Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  Walgren began to use questions as testimony. Michael Jackson was attached to both an IV stand and a urinary catheter at the time of his death, the prosecutor noted, which obviously made it more plausible that Dr. Murray had injected his patient with propofol and later lied about the amount he gave. “It’s possible, if he wanted to potentially harm Michael Jackson,” White replied.

  “If Michael Jackson did it, was he doing it to harm himself?” Walgren demanded.

  “I don’t think he realized the potential danger,” White answered.

  Walgren was at the end of his patience. “You keep throwing out these kind of rehearsed lines,” he snapped. When the defense objected, the comment was stricken, but the judge refrained from admonishing the prosecutor.

  How much was he being paid to testify on Conrad Murray’s behalf? Walgren demanded of White. He had received $11,000 so far, White answered. Did he expect additional compensation for attending court? the prosecutor wanted to know. Well, his normal day rate was $3,500, White replied, but he doubted a further payment would be forthcoming. The defendant, he explained, “has limited financial resources.”

  The prosecution replied by bringing back Steven Shafer to tell the jury that his former professor’s analysis had relied on an outdated study, and that more recent research “absolutely” supported his own opinion that Michael Jackson could not have self-administered the fatal dose of propofol.

  But even if Michael Jackson had injected himself with the propofol that stopped his heart, David Walgren told the jury in his closing argument, Conrad Murray was still responsible. The jurors had heard Dr. Murray tell detectives that Jackson liked to “push” the drug into his own veins, which meant he had to be aware that his patient might inject himself if left alone. A “foreseeable consequence” was all that was required to arrive at a verdict of guilty, Walgren said, but this case also offered clear evidence of the defendant’s “consciousness of guilt” on multiple fronts. Most damning was Murray’s failure to inform paramedics and emergency room doctors that he had administered propofol to his patient. Equally significant, though, was that Murray had not documented his “pharmaceutical experiment” of using propofol to treat insomnia with a single medical record. The prosecutor reminded the jurors of the converstion recorded on Dr. Murray’s iPhone weeks before Mr. Jackson’s death. They had heard for themselves “the tragic, sad voice of Michael Jackson in some sort of drug-induced, slurred stupor,” Walgren told the panel. “After hearing this voice, after hearing Michael Jackson in this condition, what does Conrad Murray do? He orders the largest shipment of propofol.”

  Did anyone in the courtroom believe that Conrad Murray left his patient’s bedside for only two minutes to go to the bathroom, then returned to find his patient no longer breathing? “How long Michael Jackson was there, by himself, abandoned, we’ll never know,” Walgren said. “Did he gasp? Did he choke? Were there sounds? We don’t know, and we’ll never know.”

  At this point, Conrad Murray’s attorneys needed someone else to blame. Targeting the victim, though, was looking less and less like a winning tactic. Chernoff pointed first to the media, and to a political establishment that seemed to answer to the media. “Somebody’s got to say it,” Ed Chernoff told the jury. “If it were anybody but Michael Jackson, would this doctor be here today?”

  Chernoff decried Walgren’s decision to repeatedly show jurors photographs of Jackson’s children. “It’s heartbreaking to see those kids, you know that and I know that,” the defense attorney said. “That’s why they showed those kids. There’s a tremendous desire to see Dr. Murray as this perfect victim.”

  But Conrad Murray was just “a little fish in a big dirty pond,” Chernoff went on, one who had no knowledge of the other doctors his patient was seeing or of the drugs they were giving him. All Dr. Murray saw was a man overwhelmed by stress who desperately needed rest. Chernoff called out the corporate bogeymen of the Anschutz Entertainment Group. “Michael Jackson was under a tremendous, abnormal, impossible amount of pressure from AEG,” the defense attorney said, and Dr. Murray saw no way to relieve that pressure but to help his patient get some much-needed sleep.

  Only at the end did Chernoff ask the jury to consider what responsibility for his own death might belong to the so-called victim: “Was Dr. Murray supposed to watch Michael Jackson to save him from himself at all times? At what point do you draw the line for Dr. Murray’s responsibilities for a grown-up?”

