A few years ago, I posted the following question and answer as part of a longer examination of the call that was allegedly placed by Joe Esposito to Jerry Weintraub on August 16, 1977:
Q : Were you with the Colonel when you found out Elvis passed away?
Jerry Weintraub : No, I was at home and he was supposed to start a tour for me the next day in Maine and my telephone rang and it was Joe Esposito on one line. I don’t know if he remembers this but it was Joe and he said, “Jerry, I got to talk to you,” and my other line rang and I said, “Hold on one second, Joe.” And I hit the other line it was Roone Arledge from ABC news and he said to me, “Jerry, Elvis is dead.” And I said, “What? What?” I said, “Hold on”, and I got back on with Joe. I said, “Joe, what’s the matter?” Joe said, “I’m in the bathroom with Elvis. He just died. He hadn’t gone. They hadn’t taken him away yet.” He said, “I just want you to know because your phone is gonna start ringing.” I said, “It’s already rung. Roone Arledge is on the phone.”
In this interview, Weintraub places the call from Graceland during the time the paramedics were onsite, which was 2:33pm – 2:47pm, a 14-minute window.
He also states that Joe Esposito called first, then Arledge’s call came in (on a second phone line) while Weintraub was on the phone with Esposito. However, in his 2010 memoir, “When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead,” Weintraub places Arledge’s call first.
Here is the pertinent section from the book (page 159):
The following questions are raised by this account:
1. Here, Weintraub
places the Arledge call before the Esposito call. Why has Weintraub changed the order of the
calls? (Granted, could be a simple
recall error.)
2. Weintraub states that Arledge’s “people” had picked up the
911 call on a police scanner in Memphis, but in 1977 there was no 911 emergency
system in place, and from what Esposito and others have claimed, the call was
placed for someone “in distress.” How
would Arledge have learned that anyone was dead
based on this call, before the
paramedics had even arrived at Graceland?
3. Further on this point, if the emergency call had been picked
up by Arledge’s sources on a police scanner, the alleged wording of the call
still would not have given any clue as to the identity of the patient, nor the
condition of the patient. From what
we’ve been told, Elvis’s name was not used when the emergency call was placed,
which would have been standard protocol.
How would Arledge’s people have known that the call was placed for Elvis,
specifically, if Elvis’s name was not mentioned?
4. In Weintraub’s previous statement, Joe Esposito called him
before the paramedics had left Graceland en route to Baptist Memorial Hospital. My analysis, then, was based on the time-frame that the paramedics were in
the bathroom attending to Elvis. One key
statement was, “they hadn’t taken him away yet,” which presumably means that
the body had not yet been removed by the paramedics. This places the call to Weintraub sometime
between 2:33pm (when the paramedics arrived) and 2:47pm (when the paramedics
departed Graceland for BMH). However, in
his book, Weintraub states that Esposito called when Elvis’s body still was on
the bathroom floor, yet before the
paramedics had arrived. This narrows the
window of time for this call to the period of time when Esposito was “waiting
for the police to arrive” (the EMTs, actually), which was a mere 3 minutes
(from the time of the call to the fire station at 2:30pm to the time the
ambulance arrived at 2:33pm).
5. Why has Joe Esposito never, to my knowledge, mentioned this
call, and why was this call placed at this time, in the middle of what we have
been told was a life-and-death crisis?
6. If this call was placed while Esposito was literally
standing next to Elvis’s body, why has no one ever said anything about this
call, considering that the upstairs suite and bathroom began filling up with
people as word got around the Graceland property/mansion that Elvis had been discovered in some sort of distress? From what we’ve been told,
several people have stated that CPR was being administered to Elvis, and that
Joe Esposito was one of the people working on Elvis before the paramedics arrived. But in Weintraub’s account, Esposito was not
involved in the resuscitation efforts for at least several minutes after the 2:30pm emergency call, and had, by that time, determined that Elvis was dead. Again, why has
not one person who was in the bathroom at this critical time period mentioned
this alleged phone call? Or, if the phone
call did not take place, why would Jerry Weintraub, a man of considerable
credibility in the entertainment industry with no reason to lie, state
unequivocally that the call was
placed?
As I stated previously, the content of the emergency call is a key issue
here, since Esposito would not have identified the person’s identity over the
phone, and even the people who are familiar with the content of the call have said
the emergency assistance was needed for an adult male in respiratory distress.
There was no mention of Elvis, and the people who knew the address assumed the
person in question was Vernon Presley. So, if there was no specific mention of
Elvis on the call, how did Roone Arledge know within THREE minutes of the call that
Elvis was dead? He would have had no
access to such information at that time, neither the name of the person nor the
condition of the person.
