What Killed the King of Pop?: The Complex Death of Michael Jackson

hello and welcome to the doc exchange a real stories podcast in partnership with the grierson trust every week i'll ask a new filmmaker or filmmaking team about three documentaries connected by a single theme that have made a meaningful impression on their work and life [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] yes sir i need to i i need an ambulance as soon as possible so i have we have a gentleman here that needs help and he's not breathing you're talking about michael jackson here it was absolutely huge there was a lot of pressure

to get it right this isn't a man who should have died [Music] he's not breathing yeah he's not breathing and we need to we're trying to pump him but he's not he's okay okay he's 50 years old sir okay he's unconscious he's not breathing yes he's not breathing when we were dispatched to a 50 year old male cardiac arrest we think this is a viable patient this is someone if we get to in a timely manner we can save and then when i enter this room opulent room with medical equipment in it i realize there's

something unusual here what 50 year old male would be laying in bed at noon with medical equipment we're not looking at the patient at that moment until my partner did he looked up and whispered the name michael jackson when i realized who it was i was surprised we had no idea he was there none of us had any idea who was living in our neighborhood did anybody witness what happened no just the doctor sir there was a man with our patient who identified himself as the doctor and as such i immediately asked him some information

what had happened how long has this been going on and he told me then it had just happened this was a patient to me that it seemed that he had not just passed away that some time had gone by before we were notified and in fact later when you're reflecting on this call the days the weeks the months afterwards one of the greatest regrets that all of us had was that we had not been called sooner when we came outside that's when we became aware of a very large presence we were trying to back out

on the street only to be hindered by many many cameramen putting their lenses against the glass windows of the moving ambulance [Music] people seem to forget or don't realize about this investigation it was a death investigation it really wasn't a crime at the time from the information that i had it was probably an accident or natural and we would find out that he had some pre-existing medical condition and then we would be done just look at what we knew in the first hours of this taken to the hospital there wasn't a bloody knife there wasn't

a smoking gun there was nothing on the surface that would lead anyone to believe anything nefarious had occurred when i arrived at the hospital dr barry was gone so he was no longer there at the scene we're a bit of a panic then the one person that was in a room with them at the time that everything happened is no longer at the hospital there were several attempts right away to get a hold of dr murray that were negative that he they were going to voicemail you have family members jackson family members coming in and

people wanting some questions answered as well as us it is believed he suffered cardiac arrest in his home a team of doctors including emergency physicians and cardiologists attempted to resuscitate him the emergency room physician they believed it was a heart attack partly because of what mr murray had told them never told them anything about any other narcotics or anything they just believed he had had a heart attack and stopped breathing [Music] so here we are at the carrollwood house [Music] that day by the time i got here we had to block off this side of

the street the entrance side of the street and it was full of media vans we had never seen anything like it i had never seen anything like it [Music] there was the room where dr murray treated mr jackson and then there was a locked room which was uh mr jackson's bedroom there's a fireplace in the room and it was roaring so the room was very very hot there were like post-it notes or pieces of paper taped all over the room on mirrors on doors with little slogans or phrases i don't know if they were lyrics

or thoughts or some of them seemed like poems the bedroom was it was a mess [Music] in the room where he was being treated it did not seem like a room fit for any type of medical treatment not even like a home makeshift medical suite it was just bare bones i just remember going in there and there's an iv stand and a saline bag and just various medications strewn about there was a computer on the bed there was a lifelike doll on the bed and it's kind of like advertisements of uh pictures with babies everybody

knew about the allegations that had been leveled against mr jackson over the years one of the things when i saw the laptop on the bed do i go into it but you have to realize the type of case i was investigating when you get you know hold of investigation you have to kind of whittle out what is and what isn't it's like with any case um you don't allow whatever the victim was into prior to his death your investigation is focused on how did he die and who was responsible for it in the room where

