Descriptions of life inside the Hayvenhurst compound varied considerably from visitor to visitor. “Camp Jackson,” Paris Hilton’s mother Kathy described it to People magazine, which quoted another “insider” who painted a picture of three happy children whose devoted grandmother had helped them settle into a life that was “simple and sweet.” “On a typical day the kids get up early and romp around the grounds with their dogs, Jackson and Kenya, before drifting over to the pool,” People told its readers. “Indoors, they watch movies, play Pictionary and horse around with Grandma.” Arnold Klein saw things rather differently: “The Sodom and Gomorrah show in Hayvenhurst,” he called the Jackson family home. He was so disgusted with them all, Klein told TMZ, that he had lost interest in anything beyond the “the welfare of the children.”
Amid the dueling characterizations, there was at least some agreement about how the three kids were dealing with life after Michael. Prince was still withdrawn, but visitors to the Hayvenhurst compound also sensed a resolute composure in the boy, an iteration of the poise Natalie Maines had remarked upon one year earlier. He didn’t want to talk much about his father, or anything else for that matter, and continued to spend silent hours at a stretch playing video games, but what little he did say suggested that Prince had been paying close attention to what was going on around him. A couple of his uncles were quite uncomfortable with some of the questions the boy was asking about his inheritance. Paris summoned up memories of her father far more frequently than both of her brothers combined. She seemed to find comfort in recalling the day Daddy had introduced their puppy Kenya into the family, or that evening when he took them all to the tower of the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas, where they stood eating Snickers bars and looking out on the phantasmagoria of colored lights. She was becoming interested in fashion and developing a sense of personal style; when she needed new eyeglasses, she posed in more than a hundred different frames before choosing the one that suited her. Blanket still seemed to be suffering, but not so intensely. Only seven when his father died, the youngest child continued to cry out for Daddy during the night for weeks after his arrival at the Hayvenhurst house. He wanted to be held often. Katherine Jackson’s fundamentally loving nature was a blessing to the boy, most visitors to the family compound said, and he was increasingly devoted to her.
Michael’s siblings, though, squabbled regularly and often loudly over the disposition of Michael’s estate, and in particular about what it had cost to make peace with John Branca. All of Katherine Jackson’s children, but Randy most aggressively, were complaining that she had accepted a deal with Branca that cut them out of the estate entirely. Katherine herself was increasingly unhappy with the stingy allowance she received. While John Branca and cocounsels were responding generously to any request that directly benefited Michael’s three children (by its accounting, the estate had shelled out $115,000 for a “family vacation” during the second half of June and the first part of July in 2010), they were providing Katherine Jackson with a monthly cash allowance of just $3,000, and the entire family were up in arms about it. Almost nothing was left over for Katherine’s children, and that was as intended, according to Branca, who said that Michael Jackson had made it very clear that he did not intend to provide for his siblings. Even when Branca upped Mrs. Jackson’s monthly stipend to $8,000, several of her surviving children continued to complain vociferously, demanding that Katherine mount a genuine challenge to the estate’s administration.
The clamor for action grew deafening after the estate trustees submitted to Judge Beckloff’s court their preliminary accounting of “disbursements” during the sixteen months between Michael’s death and October 31, 2010. The three-page document showed that nearly $29 million had been paid out to people working for the estate. John Branca’s first two hires were being well taken care of: More than $600,000 had been paid to Sitrick and Company, which was still only about a third of the nearly $1.8 million that had been collected by Howard Weitzman’s law firm. All told, nearly $6 million had been paid to attorneys working for the estate. Greenberg Traurig had recieved more than $2.1 million, while Hoffman, Sabban & Watenmaker had collected just about $1.6 million. Branca’s own firm had received only a little more than $100,000 for its services, but Branca himself had done far better than that, as had John McClain. Under the heading “Co-executive and Creative Director Compensation,” nearly $18 million in payments were listed between February 2, 2010, and October 8, 2010, indicating that Branca and McClain had each pocketed nearly $9 million in a period of eight months. Even if those payments were for the full sixteen months of work, it meant that Branca and McLain were averaging nearly $600,000 per month in compensation. And meanwhile Branca wants you to thank him for raising your allowance to $8,000 a month, Joe and Randy Jackson told Katherine.
