Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  Michael Jackson had been taking Valium regularly for almost a quartercentury, and the 10-milligram dose Dr. Murray claimed to have given him during the early morning hours of June 25 was not going to put this patient to sleep, at least not all by itself. In fact, according to Murray, the Valium had very little effect at all. At around 2 a.m., as he recalled, using the IV that was hooked up to his patient nightly, Dr. Murray gave Michael a slow injection of lorazepam, a stronger, fast-acting benzo that is most often marketed as Ativan. Like diazepam, lorazepam acts on the central nervous system and is employed mainly to treat anxiety but can also be used to ease insomnia or epileptic seizures. In hospitals, Ativan is regularly administered to patients doctors deem “aggressive.” Its principal properties are classified as “sedative-hypnotic” and “anterograde amnesia,” a medical description of the loss of the ability to form a new memory without affecting long-term recall. Ativan is even more effective than Valium at helping people forget unpleasant experiences. It’s also even more addictive, and withdrawal from lorazepam can bring on not only insomnia and seizures, but also a full-blown (albeit temporary) psychosis. Kicking an Ativan addiction is a lot like withdrawing from long-term alcohol abuse, drug treatment specialists say. Also, using lorazepam over a lengthy period of time can actually increase anxiety in a person, not to mention inducing confusion, depression, dizziness (losing balance and falling are quite common), hyperactivity, hostility, agoraphobia, and suicidal thoughts. The 2 milligrams Dr. Murray said he shot into Michael Jackson’s veins that morning was actually the minimum recommended dose for treating insomnia, though of course that didn’t take into account the diazepam already in his system. “Polypharmacy” is the pejorative term that doctors use to describe such mixing of drugs.

  At 3 a.m., Dr. Murray remembered, he administered another “slow push” through the IV, this time sending the benzodiazepine drug midazolam (the specific brand name was Versed) into Jackson’s veins. Midazolam is stronger than lorazepam and considerably more potent than diazepam. The hypnotic and amnesic effects are each more powerful. Rectal administration of midazolam has become a preferred treatment for children suffering seizures because it is so fast-acting and so effective at erasing all memory of a disturbing event. Midazolam is also more dangerous than either diazepam or lorazepam, however, and has caused both respiratory and cardiac failures that have resulted in patient deaths, as well as cases of hypoxic encephalopathy, an interruption in the supply of oxygen to the brain that can result in permanent damage. Manufacturers as well as medical associations strongly urge that midazolam not be used outside a hospital setting where resuscitative drugs are readily available, and that patients who have received it by injection be constantly monitored by their doctors. The recommended initial dose of midazolam is 1 or 2 milligrams. According to Dr. Murray, he gave Michael Jackson 2 milligrams.

  “Four o’clock came and four o’clock went, and he was still awake,” Conrad Murray would explain to a police investigator later. “And he complained, ‘I got to sleep, Dr. Conrad. I have these rehearsals to perform. I must be ready for the show in England.’”

  By 5 a.m. Michael was tossing and moaning, insisting again and again he had to get some sleep. “He said, ‘Please, please give [me] some milk so that I can sleep, because I know that this is all that really works for me,’” Dr. Murray recalled. Again he refused to give his patient propofol, the doctor said, and instead administered another 2 milligrams of Ativan in a slow push through the IV. Michael still couldn’t sleep.

  The sun had already been up for more than an hour at 7:30 a.m. Michael was by then in an agony of sleeplessness, according to Dr. Murray, who claimed to have given him one more IV injection, this time pushing another 2 milligrams of Versed into his patient’s veins. He remained at Jackson’s bedside after this, Murray would claim, constantly monitoring his patient’s condition with a device called a pulse oximeter connected to Michael’s index finger that provided a steady readout of his pulse rate and oxygen levels.

