Teenage
daughter of the Marquess of Queensberry, 18, died at Notting Hill house party
after two-day heroin and cocaine binge, inquest hears
Lady Beth Douglas, 18, was found dead in March with needle
marks in her arm
Her death is the latest ‘Queensberry Curse’ tragedy to
befall aristocratic family
Family members have endured suicide and violent deaths,
married into Osama bin laden's family and 9th marquess was instrumental in
Oscar Wilde's downfall
By CHRIS GREENWOOD CHIEF CRIME CORRESPONDENT FOR THE DAILY
MAIL
PUBLISHED: 22:02 GMT, 9 November 2018 | UPDATED: 02:41 GMT,
10 November 2018
The teenage daughter of the Marquess of Queensberry died at
a house party after a two-day drug and alcohol binge, an inquest heard.
Lady Beth Douglas, 18, the youngest child of David Douglas,
the 88-year-old 12th marquess, was found with needle marks in her arm.
Her boyfriend thought she had fallen asleep on a sofa but
dialled 999 when he was later unable to revive her at the flat in Notting Hill,
west London.
The teenage daughter of the Marquess of Queensbury died at a
house party after a two day drug and alcohol binge. Lady Beth Douglas, 18, the
youngest child of Lord David, the 12th Marquess of Queensbury, was found with
needle marks in her arm +5
The teenage daughter of the Marquess of Queensbury died at a
house party after a two day drug and alcohol binge. Lady Beth Douglas, 18, the
youngest child of Lord David, the 12th Marquess of Queensbury, was found with
needle marks in her arm
He discovered she had injected heroin, possibly for the
first time. Tests also revealed cocaine and morphine in her blood.
Her father criticised detectives for failing to discover the
identity of the dealer who gave her the drugs or even to contact other people
who attended the party.
Beth’s death is the latest tragedy to befall a colourful
aristocratic dynasty which has endured centuries of misfortune once labelled
the ‘Queensberry Curse’.
The 18-year-old had injected heroin, possibly for the first
time. Tests also revealed cocaine and morphine in her blood +5
The 18-year-old had injected heroin, possibly for the first
time. Tests also revealed cocaine and morphine in her blood
The 9th marquess played a leading role in the downfall of
Oscar Wilde and he also gave his name to the official rules of boxing after
endorsing changes to the sport in 1867 that largely put an end to bare-knuckle
fighting.
More recently, the family has a link by marriage to the
family of Osama Bin Laden.
Beth, known to family and friends as ‘Ling Ling’, was the
only daughter of the marquess’s third wife, Taiwanese artist Hsueh-Chun Liao.
She was a student and talented violinist but struggled with
drug and alcohol addiction and was being treated for mental illness.
Westminster Coroner’s Court heard she died after going to a
house party at the £2.5million Notting Hill flat in March.
Her boyfriend Jenan Karagoli, 21, said the pair had spent at
least two days drinking and taking drugs while staying in hotels.
At the house party he went out to buy wine after she
complained about drinking cognac. He returned to find her apparently asleep on
a sofa where he joined her.
Mr Karagoli admitted she had asked him to obtain heroin for
her. He said: ‘I really didn’t want to do it. She used to snort heroin back
before I even knew her.
Lady Beth Douglas was a student and talented violinist but
struggled with drug and alcohol addiction and was being treated for mental
illness +5
Lady Beth Douglas was a student and talented violinist but struggled
with drug and alcohol addiction and was being treated for mental illness
‘I said I didn’t know anyone. She made a phone call and said
we were going to a party.’
Mr Karagoli, who had been taking anti-anxiety medication and
cocaine, said he did not know who supplied the lethal drug.
‘She asked me to get her a bottle of red wine,’ he said.
‘When I came back I saw the person who lived there in a chair with a crack
pipe. Ling Ling was asleep on the couch.’ Describing how he later tried to
rouse her, he said: ‘I couldn’t wake her up. The man in the flat said she had
taken heroin. I just picked up her arms and saw a little peck of dots.’
The inquest heard that Beth had been known to mental health
services since the age of 13, when she started self-harming and had been
sectioned under the Mental Health Act aged 17.
Lord Queensberry criticised police for failing to identify
the dealer who gave his daughter the heroin and possibly helped her inject it.
He said: ‘There was mention there was a lot of drug-taking
in this flat. I was concerned because in this flat where my daughter died, it
seems to have been connected with the injection of heroin.
