Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 384 - Celebrity Deaths (Back to the Conspiracy)
30 Plays2 years ago
What's more Halloween-y than death? A celebrity death-focussed episode of the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy!
—
Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
Why not support The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy by donating to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/podcastersguidetotheconspiracy
or Podbean crowdfunding? http://www.podbean.com/patron/crowdfund/profile/id/muv5b-79
Recommended
Transcript
Spooky Introduction with Puns
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the pod person's ghoul, to the cons-spook-acy. Cons-fear-acy. Can't stand it, I've almost got this. Please stop. Speaking to you from Boo, Zealand, I'm Joshua Caddison, mid-90s pop-balladeer and singer of the hit song Jesse.
00:00:22
Speaker
Okay, that's kind of scary. And in Buhai, China, it's Dr. Dial M for murder dentists. Look, I'll accept the Hitchcock reference, but that's the second time you've used Buh in as many sentences. Look, do you want to try this? No! I don't want you to try it either, and nor should anyone else. What is it about Halloween that makes the English-speaking world break out in god-awful puns? Wait, it's Halloween?
Meet the Hosts and Their Conspiracies
00:00:55
Speaker
The Podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, featuring Josh Addison and Em Denton. Hello, you're listening to the Podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy in Auckland, New Zealand. I am, as we've already established, Joshua Addison, mid-90s, popularly out there in Injuhai, China. Obviously, once again, Dr. Dial M for murder and then R for
00:01:20
Speaker
for something else in another ex which can you dial x on a phone let's assume you can dent it that's your full name now so you're not going to do the the fact fact or the real fact thing the fact fact is the fact that your name is dr dial n for murder rx for
00:01:40
Speaker
Rex Denteth? I mean, you could have gone for... Dial X for X-rated. That would have worked. X-rated? Very Halloween-y. Sorry, have you ever watched Halloween themed pornography?
00:01:57
Speaker
I don't think, I think I would remember that. I mean, we've watched Star Wars themed pornography and we've watched Pirates of the Caribbean themed pornography. I can say that we've actually watched these together because we have watched Star Wars themed pornography and Pirates of the Caribbean themed pornography together many, many years ago. Don't think I was there for the pirate one, but anyway. And if you want to know more about why we're watching that pornography together, well,
00:02:27
Speaker
you'll never find out unless maybe we put it in a bonus episode maybe we put it in a bonus bonus episode extra special patrons bonus episode exactly but enough speculation this is really this is as a halloween themed episode goes we've really gone off the rails uh so
Celebrity Death Conspiracies: Halloween Special
00:02:50
Speaker
It's Halloween. That's almost irrelevant, really. It's not quite Halloween. It's the 26th as we're recording, but it'll be out around that time. It's time for a back to the conspiracy episode. And we thought, what's the spookiest thing we could do for Halloween? We could look at death, specifically the deaths of celebrities, conspiracies, therefore, regarding what we've talked about before in the past.
00:03:16
Speaker
It's a bumper crop of corpses we've got coming up in this week's episode. Ah, so many corpses. So, have you anything else to say at the start, or should we dive straight into this giant pile of corpses? Corpse! Buckle up. We're going back to the conspiracy.
00:03:37
Speaker
Ah, deaf. Who doesn't like good teeth? It comes for us all eventually. Allegedly. Allegedly. It hasn't come for me yet. It hasn't come for me yet. No. No. I'm hoping to break them odds.
00:03:48
Speaker
So one of the very first things we looked at in fact as I recall it was the first episode where I got to choose the topic and Child of the 90s that I am and also was the last episode you ever got to choose the topic because of your choice of topic because as people are aware Not very fond of grunge not very fond of grunge in episode five grungy too grungy
Kurt Cobain: Suicide or Murder?
00:04:14
Speaker
Yes, because the first topic I picked was conspiracy theories around the death of Kurt Cobain. Was it suicide or was it not? The operative question here just is, who is Kurt Cobain and why do we care? We all care because he is the leading figure in the grunge movement out of the 1990s. You don't care because you don't like that music except for Hole, which I maintain is still grunge.
00:04:38
Speaker
Yes, but it's the only good grunge there is. And Hole was a much better band than Nirvana. So much better. Courtney was the person carrying Kurt Cobain. Well, yeah, we'll get to that shortly. So I mean, if you know anything about, you don't have to know enough about 90s music to remember the 1990
00:04:57
Speaker
five-ish hit Jesse by Joshua Caddison, a man who made my life a little interesting around that time. Fortunately, he was the one who had won, so we never heard from him again. But we heard from him a lot for a period of about a couple of months, maybe, maybe 90 years away. And apparently, he still haunts you in your dreams. Of course he bloody does. His name is almost identical to mine.
