Dolores’s deadly cocktail
Revealed: contents of hotel minibar on the night Cranberries singer died
THIS is the minibar selection singer Dolores O’Riordan chose from for the fatal cocktail that led to her accidental drowning in a London hotel bath.
An inquest this week heard that the Cranberries star consumed five spirits miniatures from the minibar and a half bottle of champagne before she drowned in the bath while wearing her pyjamas.
The exact mix of the alcohol she consumed from the minibar in the Park Lane Hilton hotel has not been disclosed. However, the bottle of champagne consumed was Pommery Brut Royal, while the minibar contained a wide selection of alcoholic drinks.
It contained two 50ml bottles each of Absolut Vodka, Havana Club Especial rum, Beefeater gin, Chivas Regal scotch whiskey, Jack Daniels Black Label Tennessee whiskey, and Martell VS Cognac brandy.
Staff at the top hotel found the singer in the bathtub wearing a long-sleeved vest and pyjama bottoms at around 9am on January 15 this year – hours after she left an upbeat voicemail to a music producer, and spoke to her mother.
Coroner Shirley Radcliffe said that there was no evidence that she was feeling suicidal and that it seemed to be solely ‘a tragic accident’, listing the causes of death as drowning and alcohol intoxication.
The manner of her death has
‘Felt reborn with the new record’
shocked family, friends and the local community in Limerick, the US and Canada.
The death of the 46-year-old mother of three who has long spoken of her battles with alcohol and mental illness stunned many as she appeared on the road to recovery with another reinvention in the wings – and a new love in her life, band member Olé Koretsky.
She had contacted room service at around midnight, and mother Eileen had spoken to her on the phone at around 2am.
‘Immediately when I knew she was dead I wanted to make sure they got a priest to her. She only went to London on the Sunday. I caught her by the hand when she was leaving, I remember, and I wished her good health. She had a few health complaints, including back problems. I felt sorry for her,’ Eileen recalled.
Some time before her death, Dolores left a final voicemail to her longtime friend and record label executive Dan Waite, at 1.12am.
Hours previously she had lent her vocals to a cover of The Cranberries’ song Zombie by the group Bad Wolves. ‘Hi Dan, it’s Dolores, I’m in London. I’m at the Park Hyatt Hilton,’ she said, and spoke about that day’s session.
‘Actually, I think it’s f***ing awesome! It sounds f***ing terribly good!’ The court heard how Dolores had written a suicide note in September of last year but lost consciousness before completing it.
But one of Dolores’s US publicists, Rey Roldan, who worked with the alternative rock band D.A.R.K, which she helped form three years ago, told the Irish Mail on Sunday that when he met Dolores late last year ‘it felt like she was reborn’.
‘She was in great spirits and had a great energy about her,’ said Mr Roldan, who first met the star in 1993 and quickly struck up a friendship. In the weeks leading up to her death, Dolores travelled to Ontario, Canada, to see her three children on December 26, 2017, and returned to Ireland on January 4, according to her last post on Twitter.
The singer’s American psychiatrist, Dr Robert Hirschfield, said they last spoke on December 26 – the same day she saw her children. He said in a statement read to the court: ‘She said that she was doing well overall. She wasn’t drinking, a little sad on Christmas Day but no thoughts of suicide.’
Five days after her return, on January 9, she was seen by one of her psychiatrists, Dr Séamus Ó Ceallaigh, of St Patrick’s Mental Health Services in Dublin, who detailed at the inquest in London this week that she had been in good spirits and had shown no signs of suicidal intent. He said she had responded very well to treatment for bipolar affective disorder.
For nearly a decade, Dolores had been living in a waterfront home on Big Bald Lake, near Buckhorn, north of Peterborough in Ontario, but moved back to Ireland in 2013 and her marriage to Don Burton, whom she wed in 1994, ended in 2014. Their son Taylor graduated from high school in 2015.
She spoke of finding some solace and solitude in her second home in Peterborough County. ‘I’m half a Canuck,’ she said in a 2009 interview with the Canadian press. ‘I’ve spent half my life here now.’
‘You can really get lost here, and I like that,’ she said.
Now, it is understood that Burton and their children – Taylor Baxter, 20, Molly Leigh, 17, and Dakota Rain, 13, – plan to move to another home as the property contains too many memories of Dolores.
‘The girls are doing okay, but Taylor is understandably finding it very hard,’ Dolores’s mother Eileen told the Limerick Leader before the inquest. ‘They are like my own children,’ she said. ‘Both girls are like Dolores and sing.
‘Dolores was recording [a song] with Taylor two weeks before she died,’ she said. ‘He has a great voice. They had the studio and the whole lot ready but poor Taylor had got a very bad sore throat problem. He couldn’t do it. It is a pity.’
Dolores, who was deeply religious, had been planning to pay her respects at her father’s grave on the weekend of her death on a planned trip home. Now she lies beside him.
‘She had been on the road to recovery’