Financial adviser killed himself in Dorset hotel

A financial adviser committed suicide at a Dorset hotel by taking a dose of cyanide.

Cyrus Nawroze, 36, booked into a room at the four-star Haven hotel in Poole on 13 August.

The next day, a maid went into his bedroom and saw Nawroze lying face-down on his bed. She assumed he was asleep and left the room.

The following day his family rang the hotel, after finding a suicide note at his London home. It was then that his body was discovered.

Forensic tests later showed Nawroze had died from cyanide poisoning. Police searched Nawroze's home in Sydenham and found an almost full jar of potassium cyanide and four pages of instructions on the different ways to take it.

They also found a book detailing methods of painless death. It was marked at a page discussing cyanide poisoning, giving the correct dosage and explaining how to mix the powdered drug with water.

The inquest in Bournemouth, Dorset, heard how Nawroze had chosen the Haven hotel as the place he wanted to die because he had happy memories of the area.

It also heard how he had been feeling depressed and unhappy with the direction in which his life was going.

A verdict of suicide was recorded.

Getting away from it all at a hotel of your choice…

Hotels occasionally feature in inquest reports as the chosen destinations for acts of suicide.

Other hotel suicides reported in Caterer over the past couple of years include:

• US businessman Jerry Stratton, 47, killed himself at the Cumberland hotel in London on 20 October 2000. He took a drug overdose before slashing his wrists and arms with a razor blade.
• Unemployed 45-year-old Marian Taylor died of a drug overdose at the Fitzroy hotel in Bloomsbury, London, on 22 February 2001. She had been living at the hotel since 1 February that year.
• Thurstan Brewin, 79, a former cancer specialist from Oxford, slit his wrists in a bath at the Pines hotel in Swanage, Dorset, on 24 February 2001. He left a £10 tip for the chambermaid who found him.
• Paddington-born Carl George Macdonald, 39, was found dead in a bedroom at the Shuttleworth hotel in Hackney, east London, on 2 June 2001. Having been deported from Canada after being jailed for robbery, he had been drinking heavily and taking painkillers.
• The naked body of record producer Steven Edgley, 49, of north London, was found by police on 22 June 2001 in the Travelodge hotel at the Scratchwood services on the M1 motorway. His body was surrounded by bottles of tablets and suicide notes.