  During the jury’s deliberations, the Los Angeles Criminal Courts Building demonstrated one more time that it could stage a show like none other in the country. The scene was strange but familiar. Michael Jackson fans screamed in the faces of Conrad Murray supporters; one fan was a woman who held a sign reading, “Turn away from addiction.” Some sport drove by in a Mercedes coupe holding a license plate out the window that read, “Love4MJ,” and was wildly applauded. A young woman who had traveled all the way from Copenhagen kept telling everyone she met how much it hurt her to know that Michael was no longer in the world. Easily the most surreal moment came when a group of protesters from the Occupy Los Angeles encampment across the street marched over to the courthouse and began shouting, “We are the ninety-nine percent!” only to be answered by Jackson fans who shouted back, “This Is It!”

  The Jackson family had been putting on its own show since day one of the trial, entering and leaving the courthouse like they were walking a red carpet amid an uproar of cheers, questions, camera clicks, and cries of sympathy. Eighty-three-year-old Joe Jackson had stalked into the courtroom on the first day snarling, but by the time Paul Gongaware took the stand the old man had closed his eyes and appeared to be napping. Eighty-one-year-old Katherine Jackson was “harrumphing incredulously,” as the Wall Street Journal’s reporter had it, when Ed Chernoff used his opening statement to present Conrad Murray to the jury as a sympathetic figure who had been pressured and manipulated by his famous patient. As witnesses began to testify, La Toya and Rebbie sat on each side of their mother, repeating into her ears what each person was saying; La Toya made sure she had the better camera angle. Jermaine, who had recently come out with the story that his brother Michael was planning to flee to the Middle East if convicted at his criminal trial in 2005, continued to insist that he was the second-most-famous member of the Jackson family. Jackie, Tito, and Marlon, as usual, preserved a measure of personal dignity by staying away and leaving the spotlight to the others. Also as usual, Katherine’s genuine displays of emotion silenced the snickering of cynics. The tears in her eyes and the pain on her face were entirely convincing as Michael’s mother listened to the full four-minute recording of her son talking to his doctor back in May 2009. “Mmm, mmm,” was all Murray could be heard replying as Michael mumbled on and on and on about how he understood the pain of the world’s children and intended to build them the biggest hospital in the world after reestablishing himself as the greatest entertainer on earth. When Michael suddenly went silent, though, a concerned Murray had asked, “You okay?” There was a long pause, then Michael answered, “I am asleep.” It was Mrs. Jackson, though, who closed her eyes.

  After three and a half days of deliberation, the jury informed the judge on the morning of November 7, 2011, that it had reached a decision. “Verdict is FINALLY IN!!!” La Toya had tweeted to her followers. “I’m on my way! I’m shaking uncontrollably!” Joe and Katherine and Jermaine arrived at the courthouse just after noon, pushing through a crowd that was slightly outnumbered by the media horde as they made their way to the courtroom on the building’s ninth floor.

  “This is not entertainment, not a circus, not a spectacle,” a young woman from Denmark told the Los Angeles Times. “This is real life.” By LA standards perhaps.

  The jury had unanimously found Conrad Murray guilty of involuntary manslaughter. This did not mean he would serve time in a state prison, as Los Angeles County district attorney Steve Cooley readily acknowledged. California’s budget crisis had resulted in, among other things, a “prison
realignment bill” called AB 109 that was sending minor felons without criminal records to local jails rather than state prisons, and the jails in turn were permitting more and more of those criminals to serve their sentences at home under house arrest.

  District Attorney Cooley sought consolation in the knowledge that, as a convicted felon, fifty-eight-year-old Conrad Murray would be losing his license to practice medicine in California. The truth, though, was that other states were under no legal obligation to honor California’s decision, and some other countries almost certainly would not. It was entirely possible that by the age of sixty Murray would be working as a physician somewhere in the world.

  Judge Pastor had done his best to show the public that such an outcome would not be his doing. He was denying the defense request that Dr. Murray remain free until his sentencing, the judge announced after the verdict was delivered. “This is not a crime involving a mistake of judgment,” Pastor told both the courtroom and the camera. “This is a crime where the end result was the death of a human being.

