Kill the Music: Red, Red Wine

This post was edited for accuracy on October 5, 2006.

The official story of Jimi Hendrix’s death originates largely in the accounts given by Monika Dannemann to the press, the police, and the coroner. Yet, other, apparently credible witnesses give a story so conflicting as to the accounts of Hendrix’s final minutes of life, that both versions completely negate each other. They simply cannot both be true in any regard. Either one is completely false, or they are both completely false.


Dannemann’s Version/The Official Version

Hendrix and Dannemann attend a party on the afternoon of September 17, 1970, where they sipped wine, ate a vegetarian rice dish, and mingled with guests. Afterward, they repaired to the Samarkand Hotel, where Dannemann lived in a rather dingy basement apartment, instead of the more comfortable Cumberland Hotel where Hendrix had already paid for a room.

At approximately 11:00pm Hendrix received a call to meet persons unknown to Dannemann (and consequently to history). Hendrix somehow anticipated the call, and it made him quite anxious. Already coming down from an acid trip, he became extremely frightened, and upset. At around 10:30pm, he telephoned Chas Chandler, but could not reach him. So he left an agitated, but incoherent message on Chandler’s answering machine. In an effort to calm down, he then took a street tranquilizer known as a “black bomber” moments before a car arrived and took him away to who knows where.

Hendrix returned to the Samarkand at 3:00am on the morning of September 18. Still wound up, and hungry, Dannemann fixed him a tuna fish sandwich, and they talked on the bed until she fell asleep at approximately 6:00am. She awoke about four hours later, and went to the kitchen to smoke two cigarettes, before heading out to the store to buy another pack.

When she returned, at about 10:30am, Dannemann checked in on Hendrix and noticed that he had taken two of her Vesperax. Here, Hendrix might have been a victim of cross-cultural misunderstanding. In the US, one often takes such medications in doses of two. Vesperax, however, was extremely potent. The recommended dosage required the user to break a single tablet into four parts, then take a quarter of it. In other words, Hendrix had unwittingly swallowed eight doses. Still, this was nowhere close to fatal.

When Dannemann looked closer, she could see “sick” on the tip of his nose, yet, he was breathing normally, and his pulse matched hers. She called Eric Burdon to ask for advice, around 11:00am. Burdon told her that Hendrix was probably just tired, and that she should let him sleep. An hour later, she called again when repeated efforts to wake him proved futile. Burdon then told her to call an ambulance.

Paramedics revived Hendrix, and sat him in a chair. Dannemann watched as Jimi repeated tried to bend his head over to vomit. But the attendants kept pushing his head up, thus causing him to swallow what he could. Everything else went down his windpipe. Ultimately, they decided to strap him into the chair so that he couldn’t move his head at all, and it is at this point where he drowned.

Dannemann rode with Hendrix via ambulance to St. Mary Abbot’s Hospital. When she arrived hospital staff kept her from accompanying Hendrix to the emergency room—that was because, she believed, the nurses and physician on duty disapproved of interracial relationships. She caused quite a commotion arguing her case, but to no avail. A doctor came out about an hour later and told her that Hendrix had died.

Dr. Gavin Thurston, the coroner who conducted the official inquest the following week, declared that Hendrix had drowned on his own vomit because his gag reflex had been suppressed by a mild overdose of Vesperax. While that might have explained (if true) how Hendrix died, Thurston declined to answer any questions of why he died, and thus issued an open verdict in the case. In other words, the coroner never ruled out the possibilities of accidental overdose, suicide, or murder.


Reginald Jones, John Saua, and Dr. John Bannister’s Version

Paramedics Reginald Jones and John Saua got a call at about 11:15:am to report to Dannemann’s basement flat. They arrived precisely at 11:27am, only to find Hendrix’s body lying in a pool of vomit and red liquid in an empty apartment. Although they knew he was long dead, they did not have the credentials to declare him thus. So they did the standard procedures given to them by training, and called police for permission to transport the fallen rock star to St. Mary Abbot’s Hospital, where ER physician Dr. John Bannister worked on him for an hour before officially declaring him dead.

Although Dr. Bannister issued the statement of death at about the time that the official version declared Hendrix dead, the state of the body—the temperature, the discoloration of his mouth and mucous membranes, etc.—told him that Hendrix had died much earlier, approximately 3:00am that morning.

Jimi Hendrix had been dead for some time, without a doubt, hours rather than minutes. He didn't have any pulse. The inside of his mouth and mucous membranes were black because he had been dead for some time. He had had no circulation through his tissues at any time immediately prior to coming to hospital…

Dr. Bannister, Jones and Saua flatly contradict the bulk of the official story. Hendrix, they said, was not alive when the ambulance arrived. Dannemann was nowhere to be found. Furthermore, while Dannemann said Hendrix had eaten a tuna fish sandwich shortly before his death, the only foodstuff that Dr. Banister could pull out of Jimi was a copious amount of yellow rice.

The most important contradiction, however, is the cause of death. Dr. Thurston, the coroner, said Hendrix drowned in his own vomit. Dr. Bannister, the physician actively attending Hendrix said that the guitarist died from drowning, all right, but not in vomit. According to Bannister, Hendrix drowned in red wine:

[Red wine] was coming out of his nose and out of his mouth. It was horrific. The whole scene is very vivid, because you don't often see people who have drowned in their own red wine. There was red wine all over him, I think that he was naked but he had something around him—whether it was a towel or a jumper—around his neck. That was saturated in red wine. His hair was matted…The medical staff used an 18 inch metal sucker to try to clear Hendrix's airway, but it would just fill up with red wine from the stomach…

This is curious for a number of reasons. First of all, Hendrix didn’t like red wine. He preferred white. While it’s possible he might have had a glass or two for social reasons, we still have to wonder why Hendrix would willingly drink enough of the stuff to drown in it. Furthermore, Dr. Bannister’s blood alcohol test showed that Hendrix was only slightly above the legal limit. Had he simply been drinking red wine in that quantity, Hendrix’s blood alcohol level should have been much higher.

If true, Dr. Bannister’s steadfast insistence on this cause of death can only mean that someone forced red wine down Hendrix’s throat. So if we go with the observations of the doctor who actually attended Jimi as patient, then we can come to only one conclusion about his death: murder.

To read earlier posts in this series, click here.