A former roadie’s claim that rock legend Jimi Hendrix was murdered by a former manager was given some validation by the doctor who attempted to save the guitar virtuoso’s life that night. John Bannister says the allegations made in James “Tappy” Wright’s book ‘Rock Roadie’ “sounded plausible because of the volume of wine” found both in and on Hendrix’s body.

Bannister told the U.K. Times that when Hendrix was brought into St. Mary Abbots Hospital in Kensington, the attendants “worked very hard for about half an hour but there was no response at all. It really was an exercise in futility.” What struck him most, however, was the wine. “The amount of wine that was over him was just extraordinary,” the 67-year-old former surgeon says. “Not only was it saturated right through his hair and shirt but his lungs and stomach were absolutely full of wine. I have never seen so much wine. We had a sucker that you put down into his trachea, the entrance to his lungs and to the whole of the back of his throat. We kept sucking him out and it kept surging and surging. He had already vomited up masses of red wine and I would have thought there was half a bottle of wine in his hair. He had really drowned in a massive amount of red wine.”

The 27-year-old Hendrix died the morning of September 18, 1970, in girlfriend Monika Dannemann’s London apartment from what was determined to be inhalation of vomit after overdosing on barbiturates. Wright claims that Hendrix’s former manager, Michael Jeffrey, drunkenly confessed to murdering the guitarist, saying, “That son of a bitch was going to leave me. If I lost him, I’d lose everything.” Apparently, Jeffrey believed Hendrix was going to replace him so he took out a $2 million life insurance policy on his client, went to the apartment with some associates and stuffed the pills and wine down Hendrix’s throat.

Despite Bannister’s claims, the case seems destined to remain a mystery. Jeffrey died in a plane crash in 1973, and Dannemann, who discovered Hendrix’s body and claimed he was still alive in the ambulance, committed suicide in 1996. Bannister, for his part, was banned from practicing as an orthopedic surgeon in Australia for fraud in 1992.

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