July 7, 2026 • 43 mins
But wait, Jim Morrison overdosed on heroin because he was a drug addict rockstar just like Janis Joplin, right? Wrong. Who exactly was “the Count," the French aristocrat who was there at the scene of Jim’s death? The same man who was with Janis Joplin hours before she died? Was rumored to somehow be involved with Jimi Hendrix? The friend of Keith Richards and Gram Parsons? And why did Jim Morrison hate him so much? And why was Mick Jagger’s ex-girlfriend Marianne Faithfull so insistent that she knew how Jim really died?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode contains content that may be disturbing to some listeners.
Please check the show notes for more information. Disgraceland is
a production of Double Elvis. This is the story of
(00:22):
how Jim Morrison really died. It's not the story of
a junkie rock star overdosing on heroin, a drug Jim
Morrison didn't use, a drug Jim's friends knew that he despised,
and it's not the story of a singer dying from
an innocuous heart attack. This story deals with what I
(00:43):
believe to be the truth behind Jim Morrison's death and
the shadowy figure from one of music history's darkest corners,
a man whose name seldom gets mentioned, but who is
known not only by the door as frontman, but by
Janis Joplin, Keith Richards, Parsons, and many others from the
sixties and seventies rock scene who found themselves in need
(01:06):
of hard drugs. This figure was an aristocrat, a French
count by the name of Jean de Boutoi, and he
was hated by Jim Morrison. But he was there in Paris,
on the scene at Jim's apartment the morning after he died.
Why what did this mysterious count have to do with
(01:28):
Jim's common law wife, his girlfriend, Pamela Corson, And did
he have something to do with Jim's death or did
Jim Morrison, as conspiracy theorists would have us believe, ever,
even die at all. Did he fake his own death
to escape the pressures of being in the doors of
being a rock star, of making music great music? Unlike
(01:52):
that music I played for you at the top of
the show. That wasn't great music. That was a preset
loop from my melotron called Misty Mountain Flop MK one.
I played you that loote because I can't afford the
rights to It's too late.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
I Feel the.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
Earth Move under my feet by Carol King. And why
would I play you that specific slice of double A
side Cheese?
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Could I afford it?
Speaker 3 (02:19):
Because that was the number one song in America on
July third, nineteen seventy one, And that was the day
Jim Morrison supposedly died of a heroin overdose, or, depending
on who you talk to, faked his own death. But
neither of those things are true. This is what really happened.
(02:42):
This is the story of how Jim Morrison really died.
I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. Jim Morrison is alive.
(03:16):
He's eighty two years old and living a quiet life
in a cottage somewhere in the south of France, reading
Rombeau and writing poetry.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Actually, no, he's not. He's dead.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
But before he died, he was the Zodiac Killer, and
then after he faked his death, he was Rush Limbaugh.
But those things aren't true either, but people do believe them.
Ever since the moment news broke back in July of
nineteen seventy one that Jim Morrison, the singer of The Doors,
had died, a good amount of people, even people close
(03:48):
to Jim, wouldn't accept the fact that he was actually dead.
They just wouldn't believe it. Dora's keyboard player Ray Manzak
was immediately skeptical his own sister and is on record
saying that Jim is the exact type of guy who
would fake his own death.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
And he was.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
Jim Morrison courted death. He'd drank himself into oblivion and
ate acid like it was candy. He dangled himself from
hotel balconies, stumbled through traffic, cut himself in a cult
blood sacrifices while blitzed on cocaine and saying about breaking
on through to the other side in the evidence in
(04:29):
the aftermath of his death, at least the evidence available
to the public was most definitely sketchy enough to lead
people to believe that Jim's death was perhaps something else. Supposedly,
nobody close to the Doors who knew Jim besides his
common law wife Pamela Corson aka Pam Morrison, saw the body,
(04:51):
and by the time Doris manager Bill Siddons arrived in
Paris three days after Jim's death, the coffin was sealed
and there was no autopsy. A day after Bill Siddons arrived,
Jim Morrison was quickly buried in Paris and his body
was never returned to the United States. Jim Morrison died
(05:12):
officially of heart failure, but no one believes that. Most
believed that Jim died of a heroin overdose. But I
don't believe that, and after listening to this podcast, you
own either. At the time of Jim Morrison's death in
July of nineteen seventy one, the Doors were one of
(05:34):
the biggest bands on the planet. Embroiled in controversy because
of Jim's antics. The band had just finished recording what
would be their final album, La Woman. Though the band
had experienced critical and creative highs and lows, the Doors
were still a top selling band, and with the completion
of La Woman, the band was free from their recording
(05:56):
obligations with Electra Records and was now the subject of
a new bidding war between other record labels. The word
was that Atlantic Records was about to offer the Doors
an unprecedented amount of cash to sign with them. All
of this was happening at the same time that Jim
Morrison was awaiting the verdict for an appeal of his
(06:17):
conviction concerning an incident two years prior in Miami where
Jim had exposed himself to an audience on stage. Jim
was facing six months in prison for the crime. Nineteen
seventy one was a time of great creative and personal
turmoil for Jim Morrison. He had just completed what he
(06:39):
believed to be his band's greatest album. He no longer
had a record label to answer to, and he wasn't
sure he wanted a new one. In a new set
of headaches, his girlfriend Pam had left Jim in Los
Angeles that spring to live in Paris. Jim suspected she
was living with another man, one who indulged her heroin happy,
(07:00):
a habit Jim Morrison hated. In addition to being separated
from the one true love of his life and facing
prison time, Jim was exhausted by the image he'd created,
that of the Lizard King, a swashbuckling leatherclat Adonna's part
rock and roll genius, part drunken buffoon. Jim had eaten
(07:20):
all the acid, he slept with, all the groupies, it
experienced all the things, and now he romanticized a quieter
life as a poet. So he traded Los Angeles, the
city of Night that he sang about an La Woman,
for Paris, the City of Light. To understand how Jim
(07:43):
Morrison really died in Paris in nineteen seventy one, you
have to understand what happened in Los Angeles in nineteen seventy.
Count Jean de Brettoi had one green eye and one yellow.
He also had the strongest heroine in Los Angeles. The
(08:05):
Count was young, handsome, mysterious, and hated by Jim Marrison,
which was an anomaly as plenty of rock stars counted
the Count as their friend, Keith Richards, Janis Joplin, Graham Parsons,
members of the GTOs, and perhaps even Jimmy Hendricks. But
Jim hated the Count for the exact reason that these
(08:25):
other rock stars appreciated the young foreign aristocrat, because he
dealt heroin. To Jim's great annoyance, the Count shared his
heroine with Jim's girlfriend, Pamela. In fact, the two shared
more than their love of the addictive opiate. Pamela and
the Count had a romantic relationship that likely stretched back
(08:47):
to the Count's first days in Los Angeles as a
UCLA student, where he became the university's Hashish supplier by
using his family's French diplomatic connections to smuggle drugs into
the States through the moroccan An embassy and on to campus.
The Count was rich and Pamela corson. Despite her relationship
(09:07):
with Jim Morrison, one of the most famous rock stars
on the planet, was not. The Count took Pamela on
extravagant jet set shopping sprees all over the world.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
He spoiled her. Jim did not.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
The Count loved the fact that Pamela was friends with
famous rock stars. Jim Morrison could care less about status.
The Count used Pamela's connection to the La rock scene
to move not only Hash but Heroin, and Jim Morrison,
by every account from everyone.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Who knew him, hated Heroin. He had an.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
Extreme lifelong fear of hypodermic needles. Pamela's Heroin used was
seriously frowned upon by Jim and a regular source of
tension between the couple, but that didn't keep the Count
from creeping around Jim and Pam's Hollywood bungalow during this time.
(10:02):
In the fall of nineteen seventy, Jim Morrison was cooling
his jets in Los Angeles awaiting sentencing for his indecency charges.
In Miami, the band was beginning work on their La
Women album and dealing with the fact that their longtime
producer and creative confidant, Paul Rothschild no longer wanted to
work with them over the direction their music had taken,
(10:23):
veering into schmaltzy territory. He said, sounded like cocktail music.
