Paula Yates, Hutchence's Girlfriend, Found Dead

Paula Yates, British TV personality and former girlfriend of the late INXS singer Michael Hutchence, was found dead in her London home on Sunday; she was forty-one. Detective Inspector Mike Christensen told the BBC that Scotland Yard was summoned to an address in St. Luke's Mews, Notting Hill, after a friend of Yates notified police that she "appeared to be dead." Police arrived at the scene, and pronounced her dead at 11:15 a.m. BST.

Christensen said there were "no signs of violence or anything of that nature," and believed that Yates had been alone in the house overnight, but they were treating the death as "suspicious." But on Monday, U.K.'s Sun reported that Yates may have been found by Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily, her four-year-old child by Hutchence, who reportedly answered the phone when a family friend called and explained that she could not wake her mother.

Yates also had three other daughters from her ex-husband, former Boomtown Rats singer and Live Aid organizer Bob Geldof: Fifi Trixibelle, seventeen, Peaches Honeyblossom, eleven, and Pixie, ten. Police explained that all four girls were being cared for by Geldof, but last night Fifi returned to her mother's house to lay a bouquet of yellow roses on the steps and then went inside briefly with a police inspector and two friends.

Geldof pleaded with the public to leave the family alone in their grief. "It doesn't require much imagination to understand the pain," Geldof said in a statement, in which he urged the press to respect the family's privacy. "Please do nothing to add to that."

It remains to be seen what Tiger Lily's fate will be. Her paternal grandfather, Kelland Hutchence, seventy-three, told reporters of his grief for his granddaughter, but explained that he was too ill to travel to London to offer any comfort to the girl. "Questions have been asked about Tiger Lily's future and all I can say is that I believe she is in good hands at the present," he said. Yates did not leave a will, so it will be up to the British courts to decide the girl's future, but she could end up living with her sisters and Geldof.

Yates was inconsolable after Hutchence was found dead by hanging in 1997 in a Sydney, Australia, hotel room. She refused to believe the coroner's report that his death was a suicide, and was later treated for depression at London's Priory Clinic.

The results of Yates' autopsy, performed today at a Westminster mortuary, were inconclusive, according to police. An inquest will follow.

JAAN UHELSZKI
(September 18, 2000)