  Even by Dr. Murray’s account, his patient by then had a combination of drugs in his system that would have put even those with the hardiest drug tolerances to sleep for hours—perhaps forever. Michael Jackson, though, was still wide awake and begging for his “milk.” At 10:40 a.m., Murray said, he told Michael that he would need to wake up around noon. Michael again demanded propofol. “He said, ‘Just make me sleep, doesn’t matter what time I get up,’” Murray recalled. He finally gave in, the doctor said, feeding 25 milligrams of Diprivan into Jackson’s IV. Michael closed his eyes, his breathing slowed, and he went to sleep—technically he was unconscious—just moments after the propofol entered his bloodstream.

  Conrad Murray was already in trouble with the law at that moment. The Clark County district attorney’s office in Las Vegas had filed a case against the doctor for his failure to pay back child support two weeks earlier on June 10. His legal jeopardy would magnify exponentially during the next few hours.

  He waited at Michael Jackson’s bedside, reading the pulse oximeter, for about ten more minutes, Dr. Murray later told the police, before deciding at about 10:50 a.m. that he could permit himself a brief bathroom break. A public record that includes the recollections of other witnesses calls into question nearly every one of Murray’s claims about what happened from this point forward, but the doctor’s story (according to police) was that he returned to the master bedroom of the Carolwood chateau after an absence of only about two minutes and discovered Michael Jackson was no longer breathing. That claim would leave Murray trying to explain how nearly another ninety minutes passed before a 911 call was made. His attorney Ed Chernoff would later insist that the police misunderstood, that Dr. Murray did not discover that Michael Jackson had stopped breathing until nearly an hour after he returned to the master bedroom.

  What can be known for certain is that Conrad Murray made three cell phone calls between 11:18 a.m. and 11:51 a.m. on the morning of June 25, 2009. The first was to his medical clinic in Las Vegas and lasted thirty-two minutes. The second was to leave a recorded message in a very calm, somewhat exhausted-sounding voice for a patient named Bob Russell: “Just wanted to talk to you about your results of the EECP. You did quite well on the study. We would love to continue to see you as a patient, even though I may have to be absent from my practice for—uh . . . because of an overseas sabbatical.” The final call was to a Houston cocktail waitress named Sade Anding. Dr. Murray asked her how she was doing and she spoke for “a few minutes” in reply, Anding recalled, before realizing the doctor was no longer on the phone, even though he hadn’t disconnected. “I just remember saying, ‘Hello, hello, hello! Are you there?’” said Anding. She realized that Conrad had dropped the phone, Anding said, when she began to hear the sounds of a “commotion,” then coughing and “the mumbling of voices.”

  According to Chernoff, the doctor, realizing that his patient had stopped breathing, “rushed over to [Jackson], felt his body to see if he was warm. He was looking for a pulse, found a weak pulse, and started performing CPR.” Assuming all of that was true, Michael Jackson probably could have been revived in a hospital setting. Heart and blood pressure monitors would have alerted doctors the moment the patient’s breathing ceased and a defibrillator would have been available to restart his heart. Conrad Murray, though, had no heart and blood pressure monitors on hand, and no defibrillator either. It did not help matters, according to medical experts, that Dr. Murray resorted to “nonstandard” CPR. Rather than pulling Michael Jackson’s body off the bed to the hard surface of the floor and performing chest compressions with two hands, what Murray did was place one hand under Michael’s body between the shoulder blades and use his other hand to compress the chest. Approximately twenty-five minutes passed between the time Murray broke off his cell phone conversation to begin administering CPR and the time a 911 call to emergency services was made at four seconds past 12:21 p.m.

  According to Chernoff, Murray spent between five and ten minutes simultaneously
trying to perform CPR and call 911. The doctor was “hindered,” his attorney explained, because there was no landline in the Carolwood chateau and Murray didn’t believe he could call 911 on a cell phone. Dr. Murray did phone Michael’s security trailer, Cheroff said, but there was no answer. He also placed a call to Michael Amir Williams’s downtown LA apartment, and left a voice mail message: “Call me right away, please, call me right away. Thank you.” Finally, the doctor ran downstairs shouting for help.

  Kai Chase was in the kitchen preparing lunch for the Jackson children and wondering why the Tuscan white bean soup she had prepared for Mr. Jackson’s dinner sat untouched in the refrigerator, she recalled, when, sometime between 12:05 p.m. and 12:10 p.m., “Dr. Murray runs down the steps and screams, ‘Go get Prince!’” Prince ran toward the sound of the shouting and was in the den’s doorway when Dr. Murray told him in a panicked voice, “Something may be wrong with your dad!”

