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Hundreds of mourners will say a final emotional farewell to murdered five-year-old April Jones at her funeral on Thursday.

And many miles away in a London hostel, a weeping man will watch her few remains being carried into church on TV overwhelmed by anger and shame.

Steven Verona knows he has to watch it. To purge himself. To try to find a way back into a life that was shattered by a killing that shocked the nation.

Because Steven is the son of April’s brutal murderer Mark Bridger.

He carries his own childhood scars meted out by the monster who was his father. Hurled across rooms. Battered till he urinated blood.

But the psychological wounds run deeper still, savagely reopened by the discovery that his father was missing April’s killer last October.

That split second ripped apart the normal family life he had struggled to build as he drowned the pain in booze, losing his home, his job and his girlfriend.

“I just wanted to curl up and die,” says Steven, 27, speaking for the first time about the father he hates. “I’d been following April’s story and like everyone I wanted her to be returned home safe and sound.

“My mind went into meltdown when my mum told me my father had been arrested. I cried for hours and wondered how I could be related to such a monster.

“They could give him 100 life sentences and it would never be enough for me. If there was ever a case to bring back capital punishment, this was it.

“I wanted him to get the electric chair, I wanted him to experience the pain April and her family have.”

(Image: Reuters)

At April’s funeral at St Peter’s Church in Machynlleth in Powys, Mid Wales, her parents Coral and Paul will bury only 17 tiny bone fragments of their daughter, found in 46-year-old Bridger’s fireplace, because the rest of her body has never been discovered.

Steven, Bridger’s eldest son, says: “If my father has a shred of decency, he needs to speak out and tell April’s family where her body is.” Steven was the same age as the tragic youngster when he and his mum finally escaped a life of hell at Bridger’s hands.

In May 1986, when Steven was just a baby, the killer threw him across a room. “Although I don’t remember it my family told me how heavy handed he was with me,” Steven explains.

“My mum tried her best to protect me from him, but sadly it wasn’t enough.”

Deborah Verona was just 17 and working as a typist when she met 19-year-old Bridger, a fireman and policeman’s son.

“My mum always said he looked like the perfect man,” Steven says. “But cracks soon started to appear in their relationship. They hadn’t been together long when she fell pregnant with me.

“At first, my grandparents thought he was a decent man but soon he started controlling my mother.”

At 18 months old, Steven was rushed to hospital after another one of Bridger’s violent onslaughts. “He was arguing with my mum and I started to cry. I was in my baby bouncer and he kicked me hard in the back,” says Steven.

“I was so badly injured my mum had to rush me to hospital. After various scans and X-rays, doctors told her one of my kidneys was scarred.”

Shortly after Steven was discharged from hospital, Deborah fled to her parents’ house in South East London. But, like many times before, Steven says Bridger always hunted her down and persuaded her to get back with him. Steven says: “My grandparents were at their wit’s end. They knew he was bad news. But she was ­vulnerable and always forgave him.”

In the months and years that followed, Deborah’s volatile relationship with Bridger was on and off and Bridger was in and out of Steven’s life.

“We moved into a caravan in Wales with Bridger, but again they were always at each other’s throats and Bridger would take it out on me,”

Steven recalls with a shudder. “I remember feeling scared and anxious. I experienced regular beatings. As a young child, I didn’t understand why I was on a daily cocktail of drugs and urinating blood, but I found out later it was because of the attack where he scarred my kidneys.”

(Image: PA)

By five, Steven was living back in London after his mother left Bridger for good.

“I think she knew she had to get away from him otherwise he’d kill her, or me,” he says. “But it wasn’t long before he tracked us down. I remember a knock at the door late at night. My mum answered and I was stood between her legs. It was Bridger. He tried to barge past my mum into the house but when he realised her new boyfriend was home, he fled.

“He was a complete coward. He liked beating up women and children but would avoid any confrontation with men. I never saw him again after that.” Sadly, Steven says his mother was never the same after Bridger. Luckily, her parents were supportive.

“I was put into care at 10,” recalls Steven. “But they never forgot about me. My nan taught me everything I know. She’d sit down and read books with me and teach me to be kind to animals and respect life. My ­grandparents were hard working decent people and I loved them dearly.”

Despite his brutal childhood, Steven managed to get to college where he studied electronics and engineering. When he was 25, in 2011, he tried to contact his father, by then living in ­mid-Wales. He says: “I hated him for what he put me and my mum through, but I was hoping he might have changed.

“I had a romantic notion we’d be able to forge some sort of relationship. I wanted a dad in my life. I tried to track him down on Facebook but couldn’t find him.” Nothing could have prepared Steven for what happened next.

On October 2, 2012 – just a day after April’s ­disappearance – he got a phone call from his mother. “She told me it was to do with my dad,” he says. “Stupidly, I thought she was going to tell me he was sorry for everything he’d put me through and wanted to meet me.

“Then she said he’d been arrested on suspicion of April’s murder, I nearly threw up.” Within months of that moment, Steven’s life was in tatters.

“I had a good job as a painter and decorator, and a girlfriend and house up until I found out the news,” he says. “Now, I’m single, unemployed and homeless after turning to alcohol to block out my father’s heinous crime.

“I hit the bottle hard. I didn’t feel as if anybody understood what I was going through. My girlfriend couldn’t handle it, and I don’t blame her for leaving me. I was sleeping rough for a while before I found refuge in a hostel in London.

“I felt weighed down by being related to the most hated man in Britain.

“Ever since I can remember family and friends have always commented on how much I look like my father, after finding out he was behind April’s death I hated the reflection.”

(Image: Sunday Mirror)

His father pleaded not guilty to April’s abduction and murder at his trial. In court, it emerged Bridger abducted the youngster when she was playing outside her home in Machynlleth, Powys, before murdering her in a sexually motivated attack. Police believe she was killed and her body disposed of at former butcher Bridger’s cottage.

Steven says: “I felt sick to the stomach when I read what had happened that night. I hated him for pleading not guilty and putting April’s family through more grief by having to go to court. He could have spared them that.”

In May 2013, Bridger was found guilty at Mold Crown Court and sentenced to a full life term. Two months later he was attacked by an inmate at HMP Wakefield, a category A prison where some of Britain’s most dangerous offenders are held.

The child killer needed hospital ­treatment after his face was slashed three times by a fellow inmate with a makeshift blade. To Steven’s horror, Bridger is now using taxpayers’ money to try to get compensation.

“It just shows what a vile, disgusting person he is,” says Steven. “Personally, I wish whoever slashed him had gone for his throat.”

With the anniversary of April’s death looming, Steven says her funeral will be a difficult time for him. “It’s hard to accept I’m related to someone so inherently evil,” Steven says. “I knew my dad was a woman and child beater, but I didn’t think he was a ­paedophile too. Every time I hear his name, I want the ground to swallow me up.

“I think of myself as a good person. The other day I saved a baby seagull after I thought it had broken a wing. For days, I fed and watered it until it was well enough to go back into the wild.

“But sometimes I’m terrified at what I might have inherited from him. I dread telling anyone who my dad is, in case they think I have evil in my blood.

Now he is preparing, in his own way, for the funeral of the little girl whose life was snuffed out by his father.

“I hope Bridger does the right thing and tells them where her remains are,” says Steven. “Not for me, for April. So she can rest in peace and her family can try to move on with their lives.”