WHO KILLED JIMI HENDRIX?*
by
David Comfort & Karl Ferris
The tragic death of 27-year-old Jimi Hendrix, considered by many the greatest rock guitarist, remains one of the most controversial and talked-about unsolved mysteries in pop history. Now, after fifty long years, the case has at last been broken.
Like many short-lived rock icons – John Lennon, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, to name a few – Jimi Hendrix, the acclaimed "Guitar God," heard his train coming early on. ”I’m not sure I will live to be twenty-eight years old,” he had told friends. “He kept repeating that he was going to die before he was thirty,” recalled Colette Mimram, his lover.
Just before noon on September 18, 1970, an ambulance arrived at London’s St. Mary’s Hospital, with the body of the star. Dr. John Bannister, the physician on duty, later testified: “Jimi Hendrix had been dead for some time…Someone apparently poured red wine down his throat to intentionally cause asphyxiation.” The coroner’s report, however, dismissed the case as “death by misadventure.”
What exactly transpired in the fateful period just prior to this “misadventure”?
Jimi had arrived in London three days earlier following the Love and Peace Festival on the German Isle of Fehmarn where Hell’s Angels security men torched the stage and attacked his roadies. Bassist, Billy Cox, feared they wouldn’t make it home alive. “We’re gonna die!” he kept sobbing on the plane from Hamburg, “Nobody’s gonna die,” Jimi kept telling his old Army buddy. But, on arrival in London the next day, Jimi told his confidante, journalist Sharon Lawrence, “Lately I’ve been thinking that I’m surrounded by wolves.” Who were these wolves?
Jimi had signed with his manager, Michael Jeffery, in the fall of 1966. At that time Jeffery managed the Animals, having commandeered the group from his mentor, Don Arden, the self-described “English Godfather of Rock” who often said: “The people I scare are going to have to keep looking over their shoulders for the rest of their lives." Wrote the Animal’s Eric Burdon in his biography: “Jeffery’s own mob sprang up around him like morning mushrooms. His main enforcer was The Turk, a nasty bastard, whose tools of choice were an axe and two highly trained German shepherds.” The singer went on to describe how Jeffery, fluent in Russian, boasted of having been a trained British Intelligence Cold War assassin and munitions expert, how he later burnt down his Club Marimba for the insurance money, and how he absconded with all the Animals’ money.
According to Hendrix biographer, Harry Shapiro, Jeffrey often boasted of "undercover work against the Russians, of murder, mayhem and torture in foreign cities.”
Jeffery toured Jimi and the Experience relentlessly after their apotheosis at Monterey Pop in’67. By ‘69, the guitarist was earning $100,000 per gig, but was told by Jeffery that it was only $50,000. Jimi was too exhausted and drugged out to realize that he was virtually broke while his manager was a multi-millionaire with Yameta tax shelter numbered-accounts in the Bahamas which insiders called “the Bermuda Triangle of untold vanished millions.” At last, burnt out on touring and declaring “I don’t want to be a clown anymore,” Jimi told his manager he was disbanding the Experience. No sooner did he reveal his intention than he was busted for heroin possession in Toronto. He came to suspect that Jeffery, desperate that he might lose his cash cow, had planted the dope and engineered the bust so he, Jimi, would be forced to keep the Experience alive to foot his legal expenses.
Four months later, just after closing out Woodstock, Hendrix was kidnapped at gunpoint, held hostage for three days, then “rescued” in a dramatic armed stand-off at his Woodstock compound. Soon he came to suspect that his manager was behind this intimidation too. Days later, Jeffery arrived at Jimi's retreat to convince him to play The Salvation, a small Mafia-owned club in New York City. He was accompanied by two thugs who started shooting their pistols at trees "for target practice.” Intimidated, Jimi agreed.
