Sorry, but a 40-year old memory is absolutely useless as evidence.
If he saw it then, he would have said so then.
Even his statement is useless. How much wine did he see? A cup? A gallon? How, after 40 years, is he able to quantify the actual amount of wine he found? AFAIK, in autopsies you measure things like that. What was the measurement? How much?
Then that’s what should be taken as evidence – something he saw at the time, not 40 years later. Reading the book could easily have affected his memory.
Obviously? I don’t think so. A person who changes his story 40 years after the fact is not evidence. In fact, you have yet to produce a single bit of actual evidence in your posts – just people telling stories and changing their mind.
It’s really a pretty preposterous way to kill someone anyway. Why not just give him enough barbiturates to kill him?
No, I don't think your insistence that he would have mentioned it then is all-ruling and irrefutable. I'm not sure what you are attempting to do here? Take the devil's advocate position or perhaps a moot defense lawyer position? Dr Bannister said he assumed Hendrix had experienced some kind of drug and wine situation that caused him to die. He assumed it was a drug/alcohol abuse death.
Autopsies were different back then. Especially with black people. The wine removed was not scientifically measured, however I trust the judgment and opinion of Dr Bannister vs someone offering grinding doubts. His opinion was many bottles worth. I trust his memory. His recounting was done closer to 20 years later and I'm sure it can be corroborated by other emergency room personnel.
Your offhand doubts grind against what is already known and the weight of the surrounding evidence. We have a scientifically-recorded blood alcohol level on record in the autopsy. We also have a barbiturate blood level. Once you record a negligible blood alcohol level associated with large amounts of wine in the lungs and body you automatically indicate death by drowning. I said in my original post that no one would offer anything to refute that basic forensic. No one has. Plus, we have someone coming forward with an alleged confession by the murderer, and there was a motive.
Your suggestion that Bannister was influenced by what he read in the book and then came forward with a false memory is rather weak considering most of the corresponding forensic evidence backs it. You have yet to answer how an unconscious Hendrix managed to get wine of any quantity into himself let alone bottles worth that killed him quickly? You are also completely ignoring the background information of Monika Danneman saying she washed 'sick' off of Jimi with wine. Who uses *wine* to wash vomit? Most people use a towel and warm water. Danneman was clearly aware she had to make an excuse for the wine. Since we've established her original account at the Inquest is complete nonsense we can also assume her wine washing story is as well. After all, the wine deeply penetrated the lungs. It wasn't just a surface application. We have to assume Danneman's trying to account for it is motivated by knowledge or guilt.
The forensics are firm. The barbiturate blood level can tell you when he took the pills and what condition he would have been in. I'll take Dr Bannister's word that he pulled large amounts of wine out of Hendrix as true. I haven't seen anyone suggest any credible evidence to prove otherwise. Once you have a large amount of wine in the body and low blood alcohol level you are corresponding to death by drowning in wine.
The correct forensic is:
Dr Bannister specified that he removed a plug of vomit from Hendrix's windpipe and the wine then gushed out. That fits the forensic of Hendrix being drowned in wine and then vomiting in response, as is known in drowning victims.
The blood alcohol level was too low to correspond to normal ingestion of wine. Several bottles worth of wine would bring the blood alcohol level up quickly, as any average college dorm student would attest.
Hendrix could not have taken in large amounts of wine while unconcious on sleeping pills.
The main witness Danneman's stories were proven bogus.
The main witness Danneman died by unnatural death just before being forced to testify.
A man has come forth with an alleged confession that fits the forensic.
The problem with that is he never *changed* his story he just gave more accurate detail.
The method of death was very sophisticated because it was successful for 30 years in covering-up the murder. You need to research the common counterintelligence method of false suicide by barbiturate at the time. Jeffery was an intelligence agent during his British national service.
The evidence is in the autopsy. It is also in the circumstances and facts I've described. I haven't seen you disprove any of them.
The reason they just didn’t just give him barbiturates was because the only explanation for that would be suicide.
The question of how and when the Vesperax barbiturate got into Hendrix is uncertain. But it is secondary to the manner of death by drowning in wine.
Straight murder by barbiturate overdose would incur a verdict of suicide that would then nullify any insurance policies. This would take part of the murder incentive away.
Although some are claiming Jeffery had a million dollar personal policy on Hendrix I don't think he did. Warner Brothers records did have a million dollar nominal artist's policy. Any suicide verdict would have incurred a further investigation by Warner Brothers in trying to make their claim.
In my opinion murder by overdose would have taken too long with too many possibilities of failure. It also would have kept the murderers at the scene too long and possibly created a noticeable struggle. The drowning in wine is more like the kind of low-class quick murder the London thugs Jeffery hired would have used. It would have suggested the fatal combination of barbiturate and alcohol as well. After all, it worked.
