Is this proof Brian Jones was MURDERED
The found original dead in Rolling his swimming Stone was pool 50 years ago this week. The builders he fired that very day were at the scene — and have always been prime suspects. But a searching re-investigation for a new TV documentary finally asks...
HALF a century on, it remains one of the greatest mysteries in rock history. What really happened to Brian Jones, the ex-Rolling Stone found dead in the swimming pool at his home, Cotchford Farm in Sussex, in 1969?
An inquest recorded death by misadventure, ‘drowning while under the influence of drink and drugs’ at some point over the night of July 2 and morning of July 3.
But the timing of the guitarist’s death, three weeks after he was sacked from the band he founded, has always raised more questions than it answered.
Now an investigative writer who, over 30 years, has re-examined the evidence and interviewed those present is set to unveil a new Netflix documentary on the subject. Terry Rawlings says: ‘Brian Jones was murdered, beyond any doubt, and there is a wealth of evidence which says that it was then covered up.’
He says Jones — drunk, paranoid and anguished — was killed by his disgruntled one-eyed, Cockney builder Frank Thorogood in a row over money, and that the murder was covered up by Jones’s former chauffeurturned-minder, ex-paratrooper Tom Keylock.
At the centre of it all is the equivocal figure of Jones, a drug addict who randomly fathered children, beat and abandoned girlfriends, destroyed every friendship he made — and yet was key to the image and sound of one of the greatest rock ’n’ roll bands ever.
John Lennon, who had been talking about forming a ‘supergroup’ with Jones just before he drowned, later said: ‘He was different over the years as he disintegrated. He ended up the kind of guy that you’d dread to come on the phone because you knew it was trouble... he was really in a lot of pain.’
Here, ALISON BOSHOFF reveals the demons that drove Brian Jones, and analyses the evidence for his alleged murder and police links to the cover up...
THE SOUL OF THE BAND ...UNTIL HE BLEW IT
BORN in Cheltenham in 1942, Lewis Brian Hopkin Jones was the son of a piano-teaching aeronautical engineer, Lewis. Mum Louisa played the organ and led the church choir.
Brian inherited their talent and was first clarinet in the orchestra at Cheltenham Grammar School. It was jazz, however, that enthralled him.
After getting his girlfriend pregnant, he left school at 17 and spent a summer busking in Europe, which is when he decided to form a band of his own, placing an advert in Jazz News in May 1962.
Mick Jagger and his friend Keith Richards had seen Jones playing with Alexis Korner’s band at the Ealing Jazz Club, and responded to the ad. In the early years, the three shared an unheated flat in Chelsea, living from hand to mouth. Jones was responsible for the group’s name — plundering the Muddy Waters song title Rollin’ Stone.
He also was responsible for evolving their outrageous, unisex look — inspired by his German-Italian model girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, who’d spent time at Andy Warhol’s infamous Factory in New york. She took him to buy women’s clothes to wear.
Hailed as the soul of the band, it was bassist Bill Wyman who summed up his importance: ‘No Jones, no Stones. He formed the band. He chose the members. He named the band. He chose the music we played. He got us gigs.’ Wyman added. ‘He was the archetypal middleclass kid screaming to break away from his background, bumming around in dead- end jobs before finally finding his niche. And when he found it, he hammered it across to the world, with idealism and commitment. He was very influential, very important, and then slowly lost it… and just kind of wasted it and blew it all away.’
BABIES & BEATINGS
By THE time he was 17, Jones had fathered two children by two different women; a son in 1959 (later adopted) with his girlfriend Valerie Corbett, and a daughter after a one-night stand with a married woman that same year (the child was raised by the woman and her husband).
In 1961, Jones had another boy with girlfriend Pat Andrews whom he later abandoned, and three years later, a son with Linda Lawrence (who later married the singer Donovan).
Within months of that birth, another girlfriend, Dawn Molloy, announced that she was pregnant and given £700 to keep quiet. He’s also said to have fathered another daughter by an American model.
He treated all women with appalling callousness and occasional violence. At the time of his death, Jones was ending a relationship with model Suki Poitier, while living on and off with Swedish dancer Anna Wohlin.
It was, however, his romance with Anita Pallenberg that defined Jones. The long, floppy hair, fur coats and jewellery they sported made them iconic, as did their prolific drug use and violent relationship. He beat her — and she hit him back.
In 1967, Jones, Anita and Richards went to Morocco. Jones overdosed, and Anita ran off with Keith. ‘That was the final nail in the coffin with me and Brian,’ Keith said. ‘He’d never forgive me for that and I don’t blame him, but hell, s*** happens.’
