When Elvis Presley died suddenly in 1977, he left an army of heartbroken fans across the globe. But the superstar’s family always remained tight-lipped about the results of his autopsy.
The Mississippi singer was discovered face down on the bathroom floor of his Graceland home, where he appeared to have fallen from the toilet close by, with his pyjama bottoms around his ankles. In the years leading to his sudden death, his health had taken a dramatic hit, after years of drug abuse catching up with him combined with a bad diet, writes The Mirror.
Mystery still surrounds the passing of the King of Rock and Roll, who was just 42 when he died.
Experts have offered different theories about the exact cause of death, but the only thing certain is that in his final decade, Elvis was not in good shape health wise.
In the years leading up to his death, he went on to tip the scales at 25 stone after he spent months barricaded in his bedroom eating junk food. His condition got so bad that he was in need of a full-time nurse, and as he reportedly refused to bathe throughout 1975, developed sores across his body.
Due to his high-fat, unhealthy diet, the Jailhouse Rock singer suffered from chronic constipation and a post-mortem examination found he had a four-month-old compacted stool sitting in his bowel. 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.
He was discovered on the floor with his pyjama bottoms around his ankles and his bottom in the air by his girlfriend, Ginger Alden. Ginger, who was just 21 at the time, opened up about his death in her memoir, writing: “His arms lay on the ground, close to his sides, palms facing upward.
“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 immediately but its findings remained under wraps 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.”
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 pyjama bottoms and crawled to the door to seek help. It takes hours to die from drugs.”
Fans will finally find out once and for all how Elvis died when the autopsy results are unlocked in 2027. The Mirror reports the biggest insight into his death until them comes from leading physician Forest Torrant, who reviewed the report while defending Elvis’ doctor, Dr. George Nichopoulos, who was later acquitted of charges he’d faced alleging he had over-prescribed drugs to the star. Mr Torrant highlighted the musician’s deteriorating health all over his body, with almost every organ affected. He’d been fit growing up and played football and practiced martial arts but as a teen he started abusing drugs. Elvis was known to have experimented with amphetamines, opioids and sedatives and always had a bad diet.
But according to the expert, that didn’t fully explain the poor state of his health from around the late 1960s onwards, with ailments including vertigo, back pain, and insomnia, eye infections and headaches. In 1973, he was rushed to hospital in a semi-coma and was found to be suffering from jaundice, severe respiratory distress, marked swelling of his face, distended abdomen, constipation, a gastric, bleeding ulcer and hepatitis.
In 1975, he was hospitalised again, this time with high blood pressure and cholesterol as well as megacolon – a condition that causes the large intestine to become distended and allows toxins to flood the body.
Elvis also suffered from emphysema, despite having never smoked and nearly died at least four times after overdosing. When he was found, Elvis also had a heart that was double the normal size. Tenant believes that a serious head injury in 1967 was the cause of a disease that had affected his stomach, liver, lungs, heart, spine, eyes and bowel. Elvis had tripped over a TV cord and knocked himself out on a bathtub which led to injuries so severe his brain tissue dislodged and seeped into his blood circulation.
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As Torrent explained in a medical paper published in 2013, this caused a progressive autoimmune inflammatory disorder called hypogammaglobulinemia. At the time of Elvis’ death, not much was known about the condition but these days medics know that such an injury could cause the symptoms displayed by the music icon, including his chronic pain, irrational behaviour, obesity and enlarged and diseased organs like hearts and bowels.
Garry Rodgers, a retired homicide detective and forensic coroner, told the Huffington Post in 2016 that he would have confirmed Elvis’ death to be a heart attack caused by heart disease and autoimmune disease which had been brought on by the 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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