Prologue - All the nonsense
I know, this site is a record guide
but this subject needs addressing as there is so much rubbish all over the internet about Jimi being murdered.
I
had read all the startling articles and books that implied that Jimi
had been murdered but too many statements were very conflictual. So, with
an open mind, I decided to sift through all the information available, in an effort and determine what really happened.
Looking
meticulously through the all the available data (and using plain old
common sense) the entire
murder theory simply doesn't stand up to scrutiny. This is serious
because a lot of the fraudulent information has ended up in many
Hendrix books and documentaries. The lies have become part of Hendrix
folklore and now we
have people all over social murder declaring that "Hendrix was murdered by his manager", "Jimi was a touring slave", "Jeffery kidnapped Jimi, "Jeffery spiked Jimi at MSG",....
all totally false as it happens but people seem to prefer the myth (or
are simply ill-informed) and like to see Jimi as a martyr. As Harry Shapiro put it in the book Electric Gypsy:
"Again, there is no evidence for
such conspiracy theories. As in life, so in death, there were too many
people wanting to hold Jimi up as a 'victim', a martyr to his genius,
done in by evil managers, record companies, hangers-on, dope-dealers,
political
militants and so on. True, like anybody else in the public eye, Jimi
was under inordinate amounts of stress. But to deny him any inner
ressources of strength to win through, the belief in the power of his
own vision and the ability to gain control over his life, is to do Jimi
Hendrix a grave disservice." ... "In Gerry Stickell's words, Jimi's
death was 'an unfortunate accident'. And almost cerainly, that's what it was."
So read on
dear visitor and learn the truth about the death of Jimi Hendrix.
I must say first of all that this page only came together thanks to all the painstaking research
done over the years by Kathy Etchingham, Michael Fairchild, Caesar Glebbeek, Harry Shapiro, Jerry Hopkins, Tony Brown, Dennis Care, Charles R. Cross, Sharon Lawrence, Ben Valkhoff, Luigi Gauti and others. So thank you guys and gals for all your hard work and
dedication. Various
books can still be found out there and
Kathy's book, though out of print (and expensive used) has a
Kindle edition. Check out the neat assessment of this subject, featured
in the latest Valkhoff/Garuti book "Hendrix 1970: Day By Day".
The circumstances surrounding Jimi's death have been subject to much
speculation. Theories abound claiming that it was suicide, an accident
and even quite ludicrously that it was a murder conspiracy, instigated by his manager
Michael Jeffery! The 2021 events in Washington DC and QAnon disinformation illustrate
the lunacy that is born out of conspiracy theory mentalities. Truth denial
is becoming widespread, especially in the U.S.A. The same
blind refusal of
irrefutable facts has also taken hold within the Hendrix fan community
over the years thanks to a succession of inaccurate information,
blatant money-making lies and also the perverted desire to paint the
musician as a helpless victim of the establishment and a machiavellian
manager. For some reason, the gullible seems to prefer the tragic,
romantic idea of Jimi the martyr to his art. In many cases, it's not
really their fault because so much of the nonsense has crept into
several Hendrix books, documentaries and thus into Hendrix folklore. A
lot of information-gatherng, 20 years after Jimi's passing, was done
under curious circumstances involving some highly untrustworthy
individuals.
As you will
see on this page, many of the people involved in that terrible day when
Jimi passed away, give
self-contradicting statements about what happened. For example, in his
book
"Hendrix: The Final Days", Tony
Brown mentions that he interviewed the key witness Monika Dannemannn
many
times in the 80s and she would change her story from one call to the
next! As you will see on this page, Jimi's road crew, Eric Burdon, the ambulancemen,
the doctors, a policeman (!),... also changed
their stories as they went along, making amateur sleuthing a very
difficult
task!
So I realised that within this infuriating tangle of conflicting
accounts, there must be a path to understanding what happened on that disastrous
morning. The accounts
couldn't all be wrong or invented. With this in mind, I set about
looking for the accounts which complimented or eliminated
another. I must say that this is all only based on the (confused)
information that we have so far and the common sense deductions that can be made from it. If any further
information becomes available (particularly about what happened at the
Samarkand Hotel and the "clean-up" crew) then that would change
a lot of assumptions on this page, and I have no problem with that.
Attempted suicide seems unlikely. There are many quotes saying
that
Jimi was depressed, confused and insecure at this stage (Sharon Lawrence
and Kirsten Nefer in particular witnessed this) but others ( Mitch Mitchell, Alan
Douglas, Gerry Stickells,...) said that Jimi was generally in good
spirits and bursting with fresh ideas and looking forward to getting
new projects under way!
What is apparent however about Jimi's last
months is
that
his chosen lifestyle had become very erratic and unhealthy with poor
sleep
cycles
and the consumption of great amounts of drugs and alcohol which had
sent
him into a spiral of paranoia, self-doubt, apathy and what appeared to
amount to a bipolar disorder or even mild schizophrenia.
Carlos
Santana, who had witnessed Jimi's excesses in November 1969 at The
Record Plant, NY: "To
me, it was a combination of the lifestyle - staying up all night,
chicks, too much drugs, all kinds of stuff. It was a combination of all
the intensities he felt, along with a lack of discipline."(2).
Buddy Miles: "To
some degree, Hendrix suffered from the drugs he was taking, because he
was doing heroin and after a while that will hurt anyone." (10)
Brian Auger talking about meeting Jimi in 1970: "...he rolled out some silver paper which he opened up and he snorted what was obviously heroin." (from my interview with Brian - see Index page).
Reading about Jimi's confused and unpredictable behaviour during his last few weeks is
unsettling and it reveals a man who was gradually losing control. He
had relished shooting to international stardom in 1967 and 1968 but
Noel remarked how, even then, Jimi would often display anxiety and
paranoia (perhaps a symptom of his unstable, violent childhood and his
equally hap-hazard and annonymous "chitlin' circuit" days). Eventually
the pressures of being the highest paid rock star of the day
got to him. His life became a maelstrom of demands from record
companies, management, banks, lawyers, radical groups, ex-lovers with
children that he'd fathered, Ed Chalpin, drug pushers, hangers-on,...
He couldn't just run away from his responsabilities, his debts, so he
unfortunately was drawn to the escape of various substances, which put
him in a very precarious situation. Being "Jimi" Hendrix had become
intolerable for him. As Tony Brown said in the preface of his book The Last Days: "Anyone with an ounce of common sense could see that Hendrix was heading for a terrible fall." Biographer Harry
Shapiro had this to say about Jimi's condition when he arrived in
London for the short European tour in August/September 1970:
"Important... in assessing the events of the coming weeks is the fact
that Jimi was physically very run down. His glandular problems earlier
in the year were a testament to that and he never had or gave himself
the time to recover fully. Jimi's poor state of physical health was
primarily a product of the lifestyle he led."
Where to begin?
When all the talk of Jimi being murdered started being put about
decades ago, I was shocked, intrigued. So I had to find out more. As I
delved into all the interviews, articles, books, videos,... comparing
all the data, I realised that many statements didn't fit the
things that were undeniable facts, i.e. the medical information.
Something didn't add up and I discovered that a murder simply didn't take place at all.
It became evident that it was imperative
to start at the hospital, because the procedures that were carried out at that crucial moment tell us everything we need to know about Jimi's condition.
Working logically back from those facts permits one to eliminate a
great number
of false and untrustworthy accounts (the murder, the
long-dead
Jimi, the lungs full of wine, etc. - all nonsense as it turns out).
So the solution is to begin with the
inescapable fact that renders the murder theory immediately
obsolete:
September 18th 1970:
Jimi certainly WASN'T long-dead on arrival at the hospital
In the afternoon of September 18th, the police and a hospital spokesperson confirmed to the
press that Jimi had passed away in the ambulance (see the above quotes from the press articles). It
was also confirmed by the Accident & Emergencies Admissions Officer (Walter Price) at the hospital and confirmed again in the
1990s by the ambulanceman who was at
Jimi's side as
the ambulance sped to the hospital with lights and siren according to the driver - so there was oviously a sense of urgency, a living patient.
At the
November 1970 inquest into Jimi's death, it was also confirmed that
Jimi died in the ambulance.
This
was the reason why, on arrival at the hospital, Jimi was rushed to the Resuscitation Room (or
Emergency Room) in a last ditch attempt to revive him. This simple fact
eliminates the popular myth that Jimi had been dead
for hours at the
Samarkand Hotel. The function of the Resuscitation
Room is to perform CPR on people who have
just stopped breathing (you've seen it movies) and have no pulse BUT might still have a chance of being resuscitated,
before the point of no return - brain death.
Doctors
NEVER attempt to revive long-dead corpses that are six or seven hours gone because of the visible signs of livor
mortis (a.k.a. "dependant
lividity" - skin
discoloration) and rigor mortis (stiffness of the jaw, neck, limbs,...)
which would inform them that the person is completely irrecuperable.
Lividity can show up in as little as 15 minutes, so if Jimi had been
dead for hours, skin discoloration would have been plainly visible to
medical personel. It obviously wasn't.
Prior to admission, arrivals are always triaged and
bodies exhibiting those signs are sent directly to the morgue. Jimi
obviously exhibited none because the two doctors who examined him in the
ambulance decided that he be rushed into the Emergency Room for
immediate resuscitation.
This simple fact has been overlooked for decades.
Jimi didn't drown in red wine
A
doctor who was on duty the morning that Jimi died
received a lot of publicity in the press when he said that he had
pumped pints of red wine out of Jimi's stomach and lungs.
He said "The medical staff used an 18 inch metal sucker to try and clear Hendrix's airway...but it would just fill up with red wine from his stomach".
The
problem with his story is that at the
autopsy, a half-digested meal still in Jimi's stomach. If his
stomach had been pumped, how could a half-digested meal remain for the
autopsy? Also, no wine was found to be among that half-digested meal, none at all was mentioned in the autopsy report.
This
proves that the account of Dr. Bannister is pure invention. That
wine suctioning simply didn't happen at all. The
autopsy also detailed the vomit that was still in Jimi's lungs. The
stomach contents and part of it which ended up in Jimi's lungs were
analysed and found to contain starch but there is absolutely no mention
of wine at all in the mix. Absolute proof that Jimi didn't drown in
wine.
Bannister also said that he had a vivid memory of the case. He told two newspapers that the body he watched being worked on was "very long" and that "He was about 10 inches (25.4 centimetres) longer than the trolley"! Hospital
trolleys are 6'6" in length in order to take a fully grown adult, so if
the man's feet were sticking out about 10" off the end, that would mean
a man over 7 feet tall. Jimi was only 5'10"
tall! Further proof that Bannister's account has nothing whatsoever to do with Jimi Hendrix.
Why
did he come forward with these lies (or memories of a different case)?
It transpired that Bannister was on trial for fraud when
he came forward with his ludicrous comments in the 1990s. At the
conclusion of the trial, he was convicted
for fraud and struck-off the register as doctor.
Further proof that Hendrix wasn't murdered and didn't drown in wine:
the 2016 autopsy review
I'll put this up now to save you a lot of time dear reader.
First of all, back in October 1970, the inquest was told that Jimi passed away in the ambulance on
the way to the hospital - so this is an established fact. Then in the
90s, during a Scotland Yard reinvestigation into Jimi's death, pathologist Dr. Rufus Cropmton went over
the original Post-Mortem report about the stomach
contents and he came to the conclusion
that Jimi's time of death was at the same time as stated in the initial
report (and not seven to eight hours earlier as the conspiracy theorist likes to
think).
For a second opinion, the police took steps to contact another eminent patholgist and he also confirmed the originally stated time of death.
Then, in 2016, 46 years after Jimi's passing, Prof. Robert Donald Teare's original Post-Mortem report was analysed by the highly experienced forensic pathologist Dr. Michael D. Hunter (who has performed over 4000 autopsies to
determine cause of death and has testified in several serious criminal trials).
Dr. Hunter's detailed
report was presented on the ReelzTV documentary titled "Autopsy - The
Last Hours Of Jimi
Hendrix". Over
the decades since Jimi's death, forensic science
has greatly evolved and using this accumulated knowledge, Dr.
Hunter goes step by step through every aspect of the 1970 autopsy
report to reach his conclusion. Also taken into account are some
details about Jimi's last couple of weeks in Europe. Despite the rather tacky, prime-time presentation (and some factual errors about Jimi regarding the events of
his last few days in London), the documentary finally provides the irrefutable proof
that Jimi Hendrix didn't drown in wine.
Relating to the conspiracy fantasy that Jimi had been forcibly
water-boarded with red wine, Dr. Hunter says that such an aggression would have been revealed in the autopsy by "an elevated level of alcohol in the blood". This
means that the relatively short time of such struggling/drowning
is long enough for the fine membranes of the mouth, the nasal cavity,
the
stomach and the lungs to absorb alcohol in great quantities. Also, if
Jimi had lain on the bed for 6 hours with pints of wine
inside his lungs and stomach (as the conspiracy theorist claims),
alcohol would have seeped through the membranes by natural diffusion
(osmosis) into the blood. In his typed report, Prof. Teare had stated "Analysis for ethanol [alcohol] failed to reveal more than 5 mg%."*. Dr.
Hunter points out that that low level is not compatible with drowning in wine. A
* The 5 mg% reading was referred to simply because it was the minimum level of intoxication for a drink/driving offense.t
the
Dr. Teare had also stated that Jimi had "100 mg per 100 ml of alcohol in his blood at the time he took the pills."
That alcohol was fully digested during the hours leading up to
Jimi's death in the ambulance and was found in Jimi's urine at the
autopsy (none left in the blood). inq
At the inquest, Dr. Teare had been more specific:t, Prof. Teare was more specific and stated that he found:
"100 mil. % alcohol in urine
but none in his blood". The PROOF that Jimi didn't drown in wine.
As said earlier, there wasn't a trace of wine in the
fluids that were found in Jimi's lungs and stomach during Professeur
Teare's original autopsy in September 1970 only vomit.
Dr. Hunter also states that if Jimi forcibly drowned in wine, there would be visible signs of struggle/injury, but
there were none at all on Jimi. "There's no
evidence of injury on him.... We can pretty much rule out that there is
inflicted trauma that resulted in the death...".
The real cause of death - sleeping pills and a "black bomber"
Dr.
