A teenage aristocrat who died from a drugs overdose was working as a prostitute before her sordid death, her boyfriend has revealed.
Lady Beth Douglas, 18 – the youngest child of David Douglas, the 12th Marquess of Queensberry – died after injecting heroin for the first time in March.
Her boyfriend Jenan Karagoli, 21, said she had been working as a prostitute and earning money by taking part in online sex videos. She had also been selling her underwear to perverts online for £30 a time.
‘I knew about all this adult work, escorting, so on and so forth – but I kept my mouth shut,’ he said. He added that the day before her death on March 7, the couple had argued about her sexual behaviour. She would tell him to wait in a pub while she disappeared for hours.
‘She told me to sit and enjoy my Guinness while she went and met a friend. Soon she would phone and say she had got us a hotel room for the night,’ he said.
When Mr Karagoli asked how she had procured £250-a-night rooms when they were penniless, Lady Beth told him ‘I did what I had to do’.
He was ‘disgusted’ at the idea of her working as an escort, and the pair had a tearful row in the middle of a three-day drugs binge, he said.
‘I knew something had been happening, but my mind was too clouded from the drink and drugs. I told her: “I know what you’re doing, you can talk to me about it. You don’t have to hide things from me and, if you’re desperate for money, I’ll help”,’ said Mr Karagoli.
He knew she had been performing dominatrix webcam shows with men for ‘two or three months’ and then she asked him if she should sell her used underwear online.
He called that ‘a step too far’, adding: ‘I now think all of this was a gateway to her seeing men in person, hence the hotel rooms.’ Mr Karagoli met the talented violinist, known to her family as ‘Ling Ling’, through friends on her 18th birthday and they had a ten-month relationship.
But he ‘could tell she had her demons from the day we first met’. He said: ‘A lot of it stemmed from losing her half-brother Milo to suicide. She loved him and would often tell me he was the only sibling to truly accept her.’
She would also often mention the ‘Queensberry curse’ and that the dynasty has endured centuries of misfortune. He said their relationship descended into regular cocaine-taking. On March 6, they were invited to a house party in Notting Hill, West London, close to the flat they shared.
He described how Lady Beth asked him to leave the party to buy wine. When he returned at around 11.30pm, she had passed out on the sofa, so he went to sleep beside her. But at 1.30am he woke to find her ‘lifeless’.
He said: ‘She was so troubled but she was a wonderful woman.’ Mr Karagoli has now sworn off all drugs and declares himself ‘clean as a whistle’.
Last week an inquest recorded Lady Beth’s cause of death as a cardiac respiratory failure and cocaine and heroin poisoning.