  “From that point on,” the chef remembered, “you could feel the energy in the house change.”

  Chernoff would say that his client told Chase to “get security” up to Mr. Jackson’s bedroom, but the chef did not recall that. Sometime after 12:10, Michael Amir Williams returned Dr. Murray’s call. Michael Jackson was having “a bad reaction” to some medication, said the doctor, who told Brother Michael to get to the Carolwood house. Dr. Murray sounded frantic, Brother Michael remembered: “I knew it was serious.”

  Michael Jackson’s “logistics director” Alberto Alvarez was in the security trailer outside Mr. Jackson’s home when his phone rang at 12:17 p.m. Brother Michael was calling to say that Mr. Jackson was in trouble, recalled Alvarez, who immediately sprinted into the house, up the stairs, and through the open door to the master bedroom. What he saw left him “frozen and stunned,” Alvarez said. Michael Jackson was lying on his back in the middle of his bed with an IV tube attached to his leg, arms outstretched, eyes and mouth wide open, as Dr. Murray performed one-handed chest compressions, his other hand under Michael’s body. “Alberto, Alberto, come quickly,” Murray called, according to Alvarez. “He had a reaction. He had a bad reaction.”

  The doctor became increasingly frantic and at one point attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation while Alvarez took over the job of performing chest compressions. Another security guard, Faheem Muhammad, was in the room by then, and saw Dr. Murray on his knees by the side of the bed, looking wild-eyed as he pushed again and again on Michael Jackson’s chest. “Does anyone in the room know CPR?” Muhammad remembered the doctor shouting.

  “I wanted to save him. I felt that I could do it”: Michael clung to Lisa Marie Presley for support in the wake of the Chandler allegations, and the two were married in May 1994. They divorced in 1996.

  (Pool ARNAL/PAT/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

  From surrogate mother to wife: Michael with Debbie Rowe in 1997 during a visit to France. Prince (Michael Joseph Jackson, Jr.) had recently been born and Rowe would become pregnant with Paris later that year. (AAR/SIPA)

  Michael (here, with Prince and Paris circa 2001) was a proud father—and by all accounts, a devoted and responsible one. (© www.splashnews.com)

  Michael with Sean Lennon on the set of the “Bad” video, 1987. Lennon appeared in the accompanying movie, Moonwalker. (Ron Galella/WireImage)

  Jimmy Safechuck was Michael’s young friend in 1988, four years before Jordan Chandler. At the time, it was considered odd but harmless. Later every one of Michael’s friendships with young boys would be examined. (Ron Galella/WireImage)

  Michael with Jordan and Lily Chandler in Monaco for the World Music Awards, May 1993. Jordie stayed in the same hotel suite as Michael, while Lily and their mother, June, stayed in another. (Nikos Vinieratos/Rex USA)

  Michael in Times Square, November 2001, at his first ever in-store appearance, at the Virgin Megastore for Invincible. Jackson seemed to be wearing the nose of his idol Peter Pan.

  (©SUZANNE PLUNKETT/AP/Corbis)

  Jackson dangling Blanket, face obscured, from the balcony of Berlin’s Hotel Adlon in 2002, where he was accepting a Bambi Award. The incident would provoke an international outcry. (©Tobias Schwarz/Reuters)

  Something in common: Michael and Elizabeth Taylor, with whom he shared a painful childhood as a child star and breadwinner, with Arnold Klein, the dermatologist who was friend and doctor to both, at an amFAR event.