Hunter says that Jimi's heart dilation could have been caused by drug
consumption. The autopsy revealed no presence of chemicals that would
indicate consumption of LSD, heroin or cocaine but there was a trace of
the amphetamine Durofet (street name "Black Bomber") in Jimi's urine
(given to Jimi by Devon at Pete Kameron's party) and the presence in Jimi's blood of the
barbiturate quinalbarbitone (from Monika Danneman's Vesparax
sleeping tablets). Hunter sees the latter as being the actual
cause of Jimi's death saying "I have no doubt that Vesparax is what killed Jimi"
and that the inhalation of vomit was not the reason why he died. Jimi's lungs did
inhale vomit but only after the brain had been fatally damaged by the
chemicals in the Vesparax tablets - "Jimi Hendrix died, not as a result of him choking on vomit but of polydrug toxicity" which "led to his respiratory failure and his death".
In summing up, Dr. Hunter says that the from evidence that is there, "we can discount murder." - just as Dr. Rhufus Compton stated to the BBC in the 90s: "There is no villain" (8).
Water-boarding? Utter nonsense.
It's very bizarre that
the conspiracy theorist thinks that Jimi died through water-boarding
with wine, especially when water-boarding is... a method of
torture, not murder!
It's
a long,
messy torture technique and would have left a very obvious criminal footprint -
blatant incriminating evidence at the crime scene. No supposed "hit-men"
would ever adopt such a clumsy, easily detectable technique to murder
someone. Water-boarding would have left the bed soaked in red wine and
we know that when the police visited the flat on the afternoon of the
18th, they found the place to be clean and they even took bedsheets for
analysis, so they were obviously soiled. Obviously there was no trace of wine all over the place.
If anyone had wanted Jimi killed, why would such a clumsy, messy and traumatising
method be used
when there are quicker and cleaner ways to kill someone? The
perfect crime would have been an overdose
injection of heroin for example, which would have gone unnoticed as a
crime because
of Jimi's reputation as a drug-taker (not to mention his trial for
heroin possession in Toronto a year earlier - for which he was aquitted
luckily)!
What
the conspiracy
theorist doesn't understand is that if the intention had been to murder
Jimi
at the hotel, the murderers would have expected the body to be
discovered there and that the police would be summoned. Their
water-boarding murder would have been discovered! They couldn't possibly have imagined that Jimi would be rushed into
Casualty at a random hospital for urgent resuscitation!
So the conspiracy theorist idea that the medical staff at
St. Mary Abbott's and the police were already giving false accounts to
the press (the "cover-up") on the very afternoon that Jimi died is utterly ludicrous.
Whatever,
all this "drowning in wine" is utter nonsense because we have
the forensic proof
that Jimi didn't drown in wine at all. As stated above, no wine was
seen or detected in Jimi's body except a little inhis urine. What does
the conspiracy theorist think? That Bannister
flushed Jimi out, then slipped some vomit back inside Jimi? Game over.
No wine, no drowning, no murder. Case closed (but I'll carry on).
Jimi's manager didn't have a life insurance policy on Hendrix
Another
popular myth. It was Warner Brothers who had put into place a policy
for Jimi, just as they did for all top artists signed to their label.
Jefferey had no such policy on him. This is of no relevance anyway
because we know for certain that Jimi wasn't murdered.
Jimi's manager wasn't an ex-MI5/MI6 special agent
Another
fantasy served up for the gullible is that Mike Jeffery was a
high-ranking British secret service agent, a spy during his army days. During
his 60s/70s music business career, Jeffery was
known for his dodgy methods, as being a scheming, ruthless businessman
and
skilled money-maker. He liked to use methods of intimidation and
would
brag that he used to be an MI6 operative. The conspiracy theorist prefers to simply trust
in Mike Jeffery's word (of all people). However,
detailed
research has revealed that he in fact was nothing more that a regular
soldier who never rose above the very low rank of Private! Even Jimi
attained the higher rank of Private First Class! Jeffery was in fact the Royal Army Education Corps, which was part of the Intelligence Corps. Research hs revealed that while in service, he spent his time on making money
schemes such as re-selling newspapers to other servicemen and was caught out.
The "Jimi was worked like a slave till he dropped" nonsense
It's as if there is a desire
among some Hendrix fans and conspiracy lovers to portray Jimi as a weak victim of Jeffery's machiavelic manipulations, driven to
tour until he dropped, worked to death etc. All utter rubbish.
If you look at the timeline,
there were only heavy touring periods in the early promotional days of
1967 (as with any band of the era) and a dense period in early 1968 (USA
promotion), which Jimi loved according to his manager Chas Chandler. After that climb to the top, Jimi toured far less and he
made sure that tour gigs were grouped around weekends in order to leave himself
time to chill and create during the week. After the last Experience
gig in June '69, Jimi took 10 months off touring and returned in April
'70 for a well-planned (weekends) tour of the States before taking
yet another month off touring, which included a 10-day holiday on the island of Maui!
So the
popular myth of the over-worked Hendrix bites the dust. When a short
tour of Europe came up in September 1970 (only about 10 gigs
planned), Jimi was
in poor mental shape to
cope with it, thanks to his reckless, drug and alcohol crazed lifestyle - however,
as pointed out, it wasn't as if he had been on a
gruelling tour schedule prior to that (not since 1968 in fact). While
in Europe for that tour he ordered further tour dates to be planned.
Hardly the touring slave that he has become pictured as.
The web of lies and twisted motivations
Over the
decades, so many Hendrix biographers have unfortunately been misled by
innacurate information relating to Jimi's tragic death. So people
merely trusted the books. Then all the gullible were duped by all
the
conspiracy
theory nonsense about murder,"waterboarding with wine", etc. As I
will detail below, all this rubbish stems specifically from the highly
unreliable
accounts of the Dee Mitchell piloted interviews (her fake maiden name was Diana Bonham-Carter),
ex-Dr. Bannister's ludicrous account and roadie Tappy Wright's
(self-confessed) lies.
To
see things more clearly, it is important to look at the
sequence of events in detail, to give a better picture of Jimi's
irresponsible and reckless lifestyle and what actually happened
on September 17th and
18th 1970.
Monika Dannemann who was with Jimi when he fell into a coma at her rented London flat at The Samarkand Hotel.
Over the years, she spread ridiculous confusion about what actually happened on September
18th 1970, either through shame or in an effort to shift resposibility
towards Jimi.
So there are the essential facts but to get a clearer picture of what happened, it's better to follow:
THE CHAIN OF EVENTS
Summer 1970 - Jimi returns to Europe
Jerry Hopkins wrote in his book "Hit & Run - The Jimi Hendrix Story": "Cocaine
or amphetamines started the day, barbiturates or heavy downers like
heroin or Quaaludes ended the day, and in between came the recreational
drugs: beer and wine and Scotch, LSD, pot, hash, peyote, soma,
mushrooms, mescaline, and speedballs made of smack and coke." (12).
That gives some idea of where Jimi's head was through in 1969/1970.
Working
on his fourth studio album (two years after he'd worked on Electric
Ladyland), Jimi was finally making progress by the summer of 1970. However, because of all
the problems with the Ed Chalpin case, the lack of touring from mid
1969 to mid 1970, his overspending and the escalating costs of the
construction of Electric Lady Studios, the Hendrix organisation was
very short of money. So to bring in more funds, a short tour of Europe
was organised.
The evening
before Jimi left for the Europe, he attended the launch
party for Electric Lady Studios. He was up all night drinking and
smoking and didn't get any sleep at all. Road mananger Eric Barrett flew to London
with Jimi and he said that they were still drunk when they arrived at
Heathrow Airport. He also got no sleep the following night. (12)
Robbie Krieger says in his autobiography that he was next to Jimi on
the plane to England for the Isle of Wight festival in August 1970 (The Doors
also played there of course) and he remembers that Jimi asked
him if he knew where to score drugs in England and to call him if
he managed to score (and it wasn't marijuana according to
Kreiger).
As soon as Jimi
arrived in London, Kathy Etchingham got
a panicked call from Angie Burdon,
telling her that Jimi had gone mad. Angie recounted (to Kathy
Etchingham) that she and another girl (who?) had been
having fun with Jimi who suddenly snapped. He violently banged the
girls heads together and smashed up the hotel suite then threw the
naked girls out of his bedroom, trapping them in the
sitting room. Kathy dashed over there and found a dilapidated Jimi in
bed with a fever and with the fire full-on (even though it was a hot
day at the time). Kathy recounted that Jimi complained of having a
bad cold and that he looked very ill with a cold fever. In 1996, she embellished that a little, telling Musician magazine "He was suffering from a reactive depression from all the problems he had." Jimi's autopsy would reveal that he had a dilated right side of the heart.
From
what the autopsy says and the fact that Jimi complained of having
an unshakable "cold" in the last fortnight of his life, Doctor Michael
D. Hunter (in his 2016 autopsy review) ruled out rheumatic fever but
said "It's possible, given Jimi's symptoms, that the dilation that we see with his heart is a response to a viral infection." So Jimi could well have been suffering from the flu.
To combat the infection, the jet-lag, the lack of sleep, Jimi had three
nights ahead of him to get some
rest before the Isle Of Wight gig but instead, thrilled to back in good
old London where his fame and fortune had begun, he went into full-on
party mode.
In the many interviews with Jimi over the following few days he'd tell one
interviewer that he was excited about the many projects that he had on
the boiler (his new studio, forming a bigger band, writing a symphony,
playing with Gil Evans and Roland Kirk,...) then the next day he'd say
to another interviewer "...I feel hat I have nothing more to give musically." Clearly opposite states of mind at the same time.
The Isle Of Wight Festival and following short tour
On the evening of August 30th, Folk musician Ralph Mctell recounted that at the Isle Of Wight
festival, Jimi was due to be on stage but couldn't be located. He was
eventually found "very out of it in somebody's garden" near the festival site, according to McTell (7).
Before going on stage, Roy Carr of the N.M.E. said that Jimi "shared a catering-size bottle of vodka with friends and journalists" (7). Festival MC Jeff Dexter said "I
went out to introduce Jimi, and he said 'Hang on, I'm not ready'. It
took him about 40 minutes to get himself together. He was in a
state."
His performance at the festival from 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. was shambolic and
lacklustre (the band hadn't played together at all since the Hawaii
gigs a month earlier). Jimi looked drawn and exhausted. Mitch
later confirmed in his autobiography "...it
was stupid that we didn't have some kind of play before IOW. In actual
fact we'd been playing quite well on the road [in the U.S.] but to go
out cold was a mistake. We were rusty and it showed....whatever the
reason was, it was just a lousy performance... I remember we were all
really brought down by our performance.". Chas said of the gig "He was wrecked.... It was a disastrous concert, it was really awful to watch."(7)
Jimi came off stage at the Isle Of Wight at something like 4 a.m. Some
eye witnesses said that Jimi collapsed when he came off stage. He
headed for a hotel for some much needed rest, as he was due to play the same day in
Stockholm! So did he go and get a good night's sleep?... not exactly:
Jimi's chauffeur Derek Dyer went to the hotel room a few hours later to
take Jimi to the airport and saw that there were two young girls ("...must have been about 16 or 17, I suppose...") in his bed. (8). As I said, the evening of that day, Jimi played in Tivoli Gardens, Stockholm
and before taking the stage, he apparently downed a bottle of whisky like it was water (8).
Another patchy performance ensued. This was followed by a shoddy
performance at Gothenburg. Chas Chandler attended that concert and found Jimi to be
a shadow of his former self: "He was wrecked...it was really awful to watch...no discipline at all there." (11)
It
was after the Gothenburg gig that
Cox went to his hotel room and was tempted to try LSD (2). Another account said that he'd drank some punch that had some LSD in the mix. Anyway, it was the first trip for
the very straight Cox and it sent him into a spiral of paranoi.
The next night
it was the catastrophic
Arrhus gig. Gerry Stickells remarked how exhausted Jimi was, due to his
flu, lack of sleep, drug taking, drinking and partying. He told the
organisers that Jimi was too tired to play but they refused to accept
it. Remember, this was only day three of the tour after Jimi had had a
month off touring and a 10-day holiday in Hawai. Jimi had to fulfil the
contract that he'd committed to. He had to be helped onto the stage by
the roadies. A totally wrecked Jimi abandoned
the performance after just
two songs. He was helped virtually bent-double back to his dressing room (2). Backstage, the concert manager said that Jimi collapsed in
his arms and that he had that cold fever. Jimi asked the organisers if
they had any
cocaine - they had none). Before that 7 minute show, eye-witnesses said
that Jimi
swallowed a handful of sleeping pills (surely his own downers). Then,
instead of finally getting a good night's sleep, he asked his
girlfriend of the moment (Kirsten Nefer) that he wanted to talk to her
all night. Which they did.
Next up was a gig in Copenhagen, where he put
on fantastic performance (the best of the aborted tour). Before the concert, Kirsten Nefer had
taken Jimi home to meet her mother. He had a much needed
nap and was given a
good meal. This gave Jimi a boost and he played brilliantly at the
evening concert. Mitch told Nefer that Jimi hadn't played that
well
for years (5).
However, before that show, he'd had a panic attack, locked himself
in the dressing room and took some persuading to go out and perform.
The following
Berlin show was weaker but his final concert at Fehmarn was an
improvement but the occasion was marred by bad weather and trouble
with aggressive Hells Angels. Billy's condition had worsened and he was
even hospitalised and given the strong sedative Thorazine. He was then
flown back to the states and the rest of the tour had to be suspended
while the Hendrix crew tried to find a replacement
bass
player. Noel Redding was called but unfortunately he failed to respond
before it was too late. If contact with Noel had been established, the
chain of events would have been entirely different. As it was, the tour
ground to a halt, leaving further dates simply cancelled.
Back to London
Right
after the Fehmarn Island concert
(September 6th), Jimi and the crew flew back to London. He went back to the
Londonderry Hotel but he was turned away because of the incident
with the two girls nine days earlier, so he checked into the
Cumberland Hotel instead (11).
He didn't sleep there however, prefering to stay at Debbie Tooney's
Fulham flat (an American friend that he'd met through a friend at the
Speakeasy).
He spent a
week flitting around town with Kirsten Nefer but from the night of Tuesday, September 15th (after Nefer left for a film role with future James Bond
actor George Lazenby) his sleeping hours were spent at a basement apartment of the
Samarkand Hotel in Notting Hill, which was being rented by
another girlfriend named Monika Dannemann. Jimi in fact often used his many girlfriend's
places to escape from the pressure of fans or even his own entourage
and management. Apparently, his baggage was at The Cumberland hotel but as always, he had a guitar with him - his favourite
"Black Beauty" Strat.