Though the British press had originally labelled Hendrix “the black Elvis,” Experience album buyers and concert-goers were mostly white. Jeffery did not want to lose this insatiable, deep-pocketed audience. So, when Jimi fired Noel Redding and Mitch Michell and launched his new all-black Band of Gypsies, Jeffery sabotaged the band’s concerts by dosing the trio with bad acid. The group folded at the end of ’69 after a disastrous Madison Square Garden gig. Then Jeffery immediately set to work coaxing Redding and Mitchell back for a resurrected Experience. Later, the Gypsies’ Buddy Miles declared: “One of the biggest reasons why Jimi is dead is because of that guy. He didn’t want him playing in an all-black band.” Before Hendrix formed the Gypsies, the Black Panthers had been calling him a “coconut” for having a white band, a white manager, and a harem of white girlfriends. “The only colors I see are in my music,” Jimi told them. During a Gypsies concert he seemed to change his mind when, after The Power of Soul, he introduced Voodoo Child with, “It’s a black militant song and don’t you ever forget it!” Jeffery was furious. When the Gypsies died, Jimi threatened to sack him, but soon backed off saying: “The devil you know is better than the one you don’t.”
Hendrix’s management contract was to expire on December 1, 1970. The day after he arrived in London from Germany, he convinced his friend, Alan Douglas, Miles Davis’s manager, to replace Jeffery. Jimi wanted to get off the road to pursue a less commercial, jazz direction, with Gil Evans and Miles Davis. Douglas promised him complete freedom to do so.
Hearing through one of his informants in Jimi’s entourage of the possible defection, Jeffery accused Douglas of “trying to steal my artist.” On the morning of September 17, Jimi phoned his New York lawyers, informing them that he would be relieving Jeffery of his management duties. Meaning that Douglas, in taking over the books, would discover the ex-spy’s embezzlement and mismanagement over the years. Meaning the end of Jeffery’s career, plus bankruptcy, if not imprisonment.
No sooner did Douglas leave for New York to file the paperwork, than the wolves began to arrive in London: paternity suit lawyers representing Jimi’s ex-lover, Diane Carpenter; PPX record producer, Ed Chalpin seeking huge reparations for a breach of contract; New York "Good Fellas" after interest payments on their long-overdue loans for the Electric Ladyland money pit; ex-girlfriends who wanted another piece of Hendrix; and Jeffery himself who wanted everything.
“If I’m free,” Jimi once said, “it’s because I’m always running.” Now, paranoid and running like never before, his drug habit was spiraling out of control. The month before, when the Who’s Pete Townsend saw Jimi, he found him in “tragically bad condition physically” and a “psychological mess.” Other musician friends, such as Steve Miller and Johnny Winter, had said the same. Soon after arriving in London, Jimi staggered into a London Club, and Eric Burdon was “devastated” by what he saw. “Jimi was a mess – dirty, out of control like I’d never seen him,” recalled the Animals’ singer who had forewarned his friend about Jeffery. “He had a head full of something – heroin, ludes, or German sleeping pills.”
The pills belonged to one Monika Dannemann, an ex-figure skater, now artiste painter-photographer, who had suddenly turned up in London with the others. Burdon described the groupie as a “stalker” who had “followed Jimi around Europe.” Days before, Hendrix had broken up with his fiancée de jour, actress Kristen Nefer. Now Monika insisted Jimi had proposed to her after only three days together. To prove it, she showed off what she claimed was an engagement ring with the image of a coiled snake.
Jimi spent the early evening of his last day dining and partying with Sir Phillip Harvey, son of a Parliamentarian Lord. When Harvey’s houseguests, two foxy teens, began hitting on Jimi, Monika went into a tirade, calling her alleged fiancé a “fucking pig.” Harvey later testified that, on hearing her violent outburst outside as they left, he feared the girl “might resort to serious violence.”
But, according to her own later account, instead of breaking their engagement, the happy couple drove back to her hotel, the Samarkand, and enjoyed a romantic evening.
In fact, at Jimi’s insistence, Monika dropped him off at record producer Peter Cameron’s flat. In attendance at the party were Jimi’s friends who distrusted Monika, especially his former black lover, Devon Wilson, aka “Dolly Dagger” who had come to London with Douglas to sort Jimi out. Days before, Devon had attacked Dannemann at Ronnie Scott’s club, kicking her out of the chair she, Devon, had been using. Hours after dropping Jimi off at the party, Monika returned and, from a phone booth across the street, from which she may have also have alerted Jeffery, demanded that he leave. Devon and others shouted out a window: “Fuck off and leave him alone!” But Monika kept frantically ringing back. At last, at about 3 a.m, Jimi left. This was the last any of his friends would see him again.