he was being treated a bottle of propofol had fallen on the ground and rolled under this moving nightstand i didn't know what it did that ended up being a huge deal later i had no medical background whatsoever my neighbor was a doctor so i went to my neighbor and i asked him about it and my neighbor was the one who got it started of whoa what is this doing here this is only used in surgeries this is used to put people under we had put it out in the press that we were looking for dr

murray we still didn't think that there was anything criminal going on the only thing that we knew was this surgery drug was at the location it shouldn't have been there the next day get a call his attorney has been in contact he consents to an interview so our plan was to let him talk and uh that's what we did so um we didn't know what happened we didn't want to assume anything and we wanted to give the doctor an opportunity to dig his own hole if that was the case it was just you and michael

he was really not some of this okay and this night it was you just you and me and he proceeded to tell us that you know michael just couldn't sleep he was just so amped up about this upcoming concert he by nature had a hard time sleeping he gave him some drugs some valium lorazepam and diazepam and a few others to try and calm michael to try and get him to rest to fall asleep and nothing works he was wide awake i said do you feel a little bit drowsy do you think your eyes are

telling you want to sleep i said no dr murray says you know after trying all these various things nothing was working and it's in the early morning hours and the next day and so finally i just gave michael his milk and that time he said i'd like to have some milk nope hot cold milk what are we talking about he says oh well that's it's a medication does the medication have a name he says well it's propofol and this was again a big revelation during this interview that propofols mentioned and what is this it is

a sedative that could also be used for he freely admits that for months he's been using this to help mr jackson sleep okay you've administered it more than ten times yes more than twenty times thirty days a month roughly every day oh so it's about the daily in my head i was thinking what the heck to drug someone to sleep even with their permission the way that he did i didn't think it was legal i monitored i have been watching for long in that period that i felt comfortable he gave him propofol and then goes

to the bathroom comes back mr jackson's not breathing so i started immediately to perform cpr and multi-mode resuscitation he goes into a panic he tries cpr while michael's on the bed he summons alberto alvarez the head of security and ultimately alberto alvarez is the one that calls 9-1-1 when we reviewed the cctv at the mansion we saw that he carried in a bag with him and also the family and the security staff told us he would always carry a bag with him when he went to the hospital he did not have the bag with it

the biggest uh aha moment was when i had asked dr murray where his bags were where where's your bag with those syringes would be at now oh really it worked i thought you left it there he was assuming that we had it you haven't got my bags once he realized we didn't have that he's like you know deer in the headlights look if you will you know legally we can search the areas that are relevant it wasn't in the room that was relevant if you walk into the dressing room and you turn right but the

high level top the the bands uh left there with the items you know in those moments people aren't they're sharpest they're not thinking the best so it's our job to take those little mistakes that people make and build a case on them first thing monday morning went to the house went to where dr murray had said that the medical bag was different room in a closet in a cubby above the closet recovered the bag we recovered a treasure trove of evidence from murray's doctor's bag we found a bunch of more medicines that he had used

like propofol and lidocaine one of the other things that we found was we found all the waste all the trash the needles the empty bottles the stuff that when we went into the room should have been laying around so we knew that sometime during this medical emergency dr murray had stopped either giving cpr or had waited to give cpr and cleaned up everything so we're thinking what could be the reasons for that within 48 hours it appeared that it was a suspicious death in the sense that there was something more than just an overdose if

your goal is to preserve the life of the person that you're giving cpr to why would you pause that to pick up trash unless you're trying to hide something if he wouldn't have told us where it was or if he would have taken it with it we wouldn't have had it we would have lost that element of the hiding the trying to cover up we were now looking at murray he was behind the death [Music] not only do you have to do what you can for the victim but you also have to take into account

the organization you're johnny uniform that has that's been a part of history and growing up with the stories that you'd heard from the manson cases [Music] you know marilyn monroe all these notorious cases that you'd see and heard about growing up were part of lapd historically our department had not had very much success on high profile cases we had lost the oj case everybody remembers the bronco chase [Music] ourselves and the da's office allowed him to turn himself in and it turned into a pursuit in a hostage situation just ridiculous and even though you have

