As he loses second wife Julia to cancer... How will troubled Tetra Pak ... trends now
EVEN to hardened detectives, it was a macabre scene. In a second-floor bedroom strewn with rubbish and swarming with flies, in one of London's most exclusive addresses, lay the decomposing body of a woman crudely covered with a tarpaulin and bin bags.
Her hand was still clutching the crack pipe that had killed her, but such was the decay she could only be formally identified by the serial number of her pacemaker.
The story of Eva Rausing's fast life and early death in 2012 was one of the corrupting power of stupendous wealth, uncontrollable drug addiction and terrible sadness. But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the tragedy was the transformation following Eva's death of her husband, Tetra Pak heir Hans Kristian Rausing.
He had been stopped by police driving erratically in his red Bristol sports car, in which they discovered a carrier bag of unopened letters addressed to his wife. It led them to the £70 million Belgravia mansion where, in his drug-befuddled, grief-stricken state, he had hidden Eva's death for two months, preventing her burial.
For nearly two years afterwards he was a patient at a Marylebone psychiatric hospital, where he slowly recovered. And it was there that he rekindled a friendship with the formidable woman who was to become his second wife and who surely rescued him.
Hans Rausing and second wife, Julia. The couple gave more than £330 million to charities
Hans and Eva, who died of an overdose in 2012 - when her body was found, her hand was still clutching the crack pipe that had killed her
The story of Eva Rausing's fast life and early death in 2012 was one of the corrupting power of stupendous wealth
Yesterday's news of the death at 63 from cancer of the whip-smart Julia Delves Broughton, whom Hans, three years her junior, married at Woburn Abbey nearly ten years ago is a blow so shattering for the family that the superstitious might conclude the Rausing name has been more of a curse than a blessing.
Julia, who had her own story of sorrow and loss, not only brought Rausing back from his appalling anguish but helped him find joy and purpose in life again. Although intensely private, the couple became one of the country's great philanthropy teams, giving away more than £330 million of Rausing's fortune, including £50 million a year to UK charities and more than 1,000 grants.
But theirs was also a love match. 'They were extremely affectionate towards each other,' said a friend. 'Hans knew he owed Julia everything, but she was equally devoted to him — protective, of course, but loving, too.'
Their romance and his recovery have been compared with that of Victoria Getty who freed her late husband, Sir Paul Getty, from his crippling drug dependence and helped him become one of Britain's most generous benefactors.
Inevitably, Julia's death has provoked questions about how Rausing will cope, but a family source tells me: 'He is very much on the straight and narrow.'
Even though Julia had had a long battle with ill health, the baronet's daughter's death was unexpected
Rausing is heir to one of Sweden's most inventive industrial dynasties, the Tetra Pak packaging family, while Julia was the granddaughter of the aristocratic Sir Jock Delves Broughton
The couple handed out vast sums from the Rausing fortune through the Julia and Hans Rausing Trust
All the same, I understand that even though she'd had a long battle with ill health, the baronet's daughter's death was unexpected. Close friends say the family have been shocked by the news.
'It does seem unspeakably cruel that after everything Hans has been through, he should lose the one person who had brought him stability and happiness,' says one of their circle.
That they had more than a decade together will doubtless be a source of strength for the billionaire's son, who was so overawed by his 6ft 8in father that he ran away to India to find himself . . . and found drugs instead.
If Hans's story is one of redemption from self-inflicted demons, his second wife's was of overcoming adversity.
Their marriage in July 2014 was a union of two names both infamous and gilded.
Rausing is heir to one of Sweden's most inventive industrial dynasties, the Tetra Pak packaging family, while Julia was the granddaughter of the aristocratic Sir Jock Delves Broughton, a central figure of the Kenyan Happy Valley set.
Sir Jock was sensationally acquitted of the war-time murder of Lord Erroll, the lover of his wife, Lady Diana, in the notorious White Mischief case which was later made into a film starring Charles Dance and Greta Scacchi.
In December 1942, shortly after the trial and not long after returning to Britain, 59-year-old Sir Jock was found dying from a self-administered morphine overdose in a room at the Adlephi hotel in Liverpool.
Unhappiness and tragedy continued to stalk the family. Julia was the product of a broken home and her father, Sir Jock's son Sir Evelyn, married three times.
His first union was childless, but the second — to Helen Shore, a Manchester greengrocery wholesaler's daughter — produced four children: daughters Julia, Isabella and Lavinia, and a son, John, who would have been the 13th holder of the 17th-century baronetcy. But he died in a freak accident when he was only two.
Sir Evelyn and Lady Delves Broughton had just finished tea on the lawn at Doddington Park — the family's 35,000-acre Cheshire estate — when John and his two elder sisters, Isabella and Julia, wandered off.
According to family folklore, Isabella was told by her mother to 'keep an eye' on her brother. But she was momentarily distracted when the toddler, who was eating toast, was taking off his shoes and stepping into the ornamental pond. He suddenly pitched forward and within two minutes was dead.
He did not die from drowning but from asphyxiation, having fallen after choking on the toast. At an inquest into his death, the coroner described the accident as a 'one in a million chance', and said no one was to blame.
But Isabella,