***
According to Monika, safely back at the Samarkand with her fiancé, “there was no stress or argument, it was a happy atmosphere,” she recalled in her memoir. She and Jimi talked about having a family, he wrote a poem for her, then they took her German sleeping pills and went to bed. The pills were prescription Vesparax, a potent form of Seconal. Monika said she gave Jimi – a longtime insomniac with a huge resistance to barbiturates – four. “He was very happy before I went to sleep," she went on. "He had no personal troubles.”
Later, when police found a Vesparax 10-pack under the bed, with nine pills missing, Monika surmised that Jimi had taken four more while she slept.
Eric Burdon recalled that “at first light of dawn” he was awakened by an hysterical Monika on the phone, saying she couldn’t stir Jimi. Eric’s girlfriend, Alvinia Bridges, was the first to arrive at the Samarkand, followed by Jimi’s roadies. Recalled one, Terry Slater: “Jimi was lying fully clothed on the bed, knackered” (dead). Soon Burdon arrived and, saying he couldn’t “look at the mess,” got everybody busy removing the drugs and guitars from the flat. Hours later at 11:27, after they finished their business, they waited outside in their car. Then an ambulance, responding to their anonymous phone call, arrived at the Samarkand. The ambulance men, John Saua and Reginald Jones, found the door open and nothing inside except a body on the bed. Saua later testified that Hendrix was covered in dried vomit, his airway was blocked, and his tongue fallen back. Jones added: “His mother wouldn't have recognized him… his bowels and bladder had let go, all that goes when you’re dead.”
Dr. John Bannister, the physician on duty at St Mary Abbot’s hospital when the ambulance arrived, later testified: “He had no pulse, no heartbeat and the attempt to resuscitate him was merely a formality…Red wine was coming out of his nose and out of his mouth. It was horrific.” He described how he tried to clear the singer’s windpipe with a 18-inch metal suction tube. “We didn't work on him for long, just a few minutes - as he had been dead for hours,” recalled his partner, Dr. Martin Seifert. The coroner, Dr. Gavin Thurston, reported the cause of death as “inhalation of vomit following barbiturate intoxication.”
The case resulted in an official “open verdict” and remained dormant for the next twenty years. In 1990 Kathy Etchingham, said to be Jimi’s longest and truest love, and Dee Mitchell, wife of Experience drummer, Mitch Mitchell, undertook a private investigation. They secured the statements of the ambulance men and St. Mary’s medical team. On the merits of their evidence, Scotland Yard reopened the case in late 1992, taking sworn statements of all the principals. But, after only a few months, investigators dismissed the case as “Inconclusive” stating it was “no longer in the public interest to re-open the original inquest." This intensified conspiracy theories relating to the Yard’s relationship with the FBI’s COINTELPRO counter-intelligence program targeting subversives – rock stars and Black Panthers. Due to Mike Jeffery’s background in British Intelligence, some wondered if he was a co-conspirator.
In 1995 Monika Dannemann released The Inner World of Jimi Hendrix. The book was filled with her otherworldly paintings of "my soul mate," among them: Jimi crowned by lightning from God's hand, and Monica peering into mystical waters beholding not her face but Jimi’s. Three years later, Kathy Etchingham released her own Hendrix memoir, Through Gypsy Eyes. In 1996 the two women sued each other. Dannemann was found guilty of Libel and Contempt of Court, and fined.
Days later, just before she was scheduled to do a tell-all to a London radio station, she was found asphyxiated in her Mercedes. Dannemann’s seventeen-year companion, Scorpion guitarist, Uri Roth, dismissed the possibility that she had taken her own life. “She considered suicide a sin,” he said, and added that she had received many death threats.
Dannemann herself had said that she’d met with Michael Jeffery shortly after Jimi’s death, and that he had warned her of dire consequences should she write a book. Instead, he “offered to pay me a large sum every month and to make me famous through my paintings with him as my manager,” she wrote.
