Was Jimi Hendrix murdered by his manager? The startling details of the singer's debauched last hours

His death has always been blamed on a drugs binge. But a new book reveals startling details about the debauched last hours of   - and the extraordinary 'confession' from the man who made him a star.

Life cut short: Jimi Hendrix, performing at the Marquee Club in London in 1967, died aged 27 of what appeared to be a drug overdose and inhalation of vomit

When the ambulancemen found Jimi Hendrix, he was lying alone on the floor of a hotel room in West London.
The door was wide open and a gas fire had been left blazing. Desperate attempts were made to resuscitate him as he was being taken to the ambulance, but to no avail.

It was an ignominious end to a guitarist whose sensational stage shows were renowned for his outrageous appearance and showmanship.
He would appear in tight red trousers and flounced yellow shirt, his face framed by a halo of Afro hair.

Troubled: Hendrix wanted to break off his business relationship with manager Michael Jeffery (above)

He didn't so much play his guitar as attack it: playing it behind his back, between his legs and with his teeth. He would even perform a simulated sex act with the unfortunate instrument, before trying to set fire to it.
And if the fire wouldn't blaze, he would go down on his knees before it, coax it with voodoo gestures and spray it with volatile lighter fuel, then pick it up and smash it to bits.
But that day in 1970 when the medics were called to the hotel room of Monika Danneman, a beautiful German ice-skating instructor, it was all over.
The coroner ruled the 27-year-old had died of barbiturate intoxication and inhalation of vomit, and returned an open verdict.
Jimi had had such a brief career that most people believed he would quickly fade from memory and be remembered as just another rock casualty. How wrong they were.
Books have been written about him, musicals penned and lately even a sex tape was found apparently showing him, or someone who looked very like him, indulging in the orgies he favoured.
But now comes the most astonishing claim of all. James 'Tappy' Wright, one of the star's roadies, says in a new book, Rock Roadie, that Hendrix was murdered by manager Michael Jeffery in a fury over the star's decision to leave him.
In addition, Wright claims, the death would allow Jeffery to cash in a life insurance policy he held on the star.
Wright claims Jeffery confessed all to him during a drinking session the year after Jimi died, saying he went to the hotel with some friends that night and killed the star by stuffing sleeping pills down his throat.
They then forced several bottles of red wine down his windpipe with the result that the star drowned.
'I had to do it,' he claimed while drunk. 'Jimi was worth much more to me dead than alive. That son of a bitch was going to leave me. If I lost him, I'd lose everything.'
So how likely is this unedifying story? Sadly, we can't ask Jeffery because he died in a plane crash in 1973. Nor can we quiz Monika Danneman, who died by her own hand 13 years ago in a fume-filled Mercedes-Benz near her East Sussex cottage.
She had long been accused of knowing more about Hendrix's death than she admitted at the time.
But the new theory will intrigue Kathy Etchingham, Hendrix's first British girlfriend, who was never happy with Danneman's version of events.
Despite moving on, marrying a doctor and settling in leafy Surrey, Kathy spent three years of her life trying to establish the truth.

Searching for answers: Kathy Etchingham, with her husband Nick, has always wondered what really happened to Jimi

Certainly, Jeffery was a mysterious and threatening figure. The Sixties brought a boom in pop music - and in the earnings of bands. Many managers, seeing the rich pickings to be had, were little short of gangsters, exploiting their acts and being prepared to use violence to see off rivals.
Jeffery, who was only 5ft 6in tall, was known for his trademark camel hair coat. He spoke in a whisper and went round in dark glasses, increasing his air of menace.
It was said he had worked for British intelligence and that he could speak fluent Russian.
A former associate of Sharon Osbourne's impresario father Don Arden (who was known as 'The Al Capone of Pop'), Jeffery started his career running a club in Newcastle.
The club burned down, he collected the insurance money - as he did when Jimi died - and used it to sign up local group the Animals.
Chas Chandler, the bass player with the Animals, had spotted Hendrix in America and persuaded him he had to come to Britain with his band, the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

The   Experience: The singer with fellow band members Noel Redding (left) and Mitch Mitchell (right). Hendrix wanted to get the band back together despite protest from his manager