this overwhelming amount of evidence to secure a conviction you don't get it we the jury in the above and title action find the defendant orenthal james simpson not guilty of the crime of murder a felony upon nicole brown simpson a human being as charged in count one of the information for us working the cases we didn't want to make the same mistakes that have been made in the department's memory and in the public memory there was a lot of pressure to get it right [Music] me personally i thought that it was going to be horrible

the public scrutiny the second guessing this is kind of like when um the generation when kennedy was assassinated i now will remember that i was in times square you know when i found out that michael jackson passed away there was a lot more pressure if you will there was a lot of eyes on us obviously to get the job done it was daunting at times when i showed up to go into the autopsy you know they had a little you know cover over the window and they're looking to make sure it's just me and no

one else is around and they open the door and they usher me in right away and close the door and lock it i'm like oh my gosh you know we're in a controlled environment this is your office this is a coroner's office what's the problem everything had been cleared out of there i remember it being close to five hours long it was extraordinarily long the thing that was odd that i found myself periodically looking at was you know his his head his scalp because whenever he's out in public is wearing a wig [Music] looking at

his scalp and the top of his head and being you know severely scarred hardly any hair at all on the sides to what he would look like in public with the flowing hair that was you know a bit different not defending his use of prescription medicine by any means but you know when you experience something like that kind of opens up the door for painkillers and whatever else that may lead to but other than that it truly just let's do this and get it done yeah blood is drawn uh and then that blood is sent

to a toxicology unit so the initial autopsy didn't didn't show much you know nothing much that you wouldn't be shocked a 50 year old body would have he was relatively healthy you know this isn't a man who should have died while an official cause of death has yet to be determined the coroner's office says it has everything needed to make a ruling on why jackson died we're still waiting for the toxicology reports and the further the completion of all the reports that are coming in the body was removed it was weeks went by and we

kept asking when are we going to hear from toxicology when are we going to hear we had a death but we didn't have a criminal death yet it's official michael jackson's death was a homicide [Music] the l.a county coroner's office says the cause of death was an acute intoxication from the anesthetic propofol once the toxicology report came back it gave us a lot more a lot more power behind our investigation other than going on a hunch now we're going on facts and then it became the idea of how bad that was the big question how

bad is this ultimately the toxicology results you have those over here and you have dr murray's statement here and it just wasn't jiving there was just no way that what he said was factual to what they found out had enough propofol in him to drop a rhinoceros he could no longer breathe on his own and murray had not set up an environment to allow for artificial means of breathing which is reckless gross negligence this is a bottle that people pee into when they're bedridden this was found at the bedside and it was full he used

the restroom without having to get out of bed what it made us think was that he was completely incapacitated that someone was caring for him to that extent seeing things like this i realized that he wasn't being helped to fall asleep he was being kept under as a consequence not having the strength or the ability to get up and go to the restroom just take care of business and continue sleeping what we did is we took our case and this included all of our interviews all of our statements and most significantly the toxicology reports and

the autopsy reports we had 11 physicians in i think five or six different specialties review this material and we're asked to render an opinion as i was looking for doctors to evaluate the level of care i came across dr shafer he was instrumental in developing propofol i demonstrated that in statement after statement after statement in conrad murray's interview what he said made no sense it was not possible he just asserted things that were not true you would need a continuous drip of the propofol and not a shot not an injection like dr murray had said

he had used it wears off really quickly so what i'm simulating right here is the dose that conrad murray claims was available to michael jackson and that the defense claimed resulted in michael jackson's death a dose of just 25 milligrams two and a half cc's of drug which is ridiculous it only lasts for a few seconds and this was the whole point of the mathematics that i presented and the heart of course keeps pumping so we know that there was 100cc vial hanging over michael jackson knowing it was empty we can see exactly how over

