Rapper ‘refused to answer’ over drug death girl
Race to find Taggart star’s daughter
THE ‘dazed and vacant’ boyfriend of Scots actor John Michie’s daughter had to be quizzed repeatedly before finally admitting his dying girlfriend had taken the party drug 2C-P, a court heard yesterday.
At first, rapper Ceon Broughton refused to answer questions from music festival staff about what he and Louella Fletcher-Michie, 24, had been doing in woodland outside the event’s grounds.
Broughton, 29, was allegedly ‘under the influence’ but ‘not really agitated’, after seeing his hallucinating girlfriend repeatedly hit herself and even try to eat thorns.
Jurors heard that after Louella went missing, Broughton initially told the event’s night manager Andrew McGrory that she had been ‘not well’ and ‘cold’. He asked staff to help find her on the site in Lulworth, Dorset.
In a log of events kept by Mr McGrory, he said Broughton only admitted he and Louella had been taking the class A substances together when he was finally told to ‘cut to the chase’.
As soon as the rapper told him of the drug-taking, he realised the upshot could be more serious than a girl going missing.
At the trial at Winchester Crown Court, Hants, prosecutor Simon Jones read a section of the log kept by the festival manager throughout the night of September 10.
Recording details of Mr McGrory’s meeting with Broughton behind a bar on the Lulworth Castle grounds, the log states: ‘Met boyfriend Ceon. He was dazed and vacant and appeared to be under the influence but not really agitated.
‘I asked where he had last seen his girlfriend and he said in the woods... I asked him if she was okay and got no response. I asked if she was breathing, he said yes. He said she was cold and he had given her his coat.
‘He said they had taken 2C-P. I realised this could be much worse than a missing girl.’
The court also heard how Taggart and Holby City star Mr Michie, 62, who has been watching the trial from the public gallery with his family, cried out ‘my daughter’ as he saw police rushing to the location where her body had been found.
Officers discovered Louella’s iPhone ‘trodden’ into mud, with a cracked screen.
Giving evidence, PC Christopher Harrison said: ‘When we got there she was on her back. She had a lot of bramble marks all over her hands.
‘I found [Louella’s] phone on the floor with a cracked screen but it had no battery life. It was sort of towards her feet, in the mud. I think it might have been trodden on.’
The court has heard how Mr Michie and his partner Carol, a one-time dancer with Hot Gossip, made a desperate 130mile dash to Bestival after hearing Louella ‘screech’ like a wild animal on the phone.
Broughton, who has recorded with top rap artists, filmed his girlfriend tripping on 2C-P, continuing to do so as her condition worsened and even allegedly after she died.
The on-site hospital was just 400 yards away, yet the court heard Broughton did not seek help in the six hours he spent with Louella in the woods.
Prosecutor William Mousley, QC, said the rapper could have saved her if he had sought medical help, but did not as he ‘didn’t want to be arrested’ because he was serving a suspended sentence and would likely be jailed.
Broughton, of Enfield, London, denies manslaughter and supplying class A drugs.
The trial continues.
‘Under influence but not agitated’