‘I QUIT’...DAY AFTER BEING FIRED
JONES announced his departure from the band in June 1969. The Stones had, by then, enjoyed phenomenal global success with hits including (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, Paint It Black and Let’s Spend The Night Together.
Jones issued a statement: ‘I no longer see eye-to- eye with the others over the discs we are
cutting. I want to play my kind of music, which is no longer the Stones music.’ The truth was that he’d been fired the previous day by Jagger, Richards and drummer Charlie Watts.
The band gave him a £100,000 pay-off plus £20,000 a year for as many years as the band continued (equivalent today to £1.6million and £323,000).
Despite his undeniable talent and mastery of many instruments, the seeds of his departure were sown when Andrew Loog Oldham was appointed the Stones’ manager/producer in 1963.
He considered Jagger, not Jones, to be the real star and he wanted Jagger and Richards to write their own songs because there was money in songwriting.
Oldham later said Jones’s life was ‘becoming more desperate for him day by day’ due to his uncontrollable drug use, drinking, paranoia and rows with fellow band members. ‘I always felt sorry for Brian,’ Watts later said. ‘He was two things: he was not very nice, and he upset people very easily. He wasn’t very pleasant.’ Wyman observed: ‘He pushed every friendship to the limit and way beyond.’
In a 2012 documentary, Jagger said: ‘Keith and I took drugs, but Brian took too many drugs of the wrong kind, and he wasn’t functioning as a musician... fame doesn’t sit very comfortably on anyone’s shoulders. But some people’s shoulders [don’t] seem to fit it on at all. He was one of them.’
Jones’s fragile state of mind was intensified by a series of drug busts as police pursued a campaign of harassment against him. He was only saved from prison by psychiatric reports that indicated that he would kill himself if locked up.
WERE THERE 3 GUESTS...OR 6?
In nOvemBeR 1968, Jones bought Cotchford Farm, near Hartfield, Sussex, the former home of A.A. milne, creator of Winnie The Pooh. And following his sacking, that is where he retreated.
It was shortly after midnight on Thursday, July 3, 1969, that an ambulance was called to Cotchford. The first policeman on site was PC Buster evans, at 12.15am.
Brian Jones was dead, his body retrieved from the pool and lying on the side.
According to the official version of events, there were just three guests at Cotchford that night: Jones’s builder Frank Thorogood, his girlfriend Anna Wohlin and a nurse, Janet Lawson, the girlfriend of Jones’s minder, Tom Keylock.
They gave statements to police saying that Jones was drunk or had been drinking. Lawson said he’d been taking sleeping tablets — which sat rather oddly alongside her claim that he was also throwing a party that night.
All three insisted that they had independently left the pool and gone to separate parts of the house minutes before he drowned alone.
Lawson said she had gone to play guitar, Thorogood that he went off to smoke a cigarette and Wohlin that she was answering a phone. In a letter written 15 years ago, PC evans said: ‘ The behaviour and demeanour of the witnesses at the scene gave rise to suspicion which has remained with me.’ Thorogood was, in fact, the first person taken away in an ambulance — to be treated for an injured wrist. Astonishingly, this didn’t raise any suspicions as to how he had come by the injury. Jones’s body was taken to the mortuary at around 6am. According to other accounts, however, it seems likely that there were several more people present at Cotchford that night. One witness, a socialite friend of Jones, nicholas Fitzgerald, said he arrived at 11pm to join the party and saw ‘at least three men and a woman’ looking at a floating body in the pool. He said he was then told by a man — who answered to the description of minder Keylock: ‘F*** off or you’ll be next.’ DCI Bob marshall, head of the investigation team, said there were ‘six or so’ friends of Jones with him that night. But police never established who the others were, nor did they ask Thorogood who else was on his building team and if they were present — a potentially crucial failure in the investigation.
‘PRISONER’ OF HIS BUILDERS
THOROgOOD and mates mo Tucker and Johnny Betsworth, had been hired originally by Richards to renovate his home Redlands in West Wittering, Sussex.
It later transpired that Tucker was a police informant who had triggered the notorious Redlands drugs bust in 1967 when Jagger’s girlfriend marianne Faithfull was discovered by police naked on a fur rug (a mars Bar may or may not have been involved).
Richards had sacked the builders after ‘liberties’ were taken and they went to work for Jones who had just bought Cotchford.
Between november 1968 to his death in July 1969, Jones paid his builders £18,000 (£291,000 today)