00:05:19
Speaker
You don't have to know, you don't have to remember that much about it to know who Kurt Cobain is. And specifically to know that he killed himself. He joined the 20, well, if we're to believe pretty much everything except for a small handful, he joined the 20, what's that is, a 27 club?
00:05:41
Speaker
Is it 27? The age of all the celebrities allegedly died, whatever it was. He died the same age as all your Jimi Hendrixes and all the rest of them. I'm glad you actually mentioned name two there. The 27 Club with Jimi Hendrix and...
00:06:00
Speaker
Yeah, and a bunch of others. But pretty much fairly early on in the piece, people started crying foul. So people and this was sort of the first time we talked about this sort of stuff. But reading back on it, it's a bunch of stuff that became very, very familiar, the more of more conspiracy theories we looked at.
00:06:22
Speaker
People questioned details in the police reports that seemed a little bit inconsistent. And there was the suggestion that, well, maybe it wasn't just a mistake on people's side. Maybe the police were covering something up. Because I mean, the police were such big fans of Nirvana and needed to keep notable public citizen and good egg Kurt Cobain's
00:06:45
Speaker
PR clean? Something of that kind? Now apparently a lot of this got kicked off by a guy called Richard Lee who was a public access host in Seattle. He claimed to have seen the crime scene and his big big problem with it was that it was a lot less bloody
00:07:02
Speaker
than you'd expect. When you hear Kurt Cobain shot himself in the head with a shotgun, you assume most of his head's gone and there's blood all over the walls, and it's an incredibly gory thing.
00:07:17
Speaker
That's not always, you know, depends on the kind of rifle and the kind of ammunition and what have you. As it happens, I understand that the first responders who found his body didn't even know he'd shot himself until they noticed a bit of blood trickling down from behind his ear. So it wasn't, you know, I gather there either wasn't an exit wound or wasn't much of one.
00:07:37
Speaker
But there seemed to be straight away a bit of that thing of, it didn't look how I expected it to look, therefore, how I, a gnarly expert who has probably never seen a crime scene where someone has shot himself before. But has watched a lot of action films and movies. Has expectations as to how much gore there should be in a human body, which is often a lot more than is actually in a human body. Yes.
00:08:01
Speaker
Now, other things people have pointed to, he left a suicide note and some people were suspicious of the fact that apparently his handwriting changes markedly and at around the point where it goes from just sort of being rambling to explicitly sort of talking about death or suicide.
00:08:20
Speaker
um now this was to begin with people like oh okay so obviously you know they've taken a note in his hand and then someone else has scrawled this the the bit at the end that makes it like a suicide note but expertly if this theory is correct because oh just any old handwriting will do you know i am now going to kill kill myself in crayon even though he's been using a fountain pen previously but the thing that people pointed out was he Kirk Kirkbane was a heroin addict i believe he had
00:08:50
Speaker
like shortly before he killed himself he had basically jumped the wall at a rehab center where he had been and had gone back to his his own house I think it was and basically he was he had a hero and high coming on in the lead up to his suicide so a lot more people were like well yeah that's when you see his handwriting go wonky that's just
00:09:11
Speaker
when the heroine was starting to kick in, and indeed some years after his death in 2002, Kurt Cobain's journals were released, and you could very clearly see these were the bits he wrote when he was straight, and these were the bits he wrote when he was high on heroine. And sometimes he wrote bits that went from being straight to being high on heroine, showing how the handwriting changed as the high hit.
00:09:35
Speaker
And one other thing, of course, people said that supposedly the toxicology report or whatever it is showed that Kurt had an enormous amount of heroin in his system, which people thought, that's much more heroin. That's enough to kill a person. That's not as much to take if you're going to get high. But what people forget is that Kurt Cobain, Kurt Cobain had a black belt in heroin. He was a committed addict. He took a hell of a lot more
00:10:03
Speaker
than the regular person might because he was an addict who'd been doing it for a long time. He had a tolerance to heroin and that means in some situations you get a very very high dose in the stomach which would kill one of us.