  “Public safety demands that he be remanded,” Pastor declared as his bailiffs prepared to handcuff Conrad Murray and place the doctor behind bars.

  The judge was talking even tougher when Murray returned to his courtroom on November 29, 2011, to face sentencing. He was outraged, Pastor let it be known, by the paid interview Murray had provided to NBC for a documentary that was to run partially on the Today show and in full on MSNBC. When asked about leaving Michael Jackson alone in his bedroom attached to an IV line filled with propofol, Murray had insisted to his interviewer that he had no reason to think that his patient was in danger. “Had I known what I know today, in retrospect, that Mr. Jackson was an addict, that might have changed things. Addicts may behave in a way that is unreasonable and I would have taken that into consideration,” Murray said. But he had no such knowledge because Michael Jackson had hidden it from him. “I only wish that maybe in our dealings with each other, he was more forthcoming and honest in telling me things about himself,” Murray explained. “Certainly, he was deceptive by not sharing with me his whole medical history, doctors he was seeing, treatment that he might have been receiving.”

  Said Murray, “I went there to take care of a healthy man who said he was fine, to just keep surveillance. But once I got in there I was entrapped.”

  Making out that he, not Michael Jackson, was the victim in this case had been just one more example of Conrad Murray’s deficient character, in Judge Pastor’s opinion.

  At least Murray had provided John Branca with an opportunity to become the indignant defender of Michael’s reputation. Branca and John McClain had signed a letter to MSNBC demanding that the network not “give Conrad Murray a platform to shift the blame, postconviction, to Michael Jackson . . .”

  Before passing sentence, Judge Pastor blasted Murray for his part in the “faux documentary” that made him out to be nothing more than a “bystander” in Jackson’s death, one who was “betrayed” by his patient, rather than the other way around.

  “Talk about blaming the victim,” Pastor said. “Not only isn’t there any remorse, there’s umbrage and outrage on the part of Dr. Murray against the decedent, without any, any indication of the slightest involvement in the case.”

  The judge expressed even greater offense at the audio file of the conversation between Jackson and Murray that had been entered into evidence during the trial. That recording had been “your insurance policy,” Pastor told Murray. “It was designed to record this patient surreptitiously at that patient’s most vulnerable point.” He not only viewed this as a “horrific violation of trust,” the judge told Murray, but wondered if the recording might have been offered for sale some day. After more talk about Murray’s “cycle of horrible medicine” and his “pattern of deceit and lies,” the judge gave him the maximum sentence allowed: four years, in county jail.

  Outside the courtroom, Katherine Jackson told a Los Angeles TV station that, “Four years is not enough for someone’s life. It won’t bring him back, but at least he got the maximum.”

  In reality, as Judge Pastor knew, AB 109 would automatically cut the four-year sentence by half, and there would be an additional reduction for time served. A spokesman for the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department, which ran the jail, stood by with a statement that Murray’s (now two-year) sentence would be reduced by no more than the forty-seven days he had already served and that the doctor was not eligible for early- release electronic monitoring or house arrest.

  Most likely, Conrad Murray would spend at least twenty months behind bars, which was about the worst that California could do to a first offender convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Whether or not this was justice was the sort of question lawyers and cable talk show hosts would enjoy debating for several days, but Conrad Murray was telling friends and family that he had already moved on. Murray said that he had no regrets about cooperating with the producers of the documentary that had run on MSNBC, various sources close to the doctor told the media, because at least it allowed him to put out his side of the story. The same sources described Murray as “surprisingly upbeat.” One friend quoted the doctor as saying, “I’m just relieved it’s finally over,” then adding, “Don’t worry, I’m fine, and I’ll be out soon.”

  The long arm of the law was still wrapping itself around various other Michael Jackson advisors and employees.

