Paramedic 33, what is your emergency? Yes, sir. I need to I uh I need an ambulance as soon as possible, sir.
All right, sir. What’s the I believe we have a a gentleman here that needs help and he’s not breathing.
You’re talking about Michael Jackson here. It was absolutely huge. There was a lot of pressure to get it right.
This isn’t a man who should have died. He’s not breathing. Yeah. He’s not breathing and we need to we’re trying to pump him, but he’s not Okay.
Okay, how old is he? He’s uh 50 years old, sir. 50? Okay. He’s unconscious.
)
He’s not breathing. Yes, he’s not breathing. When we were dispatched to a 50-year-old male, cardiac arrest.
We think this is a viable patient. This is someone if we get to in a timely manner, we can save.
And then when I enter this room, opulent room with medical equipment in it, I realize there’s something unusual here.
What 50-year-old male would be laying in bed at noon with medical equipment? We’re not looking at the patient at that moment.
Till my partner did. He looked up and whispered the name, Michael Jackson. When I realized who it was, I was surprised.
We had no idea he was there. None of us had any idea who was living in our neighborhood.
Did Did anybody witness what happened? Um no, just the doctor, sir. There was a man with our patient who identified himself as the doctor.
And as such, I immediately asked him some information. What had happened? How long has this been going on?
And he told me then that it had just happened. This was a patient to me that it seemed that he had not just passed away.
That some time had gone by before we were notified. And in fact, later, when you’re reflecting on this call, the days, the weeks, the months afterwards, one of the greatest regrets that all of us had is that we had not been called sooner.
When we came outside, that’s when we became aware of a very large presence. We were trying to back out on the street only to be hindered by many, many cameramen putting their lenses against the glass windows of the moving ambulance.
People seem to forget or don’t realize about this investigation, it was a death investigation.
It really wasn’t a crime um at the time. From the information that I had, it was probably an accident or natural and we would find out that he had some pre-existing medical condition.
And then we would be done. Just look at what we knew in the first hours of this.
Taken to the hospital, there wasn’t a bloody knife, there wasn’t a smoking gun. There was nothing on the surface that would lead anyone to believe anything nefarious had occurred.
When I arrived at the hospital, Dr. Murray was gone. So, he was no longer there at the scene.
There were a bit of a panic then. Uh the one person that was in the room with him at the time that everything happened is no longer at the hospital.
There were several attempts right away to get a hold of Dr. Murray uh that were negative.
That he they were going to voicemail. Yeah, family members, Jackson family members coming in and people wanting some questions answered as well as us.
It is believed he suffered cardiac arrest in his home. A team of doctors including emergency physicians and cardiologists attempted to resuscitate him.
The emergency room physician, they believed it was a heart attack. Partly because of what Mr.
Murray had told them. Never told them anything about any other narcotics or anything. They just believed he had had a heart attack and stopped breathing.
So, here we are at the Carolwood house. That day, by the time I got here, we had to block off this side of the street, the entrance side of the street, and it was full of media vans.
We had never seen anything like it. I had never seen anything like it.
There was the room where Dr. Murray treated Mr. Jackson. And then there was a locked room which was uh Mr.
Jackson’s bedroom. There’s a fireplace in the room and it was roaring.
So, the room was very, very hot. There were like posted note or pieces of paper taped uh all over the room on mirrors, on doors with little slogans or phrases.
I don’t know if they were lyrics or thoughts or or some of them seemed like poems.
The bedroom was it was a mess. In the room where he was being treated, it did not seem like a room fit for any type of medical treatment.
Not even like a a home makeshift medical suite. It was just bare bones.
I just remember going in there and there’s an IV stand and uh saline bag and just various medications strewn about.
There was a computer on the bed. There was a lifelike um doll on the bed.
And it’s kind of like advertisements of uh pictures with babies. Everybody knew about the allegations that had been leveled against Mr.
Jackson over the years. One of the things when I saw the laptop on the bed, do I go into it?
But you have to realize the type of case I was investigating.
Uh when you get you know, hold of an investigation, you have to kind of whittle out what is and what isn’t.
It’s like with any case, um you don’t allow whatever the victim was into prior to his death.
Your investigation is focused on how did he die? And who was responsible for it?
In the room where he was being treated, a bottle of propofol had fallen on the ground and rolled under this moving nightstand.
I didn’t know what it did. That ended up being a huge deal later. I had no medical background whatsoever.
My neighbor was a doctor. So, I went to my neighbor and I asked him about it.
And my neighbor was the one who got it started of whoa. What is this doing here?
This is only used in surgeries. This is used to put people under. We had put it out in the press that we were looking for Dr.