Jimi had met first Danneaman in January 1969
while in Dusseldorf. When he flew to England in March 1970 (to try and
persaude Kathy Etchingham not to marry Ray Mayer) he called Monika,
asking her to see him in London but she was ill and couldn't make the
trip. September 1970 and Jimi renewed contact with her on his return to
Europe for the 1970 tour. Various reports state that Jimi had proposed
marriage to at least three girls around this time: Kirsten Nefer,
Monika Dannemann and his Swedish girlfriend Catherina! Jimi was
seemingly desperate to find a close companion in his life. Kirsten
Nefer said in an interview"Jimi really wanted to get married" but she was aware that Jimi must have said this to many girls. The press got
hold of this and blew it all out of proportion, saying that they were
engaged, which Kirsten firmly denied.
One of Jimi's
American girlfriends, Devon Wilson heard that Jimi was dating Nefer and
was furious. She flew to London on the 12th (with Alan and Stella
Douglas) and proceeded to phone Jimi, telling him off. Nefer was
witness to this (11).
The journalist Sharon Lawrence was a close
friend of Jimi's and she recounts in her book ("Jimi Hendrix: The Man,
The Magic, The Truth") that she met Jimi at Ronnie Scott's Club (on Tuesday, September 15th) where
Eric Burdon & War had a short residency. She describes him as being
in a sorry state, not even recognising her for a while. "His face was ashen and his brown eyes appeared exhausted and even frightened. Never had I seen him like this... he said. "Oh Sharon." He gazed at me and he muttered, "I'm almost gone."
Jimi's
poor condition was confirmed by Burdon and his band saying that Jimi
looked "smacked out". Burdon's roadie Terry Slater said that Jimi
looked disorientated. (11) . Burdon in his book "I Used To Be An Animal": "He had his guitar with him and was wobbling too much to play." They invited him to
come back the next day.
Jimi talks to Chas
It's said that on Wednesday the 16th of
September, Jimi visited Chas Chandler at his Upper Berkeley Street flat (which they had
shared for a while in the early London days). Or did he? In an interview with Record Mirror (26/09/1970) Chas said "Last
time I saw Jimi was about three months ago, when he called round to my
flat. But I spoke to him on the Wednesday before he died." So perhaps Jimi only phoned Chas on the 16th. Monika
is quoted in the book Electric Gypsy saying that Jimi had given Chas
the phone number of his 'secret' address because he wanted to discuss
yet again the idea of Chas managing him (that would mean simply
creative management, as before, and not business management, which was
purely Jeffery's domain).
Chas had told other journalists that the physical meeting with Jimi had
happened in back in March (which was in fact when Jimi had been in
London briefly).
In Chris Welch's book, Chas is quoted: "I
never heard any more about him for three months until two days before
he died. He asked me to produce for him again. He rang me again on the
Thursday and we got to discussing the design for a cover." So it sounds like two phone calls between the two.
From that Record Mirror interview: "I'd been talking to his lawyer, who is also mine in America [Henry W. Steingarten], and there was talk about my producing him again. From
what I hear, there is a lot of Hendrix material available, but it was
just that he wasn't too happy with the way some of it had worked out.
That's where the talks started." Jimi asked Chas if he could help him
beat the new album into shape and he planned to transfer the master
tapes from Electric Lady Studios to Olympic. The two planned to meet up the following week to get things
moving. However, in the 90s, Chas said he never said those things to the press (about meetng with Jimi in March)! Hells bells.
Confirmation that Jimi had proposed to Monika?
In the
afternoon (or evening according to Monika), they went to a party at
Dick Fontaine's house for Judy Wong's birthday pary. Wong confirmed
that Jimi announced to her that Jimi and Monika were going to get
married (11). Then Jimi went
again to Ronnie Scott's (with Monika) and jammed with Eric
Burdon & War (the show was taped, eventually surfacing on
bootlegs).
Daniel Secunda said that on that day he dined with Jimi, Alan Douglas
and his wife Stella and Devon Wilson and that "Jimi and the girls were so smacked out they barely ate anything or said a word." Jimi spent the night at Secunda's flat, in bed with Devon and Stella (accoding to Secunda).
In her book and
the many interviews,
Monika Dannemann painted quite a rosy picture of Jimi's last couple of
days on planet Earth but even though Jimi had proposed marriage to her
(as he'd also
done to two other girls!), it is evident from the various eye-witness
accounts that things
weren't going at all well between them.
What follows of events on Thursday, September 17 right up to the fateful morning of the 18th :
September 17
The famous photo by Monika Dannemann of Jimi in the rear garden of The Samarkand Hotel on September 17th, 1970,
which
has appeared all over the world in various publications since the early 70s. More about this further down.
After jamming
with Eric Burdon's band War
at Ronnie Scott's and a meal at The Speakeasy on the evening of
Wednesday the
16th, Jimi spent the night at Dannemann's rented Samarkand Hotel
basement suite.
Trixie Sullivan
(Mike Jeffery's assistant) was in Majorca with Mike managing his
nightclub (Sgt. Pepper's) and she says in Tony Brown's "The Last Days"
- "Mike had arranged that everyone
would go over for a short break, so they could discuss picking a
new bass player for Jimi and continuing with the tour schedule." (hardly the behaviour of someone planning to kill Jimi as the conspiracy theorist likes to imagine).
Trixie goes on to say that Jimi phoned the Majorca office asking
for Mike but he was out, so he asked that Mike call him back. Mike
called back in the evening but a violent storm hampered communications
and he didn't get through to London. A shame that Jimi didn't get the
chance to take that little breakin Majorka.
In
the afternoon of 17th, Monika grabbed her camera and took the
famous photos of Jimi in
the
rear garden of the hotel. She later claimed that these were intended to
be for Jimi's next album, which Jimi wanted her to design. The couple
then went shopping in Chelsea and at Kensington Market. Kathy
Etchingham told Curtis Knight (interview for his book "Jimi" - W.H.
Allen 1974) that she saw Jimi with Monika at the market but that he
didn't see her. Later, in her own book, Kathy said that she talked to
Jimi and that he invited her to meet him at The Cumberland Hotel.Whatever - a detail.
Heading back to the Cumberland, Jimi spotted his other girlfriend Devon Wilson with Alan Douglas's wife Stella, on
King's Road, Chelsea. They invited Jimi to a party to be held that
evening at Pete Kameron's flat. Kameron was a music
entrepreneur/manager/producer who had been involved with setting up
Track Records
with Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp in 1966.
Jimi went back to The Cumberland (perhaps to drop off his shopping) and
left a message with the New York office to tell Eddie Kramer
that he would be back in the Big Apple on Monday. Mitch Mitchell phoned Jimi at
the Cumberland asking if he wanted to join them later at The Speakeasy
for a jam with Sly Stone. Jimi was up for it.
He didn't make it.
The visit to Phillip Harvey's apartment
Phillip Harvey, the son of the late
British politician Lord Harvey of Prestbury and member of the
Parliament for the Conservative party, wrote a detailed affidavit (which emerged in 1995 after the death of Harvey's father)
stating that Harvey and a couple of female friends spent some time with Jimi and Monika at Harvey's home at 4, Clarkes Mews on the evening of the 17th.
This is important information as it gives us clues to Monika's character.
In the late
afternoon/early evening, Harvey
was driving through London in his left-hand drive
1968 Mustang with a girl named Beth Riley in the front seat
with him. At the traffic lights, the girl saw Jimi in Monika's car
and waved. Jimi waved
back. According to Riley, Harvey recognised Monika as
being an old school friend! He invited Monika and Jimi to
his
home for a drink but first they followed Jimi to the
Cumberland Hotel where he dropped off his shopping,
checked his messages and spoke to Mitch Mitchell on the phone. They
then followed Harvey to his nearby home, where another girl joined
them. Harvey described
most of the time spent with Hendrix as "remarkably pleasant" but Dannemann was anti-social and later became violently hostile. The
following is an excerpt from Phillip Harvey's affidavit:
"With the exception of Monika who, as
the evening progressed, appeared to me to become more and more upset,
we had been having a remarkably pleasant evening, happy and interested
in each other's company. Then about 10:00pm at a particular moment when
Jimi had gone to the downstairs cloakroom, Monika quite suddenly, and
for no particular apparent reason, got up and stormed down the four
steps leading from the reception room, through the double glass doors,
past the door to the cloakroom, down the hall and out of the front door
into the mews, shouting as she left, "I'm
leaving! I'm leaving now! I've had enough!" Jimi who had obviously
heard something quickly came out of the cloakroom and back into the
reception room. I explained to him briefly what had happened. He looked
at us in a most embarrassed way and raised his eyebrows to the ceiling.
He said, "I'd better go and see what's wrong with her." He then
followed her out into the mews leaving the front door ajar.
In the kitchen and the hall at the
front of the house, I could hear Monika out in the mews shouting at
Jimi at the top of her voice, even though the individual words
themselves were indistinct. There was even some noise in the reception
room at the back of the house. At one point, when Monika's screaming
reached a particular prolonged high peak, I went to the front door to
see what was happening. I was genuinely concerned that blows might be
struck, and I was also worried that the loud screaming might provoke a
complaint to the police from the management of the King Edward VI
hospital on the other side of the mews directly opposite the house.
Jimi was just standing quietly there in
the mews while Monika verbally assaulted him in the most offensive
possible way. As I approached them, I remember hearing her shout at
him, "You fucking pig!" I interrupted them and suggested that they
should come back into the house as I didn't want the police called.
Monika simply carried on shouting at Jimi, telling me viciously to mind
my own business. She didn't seem to care less that she might be
disturbing the neighbourhood or, indeed, making a public spectacle of
herself. In fact, Clarkes Mews is very quiet, especially at night, and
I saw no sign of anybody else in the vicinity. I went back inside the
house, leaving the front door open ajar so that they could come back
inside the house if they wanted to.
Monika's haranguing of Jimi continued
in my best estimation for about half an hour. I went outside one
further time to try and cool things down, and to see if anybody else's
attention had been attracted to the scene, but Monika's shouting was at
such a pitch that I decided not to interfere again. While I did not
personally see any blows struck and Jimi, on two occasions I went
outside, looked remarkably calm given the viciousness of Monika's
language, the violence in her voice and posture would suggest to me
that she might well have struck him during the extended scene. I was
actually quite worried that Monika might resort to serious physical
violence, but Jimi appeared to me to be a fit man and I thought that,
on balance, he was probably quite capable of looking after himself, and
I had only just met them earlier that day and didn't know any details
about their relationship.
At about 10:30 pm Jimi came back into
the house alone, and walked into the reception room where Penny, Anne
and I were still wondering what was going to happen next. He apologized
profusely for Monika's behaviour and said he was very embarrassed. He
said he didn't really know what was wrong with her but she had
obviously had too much to drink. He said that Monika refused to come
back into the house and that, as he couldn't abandon her, he would have
to leave with her. He said that my house at 4 Clarkes Mews was the
nicest scene he had found in London and that he would definitely visit
us again when he got back from the USA which he thought would be in a
few weeks' time…He thanked the two girls and myself for our generous
hospitality. I saw him out into the mews and he left with Monika
driving the car. Monika was still screaming at Jimi as they left and
she did not say a word to me. The time was about 10:40pm."
It's not clear
if Jimi and Monika actually
stayed at Harvey's till around 10:30. Monika later said that they
returned to the Samarkand between 8 and 8:30 pm. In an article in The
Daily Telegraph in 2010, journalist Bryony Gordon said that the mother
of an old friend of hers lived in Clark's Mews at the time and she
remembered having seen Jimi in the Mews on the 17th of September. She
remembered this because she asked Harvey to move the big American car
(a Ford Mustang that she mistook a "huge Cadillac" that she thought
belonged to Jimi) which was blocking her exit. When Harvey emerged to
move his Mustang, she saw Jimi drive off with a friend (Monika of
course, driving her blue Opel GT Coupé). The woman (Eliza - surname unknown) said
that this was at the moment that she was leaving to see a movie (Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, showing on Oxford Street at the time), which would mean that this would have been early evening and not at 10:40 pm).
Interesting to note that Monika's possessive behaviour was more like
that of someone who had been in a relationship for months or years. She
had only been with Jimi for 2 days! Jimi must have been wondering what
sort of mess he had gotten himself into.
Gerry Stickells said that he spoke on the phone to Jimi on this evening and found him in "a great mood...he was to sign the contracts for his German tour in October the next day. We
were also talking about doing four dates in the States around
Thanksgiving. He said 'OK, we'll talk more about that tomorrow when you
bring the contracts." (6)
The Lyceum? Scotch of St. James?
I read
somewhere (source needed) that Eric Clapton said he saw Jimi in a
bar that evening but didn't join him. He also told a BBC reporter that
he'd seen him in another box at The Lyceum but as far as we know, Jimi
didn't go to the Lyceum that evening (or did he briefly pop in and
out?). Perhaps Eric was confusing the sighting with a visit to the
Scotch Of St. James because in June 2011,
musician Meic Stevens
stated that he was with Jimi at the Scotch and that Clapton was there
too! Stevens recounted that Jimi was intrigued by what he was drinking, which was Louis St
George Burgundy. Stevens added: "[Hendrix] was drinking lager or some kind
of beer and he just poured the wine in to the pint glass." So if this is true, it at least shows that Jimi was in a festive mood.
Back to top
September 18
Devon
Wilson
Stella Douglas
Angie Burdon
The visit to Pete Kameron's apartment
More proof of Monika's possessive jealousy
came in the early hours of September 18th when Jimi
went to the
party that he had been invited to at Pete Kameron's apartment, which
was on
the same square as The Cumberland Hotel.
Monika to The Daily Sketch (29 September 1970): "About
1.10 a.m. he told me he had to go to see some people. I dropped him off
at a flat and then picked him up again just after three o'clock.". In
Tony Brown's "Jimi Hendrix: A Visual Documentary", Monika is quoted as
saying that she drove Jimi round to Kameron's flat in Great Cumberland
Street at 1:45 a.m.
So Jimi
didn't take Monika into the gathering,
presumably because Devon Wilson was there. According to Monika, she had
been
insulted by Devon at Ronnie Scott's and that Jimi's intention was to go
and talk to Devon, to tell her to lay off. Also at the
party were Alan Douglas's wife Stella, Eric Burdon's ex-wife Angie (who
had been one of the girls that Jimi had aggressed a The Londonderry
Hotel when he'd arrived in London) and
several other people.
At the inquest Dannemann made no mention of this party. Those at the party indicated that Jimi came,
hung out, ate some Chinese take-away food and appeared relaxed until sometime later when Dannemann began
ringing for him on the intercom. He put her off but she came
back half an hour later. This became a heated thing and gradually got on everybody's nerves. Stella Douglas went
to the
intercom and was extremely rude to Monika apparently. This did not put
Monika off.