  (Gregg DeGuire/WireImage)

  Michael with Al Malnik’s hands on his shoulders. Malnik was one of several financial advisors who attempted to turn around Jackson’s spending and debt. At left is Brett Ratner, the film director who introduced Jackson and Malnik. In the center is producer Robert Evans. (Ray Mickshaw/WireImage)

  Ron Burkle, the supermarket billionaire and investor, was one of Michael’s financial rescuers. Here, they attended an MTV Movie Awards afterparty in 2003, along with Sean “Diddy” Combs. (Celebrityvibe.com)

  Dieter Wiesner was Michael’s manager in the early 2000s, until the criminal trial when the Nation of Islam forced him out. Behind him in the doorway is Leonard Muhammad. (AP Photo/Kevork Djansezian)

  Do you want fries with that? Marc Schaffel, one of Michael’s business partners, delivered cash to him in paper bags, which Jackson would call “Supersizing it.” Lack of a paper trail on these payments cost Schaffel some of what he’d hoped to recover in his suit against Michael.

  (AP Photo/Nick Ut)

  Tom Mesereau and Susan Yu, the legal team who represented Jackson in the Gavin Arvizo case. Mesereau to this day is a staunch defender of Jackson’s reputation.

  (Dave Hogan/Getty Images).

  Tom Sneddon, District Attorney of Santa Barbara County, in the middle of Jackson’s criminal trial. Sneddon continued to refer to the Jordan Chandler case as “open but inactive” years after the grand jury refused to indict Jackson in 1994.

  (Aaron Lambert-Pool/Getty Images)

  Michael had made his own private world at Neverland Ranch in Santa Ynez, California. At top, the main house (John Roca/NY Daily News Archive/Getty Images); from here, visitors could catch a train to the Neverland amusement park (below), with its own carousel and fairground rides, cinema with a working candy counter, and sound system embedded in the landscaping.

  (Jason Kirk/Getty Images)

  During Gavin Arvizo’s testimony at his criminal trial, Jackson was hospitalized, and nearly had his bail revoked for failing to show up the following morning. Here he is shown entering the courtroom, wearing a blazer thrown over his pajamas and walking aided by bodyguards.

  (Kimberly White/WireImage)

  By the end of the trial “he was strained beyond description,” according to Tom Mesereau, who is shown here with his client and Susan Yu leaving the courthouse after Michael was acquitted on all charges. Jackson, far from celebrating, was barely eating or sleeping and was hospitalized that night.

  (Kevork Djansezian/WireImage)

  With Neverland raided and ruined for him, Jackson left it behind. Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad al-Khalifa, prince of Bahrain, offered him a place to crash. Here, he and Sheikh Abdullah (left) traveled to Dubai and posed with Emirates motor rally driver Mohammed Ben Sulayem. (©epa/Corbis)

  Grace Rwaramba reporting to the High Court in London in November 2008, to testify in Sheikh Abdullah’s suit against Michael for failing to deliver on the album and other projects for which, the Sheikh said, he had paid him advance money.

  (©ALASTAIR GRANT/AP/Corbis)

  Tohme Tohme became Michael’s manager in 2008 and set up the O2 shows.

  (courtesy of Tohme Tohme)

  Michael visits with Japanese children from an orphanage, invited specially for a Tokyo fan event.

  (Eric Talmadge/AP/Corbis)

  Michael walks in Beverly Hills with Paris, Prince, and Blanket, 2009. The kids hated wearing masks, but said after his death that they understood he’d done it to protect them.

  (Ciao Hollywood/Splash News)

  James Brown’s funeral in Atlanta was Michael’s first public appear
ance after returning to America from Ireland, and a chance to say goodbye to a “chitlin’ circuit” friend whose moves had inspired him, and who had spoken out on his behalf in 2003. Here, Michael is sandwiched between Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson (Brett Flashnick/WpN); below, he approaches the coffin. His goodbye kiss on the Godfather of Soul’s lips would be a minor scandal. Michael would himself be laid to rest in the same model casket as Brown.

  (TAMI CHAPPELL/Reuters/Corbis)

  In 2011, Prince, Blanket and Paris (wearing a distinctive “Thriller” video jacket just like her dad’s) joined Jermaine and La Toya onstage in Cardiff, Wales, for a Michael Forever tribute concert. (Samir Hussein/WireImage)

  After Michael’s death, fans flocked to his residences in Los Angeles and childhood home in Gary, and to scores of impromptu memorials all over the world. Here, fans mark the year anniversary of his passing at his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.