Hendrix doctor says star could have been murdered

The doctor who tried to save Jimi Hendrix on the night of his death in September 1970 has agreed that a claim that the legendary guitarist was murdered is plausible.

Dr John Bannister, the Australian registrar who was the first doctor to attend to Hendrix when he was taken into hospital in London, said at the time that the guitarist had choked to death on his own vomit, which mainly consisted of red wine.

Now, he has told The Times that because of the extraordinary volume of wine found in and on his body, the idea that Hendrix was killed “sounded plausible”.

The murder claim is made in a memoir by a former roadie, James ‘Tappy’ Wright, who contends that the 27-year-old Are You Experienced? guitarist was killed by his manager Mike Jeffery for a $2 million insurance claim.
 
In Rock Roadie, Wright claims a hired gang broke into the Samarkand Hotel in west London where Hendrix was staying with his lover Monika Dannemann. They forced sleeping pills and red wine down the American's throat until he drowned, he writes.

Dr Bannister, a 67-year-old retired orthopaedic surgeon who now lives in Sydney, told The Times Hendrix was drenched in an "extraordinary" amount of wine when he was brought into the now-defunct Kensington hospital St Mary Abbots.

"Not only was it saturated right through his hair and shirt but his lungs and stomach were absolutely full of wine,” said Bannister. “I have never seen so much wine.

“We had a sucker that you put down into his trachea, the entrance to his lungs and to the whole of the back of his throat. We kept sucking him out and it kept surging and surging.”
 
In echoes of Michael Jackson's death, Wright’s claim stirs up the conspiracies that abounded around the death of the young and charismatic black musician - widely considered to be one of the greatest rock guitarists of all time.

Wright contends that Jeffery told him a month before he died in an aircraft collision in 1973 that Hendrix was "worth more to him dead than alive". Wright also claims that in mid-1970, weeks before Hendrix’s death, Jeffery was heavily in debt and was convinced his star act was about to leave him.
 
After Hendrix’s death, his lover Monika claimed that, unbeknown to her, Hendrix had taken nine of her prescription sleeping pills, a very strong German brand which the guitarist was unfamiliar with.

Monika, a former ice-skating instructor who became a drug addict, committed suicide in 1996 following a libel case brought by Hendrix's long-term English girlfriend Kathy Etchingham.

Many Hendrix fans suspected Monika knew more about his death than she let on. ·