Pretty soon, as Angie Burdon recalled, guests were hanging out the window,
yelling
at Monika. They cried, "Fuck off!" and "Leave him alone!" yet Dannemann
persisted. Then finally, Jimi went to the intercom, mumbled something and
then without saying anything, got into the elevator and left. "That was around three in the morning by then." according
to Angie (and exactly as Monika had said to The Daily Sketch).
In an article about her book in Guitarist magazine, Monika
said that when Jimi left the party, he had a handful of drugs that the
others had given to him. He said that he hadn't taken any of them and
threw them in a drain.
Bob Levine is quoted (in "Setting The
Record Straight" by McDermott/Kramer) that Mike Jeffery was at this
party! Bob must have got his wires crossed because Jeffery was confirmed to have been in Spain at the time and nobody
else at the party ever said that Jeffery was there.
A bizarre account appeared in the notorious trashy newspaper the Daily Mail came from a "musician" who was
at the party (his identity wasn't disclosed): "I heard the next day that Jimi had asked for some
drugs known as leapers but had been given sleepers instead. It was an
understandable mistake, the music was so loud," the source said. "He
started to go and people were slapping him, trying to wake him up, but
with all those pills inside him it was doing no good. People were
trying everything they could think of to get him back, but Jimi was
gone. As far as I am aware from people who were there, Jimi died at the
party - not in bed at his girlfriend's flat." This ridiculous hearsay can be discounted because it has been proven that Jimi died in the ambulance.
> About Pete Kameron
Monika said that after this party, Jimi and Monika
drove round to visit Alvenia where she was staying at Pat Hartley and Dick Fontain's house
on Elvaston Place (Alvenia confirmed this). After that they went for a drink in Soho before they
dropped Alvenia off at Ronnie
Scott's (obviously to meet Eric who was doing a residency there with the group War). In
David Henderson's book ("Scuse Me While I Kiss The Sky") it says that
Jimi and Monika drove around some more after that.
Monika later recounted that she and
Jimi then returned to the Samarkand at approximately 3 a.m. (she'd also said that she picked Jimi up at Kameron's flat "after 3 a.m.") but if we follow
what Angie Burdon said (with Jimi leaving the flat at around 3 a.m.),
and after the trip to meet Alvenia and the drinks in a Soho bar and passing by Ronnie Scott's and driving back,... it would appear
that the return to The Samarkand was more like 4 a.m. or even later.
All these details illustrate
that Dannemann was not some sort of calculated agent working for
Jeffery, MI5, the CIA,... The conspiracy theorist believes that
she was on a mission for Jeffery, to lure him back to The Samarkand to
be murdered. As we have seen, she willingly flitted all over the place
until around 4 or 5 a.m. and from what people have said about the
evening, her behaviour was simply that of a young, naive girl,
jealously in love
with Jimi.
Back to top
Sleeping pills at the Samarkand (and elsewhere)
Sleeping pills/downers - a deadly mix
During
the couple of weeks leading up to the accident at the Samarkand Hotel basement appartment, we have
numerous accounts mentioning Jimi's habit of taking sleeping pills/downers in
an irresponsible way. When his girlfriend of the moment Kirsten Nefer
met up with him before the disastrous Arhus performance, she found him
at the hotel "...staggering,
he was really out of it... Jimi talked and talked but it was all
gibberish.... Jimi kept acting weird. He told me that he had taken
some sleeping tablets that had made him confused and that he hadn't
slept for days."
At the hotel after the Arhus
performance, after collapsing then asking for cocaine backstage, Jimi
again took sleeping pills at the hotel but didn't attempt to sleep, telling Kirsten that they had to talk all
night - "We talked until about seven in the morning. By that time the effect of the sleeping pills were beginning to wear off." (6)
A
few days later (around September 14th), Jimi took a taxi with Devon
Wilson to Roger Daltry and Heather Taylor house in the Berkshire
countryside. Daltry was out on tour with The Who in Europe but
Heather's friend Catherine James was present and she recounts in her
book "Dandelion: Memoir Of A Free Spirit" that they all took LSD: "Jimi
could barely stand and repeatedly asked 'Do you have any Mandrax or
some Valium?' I had already given Jimi two Mandrax, but he had already
forgotten he'd even taken them.... he finally passed out cold on the
floor."
Catherine goes on to say: "We'd seen Jimi pretty high in the
past, but never like this.... Heather sighed 'Oh God, what if he ODs
here? Roger will kill me.". (6)
In
a 2022 interview with Romesh
Ranganathan (for the latters' light-hearted television
"mis-investigation") Roger Daltry talks of how it was a thing, a trend back then
to take downers like
Mandrax or sleeping pills and that if you got past the sleep inducing
effect, you would get a cetain "high". This was perhaps what Jimi was indulging in, along with the LSD, the cocaine,
the weed,...but
really, what exacerbated his condition was the fact that he was
amphetemines and barburates - uppers and downers... on a day-to-day
basis. A recipe for disaster.
In his
autobiography "Lonely Boy" (Windmill Books 2016), Steve
Jones of the Sex Pistols talks about spending hours and hours learning
the guitar and how much amphetamines helped him with that task: "Some
people call them black bombers, others call them black beauties, but
either way, you'd better get plenty of Mandrax to take afterwards if
you ever want to get to fucking sleep." Exactly the path Jimi took on September 18th, which would lead to his death.
Back to the Samarkand
So the detailed events above reveal that after flitting hap-hazardly around
London Jimi and Monika returned to The
Samarkand Hotel at around between 4 and 5 a.m. on the morning of the 18th.
The furious arguing between Monika and
Jimi wasn't over apparently. Monika told P.C. Ian Smith (when he took a
statement from her on the afternoon of the 18th) that upon their return
to the Samarkand flat they had an argument yet again!
P.C. Ian Smith: "She
said they had an argument and he'd stormed off to cool down. When he
came back, he took some sleeping tablets and went to bed. Then she went
out, and when she came
back, he'd been sick and she couldn't wake him" (4)
So following the time when Jimi left Pete Kameron's flat, the following visit to meet Alvenia Bridges, the following
drinks in Soho, the return to The Samarkand (at around 4 a.m.?) and the further row with Jimi going out to cool off,... a lotof
time passed. This would mean that Jimi might have taken the first
sleeping pill(s) between and 4 and 6 a.m. or even later, all of
which lines up with what Monika recounted about that morning.
The number of pills and when they were taken - a complete mystery
So
much for Monika's account that they'd had a tranquil night at the flat.
Also, personally attacking and screaming at Jimi was hardly the
behaviour of someone assigned to get Jimi to The Samarkand Hotel so that he would fall
prey to hit-men (as the conspiracy fantasist will claim).
What actually happened on their return to the Samarkand is shrouded in
mystery and not helped by the multitude of varying accounts from Monika:
1 - Jimi had tried the tablets BEFORE Sept 18th:
Guitarist (September 1995) - "That morning I secretly took a sleeping pill which is something I would never normally do". Oh really Monika? The pills were prescribed to you!
In the same article: "I
had hidden them in a cupboard but Jimi had already taken one a few days
earlier when he couldn't sleep so he knew the sleeping tablet's effect.
I secretly took one because if he knew I'd taken one he'd immediately
take one too".
Electric Gypsy: "...these tablets were not very strong. He had tried them out before and he couldn't sleep with them."
In her own book: "A few days earlier he had taken one of my tablets and it had taken him an hour to fall asleep."
2 - 18th: Jimi took the pills without her knowing
In The Final Days (P. 152), she tells Sharon Lawrence that she didn't give Jimi the pills: "...he must have found them in the cupboard"
In the Daily Sketch, ten days after Jimi's death, Monika recounted:
"I took a sleeping tablet about 7 a.m....I wanted some cigarettes but
as Jimi did not like me going out without me telling him, I looked to
see if he was awake. He was sleeping normally. Just before I was about
to go out, I looked at him again and there was sick on his nose and
mouth. He was breathing and his pulse was beating. I checked it with
mine and there was no difference. Then I tried to wake him up - but I
could not. I then saw that he had taken some of my sleeping tablets....
They are in packets of ten and I thought he had taken the lot but a
police officer found one on the floor. He must have taken them shortly
after I started to go to sleep."
3 - 18th: Jimi took tablets on the 18th and she was aware of it at the time
In one
account, she said on their return to the flat Jimi suggested taking
sleeping pills but she insisted that he should wait a while.
The Final Days (p 128) - "..he was wide awake and he was then saying he needed to have sleep, so he was thinking of taking sleeping pills..."
The Final Days (P. 156) - She told P.Weyell of the Coroner's Office that at 7 a.m. "He took some tablets and went to bed".
"I was trying to work out why Jimi Had swallowed so many sleeping
tablets. The only answer I could find was that after I had fallen
asleep he had taken the two tablets he had planned to take earlier." (1)
- A very revealing quote comes from Monika's brother Herbert.
She phoned him right after the tragic incident and told himthat Jimi
had taken a handful of pills because "...he wanted to sleep for a day and a half."
4 - Monika gave Jimi the tablets:
- Six days after Jimi's death on September 24, an interview
with Monika appeared in the German magazine, Bild. In the interview
Monika said:
"He could not sleep. So I gave him the tablets."
- In Kathy's book, Monika told Kathy, Mitch and Noel that the the pills "were very weak" and again that it is was she who gave Jimi "some" of her Vesparax tablets and when they seemed to have no effect, she gave him "some more"!!!
5 - Monika also took a pill:
- The Daily Sketch, ten days after Jimi's death: "I took a sleeping tablet about 7 a.m..."
- At the inquest: "I took a tablet at about 7 a.m."
- In her own book: "I secretly took one sleeping tablet"
- Electric Gypsy "Monika says that she took a sleeping pill but never saw Jimi take any himself."
- The Final Days (p 128) - "... I think it was six o'clock or a bit later before I took mine."
Somewhere within all of Monika's different accounts lies the truth.
Dr. Rhufus Crompton and the number of pills...and "there is no villain"
During the 1993
re-ivestigation (triggered by the Mitchell/Etchingham research)
pathologist Rhufus Crompton was asked by detectives to examine the
medical evidence. Here is what he told the BBC:
"We are going, to a large extent, on evidence from
people which cannot be corroborated one way or the other. For instance,
what he ate, what went on the previous evening, whether he went to bed
a happy man or not, how many of these pills he took, when he took
them,... these are all quite important facts in which we just have to
believe what we're told...My personal opinion is that there is no villain."(8)
So after reviewing all the evidence, the Post Mortem Reports, Dr. Crompton found nothing suspicious about Jimi's death at all.
Kathy informs us that Dr. Crompton said that the barbiturate reading in Jimi's liver was so
high that he couldn't have survived (Dr. Michael D. Hunter came to the same conclusion). Still, this doesn't give clear
indication of the actual amount of Vesparax pills taken at the Samarkand but Kathy said of Crompton's analysis:
"...when
another pathologist looked into this in 1994, his conclusion was that
there was no evidence that he had taken 9 tablets, because the
toxicology levels could have been as few as five, to have had those
levels. The only person that said he took 9 was the girl herself,
Monika Dannemann. There was no evidence that he’d taken 9, he could
have taken 5. It would have had the same devastating effect."
Jimi called his doctor in New York
There is yet another account, this time from Jimi's
friend Buzzy Linhart (who had played vibraphone on "Drifting"). He was in New York when he heard of Jimi's
death. He went to Electric Lady Studios to find out more and received a
phone call:
"I picked up the telephone on the
receptionist's desk and it was Dolly Dagger (Devon Wilson) telling me I
had to believe her. What she told me was that Jimi had called her the
day or so before and told her that he had been up for days. He had
talked to his doctor in New York City and the doctor said "You've got
to get some sleep" - the doctor said "Do you want me to call in some
sleeping pills for you to a doctor I know in London?" Jimi said" No,
that's OK, there's Tuinaols in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom
here." They agreed that Jimi- having a great tolerance to this type of
drug -would need to take 3 capsules. But this turned out to be the
German Tuinaols which were the EQUIVALENT of three a piece, so they
turned out to have the potency of 9 of his usual Tuinol capsules." (from Inside The Legacy Of Jimi Hendrix by Joe Viglione and Buzzy Linhart)
If we are to take
Linhart's/Devon's account as being factual, Jimi's U.S. doctor (no idea who that
was)
gave Jimi the go-ahead to take 3 tablets. The doctor perhaps had
only Jimi's word that the pills were Tuinals. Jimi in fact had Monika's super strong German prescription
Vesparax pills in his hand but perhaps recognised their
listed contents and simply called them "Tuinols" (which was the
brand name he
was familiar). Vesparax was in fact a combination of
secobarbital/brallobarbital/hydroxyzine and Tuinols were composed of
only secobarbital) - hence his erroneous assumption about the pills'
potency.
Linhart's account sounds factual. If he'd wanted to add some spice or
extra credibility to his book, he could have said that Jimi phoned him
directly, excited about recording together or any old thing.
In a letter to Harry Shapiro (dated Feb. 28 1992) Dr. Rufus Crompton writes:
"Vesparax is indeed as strong as a 200 mg barbiturate capsule. Hendrix
may not have realised this. [He] may have realised that he was too high
on amphetamine and looked for a barbiturate to bring him down. Not
being familiar with Vesparax, he could have taken too much, seriously
inhibiting his normal cough reflex, so that when he drank some wine, it
went down the wrong way and was not coughed up."
This is nonsense. If Jimi
was very heavily sedated, he wouldn't be drinking wine!
Crompton was obviously being swayed by (the fraud) Dr. Bannister's
ridiculous story of the 7 foot tall man that he vividly remembered
pumping wine out of. That stupid, invented story had already appeared at that stage. After that, Dr.
Crompton was consulted in
the 1994 re-investigation (triggered by Kathy Etchingham to help Noel) and
was presented with all the medical evidence. He stated to the police
that Dr. Bannister's account made no sense (document further down).
In the hours leading up to this catastrophe, Jimi had been drinking alcohol at
various locations (including a little white wine at the Samarkand) and this accounts for the alcohol detected in his urine at the autopsy (a
relatively small level). Note that the analysis of the fluids in Jimi's stomach
and lungs (the vomit) didn't mention wine at all! Crompton went on to say about the wine, "In favour of this is the fact that though he smelled of wine and it was on his face and hair, his blood alcohol was low."
(Dr.Teare - who had written the Post Mortem report - was more
precise at the inquest, saying that there was ethanol in Jimi's urine "but none in the blood."
Dr.
Seifert mentioned wine being smelt on Jimi in a filmed interview by David Kramer
(apparently - I've never seen or heard it). If Jimi had been drinking wine earlier that evening and he
hen vomited while lying on his back, then it's no surprise if it went all
over himself. ANy wine remaining in his stomach would have been digesed.