Okay - I’ll bite: what is your interest in this and what would you like to see happen at this point? Even if you tie it all up in a package with a neat bow, nothing has changed from a historical or legal standpoint unless you can get either a different ruling or a book published that is accepted as a preferred or at least alternate take on what happened…
…until then, we have another 27-year-old rock star who suffered a tragic, unfortunate and seemingly accidental death, with some folks on the sidelines saying something else happened. This has been said about Jim Morrison, too…
Am I the only one who can’t reconcile these statements? The bottom line is that this story sounds like supermarket tabloid gossip, about 3 percent more credible than “I saw Elvis and Batboy eating at a Taco Bell in Texas.”
You're just ignoring the evidence. It comes from the doctors at St Mary Abbot's Hospital; The medical forensics as recorded in the autopsy; The British Government Inquest in October 1970; and other credible Hendrix friends, authors, and researchers who made serious efforts through the years.
I'm interpreting the lack of anything disproving what I wrote to vouch for its validity.
I am not certain that we are the right crowd to dive right in - I am a big music geek, but have neither the time nor the interest to find the hard data needed to accept or reject your hypothesis. It is interesting reading, nothing more.
If you are looking for validation, you would need to go through either a legal process or broaden your exposure so other folks who have as much invested in THEIR version of things can come back with points and issues and you can duke it out from there…
I'm not sure if I'm trying to get people to "bite". My purpose is a serious analysis of the facts surrounding Jimi Hendrix's death and how it points to a scandal of serious proportions, or possibly worse.
If you are relying on legal determinations then you're just being intellectually lazy. The proof is all there for anyone willing to admit it. Just the reluctance alone of Scotland Yard to re-open the case is proof enough. Like others in here, I'm not sure what point you are trying to make? There's a fine line between devil's advocate and plain denial of the obvious.
What needed to be done is in 1970 someone needed to hire a private detective to go around figuring this out. If this was a COINTELPRO job that private detective would be in serious peril. Since all the money was tied up in the man who allegedly killed Hendrix, the only source capable of doing such an investigation was in a fatal conflict of interest with finding out the truth. You can see now why it was so hard back then to get at the truth. Most of the rock generation people surrounding Hendrix, and even Hendrix himself, were personally not the type to access establishment authorities. The Inquest, unfortunately, accepted the prevarications of Monika Danneman without question which led the authorities to assume an accidental overdose.
With all that's happened - with the attempt to get Danneman in court and her subsequent suicide (?), and with Scotland Yard's rejection of re-opening, the only move now is for someone with legal standing to sue for a re-opening of the case. The only entity with such standing is probably the estate which is currently in the possession of Experience Hendrix LLC of Seattle. Unfortunately, their stance is no different than any previous Hendrix enterprise, including Jeffery, and is mainly interested in soliciting Hendrix "product", so I don't see them spending millions to clear up what happened. But, clearly, there's enough legal grounds here to sue for an improper investigation and inquest. There's clear grounds for medical malpractice, failure to detect signs of murder, governmental incompetence and malfeasance in both the Inquest and refusal to re-open the case. This would have been done long ago if it happened in the US. My point is that I assume any "Open Verdict" assumes that if any ensuing revelatory information or evidence arises it will be used to re-examine the case. I think we've more than met that criteria. What's even creepier is when Scotland Yard announced its 1993 rejection it colored it in political terms and said something like "This serves no purpose for the interests of the British Government" (???) so you see what I mean. Furthermore there has been no formal reaction to the 2009 'confession'. Apparently an open claim of a confession is not good enough to even investigate the claim let alone re-open the investigation. This defiant legal limbo with so much gravity forcing it is nothing less than creepy. One can only naturally be led to certain questions.
Interestingly, Sharon Lawrence, a UPI reporter personal friend of Hendrix who wrote the 2005 book *Jimi Hendrix: Betrayed*, pointed out that the Bahamian offshore tax shelter accounts Jeffery used to hold Hendrix's money were established before Jeffery knew Hendrix. If you read some of Michael Collins Piper's information in his writings he shows that those Bahamian banks were notoriously well-known CIA/mafia money laundries for covert operations. It could be a coincidence that those banks were just the then-known best tax shelter banks of the day, however, the fact Jeffery had an intelligence background does aid the suggestion. Those banks funneled syndicate proceeds from US mob operations over to Switzerland where they were used in set-up banks whose main function was funding European anti-communist intelligence operations. This was a deal arranged by CIA where in return for allowing this money laundry they would take a cut to fund their covert ops. The idea being an untraceable source of income that would avoid normal means of governmental scrutiny of their doings.