The anger among Michael’s siblings, nieces, and nephews was increasingly matched by a mood of apprehension as they came to understand that Katherine Jackson would be able to collect even this pittance from the Jackson Family Trust only for as long as the eighty-year-old woman remained healthy enough to serve as the three children’s guardian. Rebbie and Janet were the only two Jacksons considered fit to replace their mother in the event of serious illness or death, but Janet had no real interest in the kids beyond “arranging photo opportunities with them,” as one of Katherine’s advisors put it, while Prince and Paris were outspoken about rejecting Rebbie’s extreme religiosity, and did not want to live with her. The brothers and La Toya were certain to be shut out if Katherine passed, a fact that only intensified the fractious nature of the family’s relations. And of course there was still the question of Joe, constantly circling the compound, sneaking in at every opportunity to look for whatever levers he thought might turn things his way.
The inclusion of Grace Rwaramba in the household was intended to provide a stabilizing effect, but it seemed to have quite the opposite effect. La Toya now appeared to have recognized Grace as a serious threat to the Jacksons’ hegemony. “The family has mixed feelings about her,” La Toya told a British reporter. “Mother says she wants to be with the kids, but I warned her to be careful. It’s not like the children like or dislike her. They like everyone. Mother is gullible and feels sorry for her.” La Toya seemed to believe that it was Grace herself who had spread the story that she was Michael’s girlfriend and was quick to dispute it. “I have a lot of questions about Grace,” La Toya had told a British tabloid not long after Rwaramba landed at Hayvenhurst. “She was instrumental in keeping the family away. All of a sudden she is back, listening and watching the family. I think her behavior is odd.”
Learning what Grace had said to Daphne Barak was what cooled the affections of Prince and Paris, according to some reports from the compound. Others said the real problem was that Grace persisted in overplaying her hand. The nanny knew that her presence at Hayvenhurst had been a determining factor in Debbie Rowe’s decision to yield custody to Katherine, these sources explained. And over time, several family members had interpreted various remarks she made as implicit threats to tell the world what she knew about the Jacksons, Michael included.
In late August word emerged from the Hayvenhurst estate that Michael’s three children would be enrolling in the fall at the exclusive Buckley School. Prince, who was pushing to explore the world outside the Hayvenhurst compound, wanted to attend class with other kids. All three of Tito’s children had attended Buckley, whose recent alumni included Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, and Kim Kardashian. When September came, though, Katherine decided to continue homeschooling the kids. It was what they were used to, she said. The estate administrators approved funds to convert the theater into a classroom and to create an actual schoolyard within the family compound, complete with a volleyball court, so that their curriculum could include PE class. The kids would take field trips and have a regular lunch, as well.
Things turned ugly a couple of months into 2010. On the first day of March, a team of officials from the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services arrived at the Hayvenhurst compound, having been called to investigate a report that Jaafar Jackson had purchased a stun gun online and was experimenting with it on his young cousin Blanket. ABC News posted an online story that Jaafar had ordered at least one, and perhaps two stun guns off the Internet, then shared the 3,000-volt weapon with the other children in the house for three days before they were caught chasing Blanket around the house with it. After receiving a phone call from an alleged witness, DCFS had dispatched a team of investigators, who arrived at the Hayvenhurst estate shortly before 11 p.m.
Adam Streisand was on the scene the next morning to refute the ABC story, acknowledging that Jaafar Jackson had ordered a stun gun (Streisand incorrectly described it as “a Taser”) online, and had “opened it in his bathroom and tested it on a piece of paper.” Katherine Jackson and a security guard at the house heard the sound, followed it to Jaafar’s bathroom, and promptly confiscated the weapon, Streisand said: “Blanket Jackson never saw or heard the Taser. Neither did Paris Jackson. Prince saw the Taser in possession of security.” DCFS officials had taken possession of the gun and removed it from the house, said Streisand, who quickly added that he saw no reason why the incident should be brought before Judge Beckloff.