However, there is also the possibility that the wine all over him
was due to Monika's bizarre actions. She confessed to Sharon Lawrence
that she
poured wine onto Jimi because "it was messy" (if Sharon's story is true
of course and not the fashionable discrediting of Monika). Remember folks that
at the inquest, Dr. Teare said that Jimi's blood alcohol level was...
0%. A small amont of alcohol was in his urine (so fully absorbed by his
system, over the hours up to midday).
The
normal dose for these German pills was a half to 1 tablet. It is of
course known that Jimi had a very high tolerance for drugs. Many people
have remarked how Jimi was able to take double or triple doses of
various drugs and hardly seem to show any difference in his demeanour.
So if Jimi popped 3 Vesparax pills, he might have simply
gone off to sleep like a baby. That would leave only 7 pills in
the 10-pill blister on the fateful morning of the 18th!
So if on the 18th Monika took her 1 pill (as she told the police, the inquest and the press on many occasions) and the
police found 1 pill near the bed, then that would leave only 5 pills
for Jimi to take on the
morning of the 18th!! Scoop! Tony Brown pointed out in The
Final Days (page 128-129) that it seems unlikely that Monika took a
tablet,
seeing as the recommended dose of half a tablet induces a good night's
sleep. However Monika says in his book that she did sleep for
three hours but awoke and had tried to fall asleep again but
couldn't. She even says that she got up and had breakfast. She has also
said that she went out to buy cigarettes (she told Kathy Etchingham that she drove down Queensway to buy them!).
Also, for all we know, Monika might have been
taking 1 of her sleeping
pills every night for the past
few days! After all, they were prescribed to her! She said in her book (The Inner World Of Jimi Hendrix) "...I
did have about forty five pescribed sleeping tablets, in packs of ten,
in a large cupboard opposite the bed, they were left over from two
operations I had recently undergone in Germany."
So this means there
could well have been only 3 or 4 tablets in the blister by the
18th! Jimi may have taken only 3 tablets again
(as he seems to have taken a
couple of days earlier) and got into difficulty because of the added
intoxication from the "black bomber" barbiturate taken at Kameron's
party, his alcohol
and drug intake and perhaps because of his apparent problem his viral
infection and perhaps
his condition of sleep apnea (see paragraph near
end of page).
So folks, you can forget the whole "9 pills" nonsense.
Did Monika deliberately drug Jimi to keep him at the Samarkand? Was it an innocent mistake?
On the afternoon of the day Jimi died, Monika told Sharon Lawrence that Jimi had taken her "prescription tablets".
Sharon asked if Monika had given the tablets to Jimi and she said "No, he must have found them in the bathroom cupboard". Monika told Sharon that she thought Jimi
had taken "about nine" and that the
pills were "very weak"! Days later she told Bild magazine that she had given Jimi the pills!
As stated above, Monika told Kathy Etchingham, Mitch and Noel that the the pills "were very weak" and again that it is was she who
gave Jimi "some" of
her Vesparax tablets and when they seemed to have
no effect, she gave him "some more"! Also, talking about the events of September 18th his book, Noel Redding (who met Monika in the 90s) says of her: "At
about 6 a.m., she says that he complained that there was something
wrong and wondered whether someone had slipped him an OD." This could of course had been another attempt by Monika of deflecting the blame from herself.
So why had Monika been recounting that
Jimi had
taken 9 pills without her knowing? This seems to indicate that
she
was trying to cover her tracks because of the profound guilt that she
had let
Jimi take her own powerful prescription tablets and this had led to his death. An
even
worse possibility: in his book "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood", Eric
Burdon suggested that after the evening's arguing, Monika spiked the
tuna fish sandwich with Vesparax, not to kill him but in the hope that
she could delay his departure from the flat. Kathy Etchingham also
supported this theory (as seen in another recent ReelzTV documentary and in the documentary "Hendix And The Spook").
After their very public argument outside
Phillip Harvey's flat and the nagging at Pete Kemeron's flat and the
futher argument at the Samarkand, did Monika fear that Jimi would leave
her for good? Did her possessive
jealousy
lead her to deliberately
try to knock Jimi out in order to keep him at the flat? Or, did she
innocently under-estimate the strength
of those tablets? Monika
could quite possibly have witnessed Jimi's high drug tolerance during
their time together (back in 1969 and September 1970), and this could
have led her to accept the dosage that Jimi took (either alone or given
by her).
If it was a simple error or a miscalculation of a dose to keep Jimi with her,
then that would explain Monika's total panic and her muddled stories, as
she tried to cover up the terrible guilt and fear that she was responsible for the death of Jimi
Hendrix.
Dannemann - the calculated killer?
The
conspiracy theorist believes that
Monika was some sort of cool, calculated agent working in league with
Jeffery/MI5/COINTELPRO in the plot to
assassinate Jimi Hendrix! I kid you not. This is disproved by the
accounts of Alvenia Bridges and Eric Burdon. Monika had in fact been in
an utter state
of panic about Jimi's
situation as she desperately tried to find out if Jimi had a doctor in
London. Monika had lied, saying that
everything was hunky dory with Jimi that night but those
at Harvey's and Kameron's flats witnessed a volatile and
aggressive Monika, publicly insulting him. Also, when the police
visited The Samarkand Hotel in the afternoon of September 18th, they
found out that the violent arguing had continued in the flat when the
couple had returned after their evening at Kameron's and in Soho (Jimi
had even walked out of the flat to cool off at one point).
In a 2015 interview, Alvenia Bridges states that when Monika phoned her on that September 18th morning in 1970, "...she was hysterical...hysterical".
Monika completely broke down after Jimi's death and I found the proof after an
interview I did with ex-Animals guitarist Vic Briggs, which led me to being
contacted by his wife Elandra Meredith.
On September 18th, Elandra had been summoned (either to the Samarkand
or Eric Burdon's hotel room) to help the hysterically out of control
Dannemann:
"The experience that
most shook me to the core was finding myself in the house of Jimi
Hendrix (sic) right after he died. His distraught girlfriend, Monika
Danneman, was pacing back and forth and round and round
chain-smoking. The room was thick with smoke and fear and
horror." - "Monika was out of her mind with shock, distraught to the point of
madness, pacing like crazy, smoking non stop with trembling hands.
She seemed incapable of relating to anything." - "She was
ranting, not sure what said, or what I said, I have the feeling I could
not get her attention to even try to calm down"
> My full interview with Elandra Meredith
Finally, if Monika was on a mission to make sure Jimi was at the
Samarkand in the early hours of the 18th, for the "hit" (cue laughter)
then why had she been nagging, aggressing and arguing with him all
evening and all night (as witnessed by many and confirmed by the
police)? Hardly the behaviour of a calculated agent for Mike Jeffery as the conspiracy theorist likes to imagine.
Jimi could have fled her at any moment.
Also, if she was a conspirator, why would she create all the fuss
phoning around and alerting Judy Wong, Alvenia and Eric, with all the
"flat full of drugs" panic? All a conspirator would have to do is sit
tight then phone for an ambulance.
It gets worse. The
conspiracy theorist also believes that Alvenia, Burdon,Wong, Stickells,
Barrett and Slater were also part of the conspiracy! So were the hospital staff!!So was Scotland Yard!!! So were MI6, the CIA and the Free Masons!!! Seriously nuts.
Back to top
Alvenia
Bridges
The call for help
According to
Monika, she said she took a
sleeping pill but woke up later and decided to go out and get some
cigarettes. She told the Daily Sketch that just before she was about to
leave, she noticed that Jimi had traces of vomit on his nose and mouth.
In another account she said that she saw the vomit on Jimi's
face when she returned from buying cigarettes. Make your mind up
Monika! She said that she tried to wake Jimi
but he wasn't responsive. In the Guitarist magazine article, she said
that the common practice in Germany is to call the doctor before calling an ambulance (in order to validate the necessity of emergency services).
Proof that Monika phoned for help well after 9 a.m.
Monika: "I knew I had to get help at once and remembered that Jimi's private doctor was a Dr. Robertson." (13). However she said that she couldn't find his number in the phone directory. Now
panic-stricken, she decided to phone her friend Alvenia
Bridges hoping that she might know of the doctor and his number
because she knew a lot of famous musicians in London. She knew of
course that Alvenia was staying at Dick
Fontaine's house (Jimi and Monika had picked up Alvenia from the house
earlier in the morning) so that's where she phoned first.
At Dick Fontaine's house, Judy Wong answered the phone. Monika said in one of her interviews that she called at about 10:30 but Judy later said "I just assumed it was about 9:30 a.m. for some reason".
Judy went on to say
that "a couple of hours later"(11) she got a call from a crying Alvenia, informing
her that Jimi had passed away (so later than 12:45 which is when Jimi was declared dead). "A couple of hours"
could of course mean 2 or 3 hours, so even 3 hours space between calls
places Monika's first call for help at around 10 to 10:30 a.m. -
corresponding with what Monika said.
Also at "around 9:30 a.m.", roadie Terry Slater arrived at Burdon's room to hear Eric on the phone with Monika,
telling here to call an ambulance.*
This timing fits what Judy Wong said but was surely later because it was apparently during the second, later call from Monika that Eric agreed that an ambulance should be summoned.
* From documents filed by Special
Operations One at Scotland Yard (according to Robert L. Doerschuk in an
article fo Musician magazine - February 1996).
So this proves
Monika didn't alert Burdon and the crew at around 6 a.m. as the
conspiracy theorist believes.
Curiously, Noel's mother
said that 9:30 was around the time that she learnt of Jimi's death,
which simply doesn't fit what is the actual timeline of events at all.
Back to
the chain of events:
Alvenia wasn't at Fontaine's house but Judy gave Monika the phone number of the
Russel Hotel, where she knew Alvenia had spent the night with Eric
Burdon after the couple had left Ronnie Scott's. When Monika finally got through to Alvenia, she asked her if
she knew the name/number of Jimi's London doctor. Alvenia didn't know and has recounted
that Monika was hysterical, saying that
Jimi wouldn't wake up and that he was vomiting. Alvenia urged
Monika
to turn Jimi over, so that he wouldn't choke. Apparently Monika did nothing except
panic - but to make things worse worse, Eric Burdon grabbed the phone and didn't treat her seriously at all (see below).
Eric Burdon rejects Monika's call for medical assistance
In his autobiography, Eric says that the first call came in "at the crack of dawn... the first light of dawn was coming through the window". He had also said that the call came "in the middle of the night". On September 18th, a crying Eric
Burdon told Jimi's close friend Sharon Lawrence about Monika's call.
Eric had been playing at Ronnie Scott's club until the early hours of
the morning and must have got to bed at around 4 or 5 in the morning,
so "the middle of the night" would've been anything from 6 to 10 o'clock to him.
Burdon told Kathy Etchingham in 1991: "I
was out of my brains. I'd just finished a gig at Ronnie Scott's. I was
in bed with Alvenia and I got this telephone call from her (Monika) and
I hung up. I said he's just stoned, I said just wake him up. And then I
went back to bed again".
Melody Maker (Roy Hollingworth - September 26 ,
1970): On Thursday night, Jimi's girlfriend phoned Eric from Notting
Hill and told him that Jimi was in a bad way. "I said he would be okay, but later told her to get an ambulance. I thought he would be alright then, but that was that."
In a later interview, Burdon said that when Monika first called, he told
her that
it
was probably nothing - "She was frantic. I told her to walk him around, coffee, splash some water in his face, you know?"(7)
and he hung up.
If only Burdon had understood the gravity of the
situation and urged Monika to dial 999 and call for an ambulance right
away!
Then he said that Monika "rung up again later...she still hadn't done anything for him...she said she'd gone for a packet of cigarettes". In the 90s, Monika told Kathy Etchingham that she had driven her car
down Queensway to find somewhere open (2). This would imply that
Monika left Jimi in difficulty while she nipped out for cigarettes?! I doubt that very much.
In another inteview, Burdon said that he'd had second thoughts about that first call and that he called Monika
back, urging her to call an
ambulance. So which is it Eric? He said that Monika was hesitant to
call an ambulance, saying that Jimi would be furious at all the
upset and that the place was littered with drug paraphernalia.
Monika herself confirmed that Burdon had put her off calling for medical help. In Tony
Brown's book "A Visual Documentary", there is a quote from her
saying:
"Eric Burdon came to the phone, telling me not to phone an ambulance
and to wait and see. I said that I had to get an ambulance and he
agreed, he just said - Well, fucking hell, then just do what you want". In another interview, Monika said that the annoyed Burdon said "Oh call your fucking ambulance then!".
Burdon even once told Kathy Etchingham "I might have phoned the ambulance". In
another interview he said that he called the ambulance from a phone box
across the street from the Samarkand Hotel! Hell Eric, come clean and
tell us what really happened for once!
In an interview in
Steve Roby's "Straight Ahead" magazine, Burdon said that it was still
dark when Monika phoned, which doesn't tally at all with what Judy Wong
and Alvenia have said or with that Scoland Yard report (mentioned above). In the same interview he said "I told her to get an ambulance... She argued about it, saying that there were incriminating things in the flat, which I guess she took care of".
WTF? In other interviews, Burdon had said "we" got the drugs and
guitars out (there was only one guitar Eric), as if he was part of the "clean-up" team. He evidently wasn't.
Burdon's accounts are
consistently all over the place and again, one can't rely on
anything that he has ever said about what happened that
morning - apart from the fact that he delayed the calling of medical help.
Monika calls the ambulance
Monika said
that she phoned the ambulance at 11:18 (which fits the
official hospital records) and that Alvenia had rung her back (from
Burdon's hotel room) to ask which hospital was Jimi being taken to.
Monika
replied that she didn't know yet, but promised to call her from the
hospital to let her know (which she didn't do).
Alvenia stated (in the recent interview
below) that she was speaking to Monika on the phone while she was
putting on her coat and shoes as she prepared to dash to the Samarkand
to help and that when she arrived the ambulance had gone. This confirms
that Monika's calls for help were within the hour preceding the
arrival of the ambulance.
Hendrix biographer Jerry Hopkins provided
another clue to what actually happened. Hopkins informs us that Alvenia
told Eric that she would go and help out Monika alone because
Burdon had a photo session organised for that day (on the roof of The
Russel Hotel with the group War (1)). At that moment, they didn't assume
that Jimi would be dead very shortly. To them, he was just in some difficulty. This would indicate that Burdon
didn't visit the flat that morning but perhaps did for the afternoon clean-up at The Samarkand. Or did he? (see further down).
Terry Slater arrives at The Samarkand
Burdon has said that he was still too stoned and tired to do anything so he sent Terry Slater
to go over to the Samarkand to see what was going on.
