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Film to solve Rolling Stones murder mystery
May 18, 2004 15:58 IST
Stephen Woolley's biopic on the Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones is expected to prove that the rock star was murdered, reports the Times, London.
Brian Jones was found dead in the swimming pool of his Sussex mansion in July 1969. He was 27. An inquest heard that he had drunk and taken drugs before drowning, and ruled it to be an accident.
But after a decade of research, Woolley, whose films include The Crying Game and Scandal, hopes to prove that Jones's death, aged 27, was no accident, but murder, says the Times.
According to the article, 'the film is expected to name the murderer as Frank Thorogood, an East End builder who befriended Jones while working at his 15th-century home, Cotchford Farm. The builder died of cancer in 1993, after a deathbed confession: "It was me that did Brian. I just finally snapped."'
Woolley spent ten years interviewing Jones's friends and those who were there on the night he died. According to the Times, the police have said that, when they have seen the evidence in the film, they may reopen the case.
Woolley describes his film as a murder mystery. "It'll be about how and why. All the information is out there. It's not fiction, but it's not a documentary." His research uncovered a "very murky" story. He was told by Jones's Swedish girlfriend, Anna Wohlin, that Jones was a good swimmer and believed that Thorogood was cheating him out of money, inflating bills for building work, the Times said.
'He was at the house when Jones took his fateful late swim. Jones was with the Stones from their formation in 1962 until weeks before his death. He was a temperamental womaniser who is said to have fallen out with the band after his girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, left him first for Keith Richards, then Mick Jagger,' the article concludes.