So Jim Morrison drank a lot and snorted a ton
of cocaine and carried on relationships with various women not
named Pamela Corson. Elsewhere in the city of Los Angeles'
bodies were dropping. A spate of heroin overdoses in the
(10:47):
first few days of October nineteen seventy were overrunning La
County emergency rooms. Street dealers went on the land when
news began to circulate that their product was killing innocent attics,
medical Examine and there's Toe attack victims who unwittingly injected
what was known as the dealer's supply, uncut, highly potent,
(11:08):
purebatch heroine that had flooded La streets that weekend. The
lethal dope sent nine people to the morgue, all because
some dealers screwed up and didn't dilute his illegal product
with a cutting agent, an additive that would allow the
drug to be injected without its potency.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
Stopping the user's hearts.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
It was the act of an irresponsible dealer, either that
or someone who just didn't care, someone who believed they
were not only above the law, but who looked down
on his customers, who put on a pedestal those with status,
the beautiful people like him, the rock stars. He coveted
relationships with someone like the boyfriend of Jim Morrison's girlfriend Pamela,
(11:52):
someone like the Count Jean de Bretoi. So Jim Morrison
(12:27):
had reason to fake his own death to disappear. He
was exhausted by his rock star image. He was potentially
headed to jail because of the criminal sentencing in Miami.
He was suddenly free from his obligations to his record
label and to his bandmates. Los Angeles had become a
hotbed of heroin use, a drug his girlfriend Pamela couldn't shake.
(12:51):
Those were the reasons. But where could Jim Morrison, an
internationally recognizable rock star, disappear to For Jim, there could
be only one answer. Paris. Paris was perfect. It was Bohemian, romantic.
It had a rich history of French poets like Arthur
(13:11):
Rimbau and Paul Verlaine, who did some of their best
work in the city. Plus American expat writers like Gertrude Stein,
Ts Eliott and Ernest Hemingway had all left their marks
on Paris back in the twenties. Perhaps now fifty years later,
the city would inspire Jim Morrison to do the same.
So how would Jim Morrison then fake his own death? Well,
(13:35):
there would need to be a cause of death heart attack,
that was believable, and he'd needed an accomplice to help
him with the faking of the death, and then of
course with the disappearing act, and ideally someone to disappear with,
and that was obvious Pamela Courson was the only answer.
He and Pam would likely have to prevent authorities from
(13:56):
closely inspecting the body. There would need to be a
quick burial of an empty casket, of course, and the
burial would most certainly have to be in Paris.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
The body would have.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
To be interred locally and not return to the States
in order to maintain their secret. And then well, at
that point, after the funeral, Pam could disappear with Jim
and they could go anywhere they wanted. They could retire
to Vienna and live the life of bohemians. They could
move to Tuscany and live off of the land. They
could stay in Paris and lay low for a while
(14:28):
until anonymously blending back into the rhythm of the city
after some time. They could even return to the United
States it was big enough to disappear in. They could
head to Texas or Florida, or the mountains in Colorado
anywhere was better than Los Angeles, but no one here
gets out alive. To pull off their scheme, Jim and
(14:53):
presumably Pam would need friends to help enter Alon Rene
in Agnes Varda Alan was one of Jim's friends, a
photographer who was in Paris at the time, and Agnes
Vardo was another one of Jim's friends, the trail blazing
French filmmaker who was at the time assisting Bernard Bertolucci
with the script for Las Tango in Paris. Both were
(15:17):
on the scene on July third, nineteen seventy one, in
the immediate hours after Jim's death, at Jim and Pam's apartment,
summoned by Pam that evening to help her through the
ordeal of dealing with the French authorities and the police
and medical examiner and their nosy neighbors. And from Milan
Rene's depiction of the death scene, it doesn't appear at
(15:38):
all that either he or Agnes Vardo were in any
way in on any sort of scheme to help Jim
Morrison fake his own death. Now, remember the evidence that
conspiracy theorists used to support the theory that Jim Morrison
didn't die is that number one, nobody saw the body,
and number two, there was no autopsy. In three, he
(15:59):
was buried very quickly in a sealed coffin. But Alan
Renee and Agnes Varda did see the body, and so.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
Did a whole lot of other people.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
More on that in a minute. And there may not
have been an autopsy, but that's because Pamela Corson was
hell bent on making sure that that didn't happen, and
Alan Renee and Agnes Varda had a front row seat
to the decisions made by the medical examiner. More on
that in a bit too sure. The body may have
been buried quickly in a sealed coffin without anyone from
America seeing it before it was interred, but that was
(16:30):
because Pamela Corson was, according to Alan Rene, determined to
make sure that authorities didn't discover that Jim Morrison, the
American rock star, had died of a drug overdose. Pamela
didn't want their apartments searched. She didn't want to be
detained by authorities either. She also didn't want Jim's reputation
(16:51):
tainted by a cause of death having to do with
illicit drugs, so a quick burial without an autopsy was necessary,
And if this meant that Jim's family and friends wouldn't
have the chance to see him in the flesh one
last time, then from Pamela Corson's perspective, so be it.
But to the conspiracy theorist, I say, Alan Rene did
(17:13):
see the body, as did a whole lot of other Parisians,
including a Frenchman whom Milan saw on the scene at
Jim and Pam's apartment in the hours just after his death,
and that Frenchman, the Count Jean de Brettoi, back in
(17:34):
Los Angeles a few months earlier, in the fall of
nineteen seventy. Over that weekend, the emergency rooms were overrun
with heroin fatalities. The Count Jean de Brettoi sat nervously
in Mercy Fontano's Hollywood apartment. Mercy was known around the
LA rock scene as Miss Mercy. She was a protege
(17:56):
of Frank Zappa, part of the all girl rock group
the GTOs, and like most of the LA scene at
the time, she was friendly with the Count. The Count
told her, I have something for you. Mercy had a
habit of saying yes to any drug put in front
of her. The Count had a new batch of dope.
The Count wanted to see the effect that drug had
(18:17):
on one of his clients. He just dropped off a
few baggies with another client an hour or so ago
and had a weird feeling about it. He was worried
was this dope too strong? The Count could shoot up
Miss Mercy and if everything was okay, then he'd know
and he could stop worrying. And if the dope was
too strong.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Well it was too late to cut it.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
Too much of it was already out on the street,
but at least the Count wouldn't know, and he could
make arrangements to fly out of the country before anything
bad came back on him. The Count sat back and
watched Miss Mercy shoot his heroin. Immediately something was wrong.
Miss Mercy felt it. She started struggling, panting, waving her
(19:03):
arms and trying to speak, but the words wouldn't come.
It was exactly like one of those dreams. The monster
is there with you in the room. You can see him,
but no one else can. He's going to kill you,
but you can't get your voice to work. You're trying
to scream, but nothing comes out. Miss Mercy was trying
(19:23):
to say something. Her eyes rolled back into her skull
and her head fell backward against the chair. She then
pulled her head back up in the struggle, and it
rolled loosely around her shoulders as she managed to somehow
get out the words I'm going down.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
I'm going down.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
The Count could see that and was already working to
solve the problem by loading a syringe with cocaine dissolved
in water. He then jammed the needle into Mercy's other arm,
a direct hit with a vein. Mercy shot up out
of her seat with a gasp. She was going to
be okay, but the Count had his answer. The heroine
was not okay. This heroin was too strong, and yes,
(20:04):
it most certainly needed to be diluted. He thought of
his other client, the one whom he just left with
numerous baggies of this lethal heroin. He remembered that she
wore an amulet around her neck, and that she kept
it filled with cocaine for occasions just like this, a
precaution to snap her back to life if heroin ever
sent her into an overdose. Except what she didn't know,
(20:28):
and what the Count also didn't know, was that his
client had a friend and that friend had decided that
cocaine wasn't as useful to have around as heroin was,
so that friend emptied the cocaine from the Count's client's
amulet and stuffed it with heroin. That same night, when
the Count's client injected his dope and had the same
(20:49):
reaction Miss Mercy had, she reached for the cocaine in
her amulet and quickly snorted it in an effort to
save her own life. Except what she ended up snorting
instead was more heroin. So Janis Joplin died of a
double dose of Count Jean de Bertoi's lethal heroin on
October fourth, nineteen seventy, along with eight other victims in
(21:12):
the Los Angeles area that weekend. This happened just two
weeks after Jimmy Hendrix died in London, officially from choking
on his own vomit after taking too many of barbituates
and drinking too much wine. But there were already rumors
that authorities had it all wrong, that Jimmy had been murdered,
something to do with his manager and an insurance policy
(21:34):
and a debt to the mob and being injected with
a hot shot of heroin. Either way, a couple days
later in Hollywood, when Jim Morrison got word that Janis
Joplin had died, he sat at the bar at Barney's Beanery,
stared into his whisky, raised his glass to the barflies,
(21:55):
and said, you're drinking with number three.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
We'll be right back after this word word word.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
Jim Morrison was right. Less than a year later, he
would indeed become number three. He was dead, and he
most certainly did not fake his own death and disappear again.