Murray. We still didn’t think that there was anything criminal going on.
The only thing that we knew was this surgery drug was at the location that shouldn’t have been there.
The next day, get a call. His attorney has been in contact. He consents to an interview.
So, our plan was to let him talk. And uh that’s what we did. So, um how long have you been uh Dr.
Conrad Murray? I first um started attending to him in 2006. And was it continuous?
Since 2006 on? No. Well, no. Or on and off? Off and on. Intermittent. Okay.
We didn’t know what happened. We didn’t want to assume anything. And we wanted to give the doctor an opportunity to dig his own hole, if that was the case.
It was just you and Michael. It is really not so it is. Okay. And this night it was you just you and Michael.
Just myself and him. And he proceeded to tell us that uh you know, Michael just couldn’t sleep.
He was just so amped up about this upcoming concert. He, by nature, had a hard time sleeping.
He gave him some drugs. Some Valium, Lorazepam, and Diazepam, and a few others to try and calm Michael, to try and get him to rest, uh to fall asleep.
And uh nothing works. He was wide awake. I said, “Do you feel a little bit drowsy?
Do you think your your eyes are telling you you want to sleep?” He said, “No.”
Dr. Murray says, you know, after trying all these various things, nothing was working. And it’s the early morning hours of the next day.
And uh so, finally, I just gave Michael his milk. And at that time you said that I’m that I do have some milk.
Milk? Hot, cold milk? What What are we talking about? He says, “Oh, well, that’s it’s a medication.”
Does the medication have a name? He says, “Well, it’s Propofol.” And this was, again, uh a big revelation during this interview that Propofol’s mentioned.
And what is this uh Propofol? It is a sedative that could also be used for anesthesia.
He freely admits that for months he’s been using this to help Mr.
Jackson sleep. Okay, you’ve administered it more than 10 times. Yes.
More than 20 times? 30 days a month. Roughly? Every day. Oh, so it’s about to be daily.
Uh uh daily. In my head, I was thinking, “What the heck? To drug someone to sleep, even with their permission, the way that he did.”
I didn’t think it was legal. I monitored I I did not watch him. For long in that period that I felt it’s comfortable.
He gave him Propofol and then goes to bathroom, comes back. Mr. Jackson’s not breathing.
So, I started immediately to perform CPR? And mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He goes into a panic.
Uh he tries CPR while Michael’s on the bed. He summons Alberto Alvarez, the head of security.
And ultimately, Alberto Alvarez is the one that calls 911. When we reviewed the CCTV at the mansion, we saw that he carried in a bag with him.
And also, the family and the uh security staff told us he would always carry a bag with him.
When he went to the hospital, he did not have the bag with him. The biggest uh aha moment was when I had asked Dr.
Murray where his bags were. Where Where’s your bag with with those syringes would be at now?
Oh, really? I don’t have that. Yeah. Where I thought you left it there. He was assuming that we had it.
You haven’t got my bags? Once he realized we didn’t have that, he’s like, you know, deer in the headlights look, if you will.
You know, legally, we can search the areas that are relevant. It wasn’t in the room that was relevant.
If you walk into the dressing room and you turn right to the high level top, the the bags left there with the items in it.
You know, in those moments, people aren’t their sharpest. They’re not thinking the best.
So, it’s our job to take those little mistakes that people make and build the case on them.
First thing Monday morning, went to the house, went to where uh Dr. Murray had said the medical bag was.
Different room, in a closet, in a cubby above the closet. And we recovered the bag.
We recovered a treasure trove of evidence from Murray’s doctor’s bag. We found a bunch of more medicines that he had used, like Propofol and Lidocaine.
One of the other things that we found was we found all the waste, all the trash, the needles, the empty bottles, the stuff that, when we went into the room, should have been laying around.
So, we knew that sometime during this medical emergency, Dr. Murray had stopped either giving CPR or had waited to give CPR and cleaned up everything.
So, we’re thinking, “What could be the reasons for that?” Within 48 hours, it appeared that it was a suspicious death in the sense that there was something more than just an overdose.
If your goal is to preserve the life of the person that you’re giving CPR to, why would you pause that to pick up trash, unless you’re trying to hide something?
If he wouldn’t have told us where it was, or if he would have taken it with him, we wouldn’t have had it.
We would have lost that element of the hiding, the trying to cover up.
We were now looking at Murray. He was behind the death. Not only do you have to do what you can for the victim, but you also have to take into account the organization.
You’re Johnny in a uniform that has that’s been a part of history. And growing up with the stories that you’d heard from the Manson cases, you know, Marilyn Monroe, all these notorious cases that you had seen and heard about growing up were part of LAPD.
