The doctor who tried to revive Jimi Hendrix has admitted it is "plausible" that the legendary singer and guitarist was murdered.
John Bannister, who was on-call at the now closed St Mary Abbots Hospital in Kensington when Hendrix was admitted, has revealed that the circumstances of his death are consistent with a murder theory suggested by former Hendrix road manager James ‘Tappy’ Wright.
Although the official reason for Hendrix’s death is that he choked on his own vomit after a drug overdose, Wright has claimed that Hendrix was killed by a gang who broke into his hotel room and forced him to consume wine and painkillers until he drowned on the orders of his manager Mike Jeffrey.
In his book Rock Roadster, Wright claims that Jeffrey ordered the killing after he took out a $2m insurance policy on Hendrix’s life and told him that Hendrix was "worth more to him dead than alive".
He also alleges that Jeffrey confessed that he ordered the killing a month before he died in a plane crash.
Bannister has now confirmed that Wright’s theory "sounded plausible because of the volume of wine".
He said: ""We worked very hard for about half an hour but there was no response at all. It really was an exercise in futility. Somebody said to me ‘You know who that was?. That was Jimi Hendrix’ and, of course, I said, ‘Who’s Jimi Hendrix?’.”
"The amount of wine that was over him was just extraordinary. Not only was it saturated right through his hair and shirt but his lungs and stomach were absolutely full of wine.
He added: "I have never seen so much wine. We had a sucker that you put down into his trachea, the entrance to his lungs and to the whole of the back of his throat.
“We kept sucking him out and it kept surging and surging. He had already vomited up masses of red wine and I would have thought there was half a bottle of wine in his hair. He had really drowned in a massive amount of red wine."