So while there's no direct evidence of a COINTELPRO assassination of Hendrix, the stage is most certainly set. The lack of any willingness to re-open the case only aids the suggestion. After Hendrix died the newspapers went wild with claims of a heroin overdose. Hendrix was not a heroin user. There were no needle marks found on his body nor was there any heroin in his system. This media assault is classic of an intelligence defamation campaign.
Sharon Lawrence wrote that before Hendrix died he mentioned to her that he no longer liked red wine.
As in the TWA 800 thread, you haven’t provided any evidence. At best, you’ve provided people talking about what they claim is the evidence, but those aren’t the same thing.
No, I’m just familiar with this kind of story. I don’t take them seriously because the claims are usually made by people grubbing for money or fame, or authors trying to sell books in which they make absurd claims about dead people. See also: ‘The British government killed Princess Diana.’
Edit: Or by people who have changed their story from something understandable to something “more interesting” years after the fact. I believe there are a number of similar cases relating to the JFK assassination.
Assume the OP’s facts about the doctor’s findings are true. Aren’t they explainable as Hendrix taking a handful of pills, attempting to wash them down with wine, choking, aspirating wine as well as vomit, and then dropping the wine bottle and falling into the puddle? I don’t see a need to add murder allegations.
I'll explain why that can't be.
You can't do that physiologically. If you attempted to kill yourself as you describe you would cough and spit out the wine as you tried to force it into yourself. It's an almost involuntary bodily survival reflex.
But it contradicts the autopsy forensics as well that are written in stone. The Vesperax barbiturate blood level was recorded. The autopsy recorded that the level was enough to incapacitate Hendrix and his gag reflex. So you are trading off a level of consciousness where you could somehow pour wine into your lungs as you increase in barbiturate intoxication. There's a point where you would be too unconscious to administer wine into yourself and Hendrix had reached that point. It's simple sense that any level of consciousness that would allow you to pour wine into your lungs would be accompanied by a level of gag reflex that would expel it.
Seeing how unlikely that is we now have to consider the value of Danneman's false story and Jeffery's alleged confession and motive.
The short answer is the autopsy showed he had too much barbiturate in his blood to have done that all in one move.
Also, Dr Bannister noted that the incidence of vomit and wine was more in the manner of a plug of vomit corking in the massive amount of wine behind it in the lungs and stomach. Such a forensic would indicate a large amount of wine drowning the victim followed by the common occurrence seen in drowning victims of vomiting.
Any face-down puddle posture would automatically necessitate a disgorging of the wine by pressure and gravity. Hendrix was found in bed on his back, fully dressed, and soaked in wine. Danneman admitted trying to 'wash sick off' with wine. (Who uses wine to wash off vomit?)
The doctor said several bottles worth.
Let’s be clear about this: *I am **TOTALLY *being intellectually lazy. Done - end of story; guilty as charged.
That’s my point. Unless you can get some sort of legal ruling which means that someone in authority HAS spent the time to review your case and rule in your favor - which can then serve (to me) as a proxy for intellectual rigor, then I am not going to look at what you are presenting as anything more than curious stuff similar to any number of other conspiracy theories I hear about. Or maybe if you get a credible journalist to take up the cause.
I wasn’t clear. I didn’t mean that he deliberately inhaled wine into his lungs, I mean that perhaps he drank wine following the pills (recreationally, not suicidally), choked, and involuntarily aspirated some into his lungs. If in fact several bottles worth of wine came gushing out, most of that would have been from his stomach, wouldn’t it? Don’t most drowning victims actually end up with relatively little fluid in the lungs, because the larynx closes?
I guess my first answer to that would be Monika Danneman was with Hendrix the whole time that would have happened. She never mentioned it. I can't say what Monika Danneman did or what her reaction would be but the scenario you suggest would involve Monika watching Hendrix do this and letting it happen without trying to assist.
Plus your scenario violates the invariable gag reflex reaction that would have coughed the wine out had it happened that way. Your scenario is almost automatically excluded because the only thing Hendrix could have choked on if it happened that way would be the pills. There were no pills found in his throat or in any place that would have suggested your scenario. The barbiturate blood level in the autopsy suggests the pills were digested and absorbed. That couldn't have happened if Jimi died shortly after choking by trying to wash pills down with bottles of wine - which is ridiculous in itself. People who knew Hendrix would tell you he wasn't the type to chug bottles of wine.
The lungs were probably filled with wine because the wine bottles were shoved down his windpipe.
Isn’t that statement the classic response by every conspiracy theorist? No offense, but that makes me not want to bother engaging in discussion.
Saying you found this stuff on the web and in books isn’t very convincing. If you’re going to bother to type all these words, type some citations: which books, what pages, who wrote them, what are their qualifications? Websites or postings by the principals, not by people talking about the principals. That sort of thing. The burden of proof is on the person proposing a novel theory.
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