To recap the conspiracy, theorist case that Jim faked his
own death relies on the claim that nobody saw his
body after he died, nobody besides Pamela and perhaps a
(22:39):
crooked Parisian official or two who were bribed. But this
is categorically false. According to Alan Rene, Agnes Varda, and
many others, there were numerous people who streamed in and
out of Jim and Pam's apartment in the hours after
he died, trying to make sense of the situation, and
Jim's body was on full display. Jim's heart stopped sometime
(23:03):
in the early morning hours of July third, nineteen seventy one.
His body was discovered by Pamela, she claims, a few
hours after that, in the bathtub, lying in the water dead,
and that's where the body was when Alan and Agnes
arrived a few hours later, after Pamela had called him
(23:23):
to come over to help assist with the ordeal that
was unfolding around her. When Alan arrived, there was already
a police investigator on the scene who had taken charge.
He obviously saw the body. Alan, being a French expat,
helped the inspector translate the information that he needed from Pamela,
who only spoke English. Pamela, according to Alan, was determined
(23:47):
not to let the inspector or anyone else know the
truth of Jim's identity, that he was a rock star.
She wanted them to believe he was an ordinary American citizen.
Alan assumed that this was to head off any unwanted
attention from the press, which is understandable. Along with the
police inspector, there were now paramedics on the scene, and
(24:07):
they also saw the body still in the tubs, still
submerged in water. More policemen arrived and more eyes on
the body. The front door to the apartment was opened,
Alan saw a curious neighbor from the building just wander
inside the apartment, and the neighbor later recounted that he
too saw the body. The apartment was a hive of
(24:28):
activity in those morning hours and during all of this.
At some point Alan and Agnes pulled Pamela aside to
get the story. Pamela explained that earlier in the evening,
she and Jim decided to sniff some heroin. She went
to bed. He then, apparently according to Pamela, snorted more heroin,
(24:49):
drew a bath, got into the tub, and never got out.
Alan was immediately skeptical. He was close with Jim Marson.
He knew that Jim hated heroin, and that Jim hated
when Pamela used heroin. The idea that he would use
heroin with Pamela was highly suspicious. There was now a
(25:11):
doctor on the scene. He saw the body as well,
and he wanted to know from Milan what Jim's story was.
The phone then rang. Pamela answered it and spoke in
hushed tones. Alan knew who she was speaking with, her
Parisian friends, the ones Jim hated so much, the ones
(25:32):
Jim wanted Pamela to break free from the heroin addicts
Jim said to Alan recently about Pam in regards to
her and her friends and her heroin habit, quote, you
and I are on the side of life, She is
on the side of death. Pam told Alan that she
had gotten rid of all the drugs in the apartment,
(25:54):
but Alan also saw Pam inside of Jim's desk while
the authorities were pre occupied locking away his papers his poetry.
She then made for the fireplace with another stack of papers, letters,
letters that she had written musings. She told Alan about
her drug use that she didn't want the authorities to find.
(26:16):
She set fire to the letters in the fireplace as
she also grabbed the newsweek magazine Jim was reading and
the cover story on that magazine the Plague of Heroin.
Pamela then grabbed a fur coat. It belonged to one
of her friends and it was seemingly.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
Worth a lot of money.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
She told Alan that she had to call her sister
in Los Angeles and that she wanted her sister to
head to the Electra Records office to steal the latest
earnings from the doors before it was too late. Alan
Renee is on record recounting this statement from Pamela corson.
Alan suggested that instead of focusing on stealing money, that
they called Jim's lawyer in Los Angeles to help arrange
(26:56):
the necessary affairs of the deceased. Emila did not like
this idea. She then explained that she wanted Jim's body cremated.
Alan protested cremation in France was something that criminals did
to the deceased when they didn't want to answer questions
about the recently departed. But Pamela didn't want Jim's body
flown back to the United States. She was suspicious of
(27:19):
the process the body would be inspected. She didn't want
it known that Jim overdosed, so cremation was necessary. Alan
protested again and convinced Pam that a proper burial could
take place there In Paris quickly at Perlachet's Cemetery, the
eternal home of great artists, befitting of Jim's post mortem company,
(27:40):
including Frederick Chopin, Eugene Delacroix, Edith Piaf, and Oscar Wilde.
In the meantime, Jim's body would remain in the apartment
in the tub on ice, with Pam sleeping next to him,
keeping guard throughout the end of the weekend and into Monday,
a highly unusual move, something that authorities told Pam was
(28:02):
nearly never done. But Pam wouldn't allow the police inspector,
or the medical inspector or the doctors to prevail against
her wishes to keep the body in the apartment until
the funeral. For reasons I still don't understand, authorities allowed
Pam to keep the body there in the apartment. Dry
ice was delivered and the bathtub was packed, and Jim
(28:22):
Morrison's dead body remained under the watchful eyes of his girlfriend,
Pamela Corson. A month earlier, in June nineteen seventy one,
in the south of France, on the French Riviera, at
a decadent hideaway known as Vaenelco, the Rolling Stones had
begun recording what would become their masterpiece Exile on Main Street.
(28:45):
They were outlaws on the run, hiding out from UK
tax collectors. In addition to their financial problems, the Stones
had another problem where to procure heroin to satiate the
habits of Stone's guitarist Keith Richards and his friend and
visitor to Nellcote, The cosmic American songwriter Graham Parsons. To
(29:06):
solve this problem, the Stones had another visitor, the Count
Jean de Brettoi. Keith Richards was so impressed by the
Count's product that he offered the Count use of his
home in London. The Count took Keith up on the offer.
He left the French Riviera for Keith's place, and when
(29:28):
he settled into Keith Diggs in the Tony neighborhood of
London's chain Walk, he made some new friends, new friends
with similar habits. Talithagetty, heiress to the Getty Fortune, an actress, songwriter,
Rolling Stone's muse and ex girlfriend to Mick Jagger, mary
Anne Faithful. The Count was especially keen on mary Anne.
(29:51):
Mary Anne was rock and roll Royalty. Mary Anne co
wrote the Stone song Sister Morphine. She was famously part
of the Stones bust at Redlands. She was the infamous
naked girl in Fur who was plastered all over the
front pages of the newspapers back in nineteen sixty seven,
and she loved heroin so in June of nineteen seventy one,
(30:13):
while Count Jean de Battoi took advantage of Keith Richards's
offer to use his home in London. He also took
advantage of his new neighbour's heroin habit and used his
supply to begin a relationship with one of London's hippis
young women, Mick Jaggers ex Maryanne Faithful. The pair quickly
decided to split from London for Paris. The Count had
(30:35):
another girl there, another girl who relied on his heroin,
another girl with a rock star boyfriend, Pamela Corson aka
Pam Morrison. In the early hours of July third, nineteen
(31:17):
seventy one, Marianne Faithful and the Count Jean de Battoia
awoke to the sound of the telephone they were in
bed in a five star Paris hotel. According to Marianne,
Pamela Corson was on the other end of the line
and she was frantic, begging the Count to come to
her apartment immediately. Marianne was not jealous anything, but she
(31:42):
wanted desperately to meet the notorious rock star Jim Morrison.
The Count wouldn't allow it, though. After hanging up, he
quickly dressed and left Marianne behind for Pamela.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
Jim Morrison was dead by that time.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
On the morning of July third, nineteen seventy one. His
death was not faked. We know this because of the many,
many people who saw his body over the span of
many hours later on that morning. The more interesting question
isn't did Jim Morrison fake his death? No, the more
interesting question is how did Jim Morrison die? Officially, a
(32:19):
French medical examiner determined that Jim Morrison died of heart failure.
This is what Pamela Courson wanted. She did not want
it known that Jim died of a drug overdose, but
he did.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
Clearly.