00:10:19
Speaker
probably wouldn't kill him. No. So aside from, so you have suspicions that maybe it wasn't suicide, maybe it was murder made to look like suicide, and fairly early on people saying, oh, it started blaming Courtney, and there really seemed to be no
00:10:37
Speaker
nothing behind this other than a bit of sort of John Lennon and Yoko Ono thing where lots of people loved Kurt Cobain, lots of people didn't like Courtney Love, you know, why did he have to be the one who died instead of her sort of thing and just transferred a lot of stuff onto her. There wasn't a hell of a lot of
00:11:01
Speaker
anything really that people could point to to say that there was specifically Courtney was behind his death. Well, apart from good old sexism, yes.
00:11:12
Speaker
One guy, one time, claimed that Courtney Love had asked him to kill Kurt for her, which is a thing one guy said one time, and there doesn't appear to have been anything credible behind it. There had been a previous incident when Kurt and Courtney were in Rome, where Kurt had swallowed a bunch of pills in champagne or something, and they had to have a stomach pumped or something. It did, obviously, as you might suspect when you're down
00:11:41
Speaker
of champagne and pills affected him very badly. It wasn't clear if that was an accidental misadventure or if that was a suicide attempt, but then other people said, was it actually a murder attempt? And again, there are those good old discrepancies where someone says something and he says something else later, which people love to jump on. I mean, an awful lot of this is, well, it could be this,
00:12:10
Speaker
Or is it? I mean, it could be that. Or was it? Yes. I mean, you could say that, Josh.
00:12:20
Speaker
you could say otherwise as well. And then when it all comes down to it, one thing that I've never heard successfully put across is why would Kourtney, Kourtney, like I'm bloody shipping them, why would Kourtney have killed Kurt? She apparently loved him. I will maintain to my dying day that the pairing of
00:12:47
Speaker
heart-shaped box and doll parts are one of the two most romantic ballads ever written exchanged between a couple.
00:12:56
Speaker
What did she have to gain by him being dead? Especially if you were of the opinion that Courtney was riding Kurt's coattails, that he was the famous one and she was just leeching fame off of him. Why would she kill her meal ticket? And as you point out, like when they got together, she was the big star. Yeah, so Holt was a massive success at the time and Nirvana
00:13:21
Speaker
quickly eclipsed them and I would say wrongly but did quickly eclipse them but it was very much he the fan guessing with the maestro and then the fan becoming a maestro as well.
00:13:34
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean really, as we concluded all the way back in 2014 in episode 5, there's really just not a lot to it. It's easy to sort of see psychologically why people would perhaps like to believe that Kurt didn't commit suicide.
00:13:53
Speaker
A lot of other people have pointed out, oh, you big fans are so lucky you didn't get to see him live into old or middle age. There is actually a Chris Morris sketch on the first season of Blue Jam, which is a hypothesis as to what Nirvana would be doing now at the time that Blue Jam was made, which was sometime in the late 90s, which is essentially
00:14:20
Speaker
Nirvana tracks being used as advertising for things like mouthwash and toothpaste. In case of yes, if he had lived another 20 years or so, you would probably
00:14:31
Speaker
see things and go, oh, you've really sold out there, Kurt. Or, as we've seen with what happened to the front person for smashing pumpkins, endorsing really, really weird right-wing views. That's it. Dave Grohl's still cool, as far as I can tell. I mean, he did make that pact with the devil. I've seen the documentary film. Studio 666, the well-known, True to Life, Exposé.
00:15:01
Speaker
All I remember is that he refused to let them use Foo Fighters songs in what was it? High School Musical? What was the show? No, I have no idea about this, but I'm already supporting him in this manner. Anyway, so I mean, that was our first crack that did celebrities, but then scarcely scarcely nine episodes later in episode 14. We asked the big question.
Paul McCartney's Death: A Beatles Mystery?
00:15:27
Speaker
Is Paul McCartney dead? Josh, I want to put you now. Is Paul McCartney dead? No. Is he creatively dead? Yes, I could probably agree with that. So there's a long-standing conspiracy theory that Paul McCartney died. It's all based upon photographic evidence. Now, Josh,
00:15:47
Speaker
If I were to tell you that there was an album cover for a Beatles album that shows four Beatles crossing the road, and that's not actual literal insects here, it's the members of the Beatles, crossing the road, and three of them are wearing shoes, and one of them isn't, would you assume that that means the person who's not wearing shoes is dead? Obviously. What other meaning could there be?
00:16:14
Speaker
I'm just assuming that maybe Paul forgot to put his shoes on or was trying to be different because that's what Paul does when you make things like the Frog Chorus. He tries to be very different and nobody likes you when you're being different, Paul. Nobody likes you. Yes, I mean, I still don't really know how this started. Was it another one of those things where somebody made a joke and then other people took the joke?
