Billionaire couple in Britain commit suicide by liberalism

They were billionaires but lived like paupers in a $100 million London mansion.
They were one of Europe’s glamour couples, friends of Prince Charles, but retreated from ornate ballrooms and charity galas to a filthy drug den in their home.
The secret life of Hans and Eva Rausing was exposed Monday when British police busted him for drug possession — then found the remains of his addict wife in an upstairs bedroom of their home in the Belgravia section.
Investigators suspect Hans, the 49-year-old heir to the $6 billion Tetra Pak food-packaging empire, had been living in a drug-fueled stupor with the body of the US-born Eva, 48, for as long as week.


A friend said that in recent months, the couple dressed shabbily instead of in the tuxedos and gowns they were known for. They both lost weight, turning into gaunt figures who looked much older.
The Rausings also retreated to two rooms of the six-story Georgian townhouse that they turned into a crack den.
They told their servants not to enter the rooms. Police believe Hans Rausing rarely left them in the final days of his wife’s life, except to buy drugs.
“It was total squalor. Really messy. You wouldn’t believe they were billionaires,” a friend told British newspapers. “It shows the effect of drugs. They couldn’t look out for themselves or their house.”
It was a disastrous descent for Eva Rausing and her husband, a member of Britain’s 12th-richest family.
Eva, daughter of a wealthy former Pepsi executive, met Hans Rausing around 1990 — at a drug rehab clinic in California.
Hans had grown up in Sweden, where his grandfather founded the family’s carton enterprise in the 1930s. But he showed no interested in the business.
“He has never had a job in his life,” said Swedish journalist Peter Andersson, who chronicled the family in his book, “Tetra — The History of the Rausing Dynasty.”
“Instead, he went off to India to find himself. He came back from there seriously ravaged by drugs,” Andersson said.
Eva later hinted she got hooked about the same time, the late 1980s, while attending a California college.
“I had a good time — too good, as I dropped out and did not go back to university until the grand old age of 24,” she wrote on MySpace. “Which leaves some troubled years in between.”
But she cleaned up and “became a good girl, if maybe a little boring, got a degree in economics,” she added.
She and Hans married soon after they met, and they began a new life in London.
They had four children — “I suppose they are my greatest achievements,” she wrote — and became known for their philanthropic work, including serving on the boards of anti-drug charities.


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