What Really Killed the King?

Above, Elvis Presley's grave. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

An interesting article on the cause of death of Elvis Presley was posted last year and updated a few months ago in The Huffington Post.

It was written by former homicide detective and forensic coroner Garry Rodgers. His conclusions are surprising, but they do make a lot of sense. He puts the beginning of the end in 1967.

The article begins with:

Elvis Presley suddenly dropped in the bathroom of his Graceland mansion on the afternoon of August 16, 1977. He was rushed to Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, pronounced dead, then shipped to the morgue and autopsied the same afternoon. 

Three days later, the coroner issued Elvis’s death certificate stating the cause as “hypertensive cardiovascular disease with atherosclerotic heart disease” — an arrhythmia, or heart attack for short. 

However, toxicology results soon identified several pharmaceutical drugs in Elvis’s system with codeine being ten times the therapeutic level. This started accusations of a cover-up and suggesting conspiracy theories of a sinister criminal act. 

Pushing 40 years after, modern medicine and forensics took a new look at the Presley case facts and indicated that something entirely different from a heart attack or a drug overdose really killed the King of Rock & Roll.

Interesting theory!

To read more, go here.