The Jackson family was less concerned about what the judge might think of the stun gun story than with how Debbie Rowe might react to it. The cordial relations that appeared to have resulted from Rowe’s agreement not to contest Katherine Jackson’s custody of the children had chilled considerably in August when Katherine’s attorneys opposed Debbie’s petition to have the Michael Jackson estate pay the nearly $200,000 in legal fees she owed to Eric George, calling the amount “unreasonable.” The Jacksons had reportedly complied with their agreement to inform Prince and Paris that Debbie was their biological mother, and to retain a child psychologist who would structure and monitor her visits with the two older children. People who purported to speak for Rowe, however, suggested that the Jacksons were making it difficult to arrange those visits by repeatedly claiming conflicts with other scheduled events. Debbie did not believe the Jackson family welcomed her, these sources said. Tito Jackson insisted this was not the case: “She can definitely have rights to visit, hang out, and be part of the family,” he said. “After all is said and done, they are her kids. I would like to see her be part of the Jackson family. There is enough love for everybody.”
The stun gun incident, however, ratcheted up concerns among the Jacksons about whether Rowe and her attorney might bring her concerns before Judge Beckloff. DCFS wasn’t doing much to ease the family’s anxiety, sending investigators to the Hayvenhurst estate repeatedly during the next two days to question each of the fourteen people who had been living in the house at the time, as well as all security guards and other employees. Within twenty-four hours, TMZ began raising questions about Adam Streisand’s description of what had taken place. Apparently, there was a “conflict” between the accounts offered by the Jackson family and those that came from employees at the Hayvenhurst compound, TMZ reported: “We know some members of the staff will tell DCFS that the stun gun was there for several days before a member of security went upstairs and allegedly found Jaafar and other kids playing with the gun and pointing it at Michael’s son Blanket.”
Tensions inside the compound spiked again in early May 2010, when Radar Online, a Web site affiliated with the National Enquirer, posted “WORLD EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: Shocking Violence Inside Jackson Home.” What the video showed was Jermajesty speaking into a camera for a moment, then Jaafar stepping into the frame with a furious scowl and cursing his younger brother as a thief, then slapping Jermajesty across the face with enough force to send the boy sprawling to the ground. At least that’s what the editors at Radar Online saw. A perhaps more persuasive interpretation was that a couple of goofy kids had staged what they hoped might be a massive YouTube hit before some opportunistic adult got hold of it. Radar Online, though, found a clinical psychiatrist to analyze this “brutal” scene. “It shows a cycle of violence, knowing about family history,” opined Dr. Joseph Haraszti. “When he hits his brother so hard that he falls flat out, it looks like he knocks him out. There may have been violence towards him to make him behave that way.” As for the stun gun incident, Dr. Haraszti went on, “it shows lack of supervision. It seems that the children are out of control. Which begs the question, where are the adults? Who is in charge?”
Debbie Rowe was asking the same question, Radar Online reported, after catching Debbie outside a Barnes and Noble at a shopping mall in Calabasas that very evening. “Of course I’m concerned about Blanket,” an emotional Rowe replied to a question about the stun gun imbroglio. “I’m concerned about my children. Who wouldn’t be?” Debbie also took the opportunity to tell the world that, despite the Jacksons’ supposed suggestion that she could be a member of the family, she still had yet to set foot on the Hayvenhurst property. “I have never been to the house,” she said, blinking back tears.
Within the gates of the family compound, the questions that Katherine and the other Jacksons asked were: Who snitched us out to the DCFS? And who gave that video to Radar Online? The paparazzi agency X17 was reporting that Grace Rwaramba had done both. Grace’s call to DCFS had been the result of an ongoing “feud” between the children’s nanny and their grandmother over who was really raising Prince, Paris, and Blanket, according to X17. Even though Katherine knew that Grace was responsible for both calling DCFS and selling the video to Radar Online, X17 reported, the Jackson family “is afraid to get rid of Rwaramba because she has been threatening to write a tell-all book.”