Speaker 3 (32:33):
She'd admitted that on the scene to Lanrone. This information
was corroborated by Agnes Varda, who was also there with
Alan and Pam, and it's been confirmed over and over
again by others close to Jim and Pam. But Jim
Morrison dying of a heroin overdose doesn't make sense because
everyone who knew Jim Morrison, including Pamela Corson, knew that
(32:55):
he despised heroin.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
He didn't use heroin.
Speaker 3 (32:58):
Jim Morrison drained and used cocaine. Furthermore, he was in
Paris to clean up, to get healthy, so it strands
credulity to believe that he chose this time in his
life to develop a heroin habit, especially after, according to
his close friend Alan Rene, he'd recently described the drug
and his girlfriend's and her friend's usage of the drug
(33:20):
as deathly. But wait, there's more. In the police report
file by the Paris Police Superintendent, Pamela Courson stated to
him that pam found Jim's body in the tub, submerged
in water sometime between eight thirty and nine am, and
then she called authorities shortly thereafter. Pam further claimed that
(33:44):
she last saw Jim alive sometime around four in the
morning before she went to bed. However, in the report
file by the Paris Fire Brigade detailing the evidence as
witnessed by the lieutenant on the scene that morning, when
he arrived on the scene at nine twenty one am,
the water in the tub was still luke warm. Now
(34:06):
would the water still be warm if Jim drew his
bath hours earlier, or perhaps was the bath drawn later after,
perhaps after Jim died, Perhaps after Jim died somewhere other
than the tub, perhaps after Jim was placed in the tub.
(34:27):
What happened between the hours of four am when Pamela
last saw Jim at nine to twenty one am when
authorities arrived at her apartment. According to Marianne Faithful, Pamela
called the Count and the Count went to PAMs to Pamela,
and the Count moved Jim's body.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Why would they do that?
Speaker 3 (34:46):
Was that move part of a larger cleanup effort on
behalf of the two? Marianne Faithful has claimed that earlier
that evening, Pamela Morrison was snorting the Count's heroin. It
was the type of heroin with the street name cotton candy.
Heroin isn't like cocaine or marijuana. It doesn't have a
(35:07):
signature color. There's black heroin, brown heroin, and there was
cotton candy heroin called such because of its light color.
It was pinkish, nearly white, And because of this, Marianne
Faithful claims that Jim Morrison mistook Pamela Courson's heroin for cocaine,
snorted too much of it, overdosed and died. We know
(35:30):
the Count was at the apartment that morning. Remember the
phone call Pamela Morrison received from her Parisian friends, the
one that agitated Alan Rene.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
After that phone call, Alan.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
Claimed he saw the Count outside on the street and
that he himself let the Count into the apartment to
see Pam. Later that morning, when the Count returned to
Marianne at the hotel, Marianne claimed he was agitated and
that he beat her. Afterward, he told Marianne to get packed.
He was clearly scared to death, afraid for his life.
(36:05):
Jim Morrison had taken his heroin and died, and now
he and Marianne Faithful needed to leave for Morocco immediately,
or so goes the story by Marianne Faithful. This story
the story that Jim Morrison mistakenly snorted heroin thinking it
was cocaine and died. If we're to believe Marianne Faithful,
(36:27):
this story makes far more sense than the idea that
Jim Morrison was just another junkie rock star who overdosed
on smack. But wait, there's yet another story. In Paris,
in nineteen seventy one, there was a nightclub that Jim
Morrison hung out at called the Rock.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
And Roll Circus.
Speaker 3 (36:48):
It was a hotbed for drug use of all kinds,
including heroin. In two thousand and seven, the manager of
that club, Sam Benet, published a book in French only
in which he made the claim that Jim overdosed on
heroin that night at the Rock and Roll Circus, and
that his body was moved out of the club, back
to his apartment and placed in the tug. Conspiracy theorists
(37:12):
love this theory, but I don't. First of all, why
would they take the body all the way back to
Jim's apartment and carefully stage a scene with him in
the tug. Why not just take him out of the
club and leave the body in the street or in
somebody's car, or anywhere.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
Really, why go through all the trouble.
Speaker 3 (37:29):
Of having to sneak the body through the streets of
Paris into an apartment and then presumably convinced the dead
dude's girlfriend to get behind this fantastic lie with you,
a lie that would clearly complicate her life. What incentive
would Pamela Courson have to support this lie? An even
more interesting question is why was Pamela Coursen behaving so
(37:52):
dishonestly in the hours after the body was discovered. According
to Alan Rene, she was allegedly busy making arrangements to
get her hands on Jim's money back in la She
was hiding papers, burning letters, squirreling away expensive furs and
making plans to have the body quickly cremated, and when
that didn't work, she moved to have the body quickly
(38:13):
buried instead. She didn't want Jim's lawyer involved, so she
settled on dealing with his manager, Bill Siddons, who, once
he was informed in Los Angeles of Jim's death, dropped
everything and flew to Paris. According to John Densmore, the
Doors drummer, Bill Siddons told him that when he arrived
at the scene, he found heroin in the apartment in
(38:35):
a carved wooden box, and that it was his belief
that Jim snorted that heroin by accident and died. When
I look at stories like this, where multiple people are
saying different things, each with their own relationship to the truth,
(38:57):
I look for incentives. What incentives does the person making
the claim have for making that statement. Why would Bill
Siddons lie to John Densmore, the drummer for the band
that he managed, his client, his friend. I can't think
of a reason.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
Why.
Speaker 3 (39:15):
Why would Alan Rene, Jim Morrison's close friend, lie about
what he saw that morning, about the way Pam was acting.
Seems to me that doing so would make his life
more complicated, more painful. And why would Agnes Varda back
up his lies as well?
Speaker 2 (39:30):
I have no answer for that.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
Why would the manager of the rock and roll circus
publish a book with wild claims about where and how
Jim Morrison died?
Speaker 2 (39:39):
Well?
Speaker 3 (39:40):
I could think of a couple of reasons. None of
them speak to the author's credibility. Mary Anne Faithful's comments
strike me as the most credible. She had no incentive
to lie and no incentive financial or otherwise to say
what she said. She started talking immediately after Jim's death
and later published her depiction of her with the Count
(40:00):
and the Count's involvement with Jim's death in her autobiography.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Mary Anne's comments.
Speaker 3 (40:05):
Never elevated or relegated her status in pop culture. They
were just part of her own wild rock and roll story.
In her story that Jim Morrison died by mistakingly snorting
her boyfriend, the Count, Jean de Bretoi's heroin an act
that was then covered up by Pamela Corson and the Count.
That story is the story that's supported by more evidence
(40:27):
than any of the other claims surrounding Jim Morrison's death.
We know who the Count was and what he did
for a living. We know others died from his heroin.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
And after Jim died.
Speaker 3 (40:40):
After the Count split from Morocco with Mary Anne, they
soon broke up and then his life spiraled out of control.
He died in nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
Of a heroin overdose.
Speaker 3 (40:52):
Some who were close with him believed that he committed
suicide over how he felt about the deaths that he caused,
most notably the deaths of Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison.
And in nineteen seventy four, Pamela Corson also died of
a heroin overdose, but not before telling many many different
versions to friends about what happened the night that Jim
(41:14):
Morrison died. Pamela Courson was the last person alive who
truly knew how Jim Morrison passed away, a death at
just the age of twenty seven that, no matter the cause,
was most definitely a disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan and this
(41:35):
is Disgraceland. All right, guys, thanks for checking out this
(41:59):
episode of Disgraceland.
Speaker 2 (42:01):
Listen. Question of the week.
Speaker 3 (42:02):
This week's super simple, how do you think Jim Morrison died?
Was it heart failure, as officials have said. Was it
a heroin overdose by his own accord because he was
a junkie, or was it heroin overdose by mistake? Let
me know your theories and perhaps it was something else.
Six one seven nine oh six six six three eight
voicemail and text at disgrace lampod on the socials Disgrace
(42:23):
lampod at gmail dot com on email, hit me up
and let me know how you think Jim Morrison died,
and perhaps you'll hear yourself on this week's after party
coming up right after this.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
All right, here comes some credits.
Speaker 3 (42:36):
Disgraceland was created by Yours Truly and is produced in
partnership with Double Elvis, the Exactly Right Network in iHeart Podcasts.