Historically, our department had not had very much success on high-profile cases. We had um lost the O.J.
Case. Everybody remembers the Bronco chase. Ourselves and the D.A.’s office allowed him to turn himself in, and it turned into a pursuit and a hostage situation.
Just ridiculous. And even though you have this overwhelming amount of evidence to secure a conviction, uh you don’t get it.
We, the jury in the above-entitled action, find the defendant, Orenthal James Simpson, not guilty of the crime of murder, a felony, upon Nicole Brown Simpson, a human being, as charged in count one of the information.
For us working the cases, we didn’t want to make the same mistakes that had been made in the department’s memory and in the public memory.
There was a lot of pressure to get it right. Me, personally, I thought that it was going to be horrible.
The public scrutiny, the second-guessing. This is kind of like when um the generation when Kennedy was assassinated, I now remember that I was in Times Square, you know, when I found out that Michael Jackson passed away.
There was a lot more pressure, if you will. There was a lot of eyes on us, obviously, uh to get the job done.
It was daunting at times. When I showed up to go into the autopsy, you know, they had a little, you know, cover over the window, and they’re looking to make sure it’s just me and no one else is around.
And they open the door, and they usher me in right away and close the door and lock it.
I’m like, “Oh my gosh, you know, we’re in a controlled environment. This is your office.
This is a coroner’s office. What’s the problem?” Everything had been cleared out of there.
I remember it being close to uh 5 hours long. It was extraordinarily long.
The thing that was odd that I found myself periodically looking at was, you know, his his head, his scalp.
Cuz whenever he’s out in public, he’s wearing a wig. Looking at his scalp and the top of his head and being, you know, severely scarred, hardly any hair at all on the sides to what he would look like in public with the flowing hair.
Um that was, you know, a bit different. Not defending his use of prescription medicine by any means, but you know, when you experience something like that, it kind of opens up the door for painkillers and whatever else that may lead to.
But other than that, it truly just let’s do this and get it done.
Yeah. Blood is drawn. Uh and then that blood is sent to a toxicology unit.
So, the initial autopsy didn’t didn’t show much, you know, nothing much that you wouldn’t be shocked a 50-year-old body would have.
He was relatively healthy. You know, this isn’t a man who should have died. While an official cause of death has yet to be determined, the coroner’s office says it has everything needed to make a ruling on why Jackson died.
We’re still waiting for the toxicology reports and the further the completion of all the reports that are coming in.
No, when the body was removed It was weeks went by and we kept asking, “When are we going to hear from toxicology?
When are we going to hear?” We had a death, but we didn’t have a criminal death yet.
It’s official, Michael Jackson’s death was a homicide. The LA County Coroner’s Office says the cause of death was an acute intoxication from the anesthetic propofol.
Once the toxicology report came back, it gave us a lot more lot more power behind our investigation other than going on a hunch.
Now we’re going on facts. And then it became the idea of how bad. That was the big question.
How bad is this? Ultimately, the toxicology results, you have those over here and you have Dr.
Murray’s statement here and it just wasn’t jiving. There was just no way that what he said was factual to what they found out.
Had enough propofol in him to drop a rhinoceros. He could no longer breathe on his own and Murray had not set up an environment to allow for artificial means of breathing, which is reckless.
Gross negligence. This is a a bottle that people pee into when they’re bedridden.
This was found at the bedside and it was full. He used the restroom without having to get out of bed.
What it made us think was that he was completely incapacitated, that someone was caring for him to that extent.
Seeing things like this, I realized that he wasn’t being helped to fall asleep. He was being kept under.
As a consequence, not having the strength or the ability to get up and go to the restroom, just take care of business and continue sleeping.
What we did is we took our case and this included all of our interviews, all of our statements, and most significantly the toxicology reports and the autopsy reports.
We had 11 physicians in I think five or six different specialties review this material and were asked to render an opinion.
As I was looking for doctors to evaluate the level of care, came across Dr.
Shafer. He was instrumental in developing propofol. I demonstrated that in statement after statement after statement in Conrad Murray’s interview.
What he said made no sense. It was not possible. He just asserted things that were not true.
You would need a continuous drip of the propofol and not a shot, not an injection like Dr.
Murray had said he had used. It wears off really quickly. So, what I’m simulating right here is the dose that Conrad Murray claims was available to Michael Jackson and that the defense claimed resulted in Michael Jackson’s death, a dose of just 25 mg, 2 and 1/2 cc’s of drug, which is ridiculous.
It only lasts for a few seconds and this was the whole point of the mathematics that I presented and the heart, of course, keeps pumping.