In fact, Grace would leave the Hayvenhurst compound before May 1. It wasn’t the Jacksons who compelled her departure, though, but rather Alejandra Oaziaza. “That whole mess, with the stun gun and all of it, was really about just one person,” Marc Schaffel said. “Alejandra’s the one Katherine wanted out of the house.” Mrs. Jackson tried to persuade Alejandra to depart with her two youngest children during the last months of 2009. “What Katherine did originally was tell Alejandra she was going to remodel Hayvenhurst—which it definitely needed,” Schaffel recalled. “There were toilets that didn’t work and doors falling off hinges. And Alejandra almost went, but then she said, ‘Well, how do I know you’re gonna let us come back?’” After the stun gun incident, though, DCFS had made a “strong recommendation” that Michael’s children needed to be separated from their cousins, especially Jaafar and Jermajesty. This time, Katherine tried to entice Alejandra into vacating the Hayvenhurst compound with an offer that she and her children could live, all expenses paid, in the Encino condominium that Michael had transferred to his mother years earlier. “It’s a beautiful condo,” Schaffel explained. “Katherine had it completely remodeled and it was like brand-new. But Alejandra wasn’t happy. She wanted to know who was going to cook and clean for them. So Katherine, being the woman that she is, said, ‘Well, I’ll send some of the staff members over there a couple of days a week.’ And get this, Alejandra says, ‘Why would I want that when I already have full-time help here?’”
On TMZ, it was claimed that Alejandra was responsible for both the call to DCFS and the appearance of the slapping video on Radar Online, each move made as a way of letting the Jacksons know she would not leave Hayvenhurst quietly. Family members blamed Alejandra for the story that Grace had decamped from Hayvenhurst because she and Paris were fighting constantly, forcing Katherine to ask the nanny to pack her bags and go. “The only reason Grace left was because she couldn’t take the abuse that Alejandra and her kids were putting her through,” Schaffel said.
In the months since their father’s death, it had become obvious that Prince, Paris, and Blanket were destined to live out their singularly strange childhoods as the objects of a never-ending soap opera written in tabloid headlines and lit by flash attachments. They would be envied and pitied, enabled and adored, and never left alone, except when they didn’t wish to be. And the people who wanted to protect them were the ones they really had to watch out for.
At least their grandmother seemed sincerely committed to normalizing the lives of Michael’s children. The kids were allowed to spend their first Christmas without Daddy at the Cascios’ home in New Jersey. Katherine might not celebrate the holiday herself, but she wouldn’t keep Michael’s children from doing so. Six months later, on the first anniversary of her son’s death, Mrs. Jackson lamented that Prince, Paris, and Blanket “don’t have any friends,” during an interview with the Daily Mirror. “They don’t go to school, they have private lessons at home—but that will change in September.” True to her word, Katherine enrolled both Prince and Paris in the Buckley School for the fall term. Prince had been increasingly insistent upon getting the chance to mix with other kids. Paris, at first reluctant, became enthusiastic after a visit to the school. Blanket would continue to be homeschooled for a time, but perhaps in a year or two would join his brother and sister at Buckley, Katherine said.
The lawyers running the estate would accuse Mrs. Jackson of exploiting her grandchildren later that autumn, though, when she and the other Jacksons made Prince and Paris the point persons in a family campaign against the first posthumous Michael Jackson album. Cobbled together from the bits and pieces of the “comeback album” he had been working on since his 2006 stay in Ireland, plus other cuts that went back decades, the new album, titled Michael, was under attack weeks before its Christmastime 2010 release. The loudest complaints had to do with three songs that had been recorded in the basement of the Cascio family’s New Jersey home. When “Breaking News” was previewed for fans during late October on michaeljackson.com, the Jacksons promptly objected that the voice featured on the track was not Michael’s, then offered his two oldest children as exhibits A and B. Prince had told them he was upstairs listening while his father recorded with Eddie Cascio, the Jacksons said, and the boy insisted that none of what he heard matched the tracks that Sony was including on the new album. Paris was said to be especially “adamant” that the voice singing lead on “Breaking News” was not her dad’s. Sony executives grumbled anonymously that the kids were being “manipulated” by Katherine Jackson. As was his practice, John Branca remained silent and out of sight, dispatching Howard Weitzman to tell reporters that the estate had hired forensic audiologists to verify the tracks recorded in the Cascio basement and that all of them agreed they heard Michael’s voice on “Breaking News” and the two other songs. Eddie Cascio himself sounded more hurt than angry when he insisted, “It is Michael’s voice. He recorded right there in my basement.”
