Elvis Presley's hidden autopsy uncovered grim illness that caused toilet death
His dulcet tones, ravishing good looks, and blue suede shoes made him one of the most adored men on the planet, but the King of Rock and Roll passed without fanfare or applause.
Famously, on August 16, 1977 Elvis Presley, 43, met his tragic demise when he was found face down on the bathroom floor of his Graceland home. He appeared to have fallen from the toilet close by. Although the circumstances surrounding the Jailhouse Rock singer's death are well-known, for almost half a decade his family have remained tight-lipped on the results of his autopsy.
In the years leading to his sudden death, his health had taken a dramatic hit following years of drug abuse and diet laden with junk food. The once athletic musician, from Memphis, Tenneessee, went on to weigh 25 stone as he spent months barricaded in his bedroom indulging in cheeseburger platters. His condition was so fraught that he was in need of a full-time nurse, and as he reportedly refused to bathe throughout 1975, and developed sores across his body.
Elvis' body was discovered by his girlfriend GingerAs a consequence of his high-fat, unhealthy diet, Elvis suffered from chronic constipation and a post-mortem examination found he had four-month-old compacted stool sitting in his bowel - although that alone was not the cause of his death. The singer was also on a cocktail of drugs and had been prescribed almost 9,000 pills, vials and injections in the seven months before his death.
And it was his girlfriend, Ginger Alden, who found the rock and roll star's body with his pyjama bottoms around his ankles and his bottom in the air. Of the distressing scene, Ginger, who was just 21 at the time, wrote in her memoir: “His arms lay on the ground, close to his sides, palms facing upward.
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"It was clear that, from the moment he landed on the floor, Elvis hadn't moved. I gently turned his face toward me. A hint of air expelled from his nose. The tip of his tongue was clenched between his teeth and his face was blotchy. I gently raised one eyelid. His eye was staring straight ahead and blood red."
An autopsy was carried out that same day but the report was immediately sealed for 50 years by the family, sparking a slew of speculation as to what killed him. Dan Warlick, chief investigator for the Tennessee Office of the State Chief Medical Examiner, attended the autopsy and fuelled the popular theory that Elvis died while straining to go to the toilet.
He once said: "Presley's chronic constipation - the result of years of prescription drug abuse and high-fat, high-cholesterol gorging - brought on what's known as Valsalva's manoeuvre. Put simply, the strain of attempting to defecate compressed the singer's abdominal aorta, shutting down his heart."
Elvis Presley with girlfriend Linda Thompson (WireImage)Others claimed he'd died from a drug overdose, but when the investigation was reopened in 1994, coroner Joseph Davis disagreed. He explained: "The position of Elvis Presley's body was such that he was about to sit down on the commode when the seizure occurred. He pitched forward onto the carpet, his rear in the air, and was dead by the time he hit the floor.
"If it had been a drug overdose, [Elvis] would have slipped into an increasing state of slumber. He would have pulled up his pajama bottoms and crawled to the door to seek help. It takes hours to die from drugs." The autopsy results are due to be unlocked in 2027, but until then, the biggest insight into the star's mysterious death has come from prominent California physician, Forest Tennant, who actually reviewed the report while defending Elvis' doctor, Dr. George Nichopoulos, who was later acquitted of over-prescribing drugs.
For Mr Tennant, one major clue was in the full-body deterioration of Elvis, with almost every organ plagued by ill health. As a young man, Elvis had been extremely fit, playing football and practising martial arts. He did start abusing drugs including amphetamines, opioids and sedatives as a teenager and is known to have had an appalling diet.
But for Tennant, that wasn't enough to explain the long list of maladies that afflicted the rock star from the late 1960s onwards. First he complained of vertigo, back pain, and insomnia, eye infections and headaches, and in 1973 he was rushed to hospital in a semi-coma and found to be suffering from jaundice, severe respiratory distress, marked swelling of his face, distended abdomen, constipation, a gastric, bleeding ulcer and hepatitis.
He was hospitalised again in 1975 with high blood pressure, high cholesterol and a condition called megacolon, whereby the large intestine becomes distended and can allow toxins to flood the body. He also had at least four near-death overdoses that left him unconscious and in need of resuscitation, and his heart was double the normal size.
Elvis' body was ravaged by disease (Rex)And despite having never smoked, he also suffered from emphysema. So what had caused all of these disease processes in his stomach, liver, lungs, heart, spine, eyes and bowel? Forest believes it all stemmed back to a serious head injury he sustained in 1967 that triggered a progressive autoimmune inflammatory disorder.
In his opinion, as shared in a 2013 medical paper, when Elvis tripped over a television cord and knocked himself out on the bathtub, the injury was so severe that it caused brain tissue to dislodge and seep into his blood circulation. There, the body identified the matter as foreign and produced antibodies to destroy it, triggering hypogammaglobulinemia, a disorder of the body's immune system.
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At the time, little was understood about auto-immune conditions, but these days they are known to cause most of the symptoms Elvis displayed, from chronic pain, irrational behaviour, obesity and enlarged and diseased organs like hearts and bowels. And in 2016 Garry Rodgers, a retired homicide detective and forensic coroner, told the Huffington Post that with those findings in mind, he would have attributed Elvis' death to a heart attack caused by heart disease and drug use caused by an autoimmune disease which was sparked by a brain injury.
He said: "I'd have to classify Elvis's death as an accident. There's no one to blame - certainly not Elvis. He was a severely injured and ill man. There’s no specific negligence on anyone's part and definitely no cover-up or conspiracy of a criminal act. If Dr. Forrest Torrent is right, there simply wasn’t a proper understanding back then in determining what really killed the King of Rock & Roll."
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