‘ They didn’t set out to murder him ...it just got out of hand’
— a staggering sum. They were on £250 (equivalent to £4,000) a week, when £15 (£240) a week was the normal going rate.
As the months wore on, the builders increasingly abused his hospitality — ordering steaks from his butcher and charging them to him, and making hash brownies in his kitchen.
Jones became increasingly exasperated. He was also deeply paranoid. Dave Gibson, a carpet fitter who visited the house, said the musician wandered about drinking vodka all day, complaining that he was ‘a prisoner in his own home’ and expressing fears he would be killed.
MURDER OR AN ACCIDENT?
In 2008, before her death from cancer, Janet Lawson, who later changed her name by deed poll, gave an interview in which she claimed the following: ‘Frank [Thorogood] was not doing the building work properly.
‘Brian had sacked him that day. There was something in the air. Frank was acting strangely [that night], throwing his weight around a bit.’
She said she went to find Jones’ asthma inhaler and while she was in the kitchen, Frank ‘came in in a lather. His hands were shaking. He was in a terrible state. I thought the worst almost straight away and went to the pool to check. When I saw Brian on the bottom of the pool and was calling for help, Frank initially did nothing.’
Jones’ girlfriend Anna Wohlin, who moved back to Sweden directly after the death, later appeared to corroborate this account, saying: ‘I don’t know if Frank meant to kill Brian. ‘Maybe it was horseplay in the pool that went wrong. But I knew all along he did not die a natural death. I’m still sure of it.’ Terry Rawlings, author of The Final Truth: The Murder of A Rolling Stone who is working on the new documentary, is in no doubt about it: ‘Brian was murdered, beyond any doubt.
‘Tom Keylock, who was Brian’s minder hired by the Stones, told me that Frank murdered him with his friend Mo Tucker as an accomplice. It was not that they set out to murder him, it was an argument which got out of hand and then Brian was dead.
‘Brian sacked them on the Thursday, which was the day they should have been paid.’
He says Frank believed he was owed £6,000, (£97,000 today) and he needed the money to pay his mates. Wohlin said that Frank was ‘furious’. ‘There is no doubt that the builders led by Frank were robbing him blind,’ adds Rawlings.
And the person behind the cover-up? Was Stones’ minder and Arnhem veteran, Tom Keylock, responsible? For decades he denied he was present that night at Cotchford, but before his death in 2009 he sensationally confirmed his role to Rawlings on film, telling him: ‘Of course I was there. Where else would I have been? I had a job to do, and I did it.’
Rawlings adds: ‘Tom [Keylock] was there in the attic... multiple witness statements point to Brian dying at 9.30pm, but it wasn’t phoned through to the police until 12.30am by which time Tom had laid a false trail and everyone had alibis sorted.’
The fact that Keylock’s brother was a senior policeman added to theories of a cover-up.
Keylock also told the filmmaker Steven Woolley, who was working on the 2005 movie Stoned, that Thorogood had committed the crime ‘with Mo and Johnny looking on’.
Keith Richards always suspected Keylock of being involved. In an interview he said: ‘Someone didn’t take care of [Jones] and they should have done because he had someone there [Keylock] who was supposed to take care of him.
‘Everyone knew what Brian was like, especially at a party.
‘Maybe he did just go for a swim. I wanted to know who was there and couldn’t find out.
‘The only cat I could ask was the one I think got rid of everybody and did the whole disappearing trick, so that when the cops arrived it looked like it was just an accident.
‘Maybe it was...maybe he did the right thing but I don’t know. You can’t get to the bottom of it.’ It later emerged that the Stones’ co-manager Allen Klein had conducted his own inquiry because he believed the police had failed to do so properly.
The band’s former road manager Sam Cutler said that Klein’s report pointed the finger at Keylock as ‘the prime and only suspect’. Keylock, who had spent years clearing up Jones’s various drug-induced messes, had grown to resent his employer and may have taken Thorogood’s side in the builder’s dispute with the musician.
Almost all of those who were reported to be present are now dead including Keylock, Thorogood, Lawson, Tucker and Betsworth.
BUTTERFLIES AND A BURIAL
TWO days after Jones’s death, the Rolling Stones played a free concert in Hyde Park which turned into a tribute show.
Jagger, dressed in a white tunic, read from the Percy Shelley poem Adonais, then hundreds of white butterflies were released.
Richards wrote in his autobiography: ‘We wanted to see [Jones] off in grand style.
‘The ups and downs with the guy are one thing, but when his time’s over, release the doves, or in this case the sackfuls of white butterflies.’
His funeral was held in Cheltenham on July 10. Watts and Wyman attended, but Jagger nd Richards sent their apologies.
The last word should go to Shirley Arnold, the Rolling Stones’ secretary, who said: ‘The sadness of his dying is somehow not so bad as the sadness of seeing him try to live.’