a period of about 30 to 40 minutes it enters into a dose that would be associated with a lethal concentration of drug in a patient who wasn't being looked after because they're really under pretty deep general anesthesia at that point in time and this corresponds to having an empty 100ml vial hanging over michael jackson's head and i thought oh my god this is it this is this is a smoking gun this is actually the bottle of profile that killed michael jackson what we discovered was one of the iv bags had been emptied one of the

propable bottles had been upside down inside the bag there's a bottle of propofol inside an iv bag i mean one of the single weirdest details there was a big tear a pike or a needle that is large would have broken the top of the propofol bottle so that it could drip freely down basically murray was using the saline bag to hang the bottle of propofol from the stand but also i think to hide it because he didn't want anybody to know he was using propofol so to get an idea of just how crazy this is

the anesthetic drugs are all dangerous there is really no access outside of the healthcare setting we have pumps that are set up that are precisely calibrated and we precisely control the dose he had an iv line coming down from here and it's got a little lower clamp on the side you just adjust this little roller clamp it's it's a gravity-fed system there's almost there's very little control on the rate of the drug and that's what he was using it's insane nobody trained in propofol administration would not precisely control the infusion rate nobody trained in the

isopropyl fall would ever walk away from a patient who is receiving propofol as a continuous infusion physicians with no training in anesthesia have no business giving propofol so at that point we knew this was not an honest mistake but that this was on purpose bad medicine an md degree is not a license to do whatever the hell you want to do and just think you can get away with it one of the challenges investigation was the uncooperative witnesses of one of those was dr murray's girlfriend when we finally served the search warrant at the at

her apartment the whole place had been cleaned out there was nothing to show that dr murray had been there stayed there frequented there at all fortunately they had missed behind one of the bookcases behind one of the bookcases we found a receipt for a pharmacy that led us to the propofol these items here are what we found at nicole alvarez's house so it brings me back to remembering how difficult things were when dealing with her this business card and this receipt were the only things in his name at her place this led us to the

pharmacy when we arrived at the pharmacy the pharmacy had all the records ready they had been following the news and they knew that the police would be there eventually and as you go through you can see all the amounts one case of the 100 milliliter bottles one case of the 20 milliliter bottles in june four cases of the hundred milliliter bottles all of the amounts it's over five gallons worth of propofol a massive amount of propofol a massive amount of propofol was shipped to his girlfriend's house we found that there was other doctors that michael

had reached out to in hopes of being administered propofol and uh he was turned down that relationship was a perfect storm michael first got introduced to propofol through a dental procedure and he liked it he felt like wow this is the best way to go to sleep that was his drug of choice and he was looking for doctors that would administer that you know as wrong as it was [Music] usually you think of a doctor as someone very successful and ethical and distinguished why they would risk a patient's life for for anything what would make

it worth it and then search warrants out in las vegas at his residence as well as his place of business in las vegas and then his office out in houston texas we get into finances we get into business dealings and there's relationships we exceeded church one day at the armstrong medical clinic this morning with members from the dea and the houston police department and um we are from lapd robbery homicide division he had several children we would learn several of them by several different wives he would go out to places of adult entertainment and spend

outrageous amounts of money he would put on a show and not be able to support it financially he would leverage his closeness to a celebrity to manipulate young women into relationships we knew that he had purchased a home in october in las vegas for over a million dollars and his mortgage was was ten thousand dollars a month and he had stopped paying it he had censures from different states where he practiced medicine these different medical boards they sent us the files of the complaints and the penalties that they would impose on dr murray when he

would violate their rules we saw a pattern of sloppy behavior private physician to michael jackson and here he is uh just an absolute mess you know yeah surprising this is what i recovered from his car from the doctor's car this was the contract uh as we first found it the agreement between dr murray aeg and mr jackson the producer shall remit payment to dr murray in the amount of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars per month so this is where the money came into it michael uh started working uh preparing for this huge comeback tour

