Bob Geldof's tragedies - daughter Peaches and Paula Yates killed by same drug

22 February 2023 , 09:28

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Bob Geldof's tragedies - daughter Peaches and Paula Yates killed by same drug

Peaches Geldof was just 11 years old when her mum Paula Yates had died of an accidental heroin overdose.

Dad Bob Geldof was forced to have the conversation that no parents wants to have, sitting his daughters down to deliver the heartbreaking news that their mother had gone.

For second-born Peaches, it would be five years before the grief truly hit, sending the intelligent private schoolgirl into a toxic spiral of drinking and drug taking.

Aged 19, the tragic star reportedly had to be given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation after she stopped breathing at her home in Camden, north London, amid talk of a 'drug overdose' - although it was later claimed she'd had a bad reaction to hair dye.

Bob Geldof and his daughter Peaches pictured in 2009

Peaches was a regular on the London party scene

A few months prior to the July 2008 incident, she'd been filmed offering money to a drug dealer, saying: "I need to get all that stuff off you tonight."

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And that same year she raised eyebrows by meeting little know musician Max Drummey on MySpace; moving to New York and marrying him in Las Vegas after just weeks of dating.

It was in the Big Apple that she was first said to have experimented with heroin - the drug that would kill her in eerily similar circumstances to her mother six years later.

When her friend Freddy McConnel, 18, died of a drugs overdose in 2011, an entry about Peaches was found in his diary from a few months earlier, reading: "Peaches is coming over later and I am going to inject for the first time. Perhaps I will die. I hope I don't."

Bob later said he was aware of some - but not all - of what was happening and tried to help. By all accounts, he was a strict parent and fiercely protective.

Peaches Geldof was briefly married to musician Max Drummey

But in 2009 Peaches insisted the situation had been blown out of all proportion.

"Yeah, I've taken drugs. Yes, I have had experiences, and a few of those experiences were unsavoury, not ones I want to repeat, but I was growing up. I wanted the experience," she insisted.

"It made me feel sick. I wasn't hugely into drugs, and I'm sober now... I'm straight, I'm not Amy Winehouse. I never have been. I wasn't a crackhead."

Indeed, in the later years of her life, Peaches settled down and welcomed two gorgeous sons with her second husband, SCUM musician Tom Cohen.

The troubled star appeared to have found contentment with Tom (REX)

Peaches and Tom welcome two much-loved sons (Getty)

They quit London for a bucolic life in the Kent countryside, but it later emerged that behind the idyllic scenes she'd secretly been trying to break free from heroin addiction.

Going incognito, the star is believed to have attended a local rehab service for two and a half years, where she was prescribed heroin replacement methadone and given counselling.

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And Bob revealed that the year before her death, she'd even tried rehab. But things had gone badly wrong when she ran away from the facility in Utah, despite his desperate attempts to stop her.

Speaking to The Mail On Sunday's Event magazine about the distressing moment that preceded her death, he said: "By 2013, we'd been through it. The family had gone to Utah to a rehab place there. She was doing pretty well and we all flew out, because you have to.

Peaches had sons Astala and Phaedra with husband Thomas Cohen (Getty)

"Then she ran away from there. I tried to stop her at the door, but there's nothing you can do. She was free to leave."

Then in February 2014 Tom found texts suggesting his wife was once again using. Desperate to stay clean for the sake of her babies, she flushed her stash down the toilet in front of him.

But in her last ever interview, Peaches hinted at her torment, discussing the 'gnawing' grip of the opiod.

"Heroin is such a bleak drug," she said. "It always makes me so sad to hear about people like (actor Philip Seymour) Hoffman, who were real masters and also family men who were just wasted by the constant, gnawing obsession with it.

The Kent country home where Peaches' body was found (Splash)

"All heroin users seem to have the same core internal pain, though. It's a fascinating concept – drug of choice."

For Peaches, the pull of addiction proved to be too strong and on a rainy weekend in April 2014, while Tom was at his parents, she injected a dose of heroin that proved to be lethal.

The 25-year-old star was found slumped on the bed by Tom the next day, and an inquest heard her previous abstinence would have reduced her tolerance to the drug.

Paula Yates and Bob leave St Mary's Hospital in London with baby Peaches

Bob blamed himself. "You’re the father who is responsible and clearly failed," the broken star told ITV News.

"For anybody watching, who has a dead kid and you're a parent. You go back, you go back, you go back, you go back, you go back, you go over, you go over. What could you have done? You do as much as you can."

But all too tragically, having watched her flee rehab, the Boomtown Rats rocker admitted he had seen the death of his daughter coming and felt powerless to stop it.

"Part of me kind of half-expected [it with] Peaches, to be honest with you, you know, the way she was carrying on, there's nothing you can do about it," he told RTE Radio 1.

He has described his devastation as a 'bottomless grief'.

"The abyss is infinite," he said of his 'ever present' sorrows during an appearance on Irish chat show The Tommy Tiernan Show.

"Time doesn't heal, time accommodates. You're driving along, and you're at the traffic lights, and for no reason whatsoever the person in question inhabits you. And I'll cry."

Frances Kindon