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Eva Rausing died of cocaine abuse, coroner rules | Eva Rausing died of cocaine abuse, coroner rules |
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Eva Rausing, the wife of the Tetra Pak heir Hans Rausing, died from cocaine affecting an already damaged heart, two months before her body was found by police hidden under piles of bedding and plastic in a squalid apartment within their London mansion. | |
Her husband was shaving in the bathroom when he heard her slip from the bed, saw her eyes dulling as he tried to lift her, and knew she was already dead. He hid her body, unable to face up to her death, and told anyone who asked she had gone to California, Westminster coroner's court heard. | |
The inquest was told that Hans Rausing, who was given two suspended sentences in August for preventing the lawful burial of her body, was medically unfit to give evidence in person, but he sent a long statement in which he described their marriage as "very close and loving", and said he was "devastated" at her death. | |
The death was discovered on 9 July, when police stopped Hans Rausing for erratic driving and found a still warm crack cocaine pipe in the footwell, and a plastic bag full of unopened post to his wife in the boot. At their huge house in Cadogan Place they found the badly decomposed body in the couple's second-floor apartment where the servants – who had last seen her in late April – had been ordered never to set foot. | |
They first suspected foul play, but the inquest heard there was no evidence of violence, while toxicology tests showed traces of cocaine, opiates and amphetamines. | |
PC Darren Reynolds described the apartment, reached only by an internal lift, as resembling a squat, with drug paraphernalia, clothes and furniture littered about. They were immediately aware of a smell of decomposition. In the bedroom they saw a large bed covered in blue tarpaulin that stretched beyond it to cover the space to one side, weighed down with pieces of furniture including a 50-inch television. Under layers of plastic, clothing, blankets and duvets, they eventually found the body. | |
Eva Rausing was identified from a left thumb print and the serial number of a heart pacemaker fitted six years earlier. The pacemaker showed there had been chaotic disruption of its rhythm at 7.19am on 7 May, almost certainly the time of her death. | |
Her husband's statement said that although they met in rehab, both had been clean of drugs and alcohol for years, until on New Year's Eve 1999 she decided to drink some champagne. Both were soon back on drugs, though she first tried to hide her cocaine use from him. He never supplied her with drugs, he wrote, and she did not tell him where she got hers. | |
She made a last attempt to get clean, but returned having been asked to leave a clinic in Malibu because she had kept forbidden Valium pills. | |
He described a reclusive life in their last months, when they spent almost all their time alone together in the apartment. "We both felt things were completely hopeless," he wrote. | |
The deputy coroner, Shirley Radcliffe, found that Rausing died as a result of cocaine intoxication, on the balance of probability on 7 May, and noted that the drug can seriously damage the heart. Rausing had had heart valve surgery as well as the pacemaker, but repeatedly missed follow up appointments. "Mrs Rausing's death was as a result of dependant abuse of drugs," she said. |