Randy Jackson, though, said that the first time he heard the Cascio tracks, “I knew it wasn’t [Michael’s] voice.” The objections of other Jackson family members were echoed by will.i.am, who called the release of the new album “disrespectful.” “Now that he is not part of the process, what are they doing?” he asked. “Why would you put out a record like that?” Quincy Jones’s argument was perhaps the most persuasive: Michael was too much of a perfectionist to have put out such a rough and unfinished record.
Branca and the estate answered with a report stating that “six of Michael’s former producers and engineers, who had worked with Michael over the past thirty years—Bruce Swedien, Matt Forger, Stuart Brawley, Michael Prince, Dr. Freeze, and Teddy Riley—all confirmed that the vocal was definitely Michael.” Riley, the most credited of the several producers on the new album, protested that “without any proof” it was unfair to call the Cascio tracks frauds. “You can hear the authenticity in his voice, and you can hear the natural part of him,” Riley said.
Sony shipped 900,000 units of the new album domestically when it went into stores during December 2010. Just 224,000 copies of Michael sold in its first week of release, placing it at #3 on the charts behind albums by Taylor Swift and Susan Boyle, and well behind the 363,000 copies of Invincible that had sold in the first week of that album’s 2001 release. The initial single released from the new album, Michael’s “Hold My Hand” duet with Akon, had peaked at #39 on the Billboard Hot 100. Radio and record company executives were in agreement that questions about the authenticity of the tracks on Michael were the main reason for such a disappointing commercial performance.
The critics weren’t much kinder. “Breaking News,” the track from the new album that had gotten the most media attention, was dismissed as “self-referential rehash that spotlights all that was wrong with” Michael Jackson. In some ways, the saddest thing about Michael was that the two best cuts on the album, “Behind the Mask” and “Much Too Soon,” had been performed and produced back in the 1980s. “Behind the Mask” was especially excellent, a strangely psychedelic, lushly orchestrated R & B reworking of a track off the Yellow Magic Orchestra’s 1979 album Solid State Survivor for which Michael had written fresh lyrics, then sung them with a ferocity that he hadn’t matched since his Dangerous days. A number of critics noted how much the more recent cuts suffered by comparison.
Sony was spared this suffering by strong international sales of the new album. Questions about the Cascio tracks hadn’t received the same sort of publicity overseas, where Michael Jackson continued to be more popular than he was in his native land. Michael had shipped platinum in thirteen countries outside the United States and gold in another seventeen, making its debut at #1 in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden. First-week sales in the UK were the highest for any Michael Jackson album since Dangerous and in Japan it joined Bad, Thriller, and This Is It as the only Jackson albums to debut in the top three. The deal Sony had made with the estate might yet pay off, but only if the company got Michael’s kids and his mother in their corner. That looked less and less likely to happen.
It was scarcely a surprise that conspiracy theories flourished in the aftermath of Michael Jackson’s demise. Sudden celebrity deaths from Elvis Presley’s to Tupac Shakur’s had generated stories of arcane plots and elaborate hoaxes, and this one would as well. The difference in Jackson’s case was that the decedent himself had long been convinced there was a conspiracy to destroy him. Even in the run-up to the “This Is It” shows, Michael refused to abandon his belief that Sony and a somewhat fluid cast of accomplices were behind the criminal charges that had been filed against him in Santa Barbara County, and that gaining full control of the Beatles catalog was the cabal’s motivation. “Michael Jackson was afraid for his life throughout the entire time I knew him,” Raymone Bain said. “Michael always thought that his property and his possessions—particularly his publishing—were going to be the cause of his death.”
Sony execs Tommy Mottola and Marty Bandier were nearly always among those Michael accused of plotting against him, as well as his former manager Trudy Green and her boss Howard Kaufman, of HK Management. A paragraph in the Interfor report that claimed Al Malnik had been involved with John Branca in a scheme that used Mr. Jackson’s money was not substantiated by the slightest offer of evidence, but nevertheless had made Michael suspicious of the Florida attorney. The Nation of Islam fed that suspicion and also persuaded Michael to include Charles Koppelman and Brett Ratner among “the Jews” on his enemies list. Tom Sneddon was their partner and their pawn in the plot, as Michael and the NOI had it.
