Joel Eldridge Bio – Joel Eldridge Wiki
Joel Eldridge from Bexhill, East Sussex, mysteriously disappeared around six months after moving to Portugal to join a building project in 2018. His remains were found more than a year later. A British former car salesman – already serving a lengthy sentence of at least 36 years in a UK prison for a devastating arson attack – has been charged with Mr. Eldridge’s murder. Sadistic Jacob Barnard, 33, now faces extradition proceedings to Portugal to stand trial for the crime.
AGE:
Joel Eldridge was 29 years old.
DETAIL OF INCIDENCE:
A drug dealer serving life in jail for the murders of a mother and her four-year-old son over a £400 debt has been charged with the gangland execution of a British ex-pat in Portugal whose body was found a year after he vanished.
Joel Eldridge, 29, from Bexhill, East Sussex, mysteriously disappeared around six months after moving to Portugal to join a building project in 2018.
His remains were found more than a year later, hidden in woodland near Pedrogao Grande following a public appeal from his family and detectives from the Surrey and Sussex Major Crime Team.
A British former car salesman – already serving a lengthy sentence of at least 36 years in a UK prison for a devastating arson attack – has been charged with Mr. Eldridge’s murder.
Sadistic Jacob Barnard, 33, now faces extradition proceedings to Portugal to stand trial for the crime.
Barnard and his enforcer Andrew Milne were caged for 70 years at Brighton Crown Court in May 2021 for setting fire to the home Gina Ingles, 34, shared with her son Milo and partner Toby Jarrett.
State prosecutors in Castelo Branco in central Portugal have now charged the convicted killer and an alleged accomplice named 30-year-old Joshua Liam Sherwood with murder and desecrating a body.
A harrowing 20-page indictment prepared by the Portuguese Policia Judiciaria force seen by MailOnline accuses Barnard of hitting his alleged victim’s head with an axe after attacking him with a stun gun and stabbing and shooting him.
And it claims Mr. Eldridge was killed in a brutal execution his alleged killers had pre-planned because they feared he was about to return to the UK and report them to the police for crimes being committed abroad.
Barnard, born in Aberystwyth, had already been jailed for eight years in Portugal before his UK murder trial for drug trafficking and possessing an offensive weapon.
The weapons conviction related to the seizure of a 500,000-volt Scorpy Max stun gun, a machete-type knife, and a weapon said to have been used in Mr. Eldridge’s murder before his remains were found.
The Portuguese prosecution indictment says the slain Brit was dumped in a nearby grave on shrubland by the suspects days earlier’ and burned his body.
After a clean-up of the murder scene in the village of Macieira, it claims his alleged killers crossed Portugal’s border with Spain and laid a false trail by leaving Mr. Eldridge’s wallet, mobile phone, and passport near the city of Badajoz around a two-and-a-half hour drive from where his body was eventually found.
Recounting the alleged lead-up to the savage murder, the 20-page document says: ‘For reasons related to Joel Eldridge’s wish to return to the UK, and fearing he would co-operate with police there and report the drug trafficking activity in Portugal, Jacob Barnard and Joshua Sherwood hatched a plan to kill him.
‘We accuse the two men of executing that plan on a date between July 17 and 28, 2018, around 4 pm, in the living room of Mr. Joshua Sherwood’s home in Macieira.’
Detailing how the murder victim escaped the brunt of an alleged stun gun attack by Barnard with his quick reactions before being stabbed in the leg and shot at at least three times as he tried to escape, it adds: ‘Not satisfied with his actions, the suspect Jacob Barnard approached Joel Eldridge armed with an axe as he lay prostrate on the ground and struck him an unidentified number of times around the head.
Prosecutors say he only stopped when he was ‘tired and convinced he was dead, as was his intention.’
The traumatic head injuries Joel suffered from the axe attack were the ‘direct cause of his death.
Barnard, expected to be extradited for his Portuguese murder trial in the coming months from his UK prison cell, snorted a line of cocaine after the horrific crime and sent a mobile phone picture of Joel’s body to an unidentified friend, according to prosecutors.
They say the walls and ceiling of the room where Joel was killed had to be repainted after the murder, and one of the sofas was removed.
Although Sherwood, whose whereabouts are currently unknown, is not accused of physically attacking Mr. Eldridge, prosecutors claim the Aylesbury, Bucks-born ex-pat and his co-accused had ‘mutually agreed’ to kill their alleged victim.