CHRISTIANS IN ROME


by Michael Fairchild

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In an interview for KPFA radio, broadcast on Jimi's birthday in 1982, Eric Burdon discussed the morning that Jimi died and said, "The only thing I remember specifically and clearly is [Monika's] car was parked outside and it was a cold morning and the fog was in the back window of the car, and [Jimi] had written in the window on the car, on his way down to the apartment the night before, he'd written 'LOVE' on the back window of the car. And I remember standing outside looking at the window of the car, you know, and I knew it was his handwriting."

In light of new evidence indicating that Jimi died before 5:30 a.m that morning, the above comments are of interest because we must wonder just how early it was when Burdon arrived at Monika Dannemann's flat and noticed "fog" on the car windows. On the day that Jimi died (Sept. 18, 1970), the temperature in London reached 74 degrees. One would expect that night "fog" would be burned away by the morning sun well before 9 a.m. If Burdon saw fog, he must have been at Jimi's death scene earlier. It will be of interest to obtain hourly temperature readings of London weather for that morning and determine precisely how early it was that Burdon arrived there. [Prior to Burdon's statement about the window fog everyone had been led to believe by Monika that she didn't realize Jimi was in trouble until past 11 a.m. that morning. Keep this in mind while reading what follows.]

In addition to Burdon's statement, we should also re-examine an interview that Amsterdam radio conducted with Monika on Sept. 19, 1975. "We stayed home till about 12 o'clock," Monika said of that last night with Jimi, "and then I drove him to a flat of some friends of his, and he stayed there for about half an hour, and then I picked him up again. We talked till about 7 o'clock in the morning, and then I started to sleep, and I woke up about 9 o'clock and Jimi was still asleep and I just couldn't sleep, but after a while I realized that he got sick. Well, at first I tried to wake him up and I just couldn't, he didn't wake up, so I called the ambulance, which came after 10 minutes, and they checked him and I asked them if he would be alright again and they said yes, sure, there's nothing special about it, he'll be OK again. While we were driving in the ambulance they seated Jimi on a chair, but with his head backwards, which I found out only later that this was the worst position they could have put him in because he couldn't breath properly, because he had been sick. We got to the hospital and immediately got Jimi in a special room. At first they said to me he will be alright. I went to the doctors to ask what happened and they said he'd be alright, and then about a half an hour later they told me he was dead...I do believe that he got poisoned."

Contradicting Monika, both of the ambulance attendants who arrived on the scene that morning said that the flat was empty except for Jimi's dead body. Neither of these men have any recollection of ever having laid eyes on Monika. This is supported by the fact that they had to call the police. When a body is found in an empty flat, it is standard procedure for London Ambulance Service attendants to immediately call the police before anything at the scene is moved. The attendants were unable to identify the body, there was no one there to even say that this was Jimi Hendrix. And both attendants insist that they handled Jimi's body properly, laying him flat inside the ambulance, not upright "seated on a chair," as charged by Monika.

In addition, both of the attendants, as well as Ian Smith (the police officer who was called to the scene) swear that no one else rode along in the ambulance with Jimi's body, as Monika claims she did. What's more, Dr. Seifert, who tended to Jimi's body when it arrived at the hospital, insists that there was "no woman at admissions." Referring to Monika's claim that she was told at the hospital that Jimi was alright, and her claim to have gone in to view Jimi's body after being told of his death, Dr. Seifert insists, "No nurse went out to say we'd revived him...and no one would have been allowed to look at him or stand over him. That would never have been done."

Clearly, lies have been/are being told about the circumstances surrounding the death of Hendrix. In the face of all of these opposing accounts of that morning it is infuriating that the original 1970 inquest was such a botched up investigation. For more than 22 years we were left only with Monika's story of what happened. We have been led to regard the two ambulance attendants as everything from inept fools to criminally negligent conspirators. Having finally been tracked down and interviewed (as they should have been in 1970), the question is obvious: have these men been both libeled and slandered before an international audience for over two decades? What's more, has the general public's view of Jimi as the "drug addict zombie responsible for his own death" been the result of a cover up by "other hands" that were at play that morning? We don't know how Monika's nine sleeping pills got into Jimi's system. But in the absence for so many years of so many crucial testimonies to cross reference, public perception of his death remains outrageously manipulated.

If any one of the people with him early in the morning on Sept. 18, 1970 were more responsible for what happened (accident or foul play) than we've been led to believe, they have, until now, been successful in shifting that responsibility onto Jimi and forever condemned him to a public stigma of "irresponsible drug addict." Has Jimi been so pathetically sacrificed?…If "20th century" authorities refuse to complete their inexcusably botched 1970 inquest properly they can count on us to describe their folly in detail for Jimi's billions of future fans to look back and condemn what has been wrought.

Can any of us even believe that the mainstream media, especially in the United States, has been so conspiratorially ignoring this story? An inept British inquest set the stage for Jimi's media crucifixion and establishment watchdogs everywhere remain blind or asleep. The wall separating Hendrix fact from fiction is as high as the Tower of Babel, and in its shadow we are left to rail at the authorities like early Christian in Rome. We are early Christians in Rome...

Every one of us can spare an hour of our time to write a letter to the Attorney General's Office in London to help persuade them to do the right thing and re-open this inquest. The millions of people who have responded to Jimi, and the billions more who will respond, deserve this. But most of all, Jimi deserves this. write to:

Mr. J.D. Kellock
The Legal Secretariat to the Law Officers
Attorney General's Chamber
9 Buckingham Gate
London SW1E 6JP England

Doctors and attendants who handled Jimi's body recall him being covered with a large amount of red wine. Yet medical records show his blood alcohol level was 46 mgs when he died, meaning that his system hadn't absorbed a lot of wine, 46 milligrams when converted to ounces equals 0.0016 of an ounce - practically nothing. So a lot of wine got into him and then he quickly died, heart stops, absorption ceases, a small amount of alcohol got into his bloodstream, yet there was lots of wine spilled all over/around him. He drowned. Was it a forced drowning? Did someone hold him and pour the wine in? Why was his hair, clothes, and bedding covered in so much wine? It's too suspicious.

[NOTE: A research thief called Mr. Rob(ber)y has appeard in a British documentary which credits him for the work Michael Fairchild did with Kathy Etchingham and Dee Mitchell about Jimi's death.

Also, please be aware that for years the owners and staff at the Yahoo search engine have artificially/surgically removed this rockprophecy.com website from all listings under the words "jimi hendrix." Following the example of Paul Allen, the owners of Yahoo are intent on concealing the insights and research of Hendrix scholar Michael Fairchild, out of sheer pathological jealousy.
- James Sedgwick]