A surprising number of people from outside the family—some of them substantial figures—had bought into the Sony conspiracy theory during recent years. Tom Mesereau believed “a case could be made” that the company assisted the prosecution in Santa Barbara County in order to gain greater control of the ATV catalog. Tohme Tohme declared himself “convinced there was a conspiracy against Michael—not necessarily to kill him, but to weaken him, to make him cancel the shows and to use that to get control of the catalog.” Said an attorney who had dealt with Branca, Tohme, Frank Dileo, and Randy Phillips in connection to the AEG contract and the disposition of the Michael Jackson estate, and who had dealings as well with Leonard Rowe and the Jackson family, “Oh, there was a conspiracy certainly, but what kind of conspiracy, who was involved, and how they were involved is difficult to know.”
Of course, the story that Michael was still alive became the one most welcomed by his legions of fans. It had arisen within twenty-four hours of the death pronouncement at UCLA, when a photograph of someone who was supposedly Michael climbing out of an ambulance in the parking garage of the Los Angeles County coroner’s office had appeared on cable television. Literally thousands of descriptions of how Michael had faked his death surfaced in the months afterward. “I get at least twenty e-mails a week from people who say Michael is not dead,” reported Uri Geller. “I’m not kidding you.”
Michael was dead, though, and the one person in the world certain to answer for it continued to be Dr. Conrad Murray. As he prepared for a preliminary hearing that was scheduled to begin during the first week of 2011, Murray was left with just a few flickers of hope that he might escape from criminal liability. Among these was that Michael Jackson’s parents appeared to have recognized that they and the doctor shared certain common interests. Joe Jackson had actually written a letter asking Michael’s fans not to assault, verbally or physically, either Murray or his supporters during the doctor’s preliminary hearing. “By calling names, we are lowering ourselves to their level,” read the letter, which itself served as a sort of preamble to the complaint against AEG Joe lodged with the medical board of California one month later. Joe’s accusation in this filing was that AEG had practiced “unlawful corporate medicine.” He supported the charge by claiming that Conrad Murray had repeatedly asked for both a defibrillator and an attending nurse at the Carolwood chateau, and was denied by executives who refused to pay the cost. Court filings being made in Katherine Jackson’s wrongful death lawsuit indicated that the very same claims were going to be at the heart of her case against AEG. What this meant, among other things, was that Dr. Murray himself might be the plaintiffs’ most important witness. Murray indicated he was willing to play ball by encouraging unidentified “friends” to spread the word that he had retained copies of e-mails sent to AEG asking for both the resuscitation apparatus and a registered nurse, and that the doctor blamed Michael’s death on the company’s refusal to comply. “I could have saved Michael if I had the right equipment,” Murray was quoted as saying. “I have the paperwork to prove it.”
As the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office prepared to present its case against Murray at his preliminary hearing, Michael’s siblings made comments suggesting a growing sympathy for the physician. “Dr. Murray’s the fall guy,” Jermaine Jackson told reporters after one court hearing. “This is bullshit!” It surprised no one when La Toya issued a statement that amplified her brothers’ remarks: “Michael was murdered, and although he died at the hands of Dr. Conrad Murray, I believe Dr. Murray was part of a much larger plan. There are other individuals involved, and I will not rest and I will continue to fight until all of the proper individuals are brought forth and justice is served.”
The case took an even more unexpected twist when Murray’s attorneys filed court papers suggesting that Dr. Arnold Klein was at least partially responsible for Michael Jackson’s death. Klein “prescribed or may have overmedicated Michael Jackson, including to such point that AEG Live read Michael Jackson the proverbial ‘riot act’ to get him to stop subjecting himself to overmedication by Dr. Klein,” read the filing. Joe Jackson’s attorneys promptly demanded to know “why, given these allegations, Dr. Arnold Klein is not a required party to be added to accord proper relief.” For the first time since Michael Jackson’s death, Klein had declined to reply publicly to an allegation against him. Other people were talking, though. Michael’s longtime hairdresser Karen Faye told police investigators that Michael almost always “exhibited signs of drug use” after seeing Dr. Klein. According to Faye, she had noticed about a week before Michael’s death that he seemed more lucid and asked Frank Dileo if he knew why. “’Cause Klein is out of town,” had been Dileo’s reply, Faye said.
