London - Elvis Presley planned to kill himself and told his family of his intentions two days before he took his own life, his stepbrother claims.
David Stanley says Presley, pictured, told him he was going to a ‘higher plane’ and that his death was no accident, in a memoir called My Brother Elvis. He claims that the singer deliberately overdosed on pain medication and had deteriorated to such a state that members of his entourage had to help him to use the toilet.
Presley died aged 42 on August 16, 1977, after collapsing on the floor of the bathroom at his Graceland mansion in Memphis, Tennessee.
A coroner ruled that he died of a heart attack. In his final years Elvis suffered from depression and binged on junk food. Toxicology tests on his body detected a string of pharmaceuticals including codeine at ten times the therapeutic level.
Stanley became Presley’s step-brother in 1960 when his mother, Dee, married the singer’s widowed father, Vernon.
The book’s author last saw Presley on August 14, 1977, at which point, he writes, the singer told him he was going away and that when they next met he would be ‘on a higher plane’.
Two days later Presley died and Stanley writes that he remembers thinking he had ‘done this on purpose’.
He claims that after his step-brother’s death he hid needles and pills in his pockets before the police arrived.
Daily Mail