When Kathy Etchingham asked Slater about this, he admitted that did get
to the Samarkand before the ambulance arrived and saw Jimi "knackered"
(he didn't say "dead") on the bed and proceeded to bury some drugs from the flat in the rear
garden. Slater didn't say anything about anybody being with him on this mission, so this quick visit has been confused with the second clean-up of the flat
that was in the afternoon, before the police arrived to question Monika
(see further down).
Slater must have hidden or left before the ambulance arrived.
However, in a
statement to the police in the 90s, Slater said that he had arrived at
the flat as the ambulance was leaving (obviously he wouldn't admit to
them that he had visited the flat and buried drugs prior to the arrival
of the ambulance). Again, he didn't say that he went there with anybody else.
In his analysis, Caesar Glebbeek mentions that a police panda car arrived three minutes after Monika's call and before
the ambulance arrived. However, ambulanceman Reg Jones said that he
called the police from the radio in the ambulance (see quotes below).
Hell, it's hard work being an amateur sleuth with all these conflicting
accounts going on!
The ambulance arrives
After calling the ambulance Monika recounted: "The ambulance arrived 20 minutes later. He was still breathing. I was checking his pulse all the time."
The ambulance reached the
Samarkand Hotel
at 11:27 AM.
In the early 90s, the two
ambulance attendants Reg Jones and
John Suau
were
interviewed (by Dee Mitchell and Kathy
Etchingham) and they said that they had the
impression that Jimi
was already dead at the hotel apartment (ambulance staff are not qualified to determine death). They also said that Dannemann
wasn't at the flat when they arrived (although one of them said, around the same time, that she in fact was!).
For the record, the following are the
accounts that ended up in all the books (via Michael Fairchild's
original Straight Ahead magazine articles), as recounted to Dee and
Kathy (and later disowned by ambulanceman John Suau! - see further down).
It
must be pointed out that the ambulancemen interviews presented here
were set up by Dee Mitchell, who Kathy Etchingham would soon expose as
a libelous, stalking fraud (see her book "Gypsy Eyes").
Jones (ambulance driver)
"It was horrific, we arrived at the
flat, the door was flung open, nobody about, just the body on the bed.
We called out for someone, loads of times, so we walked in. We went
into the bedroom, it was dark because the curtains were still pulled, I
mean the gas fire was on but you couldn't see anything, your eyes had
to adjust. He was covered in vomit, there was tons of it all over the
pillow, black and brown it was. His airway was completely blocked all
the way down, his tongue had fallen back, he was flat on his back you
see. The room was dark, we had to pull the curtains. Well we had to get
the police, we only had him and an empty flat, so John ran up and
radioed, got the aspirator too. We felt his pulse between his
shoulders, pinched his earlobe and nose, showed a light in his eyes,
but there was no response at all. I knew he was dead as soon as I
walked in the room, you get a feel for it, I can't explain it, but you
do and I knew he was dead. Once the police arrived which seemed like no
time at all, we got him off to the hospital as quick as we could. See
we just have to keep working on him and we did, my shirt was wringing
wet. 'Cos the ambulances in them days, weren't equipped like they are
now, we had them crazy Wadhams [type of ambulance] in them days, awful
they was. We took him to St. Mary Abbots. That don't have a casualty
ward now but in them days it did. That was our designated hospital for
the day. There was a 'bed state' at St. Charles, you found out at the
beginning of your shift what your designated hospital was."
Jones again from Kathy Etchingham's book:
"When
we got to the flat, the door was wide open. The body was on the bed,
covered in vomit of all colours, black, brown, all over him, all over
the pillow. There wasn't another soul in sight. I went back to the
ambulance for an aspirator. We tried to revive him but we couldn't. The
vomit was all dried. He'd been lying there for a long time. There was
no heartbeat. He was blue, not breathing and not responding to light or
pain. We called the police from the radio in the ambulance. thinking he
was dead and that the circumstances were strange. A couple of young
policemen turned up and they told us to take him to the hospital.
Reg Jones told Kathy and Dee that the police
officers at the Samarkand didn't call the CID (Criminal Investigation
Department) in order to declare the appartment a crime scene, because
they couldn't be bothered with all the paper work! To them, the body
was, to quote Kathy: "...just another dead junkie in Notting Hill".
So from this account, it appeared to Jones
that Jimi had already passed away. HOWEVER, Jones is also quoted as saying "If
there had been no pulse, then I would have attempted resuscitation...
I didn't on this patient, so there was obviously no need to do so" (1). This would
mean that Jimi did have a pulse and was still alive!! Which is it Reg?
Also, Jones also told Mitchell/Etchingham that they drove to the hospital with "full lights and sirens" which
obviously means that they were transporting someone in urgent
need of medical attention - not an irrecuperable long-dead body. Boom goes the murder
theory once again. P.C. Ian Smith said he had no memory of the siren being on
as it left the hotel but it could have been put on afterwards of course to clear traffic ahead - as Monika said in her book "The driver used the siren only once, when we encountered heavy traffic."
John Suau (ambulance attendant)
The other ambulance attendant, John Suau,
initially gave an initial account similar to Jones's. Suau had filled in because Jones's regular partner was off that week.
Afterwards, the two men apparently never saw each other again. The
following is Suau's version of events, as told the renowned Hendrix
researcher Tony Brown (from previous research by Etchingham/Mitchell):
"Well I remember we had a hell of a
time trying to suck him out (with an aspirator). I mean the vomit was
dry, and there was a hell of a lot of it. The aspirators in those days
were all right but not like you have today, they couldn't shift that
lot. I mean we knew it was hopeless, nothing would have worked. To tell
the truth, I thought it was an overdose. It wasn't really my business
to diagnose, I just had to keep working. There were no bed clothes on
top of him. An ambulance crew by law just has to keep on working on him
until we get him to the hospital. There was no pulse, no respiration.
We got down to the flat, and there was nobody but the body on the bed.
So we had to radio for the police from the ambulance. We couldn't touch
anything in the flat. As I say, we knew he was gone, he was on top of
the bed dressed, but I didn't recognize him, don't know anybody would
have recognized him, his mother wouldn't have recognized him. He was in
a pool of vomit, it was everywhere, but we are not doctors, it's our
job to keep trying till we get him to the hospital, we can't proclaim
him dead…I vaguely remember taking a sample of the vomit in a
container, because we didn't know what he had taken. So as soon as the
police arrived, we were off. I was in the back with Jimi, Reg drove.
When we moved him, the gases were gurgling, you get when someone has
died, it wasn't too pleasant. The vomit was all the way down, we
couldn't have got an airway down. He was flat on his back, it's a shame
he wasn't on his side because he probably would have pulled through."
There is something which
throws doubt on these quotes (which are from the
Mitchell/Etchingham dossier). They mention masses of vomit (brown and
black) all over Jimi and the bed. Where did that great quantity of regurgitated food
come from? We know that Jimi only nibbled a few mouthfuls of Chinese
food right before he left the gathering at Pete Kameron's flat and
that a half-digested meal (with traces of rice) was still in his
stomach at death (Post-Mortem Report). So with so little food consumed
during the evening/night and with some of it still in
his gut and lungs at the hospital, the notion that Jimi vomited
profusely all over the place appears ludicrous (unless he'd had
another meal after the party - which doesn't seem to be the case apart
from one bite of a tuna fish sandwich according to Monika).
Suau would later refute these accounts!
Hendrix researcher and ex. Police Superintendent Dennis Care
interviewed Suau during his 1993
investigation into the circumstances of Jimi's death. His report was
submitted to Al Hendrix and to Monika Dannemann. His 50 page report
remains unpublished but extracts appear in Caesar Glebbeek's Univibes
special "Until We Meet Again"):
"He was on the bed, lying on his
back; there was vomit around his mouth, on his chest and some on the
pillow cases - not masses of it but more than enough to see what had
happened... The patient was still alive,
just, but he was pretty far gone... The bladder and bowels had not
voided then and neither did they in the ambulance on the journey to the
hospital... There was no mess in the ambulance caused by our patient..."
Dennis
Care showed John Suau what had been published about his presence on the
scene at The Samarkand. Here is what Suau had to say about what has
been printed and reprinted in the various books:
“I
was... shown [on 7 July 1993 by Dennis Care] a copy of what I was
alleged to have said when I was interviewed about this matter by two
women [Dee and Kahy]... The vast majority of that document* is untrue and does not reflect what I said at
that [telephone] interview.”
* The Mitchell/Etchingham files, published in Straight
Ahead #43, October 1992; Voodoo Child #27, Summer 1992; Jimi Hendrix: A
Visual Documentary by Tony Brown, p. 125; and Hendrix: The Final Days
by Tony Brown, p. 137]
In 1995, Suau was interviewed for the BBC Radio One's "Wink Of An Eye" broadcast and he said: "There's a standard procedure especially for someone who's unconscious.
They travel on their side. All the equipment is there at his head if
you need to do resuscitation, anything like that, it's all there ready
to use."
This proves that Jimi was still being considered as someone in distress
at that point and was certainly not a long-dead corpse (with all the
signs of rigor mortis and lividity that that imply).
Suau also said that Monika did not travel with them to the hospital. "There was just me and the casualty and Reg the driver. Nobody else."
"The casualty" - "Unconscious" -
Again, proof that Jimi wasn't considered to be long-dead. Ambulances
never transport dead bodies (unless they die in the ambulance - which as we know was the case with Jimi).
Note that
Suau's and Jones's accounts make no mention
of wine at
all (which would have been all over the place if Jimi had been
water-boarded). They spoke only of dry vomit which had blocked up
Jimi's airways. If he had been water-boarded with
great quantities wine filling his stomach and lungs then any food/vomit would simply have been
flushed/regurgitated out and not left his throat clogged with dry vomit. Again, this shows clearly that the ridiculous "drowned in wine" is well and
truly ruled out, even if one believes what Dee and Kathy put together.
ALSO - P.C. John Shaw
visited the flat later, on the afternoon of the 18th and he stated at the
inquest that there was nothing unusual in the flat and that everything
was "smart and clean" - which it certainly wouldn't have been if Jimi
had been in a "pool of vomit" or had been waterboarded with wine!
Shaw even took the bed sheets away for analysis, which tells us that
must have been stained with vomit (so the "clean-up" crew hadn't
changed he sheets evidently). There is also a quote from a housekeeper at the Samarkand by the name of Lydia Ranvaud: "Two
pillow cases were thrown away on the instructions of Mr. Dan Hall but
there was really no need to have done this, they merely required
washing out..."(1)
Suau also stated that in order to get Jimi
up the steps to the street, they used a "Rumbold stretcher"
(meaning a type of wheelchair that permets handlers to carry
people where a normal stretcher won't
monoeuver). Again, if Jimi had been long-dead, rigor mortis would have
made it impossible to seat him in the chair! So Jimi was oblviously
still supple.
Note that Monika said
that the ambulancemen told her that Jimi would be walking out of the
hospital that afternoon (but then Monika said a lot of things).
So it evident that the paramedics found Jimi unconcious, in a coma and not dead.
P.C. Ian Smith's unreliable accounts
On the morning of the 18th, P.C. Ian Smith had arrived on the scene just as Jimi was being
carried out. According to Smith: "The ambulancemen were there, but
Jimi was dead ... There was really nothing they could do for him." Smith disputed Dannemann's claim that she was there with Hendrix at the flat and in the ambulance: "No,
I remember quite clearly the doors shutting on the crew and Jimi ...
there was no one about. If she had been in the flat, they would never
have called us to come ... But because no one was there, he was dead,
and circumstances were a little odd, suspicious, they radioed ... us in.
It wasn't until later in the day that I found out that it was Jimi
Hendrix." However, in a 1990 interview with the Bucks Advertiser, Smith remembers being greeted by Monika at The Samarkand!
In "The Final Days", Tony Brown shows that
P.C. Ian Smith gave two differing accounts. In one he implies that he went
into the flat and saw Jimi on the bed but in a later statement he said "I didn't see him. I was there as they were carrying him out" ! Hell, if you can't rely on police officer to give a clear account, who can you believe?
In 1993, Dennis Care showed Ian Smith what is in Tony Brown's books (published in Straight Ahead #43, October 1992;
Jimi Hendrix: A Visual Documentary by Tony Brown, p. 125; Hendrix: The
Final Days by Tony Brown, p. 139) purported to have been made by him.
When shown the statement, Ian Smith immediately disowned it! So nothing that P.C. Smith has said can be taken seriously.
What a ridiculous labyrinth of conflicting accounts this case is!
A passer-by sees Jimi alive in the ambulance?
On Facebook, an eye-witness account came from passer-by Michael Glass (who saw Jimi in the ambulance):
"I was there in London when Jimi
died. I lived next door to where he was staying. I had just come from
the market and was walking by and heard him struggling with strangling.
I looked into the ambulance and saw Jimi. It was a major drag."
Was Monika in the ambulance?
When interviewed by Dee Mitchell and Kathy
Etchingham in the early 90s, it seemed that the ambulancemen had no
recollection that Monika was at The Samarkand when they arrived, or
that she had traveled with them to the hospital. So it has been assumed
that Monika was lying. However, on September 19th 1970, the day after Jimi's death, David Tune of The
Daily Mirror reported "Twenty-three-year-old Monica Danneman called an
ambulance and sat weeping beside him as he was driven to hospital.". So it's not as if Monika invented this after the tragedy.
John
Suau told Dennis Care that what is in the books (Kathy Etchingham,
Tony Brown etc.) is untrue and that Monika was at The Samarkand when
they arrived and that she either travelled with them to the hospital or
followed the ambulance (because he remembered a woman being there at
the Admissions desk): "I
also remeber vaguely a woman at the Admissions Desk; she could only
have known where we were taking the patient if she'd come with us or
followed us."
Also, when (the fraudulent) Dee Mitchell switched to
researching to help Monika (instead of Kathy), she again contacted
Suau. In a letter to Monika in 1995 she said:
"...the problem is, he said different things all three times... The
very first time I spoke to him [during the research with Kathy], he
said no one else was in the flat but 'the little girl'. And when I
asked 'who if anyone, had come in the ambulance with Jimi', he said 'I
think the little girl did, the little blond girl, yes, she rode in the
back of the ambulance.' "
Over the years, she has been quoted saying that she was in the ambulance or that she "drove with them" (implying in her car) and this seems to be confirmed by Dr. Robert Brown who was the first doctor to attend to Jimi on arrival (Brown
later became was national leader of the Australian Greens from 1996
– 2012). In his
autobiography "Optimism", Brown stated that he remembered seeing a "tall blond girl" following
the trolley carrying Jimi as it was wheeled in from the ambulance.