The knowledge that he had become the target both of a state investigation and of Dr. Murray’s defense strategy did not prevent Klein from submitting claims against the Michael Jackson estate that demanded both $48,522.89 owed for cosmetic dermatology procedures performed on the entertainer in the last months of his life and the return of a $10,000 green Gianfranco Ferre jacket that he had loaned Michael back in the spring of 2009. Those who had read documents Klein had submitted in his demand for payment were asking the doctor some sharp questions. By his own tally, Klein had injected Michael Jackson with either Restylane or Botox at least three times a week during April 2009, a month when he had also injected Jackson with 2,475 milligrams of Demerol. The same records showed that Klein had injected Michael with another 1,400 milligrams of Demerol during a two-week period in May. A number of anonymous medical professionals were quoted as questioning whether the Botox and Restylane injections listed on the medical billings were nothing more than “cover” for the Demerol injections Jackson wanted. Klein insisted he had performed every one of the procedures he had billed for and defended the Demerol injections by explaining, “You have to understand, Michael Jackson was incredibly needle-phobic. I had to sedate him.”
As questions persisted about his alleged “overmedication” of Michael Jackson, however, Klein grew increasingly mute, hunkered down with his attorneys, it was said, against the possibility that either the California attorney general’s office or the medical board of California might take action against him. Further complicating matters was that Conrad Murray’s accusations against Klein seemed to fly in the face of the claims in Katherine Jackson’s lawsuit that AEG had become responsible for the death of her son by replacing his upstanding “treating physician” Arnold Klein with the recklessly incompetent Dr. Murray. How it would all sort itself out was impossible to predict. The only surety was that the criminal case against Murray would be decided before any settlement of the civil claims against AEG.
The prosecution case laid out by Deputy District Attorney David Walgren on January 4, 2011, the first day of Dr. Conrad Murray’s preliminary hearing in downtown Los Angeles, was a surprise to no one. Not only had Murray’s administration of the anesthesic propofol to Michael Jackson during the early hours of June 25, 2009, been an “extreme deviation from the standard of care,” Walgren told the court, but the doctor compounded matters by delaying his emergency phone call to 911 while he improperly performed CPR on his dying patient, then concealed the fact that he had injected propofol into Jackson’s bloodstream from both paramedics at the scene and doctors at the hospital.
Kenny Ortega was summoned to the stand as the first prosecution witness, called mainly to describe how upset the doctor had been when the “This Is It” show director sent Michael home early from rehearsal on the evening of June 19, 2009. During a meeting the next day at the Carolwood chateau, Ortega recalled, Dr. Murray insisted that only he should make such decisions, and maintained that Michael was “physically and emotionally fine.” Murray’s attorney Ed Chernoff asked if Ortega had read Michael “the riot act” before sending him home on the evening of June 19, but Ortega (who had been named in the original filing as a defendant in Katherine Jackson’s lawsuit against AEG) denied it.
Michael Amir Williams followed Ortega to the stand and told the court about Murray’s approaching him at the hospital to say he needed to get back to the house to retrieve tubes of skin-whitening cream in Michael’s room. The next witness was Faheem Muhammad, who testified that Dr. Murray had told him he wanted to leave the hospital because he was hungry and needed something to eat. Alberto Alvarez described once again being instructed by Murray to remove the IV bag filled with some milky-white substance and of being ordered as well to load bottles filled with a similar milky-looking liquid into a medical bag before the paramedics arrived.
