LONDON — In a saga of wealth and privilege brought low in a cascade of horror, narcotics and headlines, Hans Rausing, one of Britain's richest men, was given a suspended 10-month jail term Wednesday after pleading guilty to "preventing the lawful and decent burial" of his wife, Eva, whose body was found in a state of advanced decomposition last month hidden under a pile of clothing and garbage bags at their luxury London home.

Judge Richard McGregor-Johnson told Hans Rausing, an heir to the multibillion-dollar Tetra Pak drink-packaging fortune, that his behavior was "an illustration of the utterly destructive effects of drug misuse."

Hans Rausing's lawyer, Alexander Cameron, the brother of Prime Minister David Cameron, said his client acted "when, as Shakespeare would put it, the balance of the mind was disturbed," unable to accept his wife's death after he found her body in their mansion in Chelsea on May 7, more than two months before the cadaver was discovered by police July 9.

"He has no recollection of the next 10 or 12 hours," Alexander Cameron said of the time immediately after Hans Rausing found his wife's body. "He did not move the body. He described her as looking quite restful. He felt quite unable to face up to the fact that she had died."

The case left two big questions unanswered: What caused Eva Rausing's death, and who decided to cover her body in a bizarre cocoon of clothing and plastic garbage bags, taped together and sprinkled with deodorizing powder?

An autopsy showed that the U.S.-born Eva Rausing, 48, had taken drugs — in particular cocaine — before her death, prosecutors said. But the cause of death has not been established.

Her death was discovered after police officers in the Wandsworth neighborhood of South London pulled over Hans Rausing, 49, on July 9 because of his erratic driving and found drug paraphernalia and a large amount of mail addressed to his wife in his car.

The officers went to the couple's mansion in Cadogan Place, one of London's toniest addresses. A powerful smell of decomposition led them to a fly-filled room in a second-floor annex where Eva Rausing's body was found.

A prosecutor, James O'Connell, said Eva Rausing had returned to Britain from a rehab clinic in California on April 29 and had met with her financial adviser May 3 — the last time witnesses recalled seeing her alive. The likely date of her death — May 7 — was calculated from examination of the body and of a heart pacemaker Eva Rausing had had fitted, according to court testimony.

According to court documents, Hans Rausing said in a statement to police after his arrest: "I do not have a very coherent recollection of the events leading up to and since Eva's death."

In photographs taken before his wife's body was found, Hans Rausing had often seemed disheveled. But he appeared in court Wednesday in a dark-blue suit and red tie, his beard neatly trimmed, silent except to plead guilty in a quiet voice to the charges against him, preventing his wife's burial and driving under the influence of drugs.

The public has been fascinated by the case because the couple had seemed to have everything that wealth and privilege could provide, yet were destroyed by an addiction that had haunted them since they met in a drug-treatment clinic in the United States more than 20 years ago. They also had contributed millions to anti-drug charities.

Together, they had four children but, according to a person close to the family, they had lost custody to one of Hans Rausing's sisters.

"You and your wife had every material advantage imaginable, and for a time a happy family life," McGregor-Johnson told Hans Rausing on Wednesday in Islesworth Crown Court in West London. "Your relapse into the misuse of drugs, together with that of your wife, destroyed all that."

The judge also imposed a two-month suspended sentence on Hans Rausing for the driving offense and ordered he undergo two years of drug rehabilitation supervised by a probation officer.

Like her husband, Eva Rausing came from a monied background. Her father, Tom Kemeny, a former Pepsi executive, owns an island off South Carolina and houses in Barbados and London, according to British news reports. But that fortune did not match the wealth accumulated since the mid-1940s in Sweden, where the Rausing dynasty built an empire from the manufacture of cheap but hygienic cardboard milk cartons called Tetra Paks. Hans Rausing is one of three heirs to his father's fortune, which is worth $12.9 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Eva and Hans Rausing stood to inherit a vast sum from the multibillion-dollar fortune generated by the Tetra Pak business. But their lives were gradually overwhelmed by stories of drug abuse that emerged publicly after Eva Rausing was caught trying to take illegal drugs, including crack cocaine and heroin, into a reception at the U.S. Embassy in London in 2008.

Material from Bloomberg News and The Associated Press is included in this report.