Also, in an interview on ABC Radio Hobart (Australia/North Tasmania),
Bown said that when he saw Jimi being wheeled in on a stretcher: "His girlfriend was trotting up the hill behind him in her high-heels I remember and looking helpless". Monika wasn't tall but perhaps her high heels and long blond hair gave her
a sleek look.
So obviously Monika either travelled in the
ambulance or followed directly behind in her car. In her book, Monika says "From the hospital, Gerry Stickles, Eric Barrett and Alvenia Bridges took me back to the flat." Which would obviously mean that she hadn't followed the ambulance to the hospital in her car.
Interestingly in 1993, Dee Michell wrote a letter to Monika telling her that
John Suau had initially admitted to her that Monika was at the
Samarkand when the ambulance arrived and that she was in the ambulance
with him and Jimi! This was after the ambulancemen's accounts had
appeared in Tony Brown's book "A Visual Documentary" (1992) and before
Kathy's book appeared (1998). Dee said "When
I asked 'who' if anyone had come in the ambulance with Jimi, he said 'I
think the little girl did, the little blond girl....yes, she rode in
the back of the ambulance." Was this Dee merely trying to
get into Monika's confidence (as she had previously done with Kathy?).
The other quotes above would seem to confirm that Monika did in fact
travel in the ambulance.
Was Jimi sat up in the ambulance?
Ambulanceman Reg Jones said that to get Jimi up the narrow exterior stairway from the basement flat, "...we
put him in a 'Rumbold' stretcher - that's a fold-up chair-like thing
with wheels and legs... then we carried him up the steps, into the
ambulance and onto the stretcher bed".
So Monika must have seen Jimi sat in that wheelchair as he entered the
ambulance and assumed that that was how he was transported to the
hospital.
Monika would later say that the ambulancemen had
sat Jimi up in the ambulance and that is why he choked to death (he
should have been laid down with his head to one side).
When Hendrix researcher Tony Brown quizzed ambulanceman John Suau about this he replied: "Sit
him up? No, you don’t sit people up when they’ve choked.
The steps up from the flat were steep, and you had a natural incline on
the way up, but no, he wasn’t sat up." Also, in a BBC Radio One interview (aired September 10, 1995), Suau explained how a person is normally transported in an ambulance:"There’s
a standard procedure especially for someone who’s unconscious.
They travel on their side. All the equipment is there at his head if
you need to do resuscitation, anything like that, it’s all there
ready for use."
So the suggestion that Jimi was at up in the ambulance has been
judged as a fantasy by Monika in an attempt to shift the blame from herself to the ambulance officer, BUT it was
confirmed by an X-Ray engineer (Mr. Waspe) who was on duty at St.
Mary Abbot's that morning! He told his son David Waspe that at the time, there in fact was a
rumour going around the hospital that the ambulancemen had indeed made
this fatal error! So this evidently wasn't merely an invention by Monika.
Is there another clue from an ambulanceman who had teamed up with either Suau or Jones some time later? Charles Todd: "I
worked in Fulham as an ambulanceman and often paired with an 'old
timer', who had transported Jimi to hospital. He was conveyed
unconscious, in a chair, with his head unsupported and apparently died
from asphyxiation consequent upon vomiting." (14) However, Todd doesn't say that his collegue actually said this and he might simply have read read about it.
Another rumour (1):
This is only hearsay but drummer Winston Wedderburn recounted to
musician Keith Bailey (Graham Bond Organisation, Ginger Baker's
Airforce,...) that when he worked as an ambulanceman in the 90s, his
female driving partner had worked with Reginald Jones and John Suau in
the past. She recounted that to Jones and Suau, Jimi was "just
another black drunk" (or words to that effect) who they left on his
back in the back of the ambulance.
Ambulance crew covering their error?
So one could suggest that the ambulancemen were trying to cover
themselves by recounting their stories about Jimi being already dead
when they arrived at the Samarkand. These stories might have been
concocted even back in 1970 when damaging rumours of their unprofessional
conduct which led to the death of an internationally famous pop star.
The two men perhaps kept their stories in mind, right up to their
interviews with Mitchell/Etchingham.
However, a 1992 investigation by
the London Ambulance Service found no evidence of poor treatment by the
ambulance staff. The investigator also confirmed that Dannemann wasn't
in the ambulance as it sped to the hospital. In
this case, Dannemann must have followed the ambulance in her car
(becauseshe was present at Casualty when Jmii was wheeled in.
In January 1992, David Smith
of the London Ambulance Service interviewed the two
ambulancemen and concluded that on September 18, 1970, the two men had "acted in a proper and professional manner"
and that nobody had travelled in the ambulance with them. All Smith had to
go on of course was what the two men told him, there was no third party
or ambulance camera to confirm what they recounted! So it looks like Suau and
Jones had made sure that their stories matched, to avoid any trouble in
relation to the Monika's much published accusation that Jimi's death
was their fault
for having sat him up in the ambulance. As said above, the rumour of
this error had aleady circulated at St. Mary Abbotts right after Jimi
died there, so they might have matched up their stories back then -
which would explain why their stories appeared to match up during the
Mitchell/Etchingham research. HOWEVER, there is more to all this than
meets the eye.
The initial Dee Mitchell/Kathy
Etchingham accounts published in various magazines and books have been
taken as gospel but we have seen the contradictions in them and the refutal of
those accounts by John Suau himself! Remembering a day's work 20 years
ago isn't an exact science of course but was there another reason for
the
discrepancies in their accounts? Read on.
"Dee" Mitchell - not what she seemed
In her fascinating book
"Through Gypsy Eyes"
(1998), Kathy Etchingham recounts how the recruitment of Mitch
Mitchell's wife Dee for her research into Jimi's death came about. In
80s, Noel
Redding had been served a writ by Monika because in his book, he
had accused Monika of negligence on the morning of Jimi's death. In
desperation, Noel asked Kathy if she could help him to defend himself from
Monika's attack. Kathy had initially met Dee at Mitch's book
launch party and
remembered that she said that she had worked as a researcher for the
BBC. So Kathy asked Dee if she could help out with the research into
the events of September 18th 1970. The
resourceful Dee managed to
track
down Reginald Jones and fixed up a meeting with Kathy and herself. She
also fixed up a phone interview with the other ambulanceman John Suau.
We
must
remember that Dee had been aware that Kathy's specific intention was to
disprove
Monika's accounts about what had happened at the Samarkand, in order to help poor Noel.
When
their
research was finished and the interviews had been published (in the
fanzines Straight Ahead #43 and Voodoo Child #27, then in Tony Brown's
books), the two women had little contact with
each other and Dee strangely became more and more aggressive towards
Kathy who decided to keep her distance. Then she discovered that
Dee had turned nasty and had started spreading rumours that Kathy and her
doctor husband were dealing drugs and even abusing children! Dee even
claimed that Hendrix researcher Tony Brown could confirm this!
So Kathy and her husband alerted the police, who promptly went and told
Dee that if she
didn't stop this stalking and aggressive harassment, she would face
arrest.
The
police discovered that "Dee" was hiding her real identity. Dee
had told
Kathy that she was English and that her maiden name was Diana
Bonham-Carter (the famous family
of aristocrats) but Kathy discovered that she was in fact American
and her real name was Dolores Cullen! Then Kathy discovered that
Cullen had a long history of
stalking and agressing people that were associated with the 60s
music scene!
Then, incredibly, perhaps as a perverted revenge tactic against Kathy, Dee began to groom Monika Dannemann into her
confidence and began feeding her with false information about Kathy!
Monika put some of this in her book and as a result was taken
to court by
Kathy (who won).
Then Dee moved over to Ireland to
stalk Noel Redding
and even attacked him in the street! She even tried to frame Noel's
girlfriend saying that she had described Mitch as
a drunk and a drug addict. She then put it around that it was Kathy who
was framing Noel's girlsfriend!
Kathy decided to dig deeper and contacted a record producer who
knew Cullen and he described her as "The world's biggest liar". The more Kathy investigated, the more horror
stories she found about Delores Cullen a.k.a. Diana Bonham-Carter a.k.a. "Dee" Mitchell - the very person who was at the origin
of the initial ambulace men's accounts, which as I have shown, do not correspond at all with the confirmed medical evidence.
Full details of this outrageous story in Kathy's book.
The "Dee" Mitchell/Kathy Etchingham research - tainted?
So obviously Kathy's research partner was anything but trustworthy. One might suspect that in
order
win Kathy's confidence, the devious Dee pre-briefed ambulanceman
Jones before the meeting with Kathy in order to fulfil the mission
which was
to
discredit Monika's version of events. Also, if Dee had made Reginald
Jones aware of
the fact that the ambulance crew were being blamed for Hendrix's death,
for having sat him up in the ambulance, he might have been
very enthusiastic about telling the story another way - in order to clear
himself.
When the girls traced John Suau,
his account seemed to correspond with what Jones had said. Or did it? We
now know that when Suau discovered what was printed in the book(s) he
said that it didn't represent what he had said to Dee and Kathy! I prefer to accept the account as
noted by ex-Police Superintendant Dennis Care rather than suspect accounts which had been set up by Dee Mitchell.
Alarm bells rang out to Kathy about her research partner but
unfortunately she didn't doubt the
reliability of what she heard from the ambulancemen. Kathy teamed up
with Hendrix researcher Michael Fairchild to get the story out
(initially in Steve Roby's "Straight Ahead" Hendrix fanzine) but he
would soon discover that the research he'd been shown had been
rejected as "untrue" by one of the ambulancemen! On his website (Rock Prophecy) Fairchild details a
conversation he had with Hendrix biographer David Henderson. Talking
about the delay in calling the ambulance, Fairchild says "For
some reason there was a delay [in calling the ambulance for Jimi].
Monika has changed the time when she says she woke up and left the
flat. She's changed that over the years in different interviews . . . The
ambulance drivers now waver on the point [of Jimi being dead when they
arrived], saying that he was not dead at the scene, that he died en
route to the hospital,...". Source.
Perfectly correct Mr. Fairchild - just as the hospital had told the press on the day and just as the inquest had been informed.
So unfortunately for the poor conspiracy theorist,
even the much published ambulancemen's accounts aren't reliable. Other quotes by them reveal that Jimi
wasn't dead when they found him at the Samarkand - which makes perfect sense in
relation to the urgent procedures that were carried out at the hospital.
When Kathy presented all her findings (including the ambulancemen's
accounts gathered with Dee) to the authorities, they were
unconvinced. See The 1993 Police Investigation further down this page.
Meanwhile...
Alvenia Bridges arrives at the Samarkand
It has been said that Alvenia took off
ahead
of Eric Burdon in order to assist Monika. In his autobiography and on film, Burdon says that
Alvenia quickly went to
the Samarkand to help Monika. In David Henderson's book, it says that Alvenia borrowed a car off Steve Gold.
However, in
a hazy 2013 interview ( link below) Alvenia says that
she took a taxi. There is quote in Jerry Hopkin's book where Alvenai
says that she arrived at the Samarkand just
as the ambulance arrived but in that 2013
interview, she didn't mention the ambulance and says that she found the
door of the basement flat
open and nobody inside. So this was
without a doubt 11:30 - 11:40 a.m. (the hospital records confirm the
ambulance departure time) and it fits the timeline in relation to what
she said about putting her shoes on while still on the phone with
Monika just before she left to head for The Samarkand.
On arrival Alvenia says that she asked the
taxi driver to wait, while she went down to the basement flat. Finding
nobody there, she asked the taxi driver where the nearest hospital was.
He
told her that it was St. Mary Abbotts, so off they sped the hospital.
When she got there, she found a distraught Monika sitting in the
Casualty
ward, waiting for news of Jimi. Monika told her that she had checked
Jimi in with a false name because she was afraid that Jimi would be mad
at her (which she wouldn't have said if Jimi had been dead for
hours at the Samarkand!).
> Interview with Alvenia Bridges
The
2013 Alvenia interview carries weight because this is no longer a "rock
chick" with a hip agenda and she comes across as simply an old lady looking
back honestly on what actually happened. Her account rules out Burdon's story of him arriving at the Samarkand very
early and seeing "Love" in Jimi's handwriting in the condensation on Monika's car window.
Gerry Stickells alerted
When Jimi's road manager Gerry Stickells first got the alert (from Terry Slater or from Alvenia - both versions are documented) that something was wrong with
Jimi, he dashed
directly to The Cumberland Hotel because that was where Jimi
was booked-in that week. He had no idea that Jimi was staying
at Monika's suite. Stickells is quoted in the September 19th issue of The New York Post saying:
"The next morning somebody woke me up. They didn't say he was dead, so I rushed to the hospital. That's where I found out".
In a 90s interview with Harry Shapiro, Stickells said was told at 8 or
9 a.m. that Jimi was already dead. Memory problems Gerry? As the
inquest was told, Jimi died in the ambulance. Obviously, what he said
the day after Jimi died was the truth. By the 90s his memory was hazy.
So like with
everyone else involved in this story, we have varying versions of what
happened and when. The ambulancemen, the doctors, Dannemann, Burdon,
the road crew, Mitch (see further down),... all giving varying accounts of their own experiences
that day. This is why the only concrete proof
we have that Jimi wasn't
long dead on arrival at the hospital is the fact that
resuscitation was attempted - a medical procedure that is never
performed on 6 or 7 hour old corpses, which would be stiff with rigor
mortis and blotched with lividity. Jimi obviously didn't exhibit these
signs because his heartbeat and respiration had only just stopped in
the ambulance. This simple fact eliminates the fabricated
stories/memory problems of all concerned and of course all
the murder
theory nonsense.
What
a mess this whole thing is. Now it's time to look at what happened at the
hospital to discover exactly in what condition Jimi was when he
arrived there.
Back to top
11:45 a.m.
Jimi is admitted to the Casualty and the Resuscitation/Emergencies Room
Jimi was brought to St. May Abbott's Hospital at 11.45 a.m.
on September 18 1970.
> John Suau (ambulanceman) to researcher Dennis Care:
"As the ambulance pulled into the hospital, the patient sighed and
stopped breathing. At this stage, the ambulance had pulled into the
ambulance bay. The ambulance was met by a nurse or doctor to whom I
said 'He's gone' "
This mention of something serious happening on arrival corresponds with what Monika said: "Just
as we entered the entrance to the hospital, the ambulancemen started to
move fast and put an oxygen mask on Jimi, so I knew there was something
wrong there." (2)
> Walter Pryce (Accident & Emergencies Admissions Officer): "The ambulance turned into the hospital, the two ambulancemen jumped out and dashed into Casualty". This proves
that Jimi was not long dead. If they were rushing, it means that there
was a sense of urgency - so Jimi had either passed away a short time
earlier or was on the verge of death. Then, "Two
doctors went out there, tried to revive him but couldn't. I
heard them say later that he had died in the ambulance." (confirmed to the press and at the inquest).
