Cinda Godfrey’s interest in Elvis was similarly unhealthy. As a born-again Christian, Godfrey wrote that she had been having trouble reconciling her religious views with her fixation on Elvis. But when she watched Brewer-Giorgio describe her conspiracy theories about Elvis on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1988, she claimed to have had a revelation that tied everything together. Adam, Jesus, and Elvis were the Trinity, who walked on Earth in the person of Orion. As a result of her epiphany, she wrote the book The Elvis–Jesus Mystery. As for how her friends and family regarded her obsession with Elvis as a mystical, religious figure, she wrote:
I . . . could think of no one who supported me or encouraged me throughout this endeavour. In fact, my family ran like rats on a sinking ship and my passion for the subject of my manuscript actually estranged me from those I love.
Regarding the psychic Gould’s claim that he communes with Elvis from Mars, we can offer only author Christopher Hitchens’s famous Hitchens’s Razor: “That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” We look forward to Gould’s presentation of proof, or at least an explanation of what went wrong with Elvis’s 2000 concert with angels that we were supposed to get.
The more you take a look at the various origins of the Elvis conspiracy theories, the easier it is to understand why there is no evidence for them at all. They turn out to be, at their core, fairly disturbing noise from infatuated fans that says more about them than about The King.
Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G.
* * *
Date: 1996–1997
Location: Las Vegas, Nevada, and Los Angeles, California
The Conspirators: Various
The Victims: Tupac and Biggie and anyone who loved their music
* * *
The Theory
Rappers Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. were at the top of their games when they were murdered six months apart in drive-by shootings. And their fame was such that their deaths drew conspiracy theories from all sorts of fans desperate to find a rationalization. Some theorists blamed the police, some blamed the rappers’ own associates, and some even claim they are still alive.
The Truth
Although both their killings remain officially unsolved, authorities have little doubt that both Tupac and Biggie died as the result of gang retaliations, no conspiracy theories needed.
The Backstory
The mid-1990s saw the beginning of the infamous East Coast vs. West Coast hip-hop feud—if you believe the newspapers. Today’s popular version of the story says that rapper Tupac Shakur “represented” the West Coast, and his rival Chris “Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace, aka Biggie, “represented” the East Coast. The alleged feud began when East Coast artists were said to be resentful that West Coast labels wouldn’t publish their music, and so began putting insults directed at the Los Angeles scene into their music. L.A. artists fired right back, and there were plenty of petty disputes and gang rivalries to go around.
The rivalry became firmly established as a violent one in 1994 when Tupac—who was in New York City on trial for sexual assault—was shot five times by three assailants in a recording studio, and was robbed of the $45,000 worth of jewelry he was wearing. Tupac survived, and made no secret that he blamed Biggie and his associate Sean Combs (later known as Puff Daddy) of being behind it.
Tupac then served his prison sentence for the sexual assault. Once he got out in late 1995, he contracted with Suge Knight, owner of Death Row Records, and the two became friends. Knight blamed Combs for the murder of a friend. There was no love lost between the pairs of Tupac and Knight, and Biggie and Combs.
Then, in 1996, Tupac was in Las Vegas with Knight for a Mike Tyson boxing match. Later that night, Tupac and Knight were driving on the strip when their car was sprayed with bullets, mortally wounding Tupac, who died a few days later.
Six months later, Biggie and Combs were in Los Angeles—Tupac and Knight’s turf—for an event, when a car pulled alongside Biggie’s and opened fire, killing him. Combs, following in the car behind, was uninjured.
Now, the two biggest names in the East Coast vs. West Coast hip-hop feud were both dead . . . and it didn’t take long for the conspiracy theories to arise.
Some have claimed that it was Suge Knight himself who contracted for Tupac to be killed, believing that Tupac wanted out of his contract to start a rival label. And Knight himself has been the primary promoter of two contradictory claims. One says Tupac was accidentally murdered by a conspiracy between Knight’s ex-wife Sharitha Golden and Death Row employee Reggie Wright Jr. They say Tupac simply got caught in the cross fire in a failed attempt to kill Knight himself. Another theory says that Tupac is actually still alive.
