“Singers come and go, but if you're a good actor, you can last a long time”

December 2-12, 1976
Elvis plays the Hilton in Vegas for what will turn out to be the last time.

June 26, 1977
A concert at Indianapolis, Indiana’s Market Square Arena. This will turn out to be his very last concert performance.

June 27- August 15, 1977
Elvis relaxes in Memphis and prepares for the next leg of touring for 1977.

August 16, 1977
Shortly after midnight Elvis returns to Graceland from a late-night visit to the dentist. Through the early morning of the 16th he takes care of last minute tour details and relaxes with family and staff. He is to fly to Portland, Maine that night and do a show there on the 17th, then continue the scheduled tour. He retires to his master suite at Graceland around 7:00 AM to rest for his evening flight. By late morning, Elvis Presley is dead of heart failure. It is announced by mid-afternoon. In a matter of hours the shock registers around the world.

Aug 11th - 1977: ..returning to Graceland after paying respects to his mother at Forest Hill:

Source: Behind TI V2 / photo : S. Perrish / Aug 11th - 1977

- note: Tennessee (Motorcycle) Helmet Laws did not seem to apply to Elvis...

VERY LAST PICTURE

Few Hours Before His Death

The last known photo taken of Elvis as he enters Graceland in his Stutz Blackhawk around 12:30 a.m. after a visit to his dentist on August 16, 1977

Shortly after midnight Elvis returns to Graceland from a late-night visit to the dentist. Through the early morning of the 16th he takes care of last minute tour details and relaxes with family and staff. He is to fly to Portland, Maine that night and do a show there on the 17th, then continue the scheduled tour. He retires to his master suite at Graceland around 7:00 AM to rest for his evening flight. By late morning, Elvis Presley is dead of heart failure. It is announced by mid-afternoon. In a matter of hours the shock registers around the world

Elvis Funerals

Last hours before Elvis presley´s death

EP'S LAST CAR

STUTZ Car

Omaha June 1977

Last Song Performed Live On Stage 6/26/77 Indianapolis

What killed Elvis?: Lab technicians were playing Elvis music in the background. From somewhere outside the lab, people could be heard crying. "People were just sobbing. It was a sad, sad moment," says Dr. Noel Florendo, a pathology intern assigned to help perform the autopsy of the 42-year-old man on the table at Baptist Memorial Hospital. Florendo says he and another intern followed instructions from his former professor, Dr. Jerry Francisco, as they began the postmortem on the biggest legend in music history. Elvis Presley, the world's first rock star, had outraged much of America at first, and controversy was about to follow him to the grave. In 1961, Francisco had become Shelby County's first medical examiner. He was the last word in Memphis on how people died. A pathology professor at the University of Tennessee Center for the Health Sciences, he had helped train pathologists at almost every hospital in the region. Francisco had "seen more dead people" than anyone else in the room, says Florendo. Yet, what happened Aug.16, 1977, would become one of the most highly publicized cliffhangers since the deaths of the Romanovs in Russia, the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa or conspiracy theories about a Marilyn Monroe murder.

Even now, Elvis' death could be classified as a medical "mystery," says Maurice Elliott, former vice president of Baptist Hospital and former chief executive officer of Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare. Francisco would attribute the death to "cardiac arrhythmia due to undetermined causes," or, in layman's terms, a heart attack. The rest of the pathology team suspected "polypharmacy." Elvis had a history of drug abuse, and most of those in the room did not see enough evidence of heart disease to justify calling the death a heart attack.

For Francisco, it was his second 15 minutes of fame. From his home in East Memphis, the 75-year-old retired pathologist says he had worked in relative anonymity for years until the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Francisco, who signed the death certificate, had no trouble convincing the world of the cause of that death. A rifle shell penetrated King's face just to the right of his mouth.

"The bullet never left his body," says Francisco.

