Who knew what on night Michael Hutchence died
An actress was forced to deny “some sex and drug-crazed orgy”; TV star Paula Yates unjustly cried murder at Live Aid hero Bob Geldof — then blamed a sex game gone wrong. But Michael Hutchence’s own words reveal the truth of his final hours. LISTEN TO THE PODCAST
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Before Michael Hutchence committed suicide in a Ritz-Carlton hotel room in Sydney in 1997 the last person to see him alive said he seemed to be looking forward to the future in both his personal and professional life.
But as night turned to morning, a series of phone calls, some angry, some desolate, marked a change that would end in devastating tragedy for the INXS star’s family, friends and fans alike.
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Today True Crime Australia launches Police Tape, a new podcast series in which former police officers open up on some of Australia’s most compelling cases, with a no-holds-barred insider’s view of the Hutchence investigation from ex-detective Mark ‘Scarface’ Smith.
The podcast includes explosive detail of the shocking reaction of Paula Yates — Hutchence’s partner and mother of his only child — to the suggestion that he committed suicide.
For the small group of people Hutchence reached out to in his final hours, the death resulted in everything from blame-games and scurrilous gossip to denial and despair.
Listen to the podcast and then read more about what they knew and their reaction to a tragedy that made headlines around the world.
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
KYM WILSON
Michael Hutchence had only been in Sydney for three days ahead of a 20th anniversary tour with INXS when he was found dead in room 524.
The last people to see him alive were actress and old flame Kym Wilson and her then boyfriend, lawyer Andrew Rayment, whom he invited up to his room after meeting them in the hotel’s piano bar on the night of Friday, 21 November. He was found dead the next day.
“I had never lost anyone, besides grandparents, who were that close to me before and obviously the circumstances around that were really tragic,” Wilson said in 2016.
“And then when you are in the midst of dealing with that grief to experience, and it really was, one of the first full-on media circuses in Australia when all the jets full of English press arrived, to experience that on top of it was just really overwhelming and I didn’t really know what to do with that.”
In a magazine article just a month after the tragedy she was more forthright. “People have wanted to imply that there was some sex and drug-crazed orgy happening in Michael’s room that night. Nothing could have been further from the truth,” she told Woman’s Day.
“Of course we had a drink, but in the six hours we were there, we would have only had between six and eight drinks and we were hardly drunk. There were definitely no drugs in the room when I was there and there wasn’t any sex either.”
While he was at times “pensive” waiting by the phone because of a custody case happening in London at that time over Yates’ children with singer Bob Geldof, Wilson said Hutchence’s attitude was “that he believed it was right that he and Paula get custody of the children (for a stay in Australia), and if they didn’t have luck this time, they’d keep fighting on.
“He spoke with such excitement about his future — I had really never seen him with so much to look forward to.”
Both she and Hutchence’s father Kell, who had dinner with his son that evening, told of film opportunities that were opening up for the singer in LA.
“I had never seen him so bubbly,” Kell Hutchence later told New Idea.
While money was being offered up to anyone connected to the Hutchence story by magazines and TV, barrister Andrew Rayment remained discreet.
Throughout all the reports, either at the time or in the intervening years, it is hard to find any direct response from him beyond: “I don’t want to talk about any of this at all.”
However the media storm around the star’s death was such that the NSW Bar Association decided to put out a statement, The Daily Telegraph reported in the weeks after the death.
Then president David Bennett said Mr Rayment had told police “no drugs were ingested in his presence and that no sexual activity of any kind took place in his presence”.
Kym and Andrew left the hotel room at 5am. A maid raised the alarm shortly before midday.
PAULA YATES
Even before she landed in Sydney after news of her lover’s death, Paula Yates outspoken reaction to the tragedy was making headlines.
During a Bangkok stopover, airline passengers reportedly heard her shout: “Bob Geldof murdered Michael Hutchence.
“That bastard killed Michael. He is called Saint Bob. That makes me sick. He killed my baby. We have had three years of this.”
On the morning of the suicide, the British TV star called Hutchence at 5.30am Sydney time to tell him her custody case with Geldof had been delayed to December 17, and she could not join him with the children in Australia as they had planned.
She said Hutchence sounded “desperate” and said he would beg Geldof to let the children travel.
But even as her partner’s growing despair became clear in the ensuing investigation, Yates refused to accept a verdict of suicide.
In a later TV interview with 60 Minutes, she said: “The coroner didn’t meet him (Hutchence) or know him and he would not have left our baby. He just loved her … he wouldn’t have left her, never.”
Mark Smith, one of the detectives who spoke with her regularly during the investigation, said she could not be persuaded otherwise.
“She was just adamant that she wanted her child growing up believing that it was an accidental death by auto-eroticism, instead of the fact he killed himself because he wanted to see his child,” he said.
Two years after the singer’s death Yates was still arguing the coroner got it wrong, reiterating her autoerotic asphyxiation theory in British documentary In Excess: The Death Of Michael Hutchence.
“He would have hated to have been found naked, to have lost his dignity,” she said, arguing against suicide. “He had lots of dignity, no matter what was happening. So to be found on the floor naked — no.
“He would have dressed, he would have written a note.
“He would have done it as a ritual if he had even thought of killing himself which I don’t believe he would ever have done, especially not with his responsibility to me and Tiger which he took so seriously.”