In 1895, the writer and wit Oscar Wilde (L) was jailed for
gross indecency after a legal battle with the 9th marquess, whose son Lord
Alfred Douglas (R), nicknamed ‘Bosie’, was Wilde’s lover +5
In 1895, the writer and wit Oscar Wilde (L) was jailed for
gross indecency after a legal battle with the 9th marquess, whose son Lord
Alfred Douglas (R), nicknamed ‘Bosie’, was Wilde’s lover
‘The owner of the flat is not here to make any statement.
And the other people at the party, police haven’t contacted them. I am almost
certain that this is the first occasion in which my daughter, who had taken a
lot of drugs...but she had not had intravenous heroin before as far as I know.
‘No one takes their first intravenous injection of heroin
without assistance. Someone helped her and nobody seems interested as to who
that is.’
The inquest recorded Beth’s cause of death as a cardiac
respiratory failure and cocaine and heroin poisoning.
Coroner Dr Shirley Radcliffe apologised to the family for
being unable to ‘answer all of your questions’. She said: ‘It’s not possible to
say what the cause of death was – cocaine ingestion, heroin ingestion or a
combination of the two drugs.
‘The police found no needles or syringes. As far as they are
concerned there is no further action they can take in this matter.
‘They have no evidence of any criminal act and they had no
identification details for the couple who were there that evening.’
A family with tragedies dating back to the dark ages
The ‘Curse of the Queensberrys’ dates back to the Scotland
of the Dark Ages when Sir William Douglas died in the Tower of London in 1298
after fighting for William Wallace against the English.
His son, Sir James Douglas, a confidant of Robert the Bruce,
died in 1330 taking his dead leader’s heart on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
The family were created earls in 1358. The 2nd earl died at
the Battle of Otterburn in 1388, and the 4th earl was killed four years later
in the Battle of Homildon Hill. The title was elevated to marquess by Charles
II in 1681.
In 1858 the 8th marquess shot himself dead with his own gun
while hunting rabbits. Two of his sons also died violent deaths.
In 1895, the writer and wit Oscar Wilde was jailed for gross
indecency after a legal battle with the 9th marquess, whose son Lord Alfred
Douglas, nicknamed ‘Bosie’, was Wilde’s lover. The case went to court after
Wilde unsuccessfully sued the marquess for writing that he was a ‘sodomite’.
The current, 12th marquess, David Harrington Angus Douglas,
has married three times, producing eight children by four women. Caroline
Carey, half-sister of his illegitimate son Ambrose Carey, married Salem Bin
Laden, a brother of terrorist Osama. When he died in a plane crash she married
another brother, Khaled.
In 1995, Lady Beth Douglas’s half-sister, Lady Alice
Douglas, married Simon Melia, an armed robber she met while holding a drama
workshop at a prison. They divorced after he cheated on her. In 2009, Beth’s
half-brother, Milo Douglas, 34, committed suicide by jumping off a tower block.
Marquess of
Queensberry's daughter, 18, was 'working as a prostitute and earned money from
online sex videos' before she died after taking heroin, her boyfriend reveals
Lady Beth Douglas, 18, died after injecting heroin for the
first time in March
Her boyfriend Jenan Karagoli, 21, alleged she had been
working as a prostitute
He said she had been earning money by taking part in online
sex videos
By COURTNEY BARTLETT FOR THE DAILY MAIL
PUBLISHED: 22:00 GMT, 11 November 2018 | UPDATED: 09:21 GMT,
12 November 2018
A teenage aristocrat who died from a drugs overdose was
working as a prostitute before her sordid death, her boyfriend has claimed.
Lady Beth Douglas, 18 – the youngest child of David Douglas,
the 12th Marquess of Queensberry – died after injecting heroin for the first
time in March.
Her boyfriend Jenan Karagoli, 21, alleged she had been
working as a prostitute and earning money by taking part in online sex videos.
She had also been selling her underwear online for £30 a time.
‘I knew about all this adult work, escorting, so on and so
forth – but I kept my mouth shut,’ he said. He added that the day before her
death on March 7, the couple had argued about her sexual behaviour. She would
tell him to wait in a pub while she disappeared for hours.
‘She told me to sit
and enjoy my Guinness while she went and met a friend. Soon she would phone and
say she had got us a hotel room for the night,’ he said.
When Mr Karagoli asked how she had procured £250-a-night
rooms when they were penniless, Lady Beth told him ‘I did what I had to do’.