So, we know that there was a 100 cc vial hanging over Michael Jackson. Knowing it was empty, we can see exactly how over a period of about 30 to 40 minutes, it enters into a dose that would be associated with a lethal concentration of drug in a patient who wasn’t being looked after because they’re really under pretty deep general anesthesia at that point in time.
And this corresponds to having an empty 100 mil vial hanging over Michael Jackson’s head.
And I thought, “Oh my god, this is it. This is this is the smoking gun.
This is actually the bottle of propofol that killed Michael Jackson.” What we discovered was one of the IV bags had been emptied.
One of the propofol bottles had been upside down inside the bag. There’s a bottle of propofol inside an IV bag?
I mean, one of the single weirdest details. There was a big tear, a pipe or a needle that is large would have broken the top of the propofol bottle so that it could drip freely down.
Basically, Murray was using the saline bag to hang the bottle of propofol from the stand, but also I think to hide it cuz he didn’t want anybody to know he was using propofol.
So, to get an idea of just how crazy this is, the anesthetic drugs are all dangerous.
There is really no access outside of the health care setting. We have pumps that are set up, they’re precisely calibrated and we precisely control the dose.
He had an IV line coming down from here and it’s got a little roller clamp on the side.
It’s just this little roller clamp. It’s it’s a gravity fed system. There’s almost there’s very little control on the rate of the drug and that’s what he was using.
It’s insane. Nobody trained in propofol administration would not precisely control the infusion rate. Nobody trained in the use of propofol would ever walk away from a patient who is receiving propofol as a continuous infusion.
Physicians with no training in anesthesia have no business giving propofol. So, at that point we knew this was not an honest mistake, but that this was on purpose bad medicine.
An MD degree is not a license to do whatever the hell you want to do and just think you can get away with it.
One of the challenges in the investigation was the uncooperative witnesses. One of those was Dr.
Murray’s girlfriend. Um when we finally served the search warrant at the at her apartment, the whole place had been cleaned out.
There was nothing to show that Dr. Murray had been there, stayed there, frequented there at all.
Fortunately, they had missed behind one of the bookcases. Behind one of the bookcases, we found a receipt for a pharmacy.
That led us to the propofol. These items here are what we found at Nicole Alvarez’s house.
So, it brings me back to remembering how uh difficult things were when dealing with her.
This business card and this receipt were the only things in his name at her place.
This led us to the pharmacy. When we arrived at the pharmacy, the pharmacy had all the records ready.
They had been following the news and they knew that the police would be there eventually.
And as you go through, you can see all the amounts. One case of the 100 ml bottles, one case of the 20 ml bottles.
In June, four cases of the 100 ml bottles. All of the amounts, it’s over 5 gallons worth of propofol.
A massive amount of propofol. A massive amount of was shipped to his girlfriend’s house.
We found that there was other doctors that Michael had reached out to in hopes of uh being administered propofol and uh he was turned down.
That relationship was a perfect storm. Michael first got introduced to propofol through a dental procedure and he liked it.
He felt like, “Wow, this is the best way to go to sleep.” That was his uh drug of choice.
And he was looking for doctors that would administer that, you know, as wrong as it was.
Usually you think of a doctor as someone very successful and ethical and distinguished. Why they would risk a patient’s life for for anything.
What would make it worth it? I then search warrants out in uh Las Vegas, at his residence, as well as his uh place of business in Las Vegas, and then his office uh out in uh Houston, Texas.
We get into finances. We get into business dealings and his relationships. We executed a search warrant at the Armstrong Medical Clinic this morning with members from the DEA and the Houston Police Department and uh we are from LAPD Robbery-Homicide Division.
He had several children. We would learn several of them by several different wives. He would go out to places of adult entertainment and spend outrageous amounts of money.
He would put on a show and not be able to support it financially. He would leverage his closeness to a celebrity to manipulate young women into relationships with him.
We knew that he had purchased a home in October in Las Vegas uh for over a million dollars and his mortgage was uh was $10,000 a month.
And he had stopped paying it. He had censures from different states where he had he practiced medicine.
These different medical boards, they sent us the files of the complaints and the penalties that they would impose on Dr.
Murray when he would violate their rules. We saw a pattern of sloppy behavior. Uh private physician to Michael Jackson and here he is uh just an absolute mess, you know?
Yeah, surprising. This is what uh I recovered from uh his car, from the doctor’s car.
This was the contract uh as we first found it, the agreement between Dr. Murray, AEG, and uh Mr.
Jackson. The producer shall remit payment to Dr. Murray in the amount of $150,000 per month.
