Family horror at memoir on drug death of Tetra Pak wife
ONE of Britain’s wealthiest families is at the centre of a bitter row over a book about the drug-laden death of Eva Rausing, wife of the Tetra Pak heir.
Mrs Rausing died at her Belgravia home in July 2012, aged, 48, after a long battle with addiction. Her husband, Hans Kristian Rausing, also an addict, hid her body in their bedroom for two months before the decomposing corpse was found in a police raid.
The couple’s fall from grace will be highlighted next month in Mayhem, by Hans’s sister, Sigrid Rausing, the philanthropist, publisher and editor of Granta. It is billed as “a memoir of addiction in the family”.
Eva Rausing’s father, Tom Kemeny, has condemned the book, claiming it will tear the family apart. He said the pub- lication was “inexplicable, damaging and truly sad” and offered “a cold, hollow and unsympathetic depiction of our beloved daughter”.
“I find it inconceivable that a family member, editor or not, would publicly expose such painful and personal details,” he said. “If it is a personal act of catharsis, then it should have been done privately.”
He alleged that his daughter would be alive today if she had not been separated from her children in the turbulent years when she and her husband were in the throes of addiction. “The single act of taking her four beautiful children caused Eva unbearable pain. Being separated from them left her defenceless and without hope. In our view, that was the ‘mayhem’ that ultimately caused her death,” said Mr Kemeny, who lives in the US.
“I do not deny that Hans Kristian and Eva relapsed. However, I do wholeheartedly deny that their relapse made them bad or unloving parents, which is in stark contrast to the descriptions in Sigrid Rausing’s book. Eva was a good, loving mother and I cannot bring her back, but we wish to remind the public of her many positive qualities.”
Eva moved to Britain as a child when her father, a senior executive with the Pepsi company, was posted to London.
She began experimenting with drugs in her late teens and attended many rehabilitation centres over the years. At one she met Hans Rausing, whose Swedish grandfather had invented Tetra Pak containers. The family is estimated to have a joint fortune of £18.9billion.
Mr Rausing first tried heroin while backpacking in India, but at the time of the couple’s marriage in 1992 they were both said to be drug-free.
However, they relapsed and by the time of Eva’s death were living in a squalid bedroom in their otherwise pristine five-storey home in Cadogan Place, central London. The housekeepers were forbidden to enter.
The family staged several interventions, even reportedly hiring a team of former SAS soldiers at a cost of £100,000 to follow the couple and scare off drug dealers, but all failed.
Police discovered Mrs Rausing’s body after stopping her husband for driving erratically. They found drugs in his car and went to search his home.
The body was buried beneath bin bags, sheets and clothing several feet deep, which Rausing had gaffer-taped together. A coroner ruled she died as a result of drug dependency.
At an inquest, Mr Rausing said he “did not act rationally” after seeing his wife die. He received a suspended sentence for delaying the burial of a body, and is now married to Julia Delves Broughton, a Christie’s director. He is now believed to be “clean”.
Responding to Mr Kemeny’s allegations, Sigrid Rausing said: “Any parent losing a child goes through unimaginable pain. I have some sympathy for Tom Kemeny’s wish to protect his daughter’s memory.” But Mr Kemeny’s claims were “simply not true” and she called the couple’s drug addiction as “very serious, indeed life-threatening”.
She said: “Tom Kemeny also denies that a drug relapse makes people bad parents, which he must know is an astonishing denial of the reality of drug addiction.”
The book was “about the experience of living with addiction in the family, and watching people you love self-destruct in front of your eyes”.