Additional Coverage:
- Elvis Presley’s grim illness that led to him being discovered by toilet in Graceland (themirror.com)
The Enduring Mystery of Elvis Presley’s Death: New Insights Emerge
For nearly half a century, the circumstances surrounding the passing of Elvis Presley, the King of Rock and Roll, have been shrouded in a veil of secrecy. His family’s decision to seal his autopsy results for 50 years has fueled widespread speculation, leaving fans and medical professionals alike to piece together the final moments of a music icon.
On August 16, 1977, the “Jailhouse Rock” singer was discovered by his then-girlfriend, Ginger Alden, on the bathroom floor of his Graceland home. He was found face down, his pajama bottoms around his ankles, an image that has become a haunting part of his legacy. In the years leading up to his untimely demise at age 42, Presley’s health had severely declined, marked by extensive drug abuse and a notoriously unhealthy diet.
Reports indicate that the once athletic star had ballooned to 25 stone, often isolating himself in his bedroom, consuming vast quantities of cheeseburger platters. His health was so precarious that he required round-the-clock nursing care, and it’s been widely reported that he refused to bathe throughout 1975, leading to widespread skin sores.
A high-fat diet contributed to chronic constipation, with an autopsy reportedly revealing four-month-old compacted feces in his bowel. Furthermore, Presley was heavily medicated; in the seven months preceding his death, he was prescribed nearly 9,000 pills, vials, and injections.
Alden’s account of finding Presley’s body paints a grim picture. In her memoir, she described him with his “arms lay on the ground, close to his sides, palms facing upward.”
She noted that he hadn’t moved from the moment he landed, with “a hint of air expelled from his nose. The tip of his tongue was clenched between his teeth and his face was blotchy.”
She observed his eye, “staring straight ahead and blood red.”
An autopsy was performed on the day of his death, but the results were immediately sealed by the family, prompting decades of theories. Dan Warlick, chief investigator for the Tennessee Office of the State Chief Medical Examiner, who was present at the autopsy, supported the popular theory that Presley died while straining on the toilet. He suggested that 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 maneuver,” where the strain compressed his abdominal aorta, leading to cardiac arrest.
Others speculated a fatal drug overdose. However, when the case was reopened in 1994, coroner Joseph Davis offered an alternative perspective.
He theorized that Presley “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.”
Davis argued against a drug overdose, stating that Presley “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.”
While the official autopsy findings remain sealed until 2027, significant insights have emerged from Dr. Forest Tennant, a respected California physician.
Dr. Tennant examined the autopsy report while defending Elvis’s doctor, Dr.
George Nichopoulos, who was later cleared of over-prescribing medications.
Dr. Tennant’s critical observation was the widespread physical deterioration evident in Presley’s body, with nearly every organ showing signs of poor health. Despite his athletic youth, Presley’s health began to decline dramatically, exacerbated by drug misuse, including amphetamines, opioids, and sedatives, which began in his teenage years, alongside his notoriously poor eating habits.
However, Dr. Tennant believed the extensive list of health issues that plagued Presley from the late 1960s onwards could not be solely attributed to drug abuse and diet.
Presley suffered from vertigo, back pain, insomnia, eye infections, and headaches. In 1973, he was hospitalized in a semi-coma, diagnosed with jaundice, severe respiratory distress, facial swelling, a bloated abdomen, constipation, a bleeding gastric ulcer, and hepatitis.
By 1975, he was hospitalized again with high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol, and megacolon, a condition where the large intestine becomes distended, potentially allowing toxins to flood the body. He also endured at least four near-fatal overdoses, and his heart was reportedly twice its normal size, despite never having smoked, he also developed emphysema.
Dr. Tennant’s groundbreaking theory, detailed in a 2013 medical paper, posits that a serious head injury sustained by Elvis in 1967 was the root cause of his health decline.
When Presley stumbled over a television cord and hit his head on a bathtub, the trauma was severe enough to cause brain tissue to break loose and enter his bloodstream. His body then mounted an immune response, treating this material as a foreign threat and creating antibodies to attack it, leading to hypogammaglobulinemia, an immune system disorder.
At the time, autoimmune conditions were poorly understood. However, today, they are recognized as the cause of many symptoms Elvis experienced, including chronic pain, erratic behavior, weight gain, and damage to vital organs like the heart and bowels. In 2016, Garry Rodgers, a former homicide detective and forensic coroner, stated that based on these findings, he would have classified Elvis’s death as a heart attack resulting from heart disease and medication use, stemming from an autoimmune disease triggered by a brain injury.
Rodgers concluded, “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 and Roll.”
As 2027 approaches, the world awaits the official release of the autopsy report, hoping for definitive answers to the long-standing questions surrounding the passing of an undeniable legend.