So, this is where the money came into it. [cheering] Michael uh he started working uh preparing for this huge comeback tour and that’s when he had reached out, Michael, and uh told AEG that he wanted Conrad Murray with him.
And initially AEG is like, you know, “London’s not a third world country. They have fabulous doctors over there.
What do you need your own physician for?” And Michael’s response to his managers were, “Listen, the President of the United States has a physician travel with him.
I want a physician to travel with me.” Dr. Murray agreed to go ahead and accompany him and uh provide Michael with what he wanted.
So, he needed this gig with Mr. Jackson either to pay off or to keep up with his debts.
He had the right motive. He needed money. Ultimately, the decision was made to uh charge Dr.
Murray with involuntary manslaughter as opposed to second-degree murder. The DA’s office didn’t want another high-profile failure.
It was an election year for the District Attorney. I think it was a I don’t want to say the lazy way out, uh but again, a manslaughter charge was, you know, the path of least resistance.
The family wasn’t happy with it at all. Mrs. Jackson was just beside herself that there wasn’t going to be a second-degree murder filed.
We felt the evidence suggest that it was a second-degree. The level of his negligence was just so clear that we thought that it would apply.
We do not charge people. We investigate the case and we present it. We were not happy with the choice, but we deal with what we can and uh we move forward.
Would I felt a little pressure, I guess, is when it came time to arrest Dr.
Murray. We wanted to see Murray in handcuffs and I think a lot of, you know, people wanted to see him in handcuffs.
His attorneys didn’t want Dr. Murray to be seen in in handcuffs in public cuz that’s not good for his image and neither is killing somebody, but Behind our backs, the DA’s office made that agreement with Dr.
Murray’s attorneys. The doctor turned himself in, voluntarily surrendered. You know, I’m of the opinion that regardless of who you are or what walk of life you come from, uh if you’ve done wrong, then you need to answer for that.
I am an innocent man. I therefore plead not guilty. Again, he feels he’d done nothing wrong.
It wasn’t his fault. He’s he’s just he’s arrogant individual. Conrad Murray figuratively and literally abandoned Michael Jackson.
We looked at Murray’s phone records. That was a big, huge piece.
We could see Murray on his phone at certain times. He left this vulnerable man filled with Valium and Midazolam and Lorazepam and propofol with no medical monitoring equipment, no necessary resuscitative equipment.
He left him there, abandoned him to fend for himself. So, as far as stepping away for a minute and going to the bathroom and coming back and oh my gosh, Michael’s dead?
No. He was sending emails, reviewing a contract, and he was also on the telephone with various people.
While he was on the phone, he realized that Mr. Jackson was not breathing. I heard um mumbling of voices.
It sounded like the phone was maybe in his pocket or something. It was and I heard coughing.
We looked at the timelines of when the 911 call was, I think, around 20 to 25 minutes after that call with Sade Anding.
Mr. Murray started cleaning up the mess that he had left, covering up the medical treatment that he was giving, put that away, called for help from security, directed them to call 911 while he gave ineffective one-handed CPR, and then traveled to the hospital with Mr.
Jackson. Dr. Murray fled the hospital before we arrived, waited a couple days to get his story straight, and ultimately was uh prosecuted for his conduct.
We, the jury in the above-entitled action, find the the Conrad Robert Murray, guilty of the crime of involuntary manslaughter.
[screaming] That’s how that turned out. Should it have been a second-degree murder?
Yeah, I think it could have been. Unfortunately, that is not a choice that we were able to make.
The biggest thing is that he does not get his medical license back in any state, and I I personally don’t see that happening.
And I’m just trying to keep it light and polite here, uh but yeah. He’s in his own world.
He’s in his own world, Dr. Murray. I think that this case we actually had the answers.
We won’t be in that book of unsolved murders, uh the big ones where we failed.
At least my name won’t be uh put a put in the same place as those.
It’s something I’ll never forget, obviously, rest of my life. Uh one hell of an experience.
Yeah, no regrets. In big cases like this, um sometimes, you know, friendships can really dissolve.
But not in this case, it was uh we all lived happily ever after. As soon as this one was over, it comes to this is what we expect of you.
You get your next murder, and you move forward. About 4 years after the trial, I was driving home uh from work.
I look over to my left, and I see this green older, nice Mercedes. I feel someone staring at me.
I look over, and same car, and I see Dr. Murray. It took me a few seconds to register that it was him, and by that time, our cars had separated.
But I never saw any double takes or any instant moment of recognition. At that time, I was I wondered whether or not he would start practicing medicine again.
Do you give someone like that a second chance? Someone who’s done their time for the crime that they’ve committed.
When do you let it go?