Credits for this episode can be found on the show
notes page at disgracelampod dot com. If you're listening as
a Disgraceland All Access member, thank you for supporting the show.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
We really appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (42:55):
And if not, you can become a member right now
by going to disgrace lampod dot com slash Membership members
can listen to every episode of disgracelan ad free rate
and review the show, and follow us on Instagram, TikTok,
Twitter and Facebook at disgracelampod and on YouTube at YouTube
dot com slash at disgracelampod, rock a Rolla
Speaker 2 (43:19):
He the bad don Man.
This episode contains content that may be disturbing to some listeners.
Please check the show notes for more information. Disgraceland is
a production of Double Elvis. This is the story of
(00:22):
how Jim Morrison really died. It's not the story of
a junkie rock star overdosing on heroin, a drug Jim
Morrison didn't use, a drug Jim's friends knew that he despised,
and it's not the story of a singer dying from
an innocuous heart attack. This story deals with what I
(00:43):
believe to be the truth behind Jim Morrison's death and
the shadowy figure from one of music history's darkest corners,
a man whose name seldom gets mentioned, but who is
known not only by the door as frontman, but by
Janis Joplin, Keith Richards, Parsons, and many others from the
sixties and seventies rock scene who found themselves in need
(01:06):
of hard drugs. This figure was an aristocrat, a French
count by the name of Jean de Boutoi, and he
was hated by Jim Morrison. But he was there in Paris,
on the scene at Jim's apartment the morning after he died.
Why what did this mysterious count have to do with
(01:28):
Jim's common law wife, his girlfriend, Pamela Corson, And did
he have something to do with Jim's death or did
Jim Morrison, as conspiracy theorists would have us believe, ever,
even die at all. Did he fake his own death
to escape the pressures of being in the doors of
being a rock star, of making music great music? Unlike
(01:52):
that music I played for you at the top of
the show. That wasn't great music. That was a preset
loop from my melotron called Misty Mountain Flop MK one.
I played you that loote because I can't afford the
rights to It's too late.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
I Feel the.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
Earth Move under my feet by Carol King. And why
would I play you that specific slice of double A
side Cheese?
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Could I afford it?
Speaker 3 (02:19):
Because that was the number one song in America on
July third, nineteen seventy one, And that was the day
Jim Morrison supposedly died of a heroin overdose, or, depending
on who you talk to, faked his own death. But
neither of those things are true. This is what really happened.
(02:42):
This is the story of how Jim Morrison really died.
I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. Jim Morrison is alive.
(03:16):
He's eighty two years old and living a quiet life
in a cottage somewhere in the south of France, reading
Rombeau and writing poetry.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Actually, no, he's not. He's dead.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
But before he died, he was the Zodiac Killer, and
then after he faked his death, he was Rush Limbaugh.
But those things aren't true either, but people do believe them.
Ever since the moment news broke back in July of
nineteen seventy one that Jim Morrison, the singer of The Doors,
had died, a good amount of people, even people close
(03:48):
to Jim, wouldn't accept the fact that he was actually dead.
They just wouldn't believe it. Dora's keyboard player Ray Manzak
was immediately skeptical his own sister and is on record
saying that Jim is the exact type of guy who
would fake his own death.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
And he was.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
Jim Morrison courted death. He'd drank himself into oblivion and
ate acid like it was candy. He dangled himself from
hotel balconies, stumbled through traffic, cut himself in a cult
blood sacrifices while blitzed on cocaine and saying about breaking
on through to the other side in the evidence in
(04:29):
the aftermath of his death, at least the evidence available
to the public was most definitely sketchy enough to lead
people to believe that Jim's death was perhaps something else. Supposedly,
nobody close to the Doors who knew Jim besides his
common law wife Pamela Corson aka Pam Morrison, saw the body,
(04:51):
and by the time Doris manager Bill Siddons arrived in
Paris three days after Jim's death, the coffin was sealed
and there was no autopsy. A day after Bill Siddons arrived,
Jim Morrison was quickly buried in Paris and his body
was never returned to the United States. Jim Morrison died
(05:12):
officially of heart failure, but no one believes that. Most
believed that Jim died of a heroin overdose. But I
don't believe that, and after listening to this podcast, you
own either. At the time of Jim Morrison's death in
July of nineteen seventy one, the Doors were one of
(05:34):
the biggest bands on the planet. Embroiled in controversy because
of Jim's antics. The band had just finished recording what
would be their final album, La Woman. Though the band
had experienced critical and creative highs and lows, the Doors
were still a top selling band, and with the completion
of La Woman, the band was free from their recording
(05:56):
obligations with Electra Records and was now the subject of
a new bidding war between other record labels. The word
was that Atlantic Records was about to offer the Doors
an unprecedented amount of cash to sign with them. All
of this was happening at the same time that Jim
Morrison was awaiting the verdict for an appeal of his
(06:17):
conviction concerning an incident two years prior in Miami where
Jim had exposed himself to an audience on stage. Jim
was facing six months in prison for the crime. Nineteen
seventy one was a time of great creative and personal
turmoil for Jim Morrison. He had just completed what he
(06:39):
believed to be his band's greatest album. He no longer
had a record label to answer to, and he wasn't
sure he wanted a new one. In a new set
of headaches, his girlfriend Pam had left Jim in Los
Angeles that spring to live in Paris. Jim suspected she
was living with another man, one who indulged her heroin happy,
(07:00):
a habit Jim Morrison hated. In addition to being separated
from the one true love of his life and facing
prison time, Jim was exhausted by the image he'd created,
that of the Lizard King, a swashbuckling leatherclat Adonna's part
rock and roll genius, part drunken buffoon. Jim had eaten
(07:20):
all the acid, he slept with, all the groupies, it
experienced all the things, and now he romanticized a quieter
life as a poet. So he traded Los Angeles, the
city of Night that he sang about an La Woman,
for Paris, the City of Light. To understand how Jim
(07:43):
Morrison really died in Paris in nineteen seventy one, you
have to understand what happened in Los Angeles in nineteen seventy.
Count Jean de Brettoi had one green eye and one yellow.
He also had the strongest heroine in Los Angeles. The
(08:05):
Count was young, handsome, mysterious, and hated by Jim Marrison,
which was an anomaly as plenty of rock stars counted
the Count as their friend, Keith Richards, Janis Joplin, Graham Parsons,
members of the GTOs, and perhaps even Jimmy Hendricks. But
Jim hated the Count for the exact reason that these
(08:25):
other rock stars appreciated the young foreign aristocrat, because he
dealt heroin. To Jim's great annoyance, the Count shared his
heroine with Jim's girlfriend, Pamela. In fact, the two shared
more than their love of the addictive opiate. Pamela and
the Count had a romantic relationship that likely stretched back
(08:47):
to the Count's first days in Los Angeles as a
UCLA student, where he became the university's Hashish supplier by
using his family's French diplomatic connections to smuggle drugs into
the States through the moroccan An embassy and on to campus.
The Count was rich and Pamela corson. Despite her relationship
(09:07):
with Jim Morrison, one of the most famous rock stars
on the planet, was not. The Count took Pamela on
extravagant jet set shopping sprees all over the world.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
He spoiled her. Jim did not.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
The Count loved the fact that Pamela was friends with
famous rock stars. Jim Morrison could care less about status.
The Count used Pamela's connection to the La rock scene
to move not only Hash but Heroin, and Jim Morrison,
by every account from everyone.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Who knew him, hated Heroin. He had an.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
Extreme lifelong fear of hypodermic needles. Pamela's Heroin used was
seriously frowned upon by Jim and a regular source of
tension between the couple, but that didn't keep the Count
from creeping around Jim and Pam's Hollywood bungalow during this time.
(10:02):
In the fall of nineteen seventy, Jim Morrison was cooling
his jets in Los Angeles awaiting sentencing for his indecency charges.
In Miami, the band was beginning work on their La
Women album and dealing with the fact that their longtime
producer and creative confidant, Paul Rothschild no longer wanted to
work with them over the direction their music had taken,
(10:23):
veering into schmaltzy territory. He said, sounded like cocktail music.
