Jimmy Carr to help solve death riddle
COMEDIAN Jimmy Carr is helping to fund a legal challenge over the death of a friend who died at a party attended by junkie rocker Peter Doherty.
Carr, 36, will front a fundraising gig next month in memory of his friend and fellow Cambridge graduate, Mark Blanco.
Funds from the benefit evening will be used to fund a possible private prosecution against Doherty and two others who were there the night budding actor Mark fell at a party in Whitechapel, east London, in December 2006.
Mark, 30, died from severe head injuries after the fall, which came minutes after he had rowed with Babyshambles singer Doherty, his bodyguard, Johnny “Headlock” Jeannevol, and the singer’s drug dealer, Paul Roundhill.
CCTV footage obtained by the Sunday Express earlier this year showed Mark falling from a communal balcony on the first floor of an apartment block.
Doherty and his girlfriend that night, Kate Russell-Pavier, and Headlock, are then seen running past his dying body 22 minutes later before police and paramedics arrived.
Three weeks after the incident, Headlock made a murder confession to police, but later retracted it.
A further four months later, Doherty returned to the death scene to record a video for his new song, The Lost Art of Murder, the title a reference to an 1827 essay by Thomas De Quincey - Mark’s favourite author.
However, police ruled out suspicious circumstances after officers became convinced that Mark, who had been drinking but was drug-free, had either taken his own life or accidentally killed himself trying to jump on to a nearby lamp-post.
Detectives said that Mark’s forthcoming role in Dario Fo’s play, The Accidental Death of an Anarchist, in which his character was to investigate the fatal fall of a political activist from a police station window, was significant.
However, in October 2007, a coroner ordered the Metropolitan Police to re-open their investigation after unreservedly ruling out suicide and describing the accident theory as “speculation”.
As we revealed in January, that second probe has proved inconclusive. But to the fury of Mark’s family and friends, it is believed that neither Doherty nor any of the six others who attended the gathering in Whitechapel that night have been questioned under caution.
Mark’s mother Sheila, a college lecturer, said: “We’re not happy at all with how the police have investigated this. It means we’re having to do the work ourselves.”
She also described as “significant” the findings of a Sunday Express investigation.
We filmed, from the same height and angle as the CCTV camera, a reporter standing on the balcony, then climbing over the railing and preparing to jump.
Mrs Blanco said: “I’ve sent your tape off to a biomechanics expert who is studying that and other evidence on how Mark might have fallen.”
Her barrister, Michael Wolkind QC, said: “The investigation would relate to Doherty, Roundhill and Headlock. All three have questions to answer.
“The Blanco family is considering a private prosecution.”
Jimmy Carr crossed paths with Mark at Cambridge University. They they met again years later through their mutual friend, the magician Jerry Sadowitz, at the Edinburgh Festival.
He will head a cast of other artists and musicians at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London on July 8.
