THE mother of a schoolgirl murdered by her uncle ten years ago doesn’t believe the killer will ever reveal where her daughter’s body is.

Fifteen-year-old Danielle Jones vanished without a trace on the morning on Monday, June 18, 2001.

Her mother, Linda Jones, believes Stuart Campbell, currently serving a life sentence for the crime, enjoys the power he still has over them.

She said: “I haven’t tried to contact him in prison because I don’t think he’ll ever give it up, we’ve resigned ourselves to the fact he will never tell us, it’s the one bit of control he has left.

“It’s so unsettling not knowing where she is, we can’t get any closure until she is found.”

The 51-year-old, from East Tilbury, said she didn’t know how she and her husband Tony would cope if Campbell ever gets released.

She added: “We can only hope he doesn’t get parole.”

Speaking about how she feels about the ten-year anniversary on Saturday, Linda said: “Sometimes it seems like it’s been ten years, but sometimes it seems like it could have been last week.

“It doesn’t get any easier, it gets harder, especially now because ten years is a milestone.

“Part of me didn’t want to talk about it because it brings you back into the public eye again, but I didn’t want her to be forgotten.

“It’s hard to explain how I feel really. I just don’t want it all to vanish and never be thought of.”

Linda has long accepted that her daughter is dead.

She said: “The only hope we have is that she will be found.”

The police vowed at the time they would never give up looking for Danielle’s body.

Linda said the family does have some contact with detectives but the search for Danielle’s body won’t be resumed until there is a new lead.

To this end, she has renewed the appeal for any information about where her daughter’s body could be.

Campbell was married to Debbie Jones, the sister of Danielle’s father Tony.

Linda revealed they haven’t spoken to her, or any of Tony’s family, since the trial.

The family will visit Danielle’s memorial garden at St Clere’s School, in Stanford-le-Hope, on the anniversary of her disappearance.

She said: “We normally just do something very quiet, we visit her memorial garden because we haven’t got anywhere else to go.

“We often go on her birthday as well.”

As well as the memorial garden, there is also an award given out at the school in Danielle’s memory.

Linda explained: “You get students who are very clever, but this is more for people who are not necessarily academically clever.

“It’s for children who help other children, or help in the community, it’s more of an achievement award.”

Linda and Tony, who still live in the same house in Hayle, made the difficult decision about what to do with Danielle’s bedroom a few years ago.

She said: “We haven’t kept Danielle’s room the same, we did for a long, long time after, but we didn’t want it to become a room that we didn’t want to go in any more.

“We only did it about two or three years ago though. We haven’t thrown anything away, we’ve kept everything.”

The couple are back at work, Linda part time in retail, and Tony with his tailor’s business, which is now going well, but did suffer in the aftermath of Danielle’s disappearance.

Linda said: “Tony lost a lot of work at the time because people were too embarrassed to go in the shop, which I can understand in some ways, but you wouldn’t believe the knock-on effect it had on everything.

“I went back to work in February after the trial. I needed to get out, I was just sitting in the house dwelling on it, going over and over and over it.” While the family try to reclaim some kind of normality, reading about cases like Madeline McCann in national newspapers brings it all flooding back.

Linda said: “It’s hard to read abut stuff like that in the paper because it makes it more prominent in your mind.

“I also get calls from the national media about things like that all the time.

“If I could say anything that would help the parents I would, but I know I can’t.”

Linda’s interview with the Gazette comes at a happier time for the Jones family.

Danielle’s younger brothers Ryan, 23, and Mitchell, 20, are both engaged, and Linda and Tony are eagerly awaiting the birth of their second grandchild, a baby boy, in a matter of weeks.

However, as with every happy occasion they have, it’s tinged with sadness because of their loss.

Linda added: “Ryan and Mitchell are both engaged. Ryan’s getting married shortly and he’s got a little girl and we’ve got another grandchild on the way.

“They’re OK, they are happy, and that’s all you can ask for.

“Danielle would have loved her little niece, and the one on the way. That’s what makes it harder for us, she should have been doing all this.

“She loved children, I think she would have worked with them, something to do with a nursery.”

* For more on this story, see today's Echo, or this week's Gazette.