and that's when he had reached out michael and uh told aeg that he wanted conrad murray with him and initially aeg's like you know london's not a third world country they have fabulous doctors over there what do you need your own physician for [Music] and michael's response to his managers were listen the president of the united states has a physician travel with him i want a physician to travel with me dr murray agreed to go ahead and accompany him and provide michael with what he wanted so he needed this gig with mr jackson either to

pay off or to keep up with his debts he had the right motive he needed money [Music] ultimately the decision was made to charge dr murray with involuntary manslaughter as opposed to second-degree murder the da's office in one another high-profile failure it was an election year for the district attorney i think it was a i don't want to say the lazy way out uh but again a manslaughter charge was you know the path of least resistance the family wasn't happy with it at all mrs jackson was just beside herself that it wasn't going to be

a second-degree murder file [Music] we felt the evidence suggest that it was a second degree the level of his negligence was just so clear that we thought that it would apply we do not charge people we investigate the case and we present it we were not happy with the choice but we deal with what we can and we move forward what i felt a little pressure i guess is when it came time to arrest dr murray we wanted to see murray and hancocks and i think a lot of you know people wanted to see him

in handcuffs his attorneys didn't want dr murray to be seen in handcuffs in public because that's not good for his image and neither is killing somebody but behind our backs the da's office made that agreement with dr murray's attorneys the doctor turned himself in voluntarily surrendered you know i'm of the opinion that regardless of who you are what walk of life you come from if you've done wrong then you need to answer for that i am an innocent man i therefore plead not guilty again he feels he'd done nothing wrong it wasn't his fault he's

just he's arrogant individual [Music] [Music] conrad murray figuratively and literally abandoned michael jackson we looked at murray's phone records that was a big huge piece we could see murray on his phone at certain times he left this vulnerable man filled with valium and midazolam and lorazepam and propofol with no medical monitoring equipment no necessary resuscitative equipment he left him there abandoned him to fend for himself so as far as stepping away for a minute and going to the bathroom and coming back and oh my gosh michael's dead no he was sending emails reviewing a contract

and he was also on the telephone with various people while he was on the phone he realized that mr jackson was not breathing i heard um mumbling of voices it sounded like the phone was maybe in his pocket or something it was and i heard coughing we looked at the timelines of when the 9-1-1 call was i think around 20 to 25 minutes after that call with saudi ending mr murray started cleaning up the mess that he had left covering up the medical treatment that he was giving put that away called for help from security

directed them to call 9-1-1 while he gave ineffective one-handed cpr and then traveled to the hospital with mr jackson dr murray fled the hospital before we arrived waited a couple days to get his story straight and ultimately was prosecuted for his conflict we the jury in the above entitle action find the defendant conrad robert murray guilty of the crime of involuntary manslaughter [Applause] that's how that turned out should it have been a second degree murder yeah i think it could have been unfortunately that is not a choice that we were able to make [Music] the

biggest thing is that he does not get his medical license back in any state and i i personally don't see that happening and i'm just trying to keep it light and polite here but yeah he's in his own world he's in his own world dr marie [Music] [Music] i think that this case we actually have the answers we won't be in that book of unsolved murders all the big ones where we failed at least my name won't be put put in the same place as those it's something i'll never forget obviously the rest of my

life one hell of an experience yeah no regrets [Music] in big cases like this um sometimes you know friendships can really dissolve but not in this case it was uh we all lived happily ever after [Music] as soon as this one was over it comes to this is what we expect of you you get your next murder and you move forward [Music] about four years after the trial i was driving home from work i look over to my left and i see this green older nice mercedes i feel someone staring at me i look over

in the same car and i see dr murray it took me a few seconds to register that it was him and by that time our cars had separated but i never saw any double takes or any instant moment of recognition at that time i wondered whether or not he would start practicing medicine again do you give someone like that a second chance someone who's done their time for the crime that they've committed when do you let it go [Music] you