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MUM'S AGONY
WATCHING a video of Pete Doherty singing his controversial track Lost Art of Murder, and joking about ‘suspicious deaths’, Sheila Blanco feels sick to her stomach.
The footage was filmed in the East London flat where, four months earlier in December 2006, her 30-year-old son Mark plunged to his death from a balcony outside a party attended by the Babyshambles rocker.
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Now, 17 years after she promised her dying son she would find out what happened that night, Sheila is still fighting for the truth.
In a new Channel 4 documentary, Pete Doherty, Who Killed My Son? the heartbroken mother claims Met Police bungled the initial investigation into Mark’s suspicious death, missed key evidence and lied about watching CCTV video.
The teacher from Guildford also says footage shows “callous” Doherty and his minder Johnny ‘Headlock’ Jeannevol “stepping over” Mark and running from the scene minutes after he fell.
Leading forensic scientists claim the CCTV tape suggests Mark was thrown from the balcony and that he was unconscious even before he plummeted to the ground.
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And partygoer Naomi Stirk, who saw flat owner Paul Roundhill and Johnny Headlock evict Mark before the tragedy, claims: “I don’t know if it was murder or manslaughter but I know something went on and it wasn’t accidental.”
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Ahead of the explosive documentary, which airs on Monday, Sheila tells The Sun she has been repeatedly ignored by the Metropolitan Police and, having spent over £100,000 on her own investigation, she says she won’t rest until she gets justice for her son.
“Mark was funny, kind and very soft-hearted,’ she says. “If he was earning a lot of money, which he did when he worked at Goldman Sachs, he would give some of it away. He was so generous.
“I was the last person to say goodbye. I put my head on his chest and I promised I would find out what happened and I've always been committed to that.
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“It will never change, and the way I've been treated by the Met makes me even more resolute to continue.
“It shouldn’t be the job of a mother to investigate her son’s death.”
Ejected from flat
Aspiring actor Mark, who studied at Cambridge, had been living in East London and met Paul Roundhill in his local, The George Tavern.
On December 2 2006, he had been distributing posters for his new play, The Accidental Death of an Anarchist, before heading to Paul’s flat in Fieldgate Mansions, East London.
Naomi, who was already there with Doherty, Headlock and a female pal, says Mark had been drinking and “was on a different wavelength.”
“He was all excited, in his dress rehearsal costume, with a poster of his play. He wanted Peter to go to the play,” she says.
“Peter ended up being pinned up almost against the fireplace and Mark was inches away from Peter, waving the poster of the play.
“Peter was motioning with his eyes to Johnny and Paul in a way they would understand to say ‘help me out here’. They physically escorted Mark out of the flat.
“The atmosphere was sinister.”
Another attendee, Annabel, left shortly afterwards and raised the alarm after finding Mark on the pavement outside.
“I remember just holding his hand and trying to make sure he was comfortable because he was dying,” says Naomi.
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Tragedy
Sheila got a call at 3am to say Mark was in ICU at the Royal London Hospital and says she felt “numb” with shock.
“Mark was 6ft 4in so he filled the bed, but he was peaceful,” she says. “His hearing hadn't gone and he could wiggle his toes and squeeze my hand.
“We were told by the neurosurgeons that Mark had non-survivable head injuries, and it would be a matter of days or weeks.
“I burst into tears but most of the time I didn't cry. I was in shock.”
As he lay dying, friends arrived and began to tell Sheila what they knew of the events of that night and she realised she needed to find out more.
“His right eye was black when he got there, as though he'd been attacked, although I know that can be caused by brain injuries," she says.
“We asked the police to investigate but they didn't come.”
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Police 'bungle'
Mark passed away the following morning, and after Sheila said her final farewell, police met her outside the ICU ward.
They told her Pete Doherty had been at the gathering that night and that he was Kate Moss’s boyfriend, as well as revealing Roundhill’s flat had been a “a drug den for 25 years.”
Despite the suspicious circumstances, the area where Mark fell was never cordoned off by police.
When she insisted on going to Fieldgate Mansions, later that day, she spotted red stains on the stairs, which she believed were blood, but was dismissed by the officer accompanying her.
She then walked outside and found the left lens of Mark’s glasses on the pavement.
“I couldn’t believe the police hadn’t seen it. It had been there 37 hours,” she says.
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“I picked it up and said, ‘That’s from Mark’s glasses’ and the officer said, ‘You can have it as a keepsake’. I couldn’t believe my ears, from that moment I had a bad feeling about the whole investigation.”
Pauline Forster, landlady of the George Tavern and Theatre where Mark was a regular, reveals DI Mark Dunne immediately determined his death as a suicide, adding: ”He said he had seen the CCTV footage and he was 98 per cent sure Mark had jumped off that balcony.”
But she claims that was a “barefaced lie” because police had not taken the footage from the caretaker of the flat at the time.
Mark’s inquest ruled out suicide and the coroner criticised the initial police investigation, saying DI Dunne “made unqualified presumptions into the cause of Mark Blanco's death thereby failing in his duty to pursue all reasonable lines of inquiry".
The initial report to the coroner failed to mention a confession by Johnny Headlock, who handed himself into the Bethnal Green police station on Christmas Eve, 2006, and told cops “I killed Mark Blanco” before retracting his statement several hours later.
“Dunne’s police report also said, 'there's no evidence of any violence or threat of violence in respect to Mr. Blanco's departure'," says Sheila.
“That's totally untrue, because Roundhill dragged Mark to the door, tore his jacket and set his cap on fire. When I went to see Roundhill at his flat, unannounced, he told me he punched Mark three times in the face.”
'Callous' Doherty
In the last 17 years Sheila has watched the CCTV clip over and over again.
“It shows Mark being projected out over railing and then straight down to the bricks and pavement below,’ she says.
“A couple of minutes later we see Pete Doherty coming down and stepping over Mark without stopping. Then he seems to pick up something from the ground and run away, followed by Headlock. It’s absolutely callous, a reprehensible lack of humanity."
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Forensic CCTV analyst John Kennedy told the documentary that Mark dropped from the balcony “like a dead weight” and looked “limp,” suggesting “he may well have been unconscious when he came off the balcony.”
US expert Grant Fredericks, who assisted on the 9/11 investigations, believes there was at least one other person on the balcony when Mark ‘fell’.
Ten years ago, he advised investigating officers to use a process called 3D reverse projection, which measures 250 million points in the footage and helps recreate the scene, to establish the truth.
The Met failed to take his advice so, for the documentary, he carried out the work himself and found that body parts other than Mark’s were outside of the railings, suggesting the arms of another person.
“If the measurements and the distance are correct, Mark was thrown over the balcony,” he says. “Mark was murdered.’
'Minimal' pressure
The chilling footage from four months after Mark’s death shows Doherty strumming a guitar and saying he’d “popped in to see Paulo. Suspicious deaths don’t get in the way” before singing Lost Art of Murder.
“I’m sure it was done absolutely intentionally," says Sheila. "The motive behind it is disgraceful. It makes me sick.”
On the Jonathan Ross show, around the same time, he also claimed police involved in his numerous arrests for drug offences would ask for his autograph.
Five years after Mark’s death, Doherty, Roundhill and Jeannevol were questioned and released without charge.
In a 2012 interview with NME, the singer revealed the police apologised to him for the arrest.
“The pressure they put on me was completely minimal,” he said. “They said off-tape 'Pete, we're sorry about this, but the family are convinced that their son was murdered'. I can understand it and it does look dodgy."
Sheila believes his relationship with Kate Moss could have influenced the Met’s failure to investigate.
“Kate Moss was high profile and mixed in all sorts of circles, including royalty,” she says. “That was one factor, that they didn't dare to investigate because of that. Also, it was known locally that Roundhill was a police informant.”
Roundhill told the documentary that the claim was “without merit” and the Met said they could “neither confirm nor deny” he was a police informant.
In his autobiography, A Likely Lad, Doherty devoted a whole chapter to Mark’s death, but has never contacted Sheila directly.
“I don’t want anyone to think I have a vendetta against Doherty because I don't think that’s helpful,” she says. “All the people at that gathering know what happened.”
Met Police statement
The Met told the programme:
“Our sympathies remain with the family of Mark Blanco.
“Police conducted an investigation of all the evidence available following his death. Following the initial investigation, the death has been subject to various reviews by the Met where areas for reinvestigation were highlighted, these were progressed by homicide detectives and we have also undertaken expert analysis of the CCTV footage.
"The investigation into the death remains ongoing and any new evidence of information will be assessed by detectives."
Paul Roundhill said: "Mark was my good friend, I would not protect anyone who had a part in his death. My sympathy and support is for Sheila Blanco. Mark and his family deserve justice.
Pete Doherty said: “I am sorry for Mrs Blanco’s loss and I welcome any assistance people can give her to come to terms with what happened."
Sheila is now hoping the new documentary will force the Metropolitan Police to look again at her son’s death.
“There are some damning pieces of evidence in that film and I think the police cannot ignore it,” she says. “I hope it gives them the necessary drive to bring about a conclusion to all these years of missed opportunities.”
The grieving mum says she will never give up on the vow she made to her dying son.
“I think about him every day,” she says. “I'm not a person who will collapse and cry because if I let it upset me too much I’ll get ill. I need to channel that energy into something positive,
“Mark's dead. I can't change that. I promised Mark that I would find out what happened at any cost and I will keep fighting until I get the justice I want.
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“I have to put the emotion to one side but I don’t know how those people sleep at night.”
Watch Pete Doherty, Who Killed My Son? live or stream on Channel 4, Monday at 10pm
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