Lady Beth Douglas was a student and talented violinist but
struggled with drug and alcohol addiction and was being treated for mental
illness +7
Lady Beth Douglas was a student and talented violinist but
struggled with drug and alcohol addiction and was being treated for mental
illness
He was ‘disgusted’ at the idea of her working as an escort,
and the pair had a tearful row in the middle of a three-day drugs binge, he
said.
‘I knew something had been happening, but my mind was too
clouded from the drink and drugs. I told her: “I know what you’re doing, you
can talk to me about it. You don’t have to hide things from me and, if you’re
desperate for money, I’ll help”,’ said Mr Karagoli.
He claimed he knew she had been performing dominatrix webcam
shows with men for ‘two or three months’ and then she asked him if she should
sell her used underwear online.
He called that ‘a step too far’, adding: ‘I now think all of
this was a gateway to her seeing men in person, hence the hotel rooms.’ Mr
Karagoli met the talented violinist, known to her family as ‘Ling Ling’,
through friends on her 18th birthday and they had a ten-month relationship.
But he ‘could tell she had her demons from the day we first
met’. He said: ‘A lot of it stemmed from losing her half-brother Milo to
suicide. She loved him and would often tell me he was the only sibling to truly
accept her.’
She would also often mention the ‘Queensberry curse’ and
that the dynasty has endured centuries of misfortune. He said their
relationship descended into regular cocaine-taking. On March 6, they were
invited to a house party in Notting Hill, West London, close to the flat they
shared.
The teenage daughter of the Marquess of Queensbury died at a
house party after a two day drug and alcohol binge +7
The teenage daughter of the Marquess of Queensbury died at a
house party after a two day drug and alcohol binge
He described how Lady Beth asked him to leave the party to
buy wine. When he returned at around 11.30pm, she had passed out on the sofa,
so he went to sleep beside her. But at 1.30am he woke to find her ‘lifeless’.
He said: ‘She was so troubled but she was a wonderful
woman.’ Mr Karagoli has now sworn off all drugs and declares himself ‘clean as
a whistle’.
Last week an inquest recorded Lady Beth’s cause of death as
a cardiac respiratory failure and cocaine and heroin poisoning.
A family with tragedies dating back to the dark ages
The ‘Curse of the Queensberrys’ dates back to the Scotland
of the Dark Ages when Sir William Douglas died in the Tower of London in 1298
after fighting for William Wallace against the English.
His son, Sir James Douglas, a confidant of Robert the Bruce,
died in 1330 taking his dead leader’s heart on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
The family were created earls in 1358. The 2nd earl died at
the Battle of Otterburn in 1388, and the 4th earl was killed four years later
in the Battle of Homildon Hill. The title was elevated to marquess by Charles
II in 1681.
In 1858 the 8th marquess shot himself dead with his own gun
while hunting rabbits. Two of his sons also died violent deaths.
In 1895, the writer and wit Oscar Wilde was jailed for gross
indecency after a legal battle with the 9th marquess, whose son Lord Alfred
Douglas, nicknamed ‘Bosie’, was Wilde’s lover. The case went to court after
Wilde unsuccessfully sued the marquess for writing that he was a ‘sodomite’.
The current, 12th marquess, David Harrington Angus Douglas,
has married three times, producing eight children by four women. Caroline
Carey, half-sister of his illegitimate son Ambrose Carey, married Salem Bin
Laden, a brother of terrorist Osama. When he died in a plane crash she married
another brother, Khaled.
John Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry
In February 1895, angered by the apparent ongoing homosexual
relationship between Oscar Wilde and his son Alfred, Queensberry left a calling
card reading "For Oscar Wilde, posing as Somdomite at Wilde's club. Wilde
sued for criminal libel, leading to Queensberry's arrest.
Queensberry's lawyers, headed by barrister Edward Carson,
portrayed Wilde as a vicious older man who seduced innocent young boys into a
life of degenerate homosexuality. Wilde dropped the libel case when
Queensberry's lawyers informed the court that they intended to call several
male prostitutes as witnesses to testify that they had had sex with Wilde. According
to the Libel Act 1843, proving the truth of the accusation and a public
interest in its exposure was a defence against a libel charge, and Wilde's
lawyers concluded that the prostitutes' testimony was likely to do that.
Queensberry won a counterclaim against Wilde for the considerable expenses he
had incurred on lawyers and private detectives in organising his defence. Wilde
was left bankrupt; his assets were seized and sold at auction to pay the claim.