00:16:41
Speaker
Ironically seriously, and then eventually unironically seriously? So it's one of these weird things, because if it were in the age of social media, we'd be able to track this back with relative ease. And it does seem to be rather lost to history as to exactly who was hypothesizing the Paul is dead theory back in the day. But it seems to be more of a case of several years after the Abbey Road album was released.
00:17:11
Speaker
people were looking at the careers of the Beatles subsequently and going, well, that Paul McCartney, he's not quite like the old Paul McCartney of Paul McCartney and John Lennon days. There's something off about his recent outputs, almost as if it's not really Paul, it's someone else. And then they're kind of back-porting and looking, oh, can we find evidence that maybe something went on?
00:17:37
Speaker
And rather than looking at the evidence of the breakdown in the relationship of the McCartney-Lennon writing relationship, or the fact that for the latter albums Paul McCartney is the driving force that's bringing the Beatles into recording studios to do work,
00:17:53
Speaker
because it's quite clear in the second half of the Beatles career, the rest of them are all happy to do their own solo projects. And Paul McCartney is the only one who's going, you do realise that we're actually quite a good band together, and if we just got together, we have to corral them.
00:18:11
Speaker
And so there's a kind of rationale as to why McCartney's work changes in the latter half of the Beatles career and post Beatles, which is he's a different person. But no, some people would assume, no, he had died. And for some reason, they didn't want to admit he was dead. So they found a Paul McCartney impersonator. And now, of course, I'm just thinking of the plot of the press stage.
00:18:34
Speaker
What, they got Nicholas Tesla to make a double of him? No, no, I'm going to see the Christian Bale in this one. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yep. That makes perfect sense. This is Paul McCartney and Saul McCartney. And it's now Saul McCartney who's in charge of the Frog chorus.
00:18:49
Speaker
And so then people, yeah, went over the Abbey Road album cover and did all the stuff that supposedly, the whole thing is meant to be a symbolizer, funeral procession, because John is wearing white, so he's like the clergy, and Ringo's all wearing black, so he's like a pallbearer, and George, who's dressed in work clothes, that makes him a grave digger.
00:19:15
Speaker
And then also most tellingly Paul is holding a cigarette. What's another name for a cigarette? A fag. And another one? A durry. Another one? A mother's reefer? Possibly. Also a coffin nail.
00:19:34
Speaker
Is that coincidence? And more so than that, he's holding the cigarette in his right hand, even though the real Paul McCartney was left-handed. And as we all know, left-handed people use their left hand for absolutely everything so that their right hand withers away to a stump.
00:19:50
Speaker
And then it gets replaced by a hook and they become pirates on the high seas. Interestingly, I have heard it said that Paul McCartney is indirectly responsible for Kurt Cobain's death. Because Cobain idolised Paul McCartney and wanted to do everything like him, including playing his guitar left handed, even though Kurt was right handed. Kurt also suffered from irritable bowel syndrome and it's thought that being in a slightly awkward position to play his guitar with his offhand
00:20:19
Speaker
exacerbated his irritable bowel syndrome symptoms and heroin was one of the things he turned to to combat those systems and he died by committing suicide while high on heroin. I don't think I need to
00:20:32
Speaker
I don't think I can be any clearer on this. It's true, you've connected all of the dots and I'm now convinced that Paul McCartney was Kurt Cobain. You're exactly right. Do you know who else was Kurt Cobain, in a sense? Was it Sid Vicious? It was Sid Vicious, yes. One of the other things we talked about was, did Sid Vicious kill Nancy
The Tragic End of Sid and Nancy
00:20:52
Speaker
Sponge? I mean, I'm aware that our audience may not all be as old as us and Sid Vicious is really before my time.
00:21:01
Speaker
In case you're not aware, Sid Vicious was the basest and probably most sort of notorious member of the Sex Pistols, the punk boy band put together in the 1970s, I guess.
00:21:17
Speaker
one of the more famous punk bands. He was going out with a woman called Nancy Spungen, so Sid and Nancy. There's a movie about them, Sid and Nancy. Gary Oldman plays Sid. I believe Courtney Love actually auditioned to play Nancy. I believe that as well. Yeah, I think she just got a bit part in the film in the end. And Curt and Courtney were at Roy's, sort of compared a little bit. They were grunge's, Sid and Nancy.
00:21:46
Speaker
What we do know is that Nancy, well, Sid Vicious also took all of the drugs all of the time and woke up in a hotel room from about one night to find Nancy dead of a stab wound in the bathroom.
