden persuading Earl Gernon to arrange Rob’s murder. Both are arrested after Graham gives recording to cops. Gernon is eventually freed.
MAR 2020: Breeden is convicted of soliciting to murder.
MAY 2020: She is jailed for nine and a half years. She is due to be released by 2025.