Brian Jones murdered for debt, says 150-page dossier

Pat Andrews said it was vital that Jones's body was re-examined. "Disturbing new evidence has emerged which merits a full new police investigation," she told the Sunday Express. Jones was found drowned in the pool at his Cotchford Farm home in East Sussex in July 1969, aged just 27. Three weeks earlier, he had been sacked from the Stones - the band he had founded with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

A new film, The Wild and Wycked World of Brian Jones, is expected to claim that Jones was killed by a builder, Frank Thorogood, who accidentally drowned him during a row over a £8,000 debt. The film, which receives its British premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival next weekend, will allege that Thorogood, now dead, wanted to scare Jones into paying the debt by holding him under water. Fatally, Thorogood held the guitarist under too long.

In an interview earlier this year, the film's director, Stephen Woolley, said he had made every effort to tell the story accurately.

"It is quite a complicated story," he said. "It is not like Thorogood just got up one morning and decided to murder Brian Jones. It is the route that it took to get there."

Trevor Hobley, who runs the Brian Jones Fan Club, has employed a team of private investigators, including a former Thames Valley Police superintendent, to compile a dossier of new evidence, which has been handed to Sussex police.

Mr Hobley said that a new witness had come forward who was working at Cotchford Farm on the night of Jones's death. The dossier also includes eight key points that, Mr Hobley claims, prove that the coroner's verdict of death by misadventure was unsafe.

Mr Hobley said: "We carried out an initial forensic examination at the end of last year. From that we have approached the Home Office and police and hope to get the case reopened and Brian's body exhumed in the near future."

It is understood that Sussex police are reluctant to reopen the case, but will analyse the forensic team's findings before making a final decision.