How did Jimi Hendrix die?
Jimi Hendrix
November 27, 1942 — September 18, 1970
London, England
Johnny Allen Hendrix was born in Seattle to a father who was in the Army and a mother who was seventeen, and he taught himself guitar on a one-string ukulele he found in a garage. He played it upside down and left-handed for the rest of his life, and nobody ever managed to copy what came out of it. He was twenty-seven when he died in a hotel room in London.
He had been a paratrooper, a backing musician for Little Richard and the Isley Brothers, and a nobody in Greenwich Village before an Animals bassist put him on a plane to London in 1966. Nine months later he set his guitar on fire at Monterey. Three years after that he played the national anthem at Woodstock in a way that is still the only version anyone argues about. He made three studio albums. He was, by every account, shy off stage and almost unbearably polite.
He is buried in Renton, Washington, next to his father.
The record
What is established, from the authorities and the people who were there.
Official cause: Inhalation of vomit; barbiturate intoxication. Open verdict (Westminster coroner, September 28, 1970)
He spent the night of September 17, 1970, at the Samarkand Hotel in Notting Hill with Monika Dannemann, a German figure skater he had met the year before. By her account, she woke around 11 a.m. on September 18, could not rouse him, and called an ambulance. He was taken to St Mary Abbot's Hospital and pronounced dead at 12:45 p.m. He was 27.
The post-mortem found that he had choked on his own vomit while unconscious, and that the unconsciousness was caused by a large dose of Vesparax, a German sleeping pill Dannemann had been prescribed. She said he had taken nine of her tablets; the recommended dose was half of one. Toxicology also found alcohol and amphetamine. The coroner, Gavin Thurston, recorded an open verdict: the cause of death was clear, but there was not enough evidence to say whether it was accident, suicide, or anything else.
Dannemann gave several differing accounts over the next twenty-five years of when she found him, whether he was alive in the ambulance, and what she did first. The ambulance crew later said that they arrived to an empty flat with the door open, that Hendrix was alone, and that he had been dead for some time. Dannemann was found dead in her car in 1996, two days after losing a libel case brought by Hendrix's former girlfriend Kathy Etchingham over these accounts.
In 2009 a former Hendrix road manager, James "Tappy" Wright, published a book claiming that Hendrix's manager, Michael Jeffery, had confessed to him in 1971 that he'd had Hendrix killed by forcing wine and pills into him, because Hendrix wanted out of his contract and Jeffery had a large insurance policy on him. Jeffery died in a plane collision in 1973. The claim has never been corroborated.
What happened
The family hasn’t confirmed a cause. These are the community’s theories, in the order the community finds them most likely. Everyone here is anonymous.
He took nine sleeping pills that weren't his, in a flat with one other person, and the coroner couldn't say whether it was an accident. The witness changed her story for 25 years. What happened in that room?
The page creator
- Most likely40 of 49 readers find this likely
An accidental overdose: he took far too many of an unusually strong pill to get to sleep
He had been awake for most of two days, had been drinking, and wanted to sleep. The pills weren't his, so he had no idea what a normal dose was, and Vesparax was strong enough that nine of them would put down anyone. He fell deeply unconscious, vomited, and choked. The drama around Dannemann's accounts and the ambulance timing is real, but it bears on whether he could have been saved, not on how it started. Most biographers land here.
Anonymous.
ReportThe page creator can confirm or correct this. - Also raised33 of 43 readers find this likely
He could have been saved, and the delay in calling for help is what killed him
The ambulance crew's account, the state of the flat, and the pathologist's estimate all point to his having been dead for hours before anyone called. Dannemann's own timeline moved every time she told it. On this view the overdose was survivable: sedative overdoses often are, if someone turns the person on their side and calls for help. What turned it fatal was being left alone, face up, for most of the morning.
Anonymous. Says they are a paramedic.
- Unlikely9 of 36 readers find this likely
His manager had him killed for the insurance and the contract
Tappy Wright's claim, from a drunken confession in 1971 that nobody else heard. Jeffery did have a large policy on Hendrix, Hendrix was trying to leave him, and the pathologist's finding of a large amount of red wine in his lungs and hair has been cited as evidence that it was poured into him rather than drunk. Against it: no corroboration, a source with a book to sell forty years later, and the fact that wine in the airway is also what inhaling vomit after drinking looks like.
Anonymous.
- Unlikely6 of 35 readers find this likely
He took them on purpose
The coroner specifically declined to rule this out. He had written a poem that night that some people read as a goodbye, he was exhausted and in legal and financial trouble, and nine pills is a lot. Against it: nobody who knew him thought so, he had plans for the following week, and taking someone else's sleeping pills on a night you can't sleep is not what a planned death usually looks like.
Anonymous.
When the family confirms the cause, the confirmed answer moves to the top and gets this mark. Theories stay, but are labeled as what people thought before the family knew.
Inhalation of vomit, in plain language: someone unconscious vomits and, because the reflexes that normally protect the airway are suppressed, breathes it in. It is one of the most common ways sedative overdoses actually kill, and it is why the first instruction in any overdose is to put the person on their side.
Vesparax was a combination of two barbiturates and an antihistamine, far stronger than anything sold today, and the dose Hendrix took (about eighteen times the recommended amount) was enough to cause deep unconsciousness in anyone. Barbiturates with alcohol are worse than either alone. So the mechanism of death is not in doubt. The questions on this page are about how the pills got into him, and what the one other person in the flat did between finding him and calling for help.
Westminster coroner's inquest, September 28, 1970 (open verdict) Charles R. Cross, Room Full of Mirrors (2005) Tony Brown, Jimi Hendrix: The Final Days (1997) James "Tappy" Wright, Rock Roadie (2009) Wikipedia, "Jimi Hendrix"
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