Police review Rolling Stone Brian Jones death after MoS reveals new evidence

[Jan Klimkowski]

Excerpts below from the Daily Mail article linked by Albert.

Was Brian Jones murdered?

by KEITH DOVKANTS, Evening Standard

FEW tears were shed for Brian Jones. He was, according to a contemporary, a "nasty little shit" and although he had started the Rolling Stones, his musicmaking genius burned out in a fever of drink and drugs. When he was found dead at the bottom of his swimming pool, aged 27, he was considered merely another casualty of the excesses that defined the 1960s.

Producer Steve Woolley returns from the Cannes Film Festival this week to realise a project he says will rewrite this dark chapter of rock 'n' roll history. Jones was murdered, Woolley believes, and he thinks he can prove it. The idea has been aired before in a conspiracy-theory kind of way, but Woolley claims his new film will provide conclusive proof that Jones's death was caused by an act of violence. And he will name the killer.

The screenplay Woolley took to Cannes has been seen by only a few people and remains a confidential document. He said when the film is made, later this year, he will hand his evidence over to the police. Until then the "proof" that Jones was murdered will be kept secret.

Woolley has been investigating the Brian Jones affair for nearly 10 years and he has left his own trail of clues. It is known, for example, that he has had long discussions with Anna Wohlin, Jones's girlfriend and a key witness. He has also probed deeply into the background of a member of Jones's entourage, an East End hard case who was with the rock star the night he died.

For anyone else who has investigated the Jones case, these facts point only one way. As Woolley concluded a series of meetings with the movie industry's money men - securing finance for the new film, he says - I put it to him that I could guess what was in his script.

"Yes, that is what has emerged," he said. "But we've spent years on this and we have uncovered all sorts of facts that were never brought out at the time. It is a fascinating and disturbing story. I believe the police will have to reopen the investigation."

So what will they find? The official records show that on the night of 2 July, 1969, Brian Jones was dragged from the floodlit pool at his home, Cotchford Farm, in Sussex, his lungs full of water and clinically dead. Attempts to revive him failed and at the inquest there was evidence he had been drinking and taking drugs.

Such deaths were part of the zeitgeist. If a young rock start died, this was the way it happened. The coroner recorded a verdict of misadventure and Brian Jones headed a long list of casualties that would include Keith Moon, Jimi Hendrix, Momma Cass, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and many others.

It is not the dead who make the Jones story intriguing, but the living - people such as Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg. She was the mysterious blonde who captivated Jones at the beginning of his stardom. He was a restless, pretty young man, born into a middle-class family in Cheltenham.

When he simultaneously made his teenage girlfriend and married mistress pregnant, he packed up his guitar and headed for London. He was 19.

Jones, like many musicians of his generation, had fallen under the spell of the great American blues artists. He played in the London clubs that were beginning to spring up around the new music, and when he met Jagger and Richards the Rolling Stones were born. The name was chosen by Jones and he revelled in his role as leader of the group, but he was soon to fall out with his new friends.
He began drinking heavily and experimenting with drugs. His moods and foul temper enervated Jagger and Richards. Relations between the three founder members of the band disintegrated when Ms Pallenberg deserted Jones for Richards. Soon after, she had an affair with Jagger. Jones took himself off to Sussex, to Cotchford Farm, former home of AA Milne, creator of Winnie the Pooh.

THE Stones offered him a payoff of £100,000 and £20,000 a year - the equivalent of about £1 million and £200,000 in today's money - and he was thinking about it when he died. Sir Mick Jagger, who approved the deal, is said to be worth £170 million now. But he was always more shrewd than Brian Jones. Jones's household at Cotchford included his beautiful new girlfriend, Anna Wohlin, and a man called Frank Thorogood.

He was a burly cockney, 44 years old, who had become part of Jones's circle. He was friend, minder and factotum, and in the summer of 1969 he was organising building work on the farm.
Ms Wohlin, who returned to her native Sweden after Jones's death, never believed it was an accident, but as a very young womanin a foreign land, immediately swept up by the powerful interests that surrounded the Rolling Stones, she felt unable to influence events. Now she believes she can.

She has written her own version of the affair and collaborated with Woolley on the new film. The story she tells suggests at least one person had a motive for killing Jones. According to her, Thorogood had been cheating Jones out of money.

He had been inflating bills, swindling large amounts through the building work and when Jones discovered this he instructed his accountant not to pay any more of Thorogood's claims. Thorogood said he was owed £6,000 - the price of a London flat in those days - and he was furious. But the row blew over and he was at the house the night Jones decided to take a late swim.

Ms Wohlin, who now runs a successful family business in Sweden, remembers that Jones had drunk a little wine, but was not drunk. Indeed, the postmortem showed only a moderate amount of alcohol. She said he had not taken drugs, although some traces of substances were found in his body.

He was a strong swimmer, she said, and when she left him at the pool to take a telephone call, he had been fine. Fifteen minutes later he was dead.

Frank Thorogood, who had also been swimming in the pool earlier, finally jumped in to help her pull Jones out but, Ms Wohlin recalled, he showed no great interest in rescuing Jones quickly. She believes he probably murdered Jones by holding his head underwater while she was in the house, but she has no hard evidence to prove this.

BUT there is evidence that Thorogood was the killer, and it came from his own lips. Rock author Geoffrey Giuliano, in his book Paint It Black, claims Thorogood made a deathbed confession just before he died in 1993. He called his longstanding friend Tom Keylock, who was the Stones' road manager in the late Sixties, and, according to Giuliano, told him: "It was me that did Brian. I just finally snapped. It just happened."

That, of itself, would not prompt a reopening of the case. But Steve Woolley said he has more.
"Statements made at the time were factually incorrect,î he said. "People lied - and we can prove that.î

He is calling his film The Wicked World of Brian Jones. If what he believes is true, it was wicked indeed.