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