But it wasn't that simple. Hendrix would need a work permit and, as a penniless session musician, did not qualify. So Jeffery stepped in and forged some documents 'proving' that Hendrix was a big star in New York.
He was nothing of the sort at that time, but Jeffery saw his potential. He bought Hendrix a first-class air ticket and presented him with a management contract that would give Jeffery 20 per cent of all income and 2.5 per cent of royalties. The money was channelled through shell companies in the Bahamas to avoid tax.
Hendrix signed this punitive contract in Jeffery's seedy Soho office without even reading the details - never mind consulting a lawyer - and then went to buy himself a Carnaby Street wardrobe.
In truth, Jeffery was so poor he had to borrow money from his parents to fund Hendrix's gigs, so it was vitally important to his strategy that Jimi's records sold. To make sure they did, Jeffery bought hundreds of copies to boost their performance in the charts.
Jeffery also arranged for Jimi to move in with Chas Chandler in a flat near Marble Arch in London. His room, according to one who visited him, was sinister and oppressive.
Everything - sheets, curtains, carpets - was crimson. The walls were hung with Oriental paintings and shawls, and the sideboard decorated with dead flowers. 'I dig dead flowers,' Hendrix said. 'You can learn from dead things, you know.'
Hendrix recorded his first hugely successful single, Hey Joe, in London in 1966. Overnight, Jimi was acclaimed as the musician of the moment, the wild man of rock, his music lauded (and condemned) for its supposed appeal to a primitive sexual urge.
The legend grew quickly. In America, he was branded obscene; in Sweden, he was banned from 30 hotels. He was charged with drug offences in Toronto and Los Angeles. And at a Hyde Park concert he urged the audience to take all their clothes off.
Jeffery organised everything for Jimi. He took him to New York, back to Europe and then back to the States for a gruelling tour of 49 cities.
The pace was hectic and took its toll. Chas Chandler had been producing Hendrix's records, but the stress grew too great and he quit. Meanwhile, Hendrix and his 22-year-old girlfriend Kathy Etchingham moved into a flat near Claridge's next to the house where Handel wrote the Messiah.

Sixties sex siren: Kathy Etchingham was Hendrix's first British girlfriend

Both Jeffery and Hendrix were spending money as quickly as they earned it. The manager's office was repossessed because of non-payment of rent and the pair decided to spend more time in New York, where they were planning to buy Jimi's favourite nightclub in Greenwich village and turn it into their own music studio.
Jimi indulged himself by buying jewellery or squandering lavish sums on clothes for the many girls who threw themselves at him - and he was buying drugs: heroin, cocaine, hash and LSD. Both manager and star were also fending off a series of expensive lawsuits over record contracts.
While the outgoings mounted, Jimi was finding little time to write songs. So in the summer of 1969, with the Woodstock Festival looming in America, Jeffery rented an isolated country house near the festival site for Jimi to compose without distraction.
Instead, Hendrix spent his time trying to put a new American band together to replace the Jimi Hendrix Experience, a move of which Jeffery disapproved. And then Jimi disappeared to Morocco, even managing to bed Brigitte Bardot en route after meeting her at a Paris airport.
The trip changed Jimi overnight. Eerily, he had his fortune told and was warned he had less than a year to live.
He became obsessed with death and his African roots and began to worry that he shouldn't be managed by a white Englishman - Michael Jeffery.
It all culminated in a curious incident shortly after Woodstock when the troubled star went out to buy cocaine in the middle of the night.
The details remain obscure, but he was allegedly seized by kidnappers, who asked Jeffery to surrender his management contract with Hendrix if he wanted to save the singer's life.
When he got the ransom demand, Jeffery claimed, he gathered a group of thugs armed with machine-guns and confronted the kidnappers to free Hendrix.
Noel Redding, bass player in the Jimi Hendrix Experience, thought the story so improbable he always suspected the devious manager had arranged the stunt himself to discourage Jimi from leaving him.
Whatever the truth, by then both Michael Jeffery and Jimi Hendrix were behaving irrationally.
The paranoid Jeffery always kept a gun on him, while Jimi was taking so many drugs he couldn't remember how to play.

Mind altering: Hendrix performing at Woodstock, where like other concerts he was often on drugs

At one New York concert he suddenly stopped playing, grabbed the microphone and said: 'That's what happens when Earth f***s space. Never forget that.' Then he left the stage.
There were even rumours that Jeffery was feeding him LSD in an attempt to mess up his concerts, derail his new American band and recreate the old Jimi Hendrix Experience. Hendrix now kept a Bible close to him at all times because he expected to die.
At a concert in his home town, Seattle, he was so tired he could barely keep awake.
After the gig, he persuaded three old friends to go on a maudlin tour of favourite childhood spots. In Hawaii, his mood darkened so much he threatened suicide. Back in New York, he consulted lawyers about breaking up with Jeffery.
Then, in August 1970, Hendrix took a plane to London. Kathy Etchingham saw what a state he was in when she visited his hotel room.
Though the heating was full on, Jimmy was shivering from drug withdrawal, while two naked girls romped in his suite.
He now had several sets of lawyers looking for him, some of them hired by old girlfriends anxious to establish the paternity of children they claimed were Jimi's.
And Jeffery had followed him across the Atlantic and was trying to track him down. In desperation, the star fell into the arms of a new companion, the highly possessive Monika Danneman, and moved in with her.
Monika, who always clung to the story they were going to get married, gave an idyllic description at the inquest of their last hours together. They got home at around 8.30pm, she cooked a meal and they shared a bottle of white wine, though Jimi drank more than she did.

Her version of events: According to Hendrix's German girlfriend Monika Danneman (pictured) the singer was still alive as he was taken to hospital by ambulance

He then washed his hair and had a bath, before they sat around talking and listening to music until the early hours. Jimi then said he needed to visit some people he didn't like and that he didn't want her to go with him. An hour later - at 3am - he returned. Monika made him a tuna sandwich, and at around 6.45am she took a sleeping pill and dropped off.
When she woke at around 10.30am, Jimi was asleep and breathing normally. She said she wanted to slip out for some cigarettes, but she knew he didn't like her going out without him, so she looked closer to see if he was about to wake.
Then she noticed he had been sick and that her sleeping pills were on the floor. She dialled 999 and went in the ambulance to the hospital with him. At that time, she said, he was still alive.
Kathy Etchingham is not the only person to have disputed Monika Danneman's story. A casual girlfriend living in Fulham says Hendrix's last 48 hours were a non-stop orgy of drug-taking and sex, combined with business worries.
She says Jimi pitched up at her house a couple of nights before he died 'high on drugs and in a terrible nervous state'. He spent most of the night on the phone moaning about his backers and his financial affairs.
Then he made love with two American girls until 5am, before they all took off around London, smoking dope in various apartments. One of their friends was so high on drugs that he tumbled over a bannister, breaking both his legs.
Jimi finally took part in another orgy before going back to Monika. Then, in the early hours, he left a telling message on his old friend Chas Chandler's answering machine saying: 'I need help bad, man.'
By the time it was picked up, Hendrix was dead. (Chandler later denied this story, claiming he didn't even own an answering machine.)
Whatever happened, drugs certainly played a part in it. But was it suicide, as some of his friends thought, a terrible accident - or murder by the oddball Michael Jeffery, who was indeed in London at the time?
Jeffery was such a fantasist he might easily have claimed that he killed Hendrix, but whether he did is quite another matter.
Did he benefit financially? Jimi hadn't made a will, so everything went to his father Al back in Seattle, where Jimi was buried.
But 'everything', according to Jeffery, was only $20,000. And before Al's lawyer could establish whether there was any more, Jeffery himself was killed in a plane collision in Spain.
In the conspiratorial climate of the times, rumours attended even that death. Some thought Jeffery wasn't even on the plane and had taken off to a desert island with Jimi's money.
Now, with the passage of time, it's impossible to verify this latest, remarkable version of Hendrix's death. So many people saw the star in his final hours, yet so few of them agree on what happened.
The tragedy of Hendrix is that of all the people who surrounded him day and night, none of them was there when he needed them most.