Drugs and drink kill Guinness family man (From The Wiltshire Gazette and Herald)

Drugs and drink kill Guinness family man

A SERIES of tragic deaths in one wealthy family, which has been dubbed the curse of the Guinness dynasty, has struck again.

An inquest in Salisbury on Friday heard that Robert Hesketh, a senior member of the Guinness family, died from a cocktail of alcohol, heroine and cocaine at an 18th birthday party at historic Fosbury Manor near Marlborough.

The inquest into the death of Mr Hesketh last November was conducted Wiltshire Coroner David Masters.

He was told that Mr Hesketh was attending the 18th birthday party at Fosbury Manor when his wife, Catherine, found she was unable to get into their room in the early hours of the morning.

Her uncle, Erskine Guinness, who was hosting the party for one of his sons, climbed up a ladder and through an upstairs window to get into the room.

Mr Hesketh was found unconscious and he later died.

It was the latest in a series of bizarre events to strike the family and echoed the death of Mrs Hesketh's own sister Olivia Channon from a drugs overdose in 1986.

Mrs Hesketh told the inquest that she had fallen asleep downstairs on the night Mr Hesketh died.

When she went upstairs to go their bedroom she found the door was locked.

She told the coroner: "I have never seen him take drugs."

However, Mrs Hesketh admitted to the inquest that her husband could have taken drugs without her knowledge.

When police searched the manor house the day after the party in November last year they found no evidence of drug use, the inquest heard.

Dr Adnam Al-Bari, a pathologist at the Royal County Hospital in Winchester, said Mr Hesketh died from central nervous system depression and heroin toxicity with alcohol and cocaine.

He said death would have been a gradual process, with a deep sleep and finally coronary arrest.

Recording a verdict that Mr Hesketh died from non-dependent use of drugs, Mr Masters said: "As courts often hear, there is no safe level for heroin."

Mr Hesketh was the son of Col Roger Fleetwood-Hesketh, the former Tory MP for Southport.

He was one of the men behind the campaign to deceive Hitler into believing the Allied forces would land at the Pas de Calais instead of on the Normandy beaches.