00:22:02
Speaker
He claims fairly credibly that he has no idea what happened and couldn't say for certain that he hadn't stabbed her while completely out of his skull. But other people, there was room for conspiracies for people to come in and say, ah, but someone just came in while Sid was passed out and killed Nancy and then pinned the murder on him.
00:22:28
Speaker
Oh, conversely, he murdered her and then took a lot of drugs to then go, well, plausibly, I was high off my tits when this happened. Not that I think that works in a court of law, because, oh, Mr. Vicious, we realise that you've killed someone, but you were very high on drugs at the time, so, of course, you have no moral responsibility or indeed legal responsibility for the death whatsoever. You can now go free. Obviously.
00:22:53
Speaker
And then to complicate matters, Sid was charged with her death but never saw trial because he died before he could be found guilty. I think there's a more plausible case for talking about a conspiracy theory here. And I'm not saying this is a plausible conspiracy theory, I'm certainly saying this is a more interesting conspiracy theory. Because this is the one that says, well,
00:23:16
Speaker
I mean, did Sid's poor old mum go, I don't want Sid to go to prison, so I'm going to kill him so he doesn't spend time in Chokey? So yes, again, we know that Sid died of a drug overdose. Was it suicide? Was it an accidental overdose? Or was it murder, as suggested, by his mother to spare him from going to prison, which she thought he would not survive?
00:23:43
Speaker
Now, there's no evidence as far as I'm aware, either way. The most obvious thing seems to be that Sid killed Nancy. The most obvious thing seems to be that Sid killed himself, whether deliberately or accidentally, we'll leave a note. And it's really just, I don't know, it just feels like people wanting to make an interesting story out of it, I guess.
00:24:09
Speaker
Yeah, there doesn't seem to be much way of evidence for saying that his mum was responsible for his death other than that would make a really good story.
00:24:19
Speaker
Now, of course, we can't talk about we can't talk about Kurt Cobain dying famously in the 90s without talking about other famous deaths of musicians in the 90s. Which of course does get us down to the grand debate. East Coast or West Coast, Josh? I ask you this every time and I merely keep a record of which answer you give. But East Coast or West Coast?
00:24:46
Speaker
I think I have been quite consistently in Tupac over Big E, but I have no specific problem with either of them. So yes, yes, I am more about the California love, if you will. That is the right answer, and I will accept it at this time.
East vs. West: The Hip-Hop Murders
00:25:07
Speaker
So again, what we do know, Tupac Shakur died in the drive-by shooting September 1996. His murder remains unsolved to this day.
00:25:15
Speaker
Six months later, in March of 1997, Christopher Wallace, aka the Notorious B.I.G., was also killed in a drive-by shooting. And there was to say rivalry between Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G.
00:25:32
Speaker
would be to understate that rivalry. That is, it is an entire season of the podcast series Slow Burn, which actually goes into the development of this rivalry over time. And the fact that the East Coast-West Coast divide was very much a media invention
00:25:50
Speaker
initially. So prior to the media talking about there being rivalry between the East Coast and the West Coast, East Coast and West Coast rappers in the US are actually on very friendly terms. But as the story about how new there's a rivalry between the two sides became bigger and bigger, it actually became part of the story of East Coast versus West Coast rap.
00:26:11
Speaker
So there was an LA Times article which put forward the theory that Tupac had been killed by the Southside Crips gang in revenge for an assault by Tupac on one of these earlier that evening. This article also claimed that
00:26:30
Speaker
Biggie was involved. There were other claims also that the pair of them were basically killed by their own labels. Marion Shugnight, who's the guy who's notorious for having dangled vanilla ice off a balcony to make him sign stuff over. He was known for being a guy who was not afraid to
00:26:52
Speaker
resort to physicality to get his way. The idea was that Shugknight owned the label that Tupac signed to. He was allegedly going to leave the label. And so he was killed so that his music and a whole lot of unreleased music. I might be making this up. I think Tupac released more music posthumously than he did while alive. He has released more music posthumously. He's had a very successful career.
00:27:21
Speaker
Indeed, to the point where he's even promoted. I think both Adidas or Adidas, depending on where you are in the world, and Nike, or Nike, depending on where you are in the world, choose post-death for quite some time. So there's one theory that Suge Knight kills Two Park to stop him from leaving, and then has Biggie killed to make it look like it was the result of a feud between the two of them. Retaliation.
00:27:46
Speaker
Other theories are that both rