Tara Palmer-Tomkinson’s body was ‘discovered by her cleaner’ five days after builders heard a loud bang from inside the apartment
TRAGIC Tara Palmer-Tomkinson was found dead in her flat 'by her distraught cleaner' - five days after builders heard a loud crash from inside.
Workmen in the flat below the former It Girl’s penthouse said she had not been seen since the “very loud bang” on Friday.
reports a Portuguese cleaner, in her 30s, found the tragic It Girl before she set off an alarm.
Builders said they heard an alarm at about 1pm yesterday — and minutes later police and paramedics arrived. Tara, 45, who was found by a friend, was pronounced dead at 1.40pm.
A builder told The Mirror: "It was the cleaner who found her. She was crying and it was very quiet before she arrived and set off the alarm."
Another builder said: “We thought about going upstairs to see if everything was OK, but the emergency services arrived a few minutes later.
“We’d hear her walking around up there. But last Friday we heard a very loud bang in the afternoon — like someone or something falling over. We hadn’t seen her or heard her since then.”
It is understood Tara had been heard hoovering and walking around her flat the previous Wednesday and had failed to collect three items of post from downstairs.
She is also said to have complained to the flat's owner several times about the builders who say they "didn't ever see anyone going in or out".
Another builder, who didn't want to be named, told The Mirror: "I saw her on the stairs on Saturday and she looked tired."
Police said Tara’s death in Kensington, South West London, was “unexplained” and that they were keeping an open mind over the cause.
Tara, who appeared in I’m a Celebrity in 2002, revealed in November that she had been diagnosed with a non-malignant brain tumour and worried that it could kill her.
Tara’s blood tests also revealed that she was suffering from a rare auto-immune condition, related to her anti-neutrophil cytoplasmic antibodies (ANCA-related), in which abnormal antibodies attack the body’s cells and tissues.
It is thought she was suffering from the condition – which can cause weakness, blood-filled urine and red spots on the skin - for 18 months before it was diagnosed.
She also battled addiction to cocaine and other drugs. And friends told last night how they feared she may have relapsed at a party in Mayfair before Christmas.
One said: “We never saw her take anything, but she seemed out of it and kept going to make phone calls.
“There was concern. Something was up and she looked particularly dishevelled.”
“There was a real worry she may have fallen back into using drugs as a crutch in the wake of her health worries and low moments.
“She desperately wanted to leave her drug issues in the past, but was so lonely and nobody could watch her 24 hours a day.”
WHAT IS THE AUTOIMMUNE DISEASE THAT PLAGUED TARA PALMER-TOMKINSON?
The blood is made up of two distinct parts - solids and fluid.
Red and white blood cells make up the solids, while plasma is the fluid.
Plasma cells produce antibodies, that are used by the body's immune system to fight bacteria and viruses.
Antibodies are able to recognise the germs as foreign bodies and neutralise them.
But, anti-neutrophil cytoplasmic antibodies (ANCAs) are a specific group of abnormal antibodies.
Rather than protect the body, they attack cells and tissues from the inside.
ANCAs attack white blood cells, which in turn then attack the walls of small vessels in different body tissues and organs.
This can cause vasculitis.
In different people ANCA vasculitis will attack different parts of their body.
It can affect the kidneys, skin, nerves and lungs, the nose, eyes and ears.
Vasculitis in the skin can cause red spots, in the lungs or nose it can cause bleeding.
In the nerves it causes tingling and weakness.
In the eyes vasculitis causes redness and itching, while in the kidneys it causes blood and protein to leak into the blood, and ultimately can cause kidney failure.
While in some people the condition can be short-lived and cured by treatment, in others it is a long-term disease.
Vasculitis is very rare, with around one case in every 50,0000 people.
Typically patients are around 55 years old, though in very rare cases it will be diagnosed at a younger age.
RELATED STORIES
Sources said Tara, who attended Prince William’s 2011 wedding and remained friends with both him and Prince Harry, had become a recluse since the growth was found on the pituitary gland in her brain.
A pal said: “Her health had left her in a really bad way and she was very low.
“She thought about death a lot and even discussed her funeral at points.”
Yet the star was pictured looking relatively healthy outside her home last month.
A post-mortem will now be carried out to try and establish the cause of death. Unless conclusive proof emerges, further toxicology tests will check whether she had drugs in her bloodstream.
Cops said that at this point they were “quite satisfied” no crime was involved.
A spokesman said: “At this early stage, police are not treating the death as suspicious.”
The Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall were “deeply saddened”. They said: ‘Our thoughts are so much with the family.”
Related stories
Tara’s family had bonded with the royals on the slopes of the Alps, with her father Charles teaching the Prince of Wales how to ski.
She also skied in Switzerland with the royals throughout her life and helped William and Harry cope with the death of mum Diana.
Sarah Ferguson said last night: “The York family are so shocked by this tragic news of the magnificent, beautifully energetic soul of Tara.”
Tara’s best friend, Blue singer Duncan James, tweeted: “Heartbroken and numb I have lost one of my oldest and dearest friends.
“I’m going to miss ur laughter most shmooey. Rip sweetheart.”
Tara Palmer-Tomkinson was the ultimate poor little rich girl.