So Jim Morrison drank a lot and snorted a ton
of cocaine and carried on relationships with various women not
named Pamela Corson. Elsewhere in the city of Los Angeles'
bodies were dropping. A spate of heroin overdoses in the
(10:47):
first few days of October nineteen seventy were overrunning La
County emergency rooms. Street dealers went on the land when
news began to circulate that their product was killing innocent attics,
medical Examine and there's Toe attack victims who unwittingly injected
what was known as the dealer's supply, uncut, highly potent,
(11:08):
purebatch heroine that had flooded La streets that weekend. The
lethal dope sent nine people to the morgue, all because
some dealers screwed up and didn't dilute his illegal product
with a cutting agent, an additive that would allow the
drug to be injected without its potency.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
Stopping the user's hearts.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
It was the act of an irresponsible dealer, either that
or someone who just didn't care, someone who believed they
were not only above the law, but who looked down
on his customers, who put on a pedestal those with status,
the beautiful people like him, the rock stars. He coveted
relationships with someone like the boyfriend of Jim Morrison's girlfriend Pamela,
(11:52):
someone like the Count Jean de Bretoi. So Jim Morrison
(12:27):
had reason to fake his own death to disappear. He
was exhausted by his rock star image. He was potentially
headed to jail because of the criminal sentencing in Miami.
He was suddenly free from his obligations to his record
label and to his bandmates. Los Angeles had become a
hotbed of heroin use, a drug his girlfriend Pamela couldn't shake.
(12:51):
Those were the reasons. But where could Jim Morrison, an
internationally recognizable rock star, disappear to For Jim, there could
be only one answer. Paris. Paris was perfect. It was Bohemian, romantic.
It had a rich history of French poets like Arthur
(13:11):
Rimbau and Paul Verlaine, who did some of their best
work in the city. Plus American expat writers like Gertrude Stein,
Ts Eliott and Ernest Hemingway had all left their marks
on Paris back in the twenties. Perhaps now fifty years later,
the city would inspire Jim Morrison to do the same.
So how would Jim Morrison then fake his own death? Well,
(13:35):
there would need to be a cause of death heart attack,
that was believable, and he'd needed an accomplice to help
him with the faking of the death, and then of
course with the disappearing act, and ideally someone to disappear with,
and that was obvious Pamela Courson was the only answer.
He and Pam would likely have to prevent authorities from
(13:56):
closely inspecting the body. There would need to be a
quick burial of an empty casket, of course, and the
burial would most certainly have to be in Paris.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
The body would have.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
To be interred locally and not return to the States
in order to maintain their secret. And then well, at
that point, after the funeral, Pam could disappear with Jim
and they could go anywhere they wanted. They could retire
to Vienna and live the life of bohemians. They could
move to Tuscany and live off of the land. They
could stay in Paris and lay low for a while
(14:28):
until anonymously blending back into the rhythm of the city
after some time. They could even return to the United
States it was big enough to disappear in. They could
head to Texas or Florida, or the mountains in Colorado
anywhere was better than Los Angeles, but no one here
gets out alive. To pull off their scheme, Jim and
(14:53):
presumably Pam would need friends to help enter Alon Rene
in Agnes Varda Alan was one of Jim's friends, a
photographer who was in Paris at the time, and Agnes
Vardo was another one of Jim's friends, the trail blazing
French filmmaker who was at the time assisting Bernard Bertolucci
with the script for Las Tango in Paris. Both were
(15:17):
on the scene on July third, nineteen seventy one, in
the immediate hours after Jim's death, at Jim and Pam's apartment,
summoned by Pam that evening to help her through the
ordeal of dealing with the French authorities and the police
and medical examiner and their nosy neighbors. And from Milan
Rene's depiction of the death scene, it doesn't appear at
(15:38):
all that either he or Agnes Vardo were in any
way in on any sort of scheme to help Jim
Morrison fake his own death. Now, remember the evidence that
conspiracy theorists used to support the theory that Jim Morrison
didn't die is that number one, nobody saw the body,
and number two, there was no autopsy. In three, he
(15:59):
was buried very quickly in a sealed coffin. But Alan
Renee and Agnes Varda did see the body, and so.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
Did a whole lot of other people.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
More on that in a minute. And there may not
have been an autopsy, but that's because Pamela Corson was
hell bent on making sure that that didn't happen, and
Alan Renee and Agnes Varda had a front row seat
to the decisions made by the medical examiner. More on
that in a bit too sure. The body may have
been buried quickly in a sealed coffin without anyone from
America seeing it before it was interred, but that was
(16:30):
because Pamela Corson was, according to Alan Rene, determined to
make sure that authorities didn't discover that Jim Morrison, the
American rock star, had died of a drug overdose. Pamela
didn't want their apartments searched. She didn't want to be
detained by authorities either. She also didn't want Jim's reputation
(16:51):
tainted by a cause of death having to do with
illicit drugs, so a quick burial without an autopsy was necessary,
And if this meant that Jim's family and friends wouldn't
have the chance to see him in the flesh one
last time, then from Pamela Corson's perspective, so be it.
But to the conspiracy theorist, I say, Alan Rene did
(17:13):
see the body, as did a whole lot of other Parisians,
including a Frenchman whom Milan saw on the scene at
Jim and Pam's apartment in the hours just after his death,
and that Frenchman, the Count Jean de Brettoi, back in
(17:34):
Los Angeles a few months earlier, in the fall of
nineteen seventy. Over that weekend, the emergency rooms were overrun
with heroin fatalities. The Count Jean de Brettoi sat nervously
in Mercy Fontano's Hollywood apartment. Mercy was known around the
LA rock scene as Miss Mercy. She was a protege
(17:56):
of Frank Zappa, part of the all girl rock group
the GTOs, and like most of the LA scene at
the time, she was friendly with the Count. The Count
told her, I have something for you. Mercy had a
habit of saying yes to any drug put in front
of her. The Count had a new batch of dope.
The Count wanted to see the effect that drug had
(18:17):
on one of his clients. He just dropped off a
few baggies with another client an hour or so ago
and had a weird feeling about it. He was worried
was this dope too strong? The Count could shoot up
Miss Mercy and if everything was okay, then he'd know
and he could stop worrying. And if the dope was
too strong.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Well it was too late to cut it.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
Too much of it was already out on the street,
but at least the Count wouldn't know, and he could
make arrangements to fly out of the country before anything
bad came back on him. The Count sat back and
watched Miss Mercy shoot his heroin. Immediately something was wrong.
Miss Mercy felt it. She started struggling, panting, waving her
(19:03):
arms and trying to speak, but the words wouldn't come.
It was exactly like one of those dreams. The monster
is there with you in the room. You can see him,
but no one else can. He's going to kill you,
but you can't get your voice to work. You're trying
to scream, but nothing comes out. Miss Mercy was trying
(19:23):
to say something. Her eyes rolled back into her skull
and her head fell backward against the chair. She then
pulled her head back up in the struggle, and it
rolled loosely around her shoulders as she managed to somehow
get out the words I'm going down.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
I'm going down.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
The Count could see that and was already working to
solve the problem by loading a syringe with cocaine dissolved
in water. He then jammed the needle into Mercy's other arm,
a direct hit with a vein. Mercy shot up out
of her seat with a gasp. She was going to
be okay, but the Count had his answer. The heroine
was not okay. This heroin was too strong, and yes,
(20:04):
it most certainly needed to be diluted. He thought of
his other client, the one whom he just left with
numerous baggies of this lethal heroin. He remembered that she
wore an amulet around her neck, and that she kept
it filled with cocaine for occasions just like this, a
precaution to snap her back to life if heroin ever
sent her into an overdose. Except what she didn't know,
(20:28):
and what the Count also didn't know, was that his
client had a friend and that friend had decided that
cocaine wasn't as useful to have around as heroin was,
so that friend emptied the cocaine from the Count's client's
amulet and stuffed it with heroin. That same night, when
the Count's client injected his dope and had the same
(20:49):
reaction Miss Mercy had, she reached for the cocaine in
her amulet and quickly snorted it in an effort to
save her own life. Except what she ended up snorting
instead was more heroin. So Janis Joplin died of a
double dose of Count Jean de Bertoi's lethal heroin on
October fourth, nineteen seventy, along with eight other victims in
(21:12):
the Los Angeles area that weekend. This happened just two
weeks after Jimmy Hendrix died in London, officially from choking
on his own vomit after taking too many of barbituates
and drinking too much wine. But there were already rumors
that authorities had it all wrong, that Jimmy had been murdered,
something to do with his manager and an insurance policy
(21:34):
and a debt to the mob and being injected with
a hot shot of heroin. Either way, a couple days
later in Hollywood, when Jim Morrison got word that Janis
Joplin had died, he sat at the bar at Barney's Beanery,
stared into his whisky, raised his glass to the barflies,
(21:55):
and said, you're drinking with number three.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
We'll be right back after this word word word.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
Jim Morrison was right. Less than a year later, he
would indeed become number three. He was dead, and he
most certainly did not fake his own death and disappear again.