The ex-spy employed moles to stay current on Jimi's hideouts and activities. Could Dannemann have been one of them? Who could be a more dedicated mole than an infatuated, star-obsessed stalker? However, Sharon Lawrence, who released her own memoir in 2005, believed Dannemann was more than a mole. Lawrence, Jimi’s confidante, phoned Dannemann shortly before her alleged 1996 suicide and demanded: “When he was choking, gasping for breath, did you pour red wine down his throat? I KNOW you did!” Wept Monika: “It was all untidy. He was messy. I thought it would help.” But, earlier, in 1975 she'd told an interviewer: “I do believe that he got poisoned, that he actually got murdered. There’s quite a powerful group behind all that. I think it is the Mafia.”
Lawrence, writing that Jimi in the last days “was walking around in the middle of a nervous breakdown,” at first concluded that he had committed suicide. Days after the death, Eric Burdon expressed the same opinion to a BBC interviewer: He called The Story of Life — the poem Jimi had allegedly written that night and that was conspicuously planted on a bedside table — a suicide note. The piece ends: “The story of life is quicker than a wink of an eye. The story of love is hello and good-bye until we meet again.” But Burdon soon recanted the statement, explaining that he had been stoned and distraught at the time.
So, only two possibilities remained: OD or murder. In 2009, Tappy Wright, an Animals’ roadie, published his autobiography Rock Roadie, claiming that Jeffery had confessed the murder to him in 1971. “That son of a bitch was going to leave me,” the manager allegedly told him. “If I lost him, I’d lose everything!”
In his interview on YouTube in 2016, Jeffrey’s US management partner, Bob Levine, who sued Jeffery in 1976, said: “It could have been murder… I have my suspicions, but no proof.” Furthermore, according to the VelvetRocket, Levine sent Wright a letter just after the publication of Rock Roadie. “I’m so glad you honored the truth,” he wrote, “instead of all that regurgitated shit that comes out.” Moreover, when Alan Douglas met with Jeffery a week after Hendrix died, he recalled: “He [Jeffery] was feeling a lot of guilt and told me that in retrospect, due to the pressure of loans, he felt he hadn’t treated Jimi properly. One thing he said to me I don’t think I’ve told anybody, but it’s something I’ll never forget: ‘Every time I was with a woman I thought I could love, I found she was only with me to get to Jimi.’ It was like a confession...In my opinion, Jeffrey hated Hendrix."
The question, then, becomes: Who had the most to gain from the death of Jimi Hendrix? Who, therefore, had the greatest motivation to lie and cover-up? Michael Jeffery or Monika Dannemann, or both? Fiancée or not, Monika had only known Hendrix for three days and was surely aware of his prolific romantic history. Under those circumstances, jealous she may have been, but homicidally so?
Noel Redding, Mitch Mitchell, Eric Burdon, Buddy Miles, Chas Chandler, Devon Wilson, Alan Douglas, Ed Chalpin and many others believed Mike Jeffery was responsible for Hendrix’s death. But, given the ex-spy’s cunning, exactly how? According to reliable sources, Jeffery ordered three of his enforcers to drug and waterboard Jimi into submission that night. No doubt familiar to the ex-spy, forced hydration of this kind was a Cold War torture and “persuasion” technique. Far more terrifying than his earlier intimidations – the kidnapping and drug bust – Jeffery was determined that Jimi get the message loud and clear this time: Stick with me, or die. But the waterboarding went too far, the struggle was fierce, and Jimi fatally aspirated. As ambulanceman, John Saua, had originally testified: "He [Hendrix] must have put up a real struggle by the looks of the flat." Had the case been properly investigated, the result would have been severe. Under British law, the perpetrators and their boss, Jeffery – even though their intention may not have been to kill -- would have been prosecuted for “Transferred Malice” murder and faced life imprisonment.
But how had Jeffery discovered the elusive Jimi’s whereabouts in the first place? Monika hated her black rival, Devon, and Jeffery hated Devon too, holding her responsible for Jimi’s involvement with the Panthers, for the formation of the all-black Band of Gypsies, and for his defection to Douglas. In short, Jeffery and Dannemann were anti-Devon allies. The desperate and left-out Dannemann likely called him from outside the Devon party. Jeffery then dispatched his team and they overpowered a stoned Jimi as he returned to the Samarkand with Monika. The prescient 2004 docudrama, Hendrix: The Last 24 hours, imagined three attackers -- one holding Hendrix, the other pouring wine, the third handling Monica. Hendrix’s latest biographer, Mick Wall, in Two Riders Were Approaching, suggested a similar scenario.
Jeffery was last seen at a September 17th Track Records party, the day before Jimi’s death. But when back in Mallorca, he told everyone he’d never left the island. Bob Levine, his assistant manager, had for seven days been unsuccessfully trying to phone him about funeral arrangements. When he finally got through, Jeffery unbelievably claimed that he had not even heard of Jimi’s death. Then suddenly he snapped, "I always knew that son of a bitch would pull a quickie!”
So, Jeffery pulled it off: his management contract was renewed by default, Douglas was defeated, and Devon suffered a fatal fall from a Chelsea Hotel window. Jeffery collected a million-pound insurance policy he had taken out on Jimi naming himself as personal beneficiary, and he took over the Hendrix estate which generated millions annually. Jimi’s bassist, Noel Redding – who would become a penniless woodcutter – estimated that the Experience had earned 30 to $40 million, but said, “No one knows where it went.”
In a final truth-stranger-than-fiction development, Jeffery – in 1973, days before he was scheduled to return to London to face huge lawsuits relating to his embezzlement, money laundering, and fraud – was reportedly killed in a suspicious airline collision over France, during an air controller strike. Burdon and Redding, among others, speculated that the former demolition expert checked baggage but never boarded the flight, a simple ploy in those days before computer check-ins. When Jimi’s former tour manager, Gerry Stickells, arrived to identify the body, French authorities declined to show him the “unrecognizable” charred remains of Jeffery. So, Stickells could only ID his former employer’s jewelery, which may have been in the checked baggage. There is no record of investigators checking for DNA or dental chart confirmation.
Nor did authorities explain how the manager’s plane, a large DC-9, exploded in midair killing all sixty-six aboard, while the much smaller colliding plane, a Coronado, sustained only wing damage and limped back to the airport with all eight passengers alive and well. Nor would they – or, to date, will they -- reveal any information about the possible involvement of a third plane, a military craft, although military aircraft paint was found scraped on the wreckage. The debris and frozen body parts from the DC-9 fell 29,500 feet, spreading out over a 10-mile radius — the sign of a detonated bomb onboard, not a simple collision.
Jeffery’s supposed remains were interred in London. However, eight years later, as a new murder investigation was opened by the police, they were hastily disinterred and immediately cremated, eliminating any possibility of a DNA analysis and confirmation of identity.
In the flush of his storied career, Jimi Hendrix sang in Voodoo Child, “I stand up next to a mountain, and I chop it down with the edge of my hand!” Later, seeking a rebirth with his Band of Gypsies, he sang in Machine Gun: “I pick up my axe and fight like a bomber now, yeah but you still blast me down to the ground!” In his last film, Rainbow Bridge, he recounts his vision, "Choking On the Grape": “The grape chokes me, but I can’t let the choke come up.”
In the end, James Marshall Hendrix was desperate to be reborn in a new musical life, beyond stardom, which would fulfill his legacy not as a star but as a true, multi-dimensional creative genius. As he lay lifeless and initially unidentified in St. Mary’s hospital fifty long years ago, one can almost hear the song he wrote for his beloved mother who had also died senselessly, violently, and young.
A broom is drearily sweeping up
the broken pieces of yesterday's life.
Will the wind ever remember
The names it has blown in the past,
And The Wind Cries Mary…
And so, the Guitar God was gone, but his immortal Voodoo Child refrain lives on: “If I don’t meet you no more in this world, then I’ll meet you in the next one, don’t be late.”
*Copyright © 2020 by David Comfort & Karl Ferris. All Rights Reserved
David Comfort: Author of The Rock&Roll Book of the Dead.
Karl Ferris: Art Designer & photographer of Jimi Hendrix Experience’s first two albums.
Just-released The Karl Ferris Psychedelic Experience photo book preview:
The author is a Pushcart Fiction Prize nominee, and has been a finalist for the Faulkner Award, Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren, America’s Best, Narrative, Glimmer Train, Helicon Nine, and Heekin Graywolf Fellowship. His current short fiction appears in The Evergreen Review, Cortland Review, The Morning Newes, Scholars & Rogues, and Inkwell.