Skeptoid ® Says . . .
Suge Knight is not the only one who suspects Tupac might still be alive. Tupac’s album The Don Killuminati and its cover art of Tupac crucified has led some to suspect that Tupac faked his death, and will make a second coming one day, like Jesus.
When it comes to theories surrounding Biggie’s death, his mother is responsible for most of them. Biggie’s mother filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the LAPD in 2002 claiming that rogue police officers were the ones who murdered her son. The case turned out to be one of the longest and most expensive in the history of Los Angeles. This theory was publicized in the book LAbyrinth, which claimed that the LAPD did not investigate this lead out of fear that it would draw attention to corruption in their anti-gang unit. The lawsuit was ultimately dismissed—with Biggie’s estate claiming the reason was that the investigation against the LAPD was “reinvigorated,” and the LAPD claiming the dismissal was initiated by Biggie’s estate. The court does not give its reason, and so the mystery continues to fuel the conspiracy theories.
The Explanation
Conspiracy theories notwithstanding, the Los Angeles Police Department has always generally known what happened; it just doesn’t have specific names and faces to bring to trial. The deaths of Tupac and Biggie were simple gang retaliations. You see, Suge Knight was a close associate of a violent L.A. gang called Mob Piru. Knight also wanted to publish Tupac’s next albums. So when Tupac had his legal troubles in New York, Knight offered to pay Tupac’s legal fees in exchange for Tupac letting him publish his next few albums. Tupac agreed, but when he took Knight’s money, he automatically made himself a target of Mob Piru’s enemies.
These enemies notably included the Compton Crips, another violent L.A. gang. While in Las Vegas, Tupac, Knight, and others of their entourage violently attacked Compton Crips member Orlando Anderson inside the casino. A few hours later Tupac was shot in the drive-by shooting. Investigators had little doubt that it was other Compton Crips who were responsible, retaliating for Anderson’s beating. They believe both Tupac and Knight knew who the killers were, but it’s not the kind of information gangs freely share with the authorities. When police asked the dying Tupac who pulled the trigger, he spoke his final words: “F--- you.” His murder remains unsolved.
As for the theory that Knight himself contracted the shooting? Well, Knight was seated in the car next to Tupac and was struck in the head by shrapnel. If he were going to contract a hit, you’d think he’d make sure it happened when he was out of the line of fire.
Regarding Knight’s assertion that it was his ex-wife trying to murder him that resulted in the accidental death of Tupac, it’s just another claim that is backed up by no evidence. Police investigators never found any reason to suspect her. Her own response to Knight’s charge was fairly pointed:
If I wanted to kill Suge, believe me, his ass would be dead.
Now, when it comes to Biggie’s gang ties, whenever Biggie and Combs were in Los Angeles, they hired the Compton Crips as personal security. So just by being in town, Biggie was an irritant to Mob Piru, many of whom blamed him and/or Combs for Tupac’s murder, which makes it pretty likely that any Mob Piru gang member could have killed him. Some evidence has also suggested that Biggie may have been killed by one of the Compt
on Crips—his own security—with whom he had a financial dispute.
After Biggie was killed, Combs, who was a witness, would not cooperate with police—much like Tupac. Almost certainly, it was another case of gangsters preferring to handle their own retaliation, rather than be snitches for the police.
A Mob Piru gang member named Poochie, aka Wardell Fouse, aka Darnell Bolton, has often been implicated in Biggie’s murder. One retired LAPD detective has claimed that confidential informants verified that Knight’s girlfriend paid Poochie $13,000 to kill Biggie to get revenge for Tupac, but the detective was pulled off the case before he could prove it.
Further tipping the scales toward both murders having been no more than gang retaliations is that immediately following Tupac’s murder, violence broke out in Los Angeles between the Compton Crips and Mob Piru. At least two gang members were killed.