To recap the conspiracy, theorist case that Jim faked his
own death relies on the claim that nobody saw his
body after he died, nobody besides Pamela and perhaps a
(22:39):
crooked Parisian official or two who were bribed. But this
is categorically false. According to Alan Rene, Agnes Varda, and
many others, there were numerous people who streamed in and
out of Jim and Pam's apartment in the hours after
he died, trying to make sense of the situation, and
Jim's body was on full display. Jim's heart stopped sometime
(23:03):
in the early morning hours of July third, nineteen seventy one.
His body was discovered by Pamela, she claims, a few
hours after that, in the bathtub, lying in the water dead,
and that's where the body was when Alan and Agnes
arrived a few hours later, after Pamela had called him
(23:23):
to come over to help assist with the ordeal that
was unfolding around her. When Alan arrived, there was already
a police investigator on the scene who had taken charge.
He obviously saw the body. Alan, being a French expat,
helped the inspector translate the information that he needed from Pamela,
who only spoke English. Pamela, according to Alan, was determined
(23:47):
not to let the inspector or anyone else know the
truth of Jim's identity, that he was a rock star.
She wanted them to believe he was an ordinary American citizen.
Alan assumed that this was to head off any unwanted
attention from the press, which is understandable. Along with the
police inspector, there were now paramedics on the scene, and
(24:07):
they also saw the body still in the tubs, still
submerged in water. More policemen arrived and more eyes on
the body. The front door to the apartment was opened,
Alan saw a curious neighbor from the building just wander
inside the apartment, and the neighbor later recounted that he
too saw the body. The apartment was a hive of
(24:28):
activity in those morning hours and during all of this.
At some point Alan and Agnes pulled Pamela aside to
get the story. Pamela explained that earlier in the evening,
she and Jim decided to sniff some heroin. She went
to bed. He then, apparently according to Pamela, snorted more heroin,
(24:49):
drew a bath, got into the tub, and never got out.
Alan was immediately skeptical. He was close with Jim Marson.
He knew that Jim hated heroin, and that Jim hated
when Pamela used heroin. The idea that he would use
heroin with Pamela was highly suspicious. There was now a
(25:11):
doctor on the scene. He saw the body as well,
and he wanted to know from Milan what Jim's story was.
The phone then rang. Pamela answered it and spoke in
hushed tones. Alan knew who she was speaking with, her
Parisian friends, the ones Jim hated so much, the ones
(25:32):
Jim wanted Pamela to break free from the heroin addicts
Jim said to Alan recently about Pam in regards to
her and her friends and her heroin habit, quote, you
and I are on the side of life, She is
on the side of death. Pam told Alan that she
had gotten rid of all the drugs in the apartment,
(25:54):
but Alan also saw Pam inside of Jim's desk while
the authorities were pre occupied locking away his papers his poetry.
She then made for the fireplace with another stack of papers, letters,
letters that she had written musings. She told Alan about
her drug use that she didn't want the authorities to find.
(26:16):
She set fire to the letters in the fireplace as
she also grabbed the newsweek magazine Jim was reading and
the cover story on that magazine the Plague of Heroin.
Pamela then grabbed a fur coat. It belonged to one
of her friends and it was seemingly.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
Worth a lot of money.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
She told Alan that she had to call her sister
in Los Angeles and that she wanted her sister to
head to the Electra Records office to steal the latest
earnings from the doors before it was too late. Alan
Renee is on record recounting this statement from Pamela corson.
Alan suggested that instead of focusing on stealing money, that
they called Jim's lawyer in Los Angeles to help arrange
(26:56):
the necessary affairs of the deceased. Emila did not like
this idea. She then explained that she wanted Jim's body cremated.
Alan protested cremation in France was something that criminals did
to the deceased when they didn't want to answer questions
about the recently departed. But Pamela didn't want Jim's body
flown back to the United States. She was suspicious of
(27:19):
the process the body would be inspected. She didn't want
it known that Jim overdosed, so cremation was necessary. Alan
protested again and convinced Pam that a proper burial could
take place there In Paris quickly at Perlachet's Cemetery, the
eternal home of great artists, befitting of Jim's post mortem company,
(27:40):
including Frederick Chopin, Eugene Delacroix, Edith Piaf, and Oscar Wilde.
In the meantime, Jim's body would remain in the apartment
in the tub on ice, with Pam sleeping next to him,
keeping guard throughout the end of the weekend and into Monday,
a highly unusual move, something that authorities told Pam was
(28:02):
nearly never done. But Pam wouldn't allow the police inspector,
or the medical inspector or the doctors to prevail against
her wishes to keep the body in the apartment until
the funeral. For reasons I still don't understand, authorities allowed
Pam to keep the body there in the apartment. Dry
ice was delivered and the bathtub was packed, and Jim
(28:22):
Morrison's dead body remained under the watchful eyes of his girlfriend,
Pamela Corson. A month earlier, in June nineteen seventy one,
in the south of France, on the French Riviera, at
a decadent hideaway known as Vaenelco, the Rolling Stones had
begun recording what would become their masterpiece Exile on Main Street.
(28:45):
They were outlaws on the run, hiding out from UK
tax collectors. In addition to their financial problems, the Stones
had another problem where to procure heroin to satiate the
habits of Stone's guitarist Keith Richards and his friend and
visitor to Nellcote, The cosmic American songwriter Graham Parsons. To
(29:06):
solve this problem, the Stones had another visitor, the Count
Jean de Brettoi. Keith Richards was so impressed by the
Count's product that he offered the Count use of his
home in London. The Count took Keith up on the offer.
He left the French Riviera for Keith's place, and when
(29:28):
he settled into Keith Diggs in the Tony neighborhood of
London's chain Walk, he made some new friends, new friends
with similar habits. Talithagetty, heiress to the Getty Fortune, an actress, songwriter,
Rolling Stone's muse and ex girlfriend to Mick Jagger, mary
Anne Faithful. The Count was especially keen on mary Anne.
(29:51):
Mary Anne was rock and roll Royalty. Mary Anne co
wrote the Stone song Sister Morphine. She was famously part
of the Stones bust at Redlands. She was the infamous
naked girl in Fur who was plastered all over the
front pages of the newspapers back in nineteen sixty seven,
and she loved heroin so in June of nineteen seventy one,
(30:13):
while Count Jean de Battoi took advantage of Keith Richards's
offer to use his home in London. He also took
advantage of his new neighbour's heroin habit and used his
supply to begin a relationship with one of London's hippis
young women, Mick Jaggers ex Maryanne Faithful. The pair quickly
decided to split from London for Paris. The Count had
(30:35):
another girl there, another girl who relied on his heroin,
another girl with a rock star boyfriend, Pamela Corson aka
Pam Morrison. In the early hours of July third, nineteen
(31:17):
seventy one, Marianne Faithful and the Count Jean de Battoia
awoke to the sound of the telephone they were in
bed in a five star Paris hotel. According to Marianne,
Pamela Corson was on the other end of the line
and she was frantic, begging the Count to come to
her apartment immediately. Marianne was not jealous anything, but she
(31:42):
wanted desperately to meet the notorious rock star Jim Morrison.
The Count wouldn't allow it, though. After hanging up, he
quickly dressed and left Marianne behind for Pamela.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
Jim Morrison was dead by that time.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
On the morning of July third, nineteen seventy one. His
death was not faked. We know this because of the many,
many people who saw his body over the span of
many hours later on that morning. The more interesting question
isn't did Jim Morrison fake his death? No, the more
interesting question is how did Jim Morrison die? Officially, a
(32:19):
French medical examiner determined that Jim Morrison died of heart failure.
This is what Pamela Courson wanted. She did not want
it known that Jim died of a drug overdose, but
he did.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
Clearly.
Speaker 3 (32:33):
She'd admitted that on the scene to Lanrone. This information
was corroborated by Agnes Varda, who was also there with
Alan and Pam, and it's been confirmed over and over
again by others close to Jim and Pam. But Jim
Morrison dying of a heroin overdose doesn't make sense because
everyone who knew Jim Morrison, including Pamela Corson, knew that
(32:55):
he despised heroin.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
He didn't use heroin.
Speaker 3 (32:58):
Jim Morrison drained and used cocaine. Furthermore, he was in
Paris to clean up, to get healthy, so it strands
credulity to believe that he chose this time in his
life to develop a heroin habit, especially after, according to
his close friend Alan Rene, he'd recently described the drug
and his girlfriend's and her friend's usage of the drug
(33:20):
as deathly. But wait, there's more. In the police report
file by the Paris Police Superintendent, Pamela Courson stated to
him that pam found Jim's body in the tub, submerged
in water sometime between eight thirty and nine am, and
then she called authorities shortly thereafter. Pam further claimed that
(33:44):
she last saw Jim alive sometime around four in the
morning before she went to bed. However, in the report
file by the Paris Fire Brigade detailing the evidence as
witnessed by the lieutenant on the scene that morning, when
he arrived on the scene at nine twenty one am,
the water in the tub was still luke warm. Now
(34:06):
would the water still be warm if Jim drew his
bath hours earlier, or perhaps was the bath drawn later after,
perhaps after Jim died, Perhaps after Jim died somewhere other
than the tub, perhaps after Jim was placed in the tub.
(34:27):
What happened between the hours of four am when Pamela
last saw Jim at nine to twenty one am when
authorities arrived at her apartment. According to Marianne Faithful, Pamela
called the Count and the Count went to PAMs to Pamela,
and the Count moved Jim's body.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Why would they do that?
Speaker 3 (34:46):
Was that move part of a larger cleanup effort on
behalf of the two? Marianne Faithful has claimed that earlier
that evening, Pamela Morrison was snorting the Count's heroin. It
was the type of heroin with the street name cotton candy.
Heroin isn't like cocaine or marijuana. It doesn't have a
(35:07):
signature color. There's black heroin, brown heroin, and there was
cotton candy heroin called such because of its light color.
It was pinkish, nearly white, And because of this, Marianne
Faithful claims that Jim Morrison mistook Pamela Courson's heroin for cocaine,
snorted too much of it, overdosed and died. We know
(35:30):
the Count was at the apartment that morning. Remember the
phone call Pamela Morrison received from her Parisian friends, the
one that agitated Alan Rene.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
After that phone call, Alan.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
Claimed he saw the Count outside on the street and
that he himself let the Count into the apartment to
see Pam. Later that morning, when the Count returned to
Marianne at the hotel, Marianne claimed he was agitated and
that he beat her. Afterward, he told Marianne to get packed.
He was clearly scared to death, afraid for his life.
(36:05):
Jim Morrison had taken his heroin and died, and now
he and Marianne Faithful needed to leave for Morocco immediately,
or so goes the story by Marianne Faithful. This story
the story that Jim Morrison mistakenly snorted heroin thinking it
was cocaine and died. If we're to believe Marianne Faithful,
(36:27):
this story makes far more sense than the idea that
Jim Morrison was just another junkie rock star who overdosed
on smack. But wait, there's yet another story. In Paris,
in nineteen seventy one, there was a nightclub that Jim
Morrison hung out at called the Rock.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
And Roll Circus.
Speaker 3 (36:48):
It was a hotbed for drug use of all kinds,
including heroin. In two thousand and seven, the manager of
that club, Sam Benet, published a book in French only
in which he made the claim that Jim overdosed on
heroin that night at the Rock and Roll Circus, and
that his body was moved out of the club, back
to his apartment and placed in the tug. Conspiracy theorists
(37:12):
love this theory, but I don't. First of all, why
would they take the body all the way back to
Jim's apartment and carefully stage a scene with him in
the tug. Why not just take him out of the
club and leave the body in the street or in
somebody's car, or anywhere.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
Really, why go through all the trouble.
Speaker 3 (37:29):
Of having to sneak the body through the streets of
Paris into an apartment and then presumably convinced the dead
dude's girlfriend to get behind this fantastic lie with you,
a lie that would clearly complicate her life. What incentive
would Pamela Courson have to support this lie? An even
more interesting question is why was Pamela Coursen behaving so
(37:52):
dishonestly in the hours after the body was discovered. According
to Alan Rene, she was allegedly busy making arrangements to
get her hands on Jim's money back in la She
was hiding papers, burning letters, squirreling away expensive furs and
making plans to have the body quickly cremated, and when
that didn't work, she moved to have the body quickly
(38:13):
buried instead. She didn't want Jim's lawyer involved, so she
settled on dealing with his manager, Bill Siddons, who, once
he was informed in Los Angeles of Jim's death, dropped
everything and flew to Paris. According to John Densmore, the
Doors drummer, Bill Siddons told him that when he arrived
at the scene, he found heroin in the apartment in
(38:35):
a carved wooden box, and that it was his belief
that Jim snorted that heroin by accident and died. When
I look at stories like this, where multiple people are
saying different things, each with their own relationship to the truth,
(38:57):
I look for incentives. What incentives does the person making
the claim have for making that statement. Why would Bill
Siddons lie to John Densmore, the drummer for the band
that he managed, his client, his friend. I can't think
of a reason.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
Why.
Speaker 3 (39:15):
Why would Alan Rene, Jim Morrison's close friend, lie about
what he saw that morning, about the way Pam was acting.
Seems to me that doing so would make his life
more complicated, more painful. And why would Agnes Varda back
up his lies as well?
Speaker 2 (39:30):
I have no answer for that.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
Why would the manager of the rock and roll circus
publish a book with wild claims about where and how
Jim Morrison died?
Speaker 2 (39:39):
Well?
Speaker 3 (39:40):
I could think of a couple of reasons. None of
them speak to the author's credibility. Mary Anne Faithful's comments
strike me as the most credible. She had no incentive
to lie and no incentive financial or otherwise to say
what she said. She started talking immediately after Jim's death
and later published her depiction of her with the Count
(40:00):
and the Count's involvement with Jim's death in her autobiography.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Mary Anne's comments.
Speaker 3 (40:05):
Never elevated or relegated her status in pop culture. They
were just part of her own wild rock and roll story.
In her story that Jim Morrison died by mistakingly snorting
her boyfriend, the Count, Jean de Bretoi's heroin an act
that was then covered up by Pamela Corson and the Count.
That story is the story that's supported by more evidence
(40:27):
than any of the other claims surrounding Jim Morrison's death.
We know who the Count was and what he did
for a living. We know others died from his heroin.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
And after Jim died.
Speaker 3 (40:40):
After the Count split from Morocco with Mary Anne, they
soon broke up and then his life spiraled out of control.
He died in nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
Of a heroin overdose.
Speaker 3 (40:52):
Some who were close with him believed that he committed
suicide over how he felt about the deaths that he caused,
most notably the deaths of Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison.
And in nineteen seventy four, Pamela Corson also died of
a heroin overdose, but not before telling many many different
versions to friends about what happened the night that Jim
(41:14):
Morrison died. Pamela Courson was the last person alive who
truly knew how Jim Morrison passed away, a death at
just the age of twenty seven that, no matter the cause,
was most definitely a disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan and this
(41:35):
is Disgraceland. All right, guys, thanks for checking out this
(41:59):
episode of Disgraceland.
Speaker 2 (42:01):
Listen. Question of the week.
Speaker 3 (42:02):
This week's super simple, how do you think Jim Morrison died?
Was it heart failure, as officials have said. Was it
a heroin overdose by his own accord because he was
a junkie, or was it heroin overdose by mistake? Let
me know your theories and perhaps it was something else.
Six one seven nine oh six six six three eight
voicemail and text at disgrace lampod on the socials Disgrace
(42:23):
lampod at gmail dot com on email, hit me up
and let me know how you think Jim Morrison died,
and perhaps you'll hear yourself on this week's after party
coming up right after this.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
All right, here comes some credits.
Speaker 3 (42:36):
Disgraceland was created by Yours Truly and is produced in
partnership with Double Elvis, the Exactly Right Network in iHeart Podcasts.
Credits for this episode can be found on the show
notes page at disgracelampod dot com. If you're listening as
a Disgraceland All Access member, thank you for supporting the show.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
We really appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (42:55):
And if not, you can become a member right now
by going to disgrace lampod dot com slash Membership members
can listen to every episode of disgracelan ad free rate
and review the show, and follow us on Instagram, TikTok,
Twitter and Facebook at disgracelampod and on YouTube at YouTube
dot com slash at disgracelampod, rock a Rolla
Speaker 2 (43:19):
He the bad don Man.
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