Queensberry then sent the evidence collected by his
detectives to Scotland Yard, which resulted in Wilde being charged and
convicted of gross indecency under the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 and
sentenced to two years' hard labour. His health and reputation destroyed, Wilde
went into exile in France.
Queensberry died on 31 January 1900. Ten months later, Oscar
Wilde died at the Hotel d'Alsace in Paris.
Wilde's sex life exposed in explicit court files
Under the hammer: unpublished witness statements tell of
'rough' teenage boys and soiled sheets
Vanessa Thorpe and Simon de Burton
Sun 6 May 2001 02.42 BST First published on Sun 6 May 2001
02.42 BST
Explicit documents prepared for the Oscar Wilde libel case
have come to light, offering a revealing new glimpse of the double life led by
the celebrated Irish writer.
The shocking witness statements, previously unseen, were
drawn up by employees at Day Russell of the Strand, solicitors for the defence
in Wilde's disastrous 1895 legal action against the Marquis of Queensberry.
Most of the papers were filed away and never used in court.
While Wilde is remembered today as the dandy-about-town,
sporting bespoke suits and habitually wearing a green carnation in his
buttonhole, these statements - from chamber-maids, valets, bell-boys and even a
lamp-wick seller portray his private life in lurid detail.
Seedy descriptions of Wilde's bedroom are included in the
damaging file, which was instrumental in Wilde's downfall and formed the
background for one of the most famous cases in British legal history.
Wilde took legal action against the Marquis, father of his
lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, after he found a visiting card left by Queensberry
at the Albermarle club. It was inscribed with the words: 'For Oscar Wilde
posing Somdomite [ sic ]'.
The 52 pages of statements from 32 witnesses have never been
published and are hand-written on heavy sheets of paper. They were picked up in
a London junk shop for a pittance during the Fifties by a private collector
whose widow is now selling them at Christie's on 6 June. The historic bundle,
wrapped in pink string, is expected to fetch £12,000.
Among the more sordid details are those revealed by Margaret
Cotta, a chambermaid at the Savoy Hotel, a favourite rendezvous for Wilde and
his series of young male 'renters'. Describing a prolonged visit to the hotel
by Wilde and Alfred Douglas, who was affectionately known as Bosie, Miss Cotta
said she found a 'common boy, rough looking, about 14 years of age' in Wilde's
bed, the sheets of which 'were always in a most disgusting state... [with]
traces of vaseline, soil and semen'.
Instructions were given that the linen should be kept apart
and washed separately. Miss Cotta added that a stream of page boys delivering
letters were usually kissed by Wilde, who then tipped them two shillings and
sixpence for their trouble.
Thomas Venning, a manuscripts specialist at Christie's, said
the documents provided a new account of Wilde's undoing and had 'very detailed
sexual content which was only mentioned in the trial euphemistically'.
The statements also show Wilde's carefree attitude to
discovery. Wallis Grainger, an apprentice electrician from Oxford, told how
Wilde took him to a cottage in nearby Goring-on-Thames which he had rented and
where he wrote An Ideal Husband.
On the second or third night, said Grainger, Wilde 'came
into my bedroom and woke me up and told me to come into his bedroom which was
next door... he worked me up with his hand and made me spend in his mouth'. The
former butler of the Marquis of Queensberry was in the next room.
On another occasion, during the Goring regatta, Gertrude
Simmons, governess to Wilde's two sons, reported seeing him 'holding the arm of
a boat boy called George Hughes and patting him very familiarly'. During the
same visit she came across a carelessly discarded letter to Wilde from Bosie
which was signed 'your own loving darling boy to do what you like with'.
Another statement came from a 20-year-old called Fred
Atkins, who Wilde had met at the Café Royale. Atkins said Wilde 'took me to the
hairdresser and had my hair curled'. Wilde later took him off to Paris as his
secretary, Atkins said. The job involved 'writing out only half a page of a
manuscript which took about 10 minutes' after which Wilde 'made improper
proposals'.
Queensberry had used detectives to track down a circle of
male prostitutes, and some of their statements are among those being sold.
Wilde's action against Queensberry opened on 3 April 1895 at the Old Bailey but
collapsed with a not guilty verdict. At noon on 5 April, the evidence gathered
by solicitor Charles Russell was immediately forwarded to the Director of
Public Prosecutions and Wilde was arrested on a charge of gross indecency.
On 24 May, after two further trials, he was sentenced to two
years' imprisonment with hard labour, which broke his health. After his release
he lived abroad as a bankrupt under the pseudonym Sebastian Melmoth. He died in
Paris on 30 November 1900.