The two EMTs who had been the first responders to arrive at the Carolwood chateau, Richard Senneff and Martin Blount, were especially damning witnesses. Senneff estimated that Michael Jackson must have been dead for at least twenty minutes before the first call to 911 was made. He and Blount agreed there was absolutely no chance of revival, Senneff remembered, and yet Dr. Murray insisted he felt a pulse and refused to pronounce Mr. Jackson dead. When he and the other paramedic asked if Mr. Jackson had been taking medications, Senneff recalled, the only one the doctor mentioned was Ativan; he never uttered a word about propofol and described his patient’s main problem as dehydration. Blount described Murray as soaked with perspiration when he first spoke to the paramedics and remembered the doctor insisting that he had waited only one minute after Michael Jackson stopped breathing to call 911. Blount echoed Senneff’s frustration at the doctor’s refusal to pronounce death.
The doctors from UCLA, Richelle Cooper and Thao Nguyen, said that Dr. Murray refused to recognize that Mr. Jackson was dead even though they could find no signs of life when the body arrived at the hospital’s emergency room, and that he implored them to “try to save the patient.” The doctors also remembered that Murray had told them Michael was taking Ativan, but made no mention of propofol.
Elissa Fleak, an investigator from the coroner’s office, testified that she found not only twelve bottles of propofol in the closet of Michael Jackson’s bedroom, but along with them a virtual pharmacy of other drugs, including lorazepam, diazepam, temazepam, trazodone, Flomax, clonazepam, tizanidine, hydrocodone, lidocaine, and Benoquin, as well as a quantity of syringes, needles, IV catheters, and vials, both opened and unopened. A pharmacist from Applied Pharmacy Services in Las Vegas followed with testimony that Dr. Murray had made six separate orders of Diprivan between April 6 and June 10 in 2009, for a total of 255 vials of the drug, and that he had all of it, as well as the benzodiazepine drugs he wanted, shipped to an apartment in Santa Monica.
LAPD robbery-homicide division detective Orlando Martinez testified that during the interview with Conrad Murray he conducted two days after Michael Jackson’s death, the doctor had said he was attempting to “wean” Mr. Jackson off of propofol, but that during the early morning hours of June 25, Michael had literally “begged” for the drug to help him sleep. Feeling “pressure” from his patient, Murray said, he gave Mr. Jackson a reduced dose of propofol—with the patient’s help. Michael liked to “push in the propofol himself,” Murray explained, and said “other doctors let him do it.” Murray also told him that he had gone to the bathroom for only two minutes, Detective Martinez testified, and that he saw that Mr. Jackson wasn’t breathing as soon as he returned. Los Angeles County assistant medical examiner Dr. Christopher Rogers said on the stand that he believed Dr. Murray had lied to Detective Martinez about the size of the propofol dose that was administered to Michael Jackson. If it had been a mere 25 milligrams of propofol, as Murray said, then the patient would have awakened after as little as three to five minutes of sleep, testified Dr. Rogers, who added that it was inappropriate to use propofol to treat insomnia and that he considered the medical care provided to Michael Jackson by Dr. Murray to have been “substandard.”
The prosecution appeared to be holding powerful evidence in reserve. A pair of phone company representatives were put on the stand to testify that Conrad Murray did a great deal of texting and calling between the time he discovered Michael Jackson had stopped breathing and the first 911 call. Who Dr. Murray had been texting and calling, along with what he had said to them, was not revealed. A connection between a couple of the cell phone calls Murray made and two women from the doctor’s office in Texas who had gone to a storage facility to retrieve boxes was implied but not explored.
The failure of the LAPD to secure the Carolwood chateau in the immediate aftermath of Michael Jackson’s death was the one real advantage the defense possessed. Conrad Murray’s attorneys indicated they might exploit that area of vulnerability in the future but for now there was no doubt that Conrad Murray would be ordered to stand trial on a charge of involuntary manslaughter. Before Judge Michael Pastor adjourned to prepare his decision, however, the California deputy attorney general who represented the medical board of California wanted to ask that the judge also suspend Dr. Murray’s license to practice medicine. Murray’s attorneys hastened to argue that this would deprive the doctor of the ability to mount a defense if he went to trial. It certainly would deprive him of the ability to pay their fees.
A little more than an hour later, Judge Pastor ruled that Murray would stand trial, and that his license to practice medicine would be suspended as a condition of his bail. The doctor was given twenty-four hours to notify the medical boards in Texas and Nevada of the judge’s decision.