Pryce also said " They took him
straight down to the mortuary. He never left the ambulance. That's
definite." (2) which doesn't correspond at all with what the
rest of the medical staff recounted. In actual fact, an admissions card
wasn't filled for admission to the hospital but Jimi was rushed into the Emergencies room of the Casualty ward.
> Dr. Robert Brown interviewed by journalist/filmaker Aidan Prewett:
"I just saw him, checked him –
there was nothing to be done. But they kept going; they were moving. I
just came along with the trolley, walked with it for a few steps and on
it went. But saw that there was nothing to be done. They were going the
right way to the emergency department but there was nothing to be done
there either. "He was then taken
from – instead of into the casualty department, into the
emergency
section".
Brown
says that Jimi appeared to be dead and had been dead for "some time" or "quite a while"
- which is rather vague.
AP: May I ask what – I mean, he
was unresponsive, obviously, on the bier. Was there an immediate
giveaway that it had been some kind of overdose?
BB: No. All that was apparent was that he was dead and beyond recovery.
AP: How do you tell someone is beyond recovery – there’s obviously no pulse, no breathing…
BB: Yeah, well people – after
they’ve been dead for a while, it’s classical medical
knowledge; when there’s not life. When somebody’s not got
life in them anymore.
AP: But evident that he had been dead for some hours.
BB: For quite a while, yes.
AP: What are the signs that someone’s been dead for a bit?
BB: Well these don’t apply to
him, because he was effectively my patient at the time. But – the
classic symptoms that a person has died. The body is no longer warm,
and so on. And the person’s not breathing. And that doesn’t
necessarily mean that you can’t resuscitate them. But you look at
their vital signs; you look for their pulse, you look at a
person’s eyes and so on.
So the young and inexperienced Brown only walked alongside the trolley for "a few steps" and had the impression
that Jimi had been dead "for a while". When asked what the signs of somebody who has been dead for many hours are he says that those signs "...didn't apply to him". So this again proves that Jimi hadn't been dead for 4, 6 or 8 hours at all. Brown goes on to say "...because he was my patient at the time".
Whaaat? A young doctor, fresh out of medical school, walks alongside a
hospital trolley for 5 seconds and claims that Jimi was "his patient at the time"?
In a 2011 interview with Benjamin Law, Brown said "...Jimi Hendrix was brought in dead. Straight away, I knew who he was, but there was nothing I could do for him." What could he do in 5 seconds as the trolly rushed passed him? What utter nonsense. It certainly seems that Mr. Politician was greatly exaggerating things in order to add juice to his autobiography. At least his statement that Jimi was rushed to the
resuscitation room fits the facts (confirmed by Dr. Seifert below).
Monika recounted (again in that
Guitarist article) that she felt that she wasn't being treated
seriously at the hospital, so she phoned Alvenia again, asking her to
get in touch with Gerry Stickells for assistance. This doesn't fit
Alvenia's later account where she said that she had headed for the
Samarkand by taxi just after Monika's second call from that location.
Alvenia Bridges arrived soon after to find Monika
in a state of panic. Alvenia said that the ambulance attendants assured
her that Jimi "...was going to be alright" (from Jerry Hopkins' book). In Johnny Black's book "The Ultimate Experience", there is a quote from Alvenia where she
says that Monika had checked Jimi into the hospital under a false name and
that "She was afraid he would get mad at her". However,
in Tony Brown says (in his book "The Final Days")
that the admissions book states Jimi's name, age and time of
admittance. Why would Alvenia invent a story about the false name?
Perhaps that false information was corrected (by Monika or Gerry
Stickells who arrived shortly afterwards) once it was confirmed that
Jimi couldn't be saved.
PROOF THAT JIMI WAS NOT "LONG-DEAD"
In the
afternoon of September 18th, the news spread that Jimi had passed away
and rapidly, numerous journalists arrived at the hospital.
Here again is the varying information that the journalists obtained from hospital staff within hours of Jimi's passing.
Henry Maule of The Daily Sketch said that Jimi "was found deeply unconscious at the home of a blonde girlfriend..."
A British TV news
reporter standing outside The Samarkand on the 28th of September after
the inquest: "The
inquest in Hendrix's death was told that he died on the way to
hospital, after being picked up by an ambulance at this building." (you can see this news report in
the documentary "The Uncut Story" - here is the video of the journalist)
David Tune - The Daily Mail, 19th September 1970: "Pop star Jimi Hendrix died in an ambulance yesterday on the way to the hospital" - clipping
The
Daily Telegraph (24th September 1970): Herbert Dannemann states that
his sister Monika told him over the phone on the 19th "She said he died in the ambulance"
Peter Goddard (journalist): "A spokesman for the hospital said the 27 year old guitarist was alive when admitted but died shortly [after] noon".
ABC News (18th September 1970) - "The acid rock musician died today in a London hospital."
Evening News (18th September 1970): "Pop star Jimi Hendrix died in London today after being taken to hospital suffering from an overdose of drugs" - "He was certified dead by a doctor who examined him in the back of the ambulance"
Evening Standard (18th September 1970): "Doctors...fought to save his life but all attempts to resuscitate him failed" - clipping
+
Walter Price (St. Mary Abbotts admissions officer) - "I
heard them [the two doctors] say later that he had died in the ambulance."
Noel Redding (in his book "Are You Experienced): "Contrary to some reports, Jimi was still alive when he reached the hospital."
A sense of URGENCY!
Even with their slight
differences, the above statements prove without a doubt that Jimi
certainly wasn't long-dead when he arrived at the hospital and this is
obviously why the medical staff tried to save him in the resuscitation room.
THE TRIAGE OF HOSPITAL ARRIVALS
Doctors,
nurses, Casualty Officers are highly
trained members of hospital staff (unlike ambulance crew and police
constables), they are experts in
the triage of arrivals.
The 3 main triage categories, based on the Emergency Severity Index are:
1. Immediate – Immediate threat to life and major illnesses or injuries needing prompt attention.
2. Priority – Conditions requiring urgent treatment with no immediate threat to life, limb or function.
3. Standard – Minor Illnesses or conditions
On
arrival, Jimi was classed as "Immediate" and was thus rushed to the
Resucitation Room. The personel that handle admissions can easily see signs of rigor mortis or
livor mortis (dependant lividity) which reveal that a person has been
dead for
longer than 30 to 60 minutes. Lividity can show up in as little as 15 minutes. The development of rigor mortis is also
accelerated by barbiturate in the blood system and we know that Jimi
had taken a huge dose (the sleeping pills and the "brown bomber"). So
if Jimi had been dead for an hour or so, the signs would have been
clearly visible in which case he would have been sent directly to the morgue and not rushed to the Resuscitation Room.
Notes: When reuscitation is performed
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Dr. Seifert - the resuscitation attempt
> Dr. Seifert, the Medical Registrar, also said that Jimi wasn't admitted to hospital but that he was taken into Emergencies.
In a Biography
TV documentary, Dr. Seifert says "I immediately tried to help with the
resuscitation. There was a monitor on, which was dead".
In another interview: "Jimi was rushed into the
resus room*. He was put on a monitor, but it was flat. I
pounded his heart a couple of times, but there was no point in doing
anything else as he was dead.... I never spoke to or saw anyone about
Jimi — no woman in admissions.... No one would have been allowed to
look at him or stand over him. That would never have been done. I would
have done anything to save him, but it was too late, he was dead.... No
nurse went out to say we'd revived him, because we didn't — that just
never happened. We didn't work on him anything like an hour, just a few
minutes — he was dead."
*resuscitation
"I
did not know who he was when he was first brought in and initially, I
am certain that none of the attendant medical officers or nurses knew
who he was. I did not personally see the ambulance when Jimi arrived.
It is difficult to know exactly how soon after Jimi arrived that I
attended the Casualty Department, as Dr. Bannister and myself were
called to the Department as soon as he arrived." - " My duty as a
Medical Registrar was to try and resuscitate any patients coming in who
were unconscious. We would have been giving him cardiac massage. I have
no idea what Dr. Bannister did at Casualty at that stage." - We worked
on him for a very short time, probably five to ten minutes. I do not
consider that he had much chance of survival. I have never discussed
the details concerning 18 September 1970 with Dr. Bannister.
Note that while the medical team were
working on Jimi in the resuscitation room, with him hooked up to a
cardiac monitor, an oxygen mask, repeated chest pounding, he wasn't yet
certified as dead. It was only when Dr.Seifert took the decision to
stop these procedures that Jimi's death was certified. That
certification wasn't made at the moment Jimi arrived at the hospital.
In 1995 Seifert was interviewed for a BBC documentary titled "Wink Of An Eye" where he said "We must have thought that at the time, there was a possibility that we could try and resuscitate him" (proving that Jimi hadn't been dead for hours) but "Unfortunately because the monitor remained so inactive, it
was obvious that we weren't able to resuscitate him, and I have always
assumed that Jimi Hendrix was brought in dead.
Then in 2010, Dr. Seifert implied that Jimi was still alive when he
arrived at the hospital - which is why they tried to save him!
So I contacted top Hendrix researcher Caesar Glebbeek to get some
clarity about this. In 2010, he contacted Dr. Seifert and demanded an
explanation for his conflicting accounts. For the first time ever, anywhere (many thanks to Caesar), here
is their exchange:
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Caesar Glebbeek asks Dr. Seifert to clarify
CG: "In reference to question #28: I am rather puzzled about two completely
different statements you have given in the past. I now repeat these
two versions by you:
Version #1:
"Unfortunately because the monitor remained so inactive, it
was obvious that we weren't able to resuscitate him, and I have always
assumed that Jimi Hendrix was brought in dead.
Source: Radio interview with you for the BBC program The Wink of Any
Eye: The Last Days of Jimi Hendrix, transmitted 10 September 1995." (full transcript below).
Version #2:
"To say that he [Jimi] was dead when they [Reginald Jones
and John Suau] got to the [Samarkand] hotel is probably incorrect. When
they brought Jimi into the hospital there was still some life left in
him which is why we worked so hard on him. We wouldn't have worked so
hard trying to resuscitate him if he was already dead. There was some
breathing going on. Whether you call that life or not is another story.
I worked on him for about ten minutes, and when I couldn't get him to
breath. I then decided to shut down the oxygen and declare that he was
dead. I personally couldn't find any sign of alcohol or anything like
that on him when I examined him."
Source: filmed interview with you conducted by David Kramer in London, 23 February 2000.
In Version #1 you say, "I have always assumed that Jimi Hendrix was
brought in dead" and five years later you say in Version #2, "We
wouldn't have worked so hard trying to resuscitate him if he was already
dead".
I would like to think that when Jimi was wheeled into Casualty, the
medical persons who triaged him (i.e. before you or Dr. Bannister
attended to Jimi) would be fully qualified and would be able to spot a
dead patient from a patent who¹s unconscious, and therefore if Jimi was dead that he would have been taken straight down to the morgue and not into Casualty for emergency treatment.
I would normally present both versions if and when I do not know
which version is the fully correct one, but in this case your own two
versions are so opposing to each other (i.e. dead vs. alive) that I
prefer, if possible, to end up with one version and not two.
Dr. Seifert: "I would stick with version #2, the monitor was very inactive but
obviously we needed to try to resuscitate him if possible and that is
what we did."
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Shall we read that again:
- "We must have thought that at the time that there was a possibility that we could try and resuscitate him." - BBC "Wink Of An Eye" Radio documentary.
- "We wouldn't have worked so
hard trying to resuscitate him if he was already dead. There was some
breathing going on - whether you call that life or not is another story.
I worked on him for about ten minutes, and when I couldn't get him to
breath. I then decided to shut down the oxygen and declare that he was
dead. I personally couldn't find any sign of alcohol or anything like
that on him when I examined him."
It's interesting to note also that Dr.Seifert said "I immediately tried to help with the
resuscitation." This
tells us that when Seifert arrived at the Emergencies Room, Jimi was
already receiving urgent treatment. Again, this was obviously not a
7-hour old corpse which would have had displayed all the signs of
rigor/livor mortis. Jimi was obviously at that delicate, desperate
stage of death.
Dr. Rufus Crompton
When
police detectives asked pathologist Dr. Rufus Crompton to go through
the medical evidence during their 1993 re-investigation into the case
(triggered by Kathy Etchingham's dossier, he was of the opinion that
Jimi couldn’t have
been breathing by the time he reached hospital because the autopsy
revealed vomit in the form of "free fluid" in one of his lungs. However, Dr. Michael Hunter pointed out (in
his 2016 assessment of the autopsy) that
any vomit/gastric juices could have been displaced from the stomach to
the lungs during the displacement of the body between The
Samarkand Hotel and the arrival at Casualty (particularly during the sitting of Jimi in a
special chair to ascend the basement flat steps for example).
It has been
stated of course that the barbiturate dose had heavily sedated Jimi, inhibiting
his gag reflex.
This would
explain the fact that Jimi was in serious trouble in the ambulance and
gave his last gasp on arrival. Dr. Seifert's reference to "some
breathing going on"
must have been an indication of a slight responce to the resuscitation
proceedures (perhaps what led to the confusion detailed below - "...they thought they had saved him"?).
So because CPR definitely was
performed on Jimi, this proves without any possible doubt that Jimi had passed away in a short time prior to
admission (resuscitation is never performed on 4 to 6 hour old dead bodies).
Did Dr. Seifert momentarily revive Jimi?
In the 90s TV special "Jimi Hendrix: The Man They Made God", Alvenia Bridges (who had arrived at
the hospital to find Monika in distress) said this: "A nurse came out and said that they thought they had saved him. Then
they came back and they said he was gone…and I didn't believe them
because they'd just said a few minutes ago that they thought they had
him. So I insisted to see him. I saw his hand and that beautiful
turquoise ring that I gave him, there… and I said to the nurse, OK, he's
gone."
Dr. Seifert denied this in his initial statements: "No nurse went out to say we'd revived him, because we didn't — that just never happened." However, the other interview he mentions "breathing
going on", so
perhaps a brief moment Jimi responded to the CPR and this was witnessed
by a nurse who, without Seifet knowing, took it upon herself to inform Alvenia and calm the
hysterical Monika.
One must also remember that some press
reporters had been told by a hospital spokesperson that Jimi was alive when
admitted and died afterwards (see top of page). Was this also in
reference to a moment when it seemed that Jimi was responding to resuscitation?
