Stuart Lubbock: 23 Years and Still No Justice for the Body in Barrymore’s Pool

Stuart Lubbock went to a party at a celebrity’s house and never came home. What the post-mortem found was so much worse than drowning — and more than two decades on, not one person has ever been charged.

On 31 March 2001, a 31-year-old butcher from Harlow named Stuart Lubbock was pulled lifeless from the swimming pool at Michael Barrymore’s Essex home. At the time, Barrymore was one of the most famous men in Britain — a Saturday-night institution, the cheeky face of primetime ITV. By the time the sun came up, he was something else entirely: the man whose pool a stranger had died in. And the Stuart Lubbock case has never once, in all the years since, delivered anything resembling justice.

This isn’t a whodunit with a satisfying reveal. It’s worse than that. It’s a case where the medical evidence screamed that something terrible had happened, where the crime scene was compromised beyond repair, and where the only people who know what actually happened in those early hours have never had to answer for it.

A Party, a Pool, and a Body

The gathering was small and late. Eight people back at the house after the pubs closed, drink and drugs in the mix, the pool lit up in the dark. Ordinary enough, in the grim way these things always are — right up until Stuart Lubbock was found floating face-down.

He was pulled out. CPR was attempted. He was pronounced dead at the hospital in the early hours. The initial assumption, the convenient one, was drowning — a drunk man, a pool, a tragic accident. Except the post-mortem refused to let it stay that simple.

What the Post-Mortem Found

This is the part that turns a sad accident into something that should never have been allowed to go cold.

The examination found that Stuart had suffered severe internal injuries consistent with a serious sexual assault. He also had drugs in his system — including substances he was not known to take. This was not the body of a man who had simply slipped under the water. The injuries told a story of violence, and that story demanded answers the investigation was never able to force out of anyone. Two later arrests over the years produced no charges. The evidence was there in the worst possible form, written on the body itself, and it led precisely nowhere.

The injuries told a story of violence. More than twenty years later, no one has ever had to answer for it.

The Crime Scene That Wasn’t

Here’s what makes true crime obsessives grind their teeth about the Stuart Lubbock case: the scene was gone before it was ever a scene.

In the crucial window after Stuart was pulled from the water, the property was — by multiple accounts — tidied. Items went missing, including pool thermometers that were never recovered and which some believe are central to the assault. By the time the investigation treated the house as what it was, the opportunity to preserve the truth had evaporated. You cannot solve what you were never allowed to properly examine. That, more than anything, is why this case sits open and festering to this day.

The 2018 Ruling Nobody Talks About

In 2018, Stuart’s father Terry Lubbock — who spent the rest of his life fighting for answers — took Essex Police to the Royal Courts of Justice. The case, Parker v Chief Constable of Essex Police, centred on Barrymore’s arrest and the damages he was owed over how it was carried out.

The ruling was a bitter one for the Lubbock family. The court found the arrest itself had been unlawfully executed on a technicality — meaning the man at the centre of the story was, in the eyes of the law, owed compensation rather than made to account. Terry Lubbock died in September 2021 without ever getting the answer he’d given his life to chasing. That’s the gut-punch of the Stuart Lubbock case: the grieving father runs out of time, and the machine simply moves on.

Still Posting, Still Performing

Michael Barrymore has always maintained he had nothing to do with Stuart’s death, and no court has ever found otherwise. What’s harder to sit with is the afterlife of it all.

Barrymore is active on TikTok, posting to camera, dancing, performing, courting a comeback for an audience too young to remember 2001 — while a family a few counties over marks another year without answers. Britain loves nothing more than a redemption arc for a fallen entertainer. What it has never seemed to love quite as much is the memory of the stranger who died in the pool and never got one.

Image credits: Michael Barrymore — Steve Parsons / PA. Roydon house — John McLellan.