Nine years later, it was Elvis on the table. Francisco was "absolutely shocked" at the world's reaction. A fan of "all sorts" of music, including classical and opera, he was not a fan of Elvis and knew no Elvis song to pick a favorite. Francisco had grown up in the small West Tennessee town of Huntingdon, the son of a cotton ginner and a mother who spent most of her life as a housewife before being appointed city recorder. Francisco loved organic chemistry and the life of an academician. He was now being offered $10,000 by a tabloid TV show for photographs from the Elvis autopsy.

When the autopsy was done, it was inconclusive.

"There was no way they could have ruled it was polypharmacy on the day of the autopsy because the (toxicology) results weren't back," says Florendo.

Other members of the autopsy team and others present in the room, including Maurice Elliott, say there was also no way the death could be dismissed simply as cardiac arrhythmia. Nevertheless, Francisco held a news conference after the autopsy announcing that Elvis had died of "cardiac arrhythmia due to undetermined causes."

In 1991, Dr. Eric Muirhead, retired pathology chief of Baptist Memorial Hospital, took the first official shot at Francisco. Muirhead, who had remained quiet for 14 years, says he had been "muzzled" into silence by hospital attorneys and later had not wanted to be engulfed in global publicity. Muirhead, who has since died, says Elvis "was a drug addict. We knew he was a drug addict because he had been at Baptist to be treated for that."

He says Francisco pre-empted every other member of the autopsy team, announcing the heart-failure theory to the world. "We were appalled that he made that announcement. There were eight other doctors there who disagreed with him."

Dr. Thomas Chesney, now pathology director of Baptist Hospital and of Pathology Group of the Mid-South, was present at the autopsy and says Francisco's conclusion "was unprovable one way or another. You can never go wrong with that diagnosis. One hundred percent of people have something that goes into an abnormal rhythm before they die. It's what leads up to the state that is the question. I don't think that to say someone died of arrhythmia is a very satisfactory answer."

After the initial autopsy, tissue samples were sent to laboratories around the country. Independently, they confirmed high levels of more than 10 drugs, some at near-lethal doses, in Elvis' body. Even then, Francisco stuck by his heart-failure ruling. Chesney says the drugs, mostly sedatives, were at sublethal levels.

"The question was, if you have a certain level of a variety of different things on board is that going to have a cumulative effect? If each level is sublethal, will that combination of sublethal drugs become lethal?"

Muirhead and Elliott say Elvis' heart blockage was no more than 40 percent in one vessel.

"He didn't have enough to have a bypass," Muirhead says.

Florendo, now pathologist at Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare, once was interviewed on the television show "20/20." He says he supported Muirhead's conclusion at the time.

"I was at Baptist, and he was my mentor," says Florendo, who says the competing theories devolved through the years into "a Muirhead camp and a Francisco camp." His own loyalties are divided, he says. "(Francisco) was the medical examiner after all. That was his prerogative."

In the 1991 book, "The Death of Elvis: What Really Happened," authors James P. Cole and Charles C. Thompson II exhaustively researched toxicology results and interviewed doctors, including Muirhead, off the record. Cole, a former reporter for The Commercial Appeal, says, "Fundamentally, I just think Dr. Francisco was very mistaken about this. There was no cardiac pathology in the autopsy, and the records show that Elvis clearly died of an accidental drug overdose."

Francisco is just as adamant, his voice growing tense and urgent when Muirhead's argument comes up.

"He and I disagree violently," says Francisco. He says Muirhead and Elliott's description of Elvis' heart blockage as moderate is wrong. "There were no clots, but there was plaque with up to 50 percent narrowing in two major coronary vessels."

None of the drugs in Elvis' system nor any combination of them could have interrupted the electrical activity to Elvis' heart, he says.

"Because there were drugs, there was a population of people who wanted it be a drug death. I spoke the truth as I saw it," Francisco says.

As he was from his appointment in 1961 until he retired as medical examiner in 1999, Francisco remains the last word on Elvis' death:

"I was comfortable when I said it, and I'm comfortable with it now." (News, Source: Michael Lollar, Commercial Appeal, Oct 2008)