He betrayed Wilde. But that wasn't the worst thing Bosie did
Douglas Murray's Bosie is a brave attempt at rehabilitation
of a golden boy who played on his charm... until it ran out
Philip Hoare
Sun 4 Jun 2000 00.01 BST First published on Sun 4 Jun 2000
00.01 BST
Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas
Douglas Murray
In 1895, as the storm clouds gathered over the already
tempestuous affair between Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, Bosie's
intemperate and quite possibly insane father, the Marquess of Queensberry,
voiced the opinion that his son ought to have 'the shit kicked out of him'.
I'm afraid it's an idea which might occur more than once to
the reader wading through incident after paranoid incident of hurt, reproach,
libel suit and vicious sonnet in Bosie's life story, all employed by this
'golden boy' in the relentless pursuit of his own ends. Douglas Murray's
rehabilitation of his subject is a brave attempt to redeem a character immured
in the calumny of legend. Beloved of Wilde, betrayed by Wilde, betrayer of
Wilde, Douglas was a man-boy who played on his charm until it ran out, then
raged against Fate for that mortal fact.
After a colourful introduction to the 'black Douglases',
Murray's well-researched account soon has us in the thick of the affair, and by
telling it from Douglas's point of view, the author gives us an illuminating
new angle, especially on Bosie's sexuality. An early experimenter with his own
sex, Douglas came to Magdalen as the leader of 'the cause', a campaigner by
default. Yet he would turn both straight and Catholic post-Wilde. Indeed, it
increasingly seems as though it was both protagonists' heterosexuality which
proved their downfall.
Bosie had the added burden of genetic instability to cope
with. Murray reminds us what a monster the Marquess was. He was a vicious man
who damned his family to misery. None more so than Alfred, although his other
son, Percy, was described by his father as a 'sicked-up looking creature, as if
he had come up the wrong way. When he was a child swathed in irons to hold him
together it used to make me sick to look at him and think that he could be
called my son.'
Murray's account of the familiar tragedy of Wilde's trials
is well marshalled. He points out that when Bosie failed to make it into the
dock to defend Wilde, the rest of his life would seem to have been a series of
attempts - often in the courts - to make up for the fact. Most crucial of all
is the time-bomb of Wilde's prison letter to Douglas, De Profundis, which was
kept from Bosie by Wilde's 'devoted friend' Robbie Ross and which Murray
correctly sees as Wilde's most 'destructive legacy' to Douglas.
Bosie became twisted up in his own past, his literary talent
wastefully channelled into vituperative sonnets and magazines which seem to
exist solely for the purposes of pursuing his campaigns against Robbie Ross,
the Asquiths, Jews, and any other party by whom he felt wronged. This sometimes
tiresome sequence of spats culminated in the infamous Pemberton Billing trial
of 1918, when the protofascist MP Billing alleged the war effort was being
undermined by sexual perverts in the highest positions of influence. Douglas,
seizing the opportunity for revenge on Ross - and Wilde, by one remove - and
encouraged by Billing in his mad conspiracy theories, took the stand to declare
that Wilde was 'the greatest force of evil that has appeared in Europe during
the last 350 years'.
But Douglas's public nadir came when Churchill sued him over
wild allegations that he had taken part in a Jewish-financed conspiracy to have
Kitchener 'murdered' in 1916; Douglas received a prison sentence. Murray depicts
this as a turning-point in Douglas's life. Like Wilde, Douglas wrote an epic
work whilst in prison - In Excelsis - which his biographer sees as a purging of
his old obsessions, although with lines such as 'The leprous spawn of scattered
Israel/Spends its contagion in your English blood', it merely repeated the kind
of libels which had got Douglas into prison in the first place. Contorted in
the fundamentalist pathology of the time, such accusations were little removed
from those made by Billing's intellectual patron, Arnold White, that: 'Wilde,
after death, was found to have a tumour on his brain, a fact that pointed to a
hospital rather than Reading gaol'.
Yet Douglas did redeem himself in the Twenties and Thirties,
repledging his name to Wilde's. Abandoned by his wife, his son in a mental
hospital, slipping further into poverty, he was supported only by his undoubted
Catholic faith and friends as disparate as Marie Stopes and Bernard Shaw. In a
centennial year which threatens many more books on Wilde, Murray's book does a
fine job of putting an irksome and faded legendary boy to bed.
• Philip Hoare's study of the
Billing case, Wilde's Last Stand , is published by Duckworth
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