Yates died of an accidental heroin overdose in 2000. Geldof won custody of her and Michael’s child Tiger Lily so she could be raised with her half-sisters.
BOB GELDOF
Paula Yates’ ex-husband, Live Aid founder and Boomtown Rats frontman Sir Bob Geldof, took two calls from Hutchence on the morning he died.
In delivering his suicide verdict, New South Wales coroner Derrick Hand reflected on the second, longer call to Geldof.
“Geldof refers to the deceased’s demeanour as being ‘hectoring and abusive and threatening’ in nature,’’ Mr Hand said. “He refers to the deceased as ‘begging’ to allow him to let the children come to Australia.
“Hutchence did not sound depressed during the conversation.”
A guest in the next room told police of hearing Hutchence scream at one stage: “She’s not your wife any more.”
But while Geldof told friends Hutchence was angry, he denied they argued.
“We didn’t have a row — it takes two people to have an argument,” he said.
“He called up late and I couldn’t understand a word he said. I just put down the phone.
“Michael had been bombarding me with calls for the past few months. It was impossible to talk to him because he was always off his head.”
Meanwhile, a friend of the I Don’t Like Mondays singer defended Geldof’s decision to stop Yates taking their youngest daughters — Peaches, then eight, and Pixie, seven — to Australia for four months.
“Four months was too long for them to be away when they’ve already had so many holidays this year,” the friend said in the days after Hutchence’s death
“All Bob is trying to do is look after his children. He loves them.
“He doesn’t feel as if he is to blame even if Paula’s trying to make out that it is his fault, which is atrocious.”
In 2011, Geldof gave some insight into his state of mind over his marriage collapse and losing Yates to Hutchence.
“When she left me I was destroyed,” he told the BBC. “I loved her very much. And I didn’t understand why: never saw it coming. So I just floated; the pain was beyond immensity. The grief was universes of grief. My head was crowded with loss.”
At one point, he said, he made a list of reasons to kill himself or not. “There was only one item in the list for why I should continue: it just said, ‘the children’.”
MARTHA TROUP
It was a brief and worrying call that INXS manager Martha Troup immediately tried to return, but Hutchence did not pick up.
“Martha, Michael here, I f---ing had enough,” the star said in a voicemail message.
Troup, who was in New York, rang the Sydney hotel immediately in an attempt to talk to Hutchence, and the telephone rang out.
At 9.50am, Hutchence left another message on Troup’s answering machine. “The deceased sounded as if he was affected by something, and was slow and deep,” coroner Mr Hand said.
Troup said of the death: “He snapped. He felt the pressures and it was a snap.”
She was adamant Hutchence’s death was not the accidental result of autoerotic asphyxiation.
“I can say unequivocally that that’s not it,” she reportedly told online music magazine Addicted To Noise in December 1997. “Absolutely not. The detectives’ report will come out and it was absolutely not that.”
“I think [it was] pressures about his child, Tiger, and Bob Geldof and all the escapades that went on in the last year. It just reached a climax.”
Unable to contact Hutchence herself, Troup called John Martin, the tour manager for INXS, who said he had received a note from the singer saying he was “not going to rehearsals today”.
It was a far cry from the last time Troup spoke to Hutchence at 1am Sydney time when he was still with Kym Wilson and Andrew Rayment.
“He’d come back from dinner with his dad,” Troup told The Australian in 1998. “I called him up and I said, ‘Hey’, and he goes, ‘Martha’ and he was in a brilliant mood, a very good mood, happy. You could tell he was drinking. And he said, ‘I’m here with some film people,’ and I said, ‘Film people?!’
“And he was just laughing and he goes, ‘No, no, no’. When you spend day in and day out with somebody — I knew what ‘no, no, no’ meant. Like, ‘No, Martha, this is not a thing with a woman, I’m with a couple.’ And then we started talking about (a prospective role in) Quentin (Tarantino)’s movie.”
MICHELE BENNETT
Former girlfriend and close confidant Michele Bennett also received two calls on the day of Hutchence’s death.
The successful film producer said the first went to her answering machine and that Hutchence sounded “drunk”.
Hutchence rang again at 9.54am.
“The deceased commenced to cry and, according to Ms Bennett, sounded very upset,” Mr Hand said in his report on the death.
“She was concerned about his demeanour and for his welfare and told him she would come immediately.
“However, when she arrived at the hotel she was not able to rouse him by knocking loudly on his door nor by ringing him.
“She wrote a note and left it at reception.
“Ms Bennett stated that Mr Hutchence never expressed previous inclinations regarding suicide.”
In an article last year in Stellar magazine, Bennett was quoted on the relationship between Yates and Hutchence, saying: “He loved her provocativeness. It was fun for him. She was intelligent. He liked how witty she was, and that she had this earth mother side as well. But I think she became insecure about him … and he didn’t like that.”
She also thought Hutchence would feel guilty about breaking up a home, and the relationship brought a flood of negative press.
Hutchence himself told news.com.au just days before his death: “It concerns me a great deal that every move that I make is looked at, photographed, and made into gossip, some f---ing sound bite that doesn’t resemble the truth.
“I don’t want to be exposed like that all the time. I don’t want to be known as someone that’s just a shallow sound bite. I have worked too long and too hard for that.”
• For crisis support and suicide prevention — Lifeline Australia 13 11 14