‘A fella’s drowned in the pool … Fucking hell … I think the geezer’s dead, mate.” So runs the 999 call by Justin Merritt, one of nine people at a party at 4 Beaumont Park Drive in Roydon, Essex on 31 March 2001. It was the home of the TV star Michael Barrymore, and all hell broke loose. Mostly, of course, for the family of the 31-year-old man who died – Stuart Lubbock. But they, and he, faded out of the story, as victims tend to do when they have the double misfortune of dying within the vicinity of a celebrity.
Barrymore: The Body in the Pool (Channel 4) was the story of the two police investigations into what came to be widely believed was the rape and murder of Lubbock at Barrymore’s house, the star’s arrest and release, and the tabloid frenzy surrounding it all. The documentary had its faults, but it performed its central duty well. It restored Lubbock’s suffering and death and his family’s enduring misery – etched, absolutely, on the faces of his brother Kevin and father, Terry, which look as if they have been contorted in pain for every minute of the past 18 years – to primacy.
Mid-90s footage of Barrymore at the peak of his career – and you can see his talent burning, his perfect ease on stage, the natural mastery of his form, the love between him and the audience so strong that it is almost visible – felt like it came from a far-distant era, when a popular star could unite a viewing public instead of simply creating silos of differing opinions.
The reaction when the married, beloved star came out as gay (at a drag night at the White Swan pub in Limehouse, east London, in 1995) was, alas, more recognisable. We have come some way in the business of not being intolerant, brutish, prurient tools about it, but the tabloids’ gleeful hunt for past lovers, tell-alls and assumptions of various vile kinds didn’t feel as alien as you might hope.
When Lubbock’s body was discovered, the stage was already set for a febrile drama. The papers were filled with stories about “gay sex orgies”, drugs and Caligulan debaucheries. Or, as the former News of the World reporter Paul McMullan put it: “Telling a fucking load of lies … Didn’t matter.”
“I didn’t understand,” says Terry Lubbock, fragile-looking in contemporary footage, and a hundred years older and frailer now. “I couldn’t make sense of it. I couldn’t grasp the fact my son was linked to Barrymore.” Kevin, who was at the nightclub with Stuart the night Barrymore’s assistant invited his brother back, says: “All Stuart wanted was to be able to say: ‘Guess whose house I was in last night!’” when he went to work the next morning.
Instead, he died. Drowned. But his lungs were not waterlogged, and he had terrible anal injuries suggesting the kind of trauma that, in combination with the drugs in his system, some say could have brought on a heart attack – his body then put into the swimming pool to make it look like a tragic accident, the tabloids claimed. There were two police investigations, four pathologists’ reports, three arrests – Barrymore among them – and no charges brought. The case remains unsolved.
The documentary only touched, far too briefly and towards the very end of the film, on the failure of the police to secure the crime scene at the very start (which was confirmed by an IPCC report campaigned for by Terry). According to the report, witnesses were allowed to come and go and in the process two pieces of potentially vital evidence – a door handle and a pool thermometer capable of inflicting the injuries found on Lubbock’s body – went missing. It seemed an odd weighting of the story, possibly explained by the documentary seeming to be part of a new push by Essex police, who have appointed a new senior investigating officer to the case, to generate new leads – helped, hopefully, by the offer of a £20,000 reward from Crimestoppers for information. “Nineteen years is a long time,” said the new senior investigating officer, DCI Stephen Jennings. “Loyalties change.”
Some do, some don’t. Terry, now 74 and in a care home, agrees that 19 years is a long time. “If I try hard, I can think of Stuart as a child, I can think of him as a person, as a man … But this thing is so big, it smothers everything that was good about my son. I feel exhausted. But he is still in me. How can a father dismiss the questions till he’s got the answers about his son’s murder?”
Our last view of Barrymore is of him skating in sequinned glory during his turn on Dancing on Ice at Christmas two months ago. Our last view of Terry is of him watching, and shaking his head.