  Dr. Arnold Klein was feeling the squeeze. Well before the Conrad Murray trial had begun, Klein was advising friends that he had been summoned to a hearing before the medical board of California to answer accusations that he overprescribed dangerous drugs to Jackson. With friends fleeing and his Beverly Hills practice dissolving, Klein had hired a $20,000-per-month publicist in the homes of “re-branding,” but the effort was not met with success and patients continued to abandon him in ever-increasing numbers. By the end of 2011, the doctor’s finances had contracted to the point where not only were all three of his homes up for sale, but he was also auctioning off the memorabilia he had collected from friends who included Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor. Bonhams & Butterfields was offering Klein’s invitation to Taylor’s eighth wedding (to Larry Fortensky, at Neverland) at an opening price of $350, while the bidding on the hat Jackson was wearing when he left the hospital after being treated for the burns suffered during the Pepsi commercial in 1984 was to start at $10,000. Also on the block was Princess Leia wig that had been worn to a party by one of Klein’s few remaining friends, Carrie Fisher, who around Christmas time would loan Klein $150,000 to hire a new bankruptcy lawyer.

  The medical board, meanwhile, continued to tighten its grip, questioning dozens of witnesses about Klein’s alleged use of aliases on prescriptions, his reported distribution of drug samples to patients and the claim that Klein regularly prescribed narcotics to himself. His attempts at self-defense accomplished little more than to make him an object of derision and animosity. On his Facebook page, in a post titled “The California Medical Board: A Novel by Kafka,” Klein had claimed that the Board’s chief investigator was guilty of “elder abuse” for the ferocity with which he was tracking his prey. The medical board had responded on May 2, 2012 by ordering Klein to “undergo a physical examination, a mental examination, including psychological testing, and to submit to testing to detect the presence of illicit drugs,” warning that the failure to comply might likely result in the revocation of his license to practice medicine. That very same day, the former lover of Liberace had suggested to Entertainment Tonight that he and Michael Jackson had also been lovers, dredging up the defense Klein had made of Jason Pfeiffer’s earlier claims about a relationship with Michael, just when the subject seemed to be fading from tabloid headlines.

  It would be one thing after another, though, with Dr. Klein, as the tabloid press by now clearly understood. In mid-May 2012, the real estate company that owned the Beverly Hills mansion he had rented for $60,000 per month went to court once again to get him out of the house. Klein had
earlier won a stay of his eviction because he was in bankruptcy proceedings. YHL 26 Holdings, though, was now arguing that the stay should be lifted and Klein forced to move, because he “has taken advantage of the protection of the automatic stay to maintain a lavish personal lifestyle at the expense of his creditors.” In June, Klein went to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office with a request that they file charges of criminal theft against photographer David LaChapelle. Klein alleged he had returned a “painting-like” photograph he owned that depicted Michael Jackson as Jesus Christ to LaChapelle for repairs, after it was damaged in the 2010 fire at his Windsor Square mansion. LaChapelle had repaired the piece, Klein complained, but instead of giving it back LaChapelle arranged to exhibit it in galleries worldwide. After due consideration and no small amount of eye-rolling, the district attorney’s office had declined to file charges. For the time being, the photograph would remain in a police evidence vault. As for the case itself, said LAPD Art Theft Det. Hrycyk, “I’m glad to get rid of it.”

  Raymone Bain had spent the summer of 2011 dealing with the IRS, which in June had charged her with failing to file tax returns or to make tax payments during the years from 2006 to 2008, when she was earning $30,000 per month as the president and general manager of the Michael Jackson Company. After Bain pleaded guilty, the feds asked U.S. Magistrate Judge Alan Kay to lock Bain up for eighteen months to show how the government dealt with tax scofflaws. At her sentencing hearing in Washington, D.C., on October 25, 2011 (right around the time Randy Phillips was testifying at the Conrad Murray trial in Los Angeles), Bain had tearfully pleaded for mercy, explaining to the judge that during that three-year period she had been overwhelmed by dealing with the affairs of a mother who was dying of Alzheimer’s and of her erratic and demanding pop star employer. Bain appeared to skate when Kay sentenced her to five years’ probation and payment of $202,422 in federal and local back taxes. Back in LA, though, Tom Mesereau was saying that it was Raymone who had been responsible for Michael Jackson’s failure to pay taxes during those same years, and that the Jackson estate should take a hard look at holding her responsible.