Prince Charles’s goddaughter often partied to the point of self-destruction but her honesty and jolly hockey sticks charm made her impossible to dislike.
She sprung to fame on the ski slopes of Klosters in Switzerland as aristocratic farmer dad Charles, a former Olympic skier, and mum Patty holidayed with pal Prince Charles.
Throughout the 1990s, Tara and her family were said to join the prince on at least three holidays a year.
She caused a stir when she was pictured kissing Charles at Klosters in 1995, with the public clamouring to find out who this mystery woman was.
Following Princess Diana’s death in 1997 she became a source of emotional support for the prince and his children William and Harry.
The Charles kiss brought Tara instant fame, but her troubles were never very far away.
She said recently: “I’d love to lie and say I have no regrets, but I do.
“I’d like to go back to that young girl and shake her. So much was handed to me on a plate.”
Born in Hampshire in 1971, Tara was raised on the 1,200-acre Dummer Grange estate near Basingstoke, the youngest of three children.
When she wrote first novel Inheritance about a posh girl who falls into drug-taking, she confessed it was based on herself but insisted: “Ironically, while everyone was doing drugs when I was 19 or 20 I was really against them.
“I was against everything.
"I didn’t want to lose my virginity.
"I was mischievous and naughty, but I certainly wasn’t going to do anything like that.”
After school she worked as a stylist’s assistant at Tatler magazine and in the City for Rothschilds bank but by the mid 1990s and aged 24 she had found the hard-partying It Girl role that would define her adult life.
Ghost-writers on her columns in the Sunday Times and Spectator soon became aware her phoned-in ramblings were drug-fuelled.
In one shocking episode she arrived at a party in a bikini and a snorkel, eyes wild and pupils dilated.
By this time her habit was costing her £400 a day and her weight had dropped to just over six stone.
Then there was a slurring appearance on Frank Skinner’s TV chat show in 1999, followed by an overdose that left her almost paralysed on the floor of her flat for three days.
She said: “I wasn’t a pretty sight.
"I’d thrown up and was covered in burns because I couldn’t reach the ashtray, so I put my cigarettes out on my hand.”
As she lay on the floor she began timing her heartbeats, convinced her heart would stop.
When she finally reached the phone her parents were there within an hour — and two days later she was in The Meadows rehab clinic in Arizona.
Tara was so ill, she even got drunk on the flight over.
But the £35,000 process worked and she was widely thought to have kicked drugs.
Sorting out her love life was less simple.
She once said: “I would never go out with a man who, when boarding an aircraft, turned right.”
In the mid-1990s PR man Kris Thykier, married to Claudia Winkleman since 2000, was said to be considering asking Tara to marry him.
But he was scared off by her presence in the gossip columns.
She had a romance with EastEnders’ Sid Owen in 1998 before a year-long relationship with Duran Duran keyboardist Nick Rhodes, who helped her through rehab.
Shortly after being treated for cocaine addiction, Tara fell for Greg Martin, playboy son of Beatles producer Sir George Martin, even getting engaged.
But the closest Tara got to true love was with Matalan heir Jamie Hargreaves who she dated in 2004. She was distraught when he dumped her.
Other notable boyfriends included singer James Blunt, who she had a brief fling with in 2006 and Blue star Duncan James.
Asked what one thing she most desired, Tara said: “The ultimate man who absolutely adores me and actually married me for no other reason than love.”
She said many boyfriends treated her like a cash machine, joking: “My initials may be TPT, but they could probably be ATM.”
In 2002 Tara went to the jungle for I’m a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! and finished as runner-up.
More TV work followed, including a celebrity version of Blind Date, Loose Women and children’s weekend show SM:TV Live.
A talented concert pianist, she also won Comic Relief Does Fame Academy.
Although she was no longer using drugs, her nasal septum collapsed in 2006 and she had it rebuilt at a cost of £6,000.
Typically for Tara, she shared the news publicly.
By 2008 there were signs her mental health had also been affected by the drugs.
“I was really tired,” she said, “so I took a strategic move out of the red carpet, out of film premieres, out of magazines.
"I basically wore my pyjamas for two years, sat in my flat and wrote a novel.”
She lectured about the dangers of drugs and from 2013 was the patron of Scottish charity Speur-Ghlan which delivered early intervention for children diagnosed with autism.
By now haunted by loneliness, she confessed: “I’ve only been out three times this year.
"I’ve seen a therapist every single week for the last nine, ten years of my life.”
She was arrested at Heathrow in December 2014 after a meltdown at being turned away from a first class lounge and it was assumed she was back on drugs.
But she insisted it was a panic attack.
A year later, after returning from another skiing trip, she was diagnosed with a brain tumour, but kept it secret until reports of her odd behaviour and appearance prompted her to break her silence.
In her last interview in November she said: “I’m not the person I was. I’m much calmer.
“I don’t go to places like Ibiza because the party world scares me.
“It used to really matter what people thought and said about me.
"Now it doesn’t bother me whether people write that I’m off my face, on my face, in my face, whatever.
“It’s all pretty trivial compared to...compared to...”
Unable to finish her sentence, Tara pointed to her head and wept.