This week would have seen a big milestone for Elvis Presley – his 90th birthday – but sadly, the King of Rock and Roll with fascinating Irish roots life ended all too soon.
On August 16, 1977, the 42-year-old musician was found face down on the bathroom floor of his home in Graceland with his lower half undressed.
The news of his untimely death shocked people around the world, leading to many theories about the cause. In the months leading up to his death, Elvis’s health had taken a turn for the worse, with significant weight gain and increasing health issues that made everyday life a struggle.
He was no longer the energetic, charismatic star he once was, and his poor condition left fans saddened by his passing. The exact cause of Elvis’s death remains unclear due to his family’s decision to keep the autopsy results private for 50 years.
However, experts have put forth various theories, one of which points to a previous injury as a contributing factor.
It was Elvis’s girlfriend, Ginger Alden, who found him on the bathroom floor that day. In her memoir, she described the scene, 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.”, reports the Mirror.
“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 conducted on the same day, but the report was immediately sealed, leading to a wave of speculation about the cause of his death.
Dan Warlick, the chief investigator for the Tennessee Office of the State Chief Medical Examiner, who attended the autopsy, supported the popular theory that Elvis died while straining on the toilet. He once stated: “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. Put simply, the strain of attempting to defecate compressed the singer’s abdominal aorta, shutting down his heart.”
Some suggested he’d died from a drug overdose, but when the investigation was reopened in 1994, coroner Joseph Davis disagreed.
He clarified: “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.”
The autopsy results are set to be revealed in 2027, but until then, the most significant insight into the star’s mysterious death has come from renowned California physician, Forest Tennant, who had the opportunity to review the report while defending Elvis’ doctor, Dr. George Nichopoulos, who was later cleared of over-prescribing drugs. For Mr Tennant, a major clue lay in the full-body deterioration of Elvis, with nearly every organ suffering from poor health.
As a young man, Elvis had been incredibly fit, engaging in football and martial arts. He did begin abusing drugs including amphetamines, opioids and sedatives as a teenager and is known to have had a terrible diet.
However, for Tennant, this wasn’t enough to explain the extensive list of ailments that plagued the rock star from the late 1960s onwards. Initially, he complained of vertigo, back pain, 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 facial swelling, 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.
Despite never having 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.
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 stated: “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.”