When all is said and done, conspiracy theories that claim that the deaths of Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. were part of an East Coast/West Coast hip-hop rivalry are just not true. These theories are not only inconsistent with the structure of the gang tensions that are known to have existed; they also don’t really explain either murder since both Tupac and Biggie were born and raised in New York. Instead, these theories appear to be the invention of the media, eager to link the two deaths by attaching a romantic pop culture angle to them.
Skeptoid ® Says . . .
Tupac’s parents had, in their younger years, been associated with the Black Panthers, labeled a subversive group by the FBI in those early J. Edgar Hoover days. In line with Hoover’s war on anything he considered subversive, a book came out in 2008 called The FBI War on Tupac Shakur and Black Leaders, which claimed that the government assassinated Tupac as part of the FBI project COINTELPRO (see the section in Part 8) to discredit leftist groups.
Princess Diana
* * *
Date: 1997
Location: Paris, France
The Conspirators: British MI6 Intelligence
The Victims: Princess Diana, Dodi Al-Fayed, Henri Paul, Trevor Rees-Jones
* * *
The Theory
The British royal family is an institution, centuries old, that represents stability and ideals. But to some who take this to an extreme, a significant component of this stability is that the royal family has always consisted of only white Christians. When Princess Diana—who had divorced from Prince Charles the previous year—became secretly engaged to Dodi Al-Fayed, a Muslim of Egyptian descent, and was said to be carrying his child, some conspiracy theorists suspected that this diversity might be too much for the British government to bear. Therefore, they believe, she was murdered by a secret conspiracy cooked up by the intelligence agency MI6 to protect the purity of the royal family.
According to the theorists, while traveling by car from the Hôtel Ritz Paris to an apartment across town, Diana and Dodi were pursued by paparazzi. To prep for the murders, security cameras in the vicinity were disabled, Diana’s security forces were mysteriously not present, and a white Fiat Uno was dispatched by MI6 to run them off the road. Sure enough, as their Mercedes entered an underpass tunnel at high speed, it hit the Fiat and struck a pillar. The accident killed three of the four occupants in the car, including Diana and Dodi. The Fiat was never found.
When the government arrested several of the paparazzi who were on the scene, the conspiracy theorists claim that the government was using them as scapegoats to cover up their own involvement.
The Truth
The deaths of Princess Diana and the others in the car with her were caused by a lack of seat belts and a drunk driver going too fast and losing control. She was not murdered by British intelligence agents.
The Backstory
Although Prince Charles and Princess Diana separated in 1992, they did not formally divorce until 1996. But by then it was clear they were both pursuing separate lives. Charles had been seeing Camilla Parker Bowles, with whom he had an on-again/off-again relationship both before and during his marriage to Diana. And Diana had been seeing Dodi Al-Fayed, son of the billionaire Mohamed Al-Fayed.
About a year after the divorce, Diana and Dodi spent nine days aboard the Al-Fayed family’s yacht, the Jonikal, off the French and Italian Rivieras. They then went to the family’s hotel in Paris, the Hôtel Ritz Paris. They dined late and then decided to head to a family-owned apartment across town.
Diana and Dodi were in the back seat of the Mercedes S-Class sedan, which was driven by Henri Paul, deputy head of hotel security. Riding shotgun was Trevor Rees-Jones, a former paratrooper and personal bodyguard to Dodi. Diana had no security of her own. None of them were wearing seat belts, and the driver, Paul, was drunk.
The relationship between the British royals and paparazzi photographers has often been a contentious one. The paparazzi’s reputation has often been to intrusively pursue the royals almost to the point of harassment, and the usual response from the royals has been to try and get out of their eye. On this night, Paul drove faster and faster to get away from the paparazzi that were chasing them. Going down a ramp to enter an underpass tunnel at approximately 60 mph, Paul swerved to avoid a slower white Fiat Uno, but grazed it. As a result of the hit the Mercedes began to fishtail and Paul lost control. The car hit a concrete support pillar head-on, nearly splitting in half. It spun and slammed to a stop against a wall.
Dodi and Paul were killed outright. Rees-Jones (who had put on a seat belt a few moments before the crash) was unconscious with severe facial and head injuries. Diana lay fatally injured on the floor in the back. Most of the paparazzi stopped. Although some took photos, others rendered what aid they could. When authorities arrived minutes later, seven of the paparazzi were arrested. Diana was conscious, but she died three and a half hours later. Unusually, the hospital embalmed Diana’s body that same day.
Very soon after the deaths, Dodi’s bereaved and outraged father revealed that the couple had been just about to announce their engagement and were expecting a baby (a claim that the embalming made impossible to verify). He began asking questions and leveling charges against the government. Why were there no security videos of what happened? Why was her body embalmed, if not to hide her pregnancy by a Muslim man? Where were Diana’s private security personnel? And why had the government not found this mysterious white Fiat?
The Explanation
By 2004 Mohamed Al-Fayed had made so many claims of a murder conspiracy that the Metropolitan Police were compelled to form Operation Paget, a special investigation unit, to look into the matter. Their report ran 832 pages divided into sixteen chapters. It investigated 175 separate charges made by Mohamed, and each was found to be without any evidence. Let’s take a look.
Skeptoid ® Says . . .
The Operation Paget report was made freely available online by the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), and you can find it by searching for The Operation Paget Inquiry Report Into the Allegation of Conspiracy to Murder online. Proponents of Mohamed’s conspiracy charges tend to dismiss it as government propaganda meant to discredit Mohamed, but you can read it and judge its contents for yourself.
For starters, Diana had no security personnel of her own by choice. She disliked them and, once she divorced Prince Charles, she wasn’t required to have them. The Al-Fayed family had their own private security team and that was enough for her. On the evening of her death, Henri Paul and Trevor Rees-Jones were the security. So she had exactly as much security as she wanted.
The lack of security camera video of the crash turned out to be unfortunate but not mysterious. There were a good number of private security cameras along the route, and police looked at all of them, but they showed mainly building entrances, not the streets the Mercedes took. There was, however, a single video camera mounted above the entrance to the tunnel, and this camera should have been able to capture the actual moment when the Mercedes and the Fiat came together. Unfortunately, this camera only monitored live traffic and didn’t record the feed.
The accident would have been witnessed live by somebody in the traffic office, but the office had closed more than an hour before the accident, so there was nobody to see whatever may have been visible on the screen.
The embalming of Diana’s body was, indeed, improper for the hospital to have done because she should have had a postmortem examination, and embalming made that impossible. If Diana’s death had been caused by anything suspicious, the embalming procedure almost certainly would have erased any traces, so Mohamed was well justified in questioning this. However, the French police ordered the hospital to do it because they knew French president Jacques Chirac would be viewing the body. Although the embalming could possibly have erased evidence, it doesn’t prove that any such evidence ever existed in the first place.
And what about that mysterious white Fiat Uno that was never found? Authorities only knew that it had existed at all because of reports from the witnessing paparazzi and from the paint that it left on the Mercedes wreck. The paint was a commercial white paint called Bianco Corfu, numbered either 210 or 224, which had only been used on Fiat Uno cars manufactured between 1983 and 1987. A massive dragnet by French police examined roughly 2,000 cars with this paint, but none of them were a match. Every so often a new claim about a white Fiat Uno comes out in the news, but the car involved in the crash has never been found. Certainly MI6 had the resources to permanently disappear a Fiat, but there’s no evidence they did so.
Also, even if MI6 had indeed chosen to kill Diana, using a Fiat Uno as the murder weapon was a horrible plan. Having a compact, lightweight Fiat bump a much heavier Mercedes S-Class (one of the safest cars in the world) is pretty far away from being a sure-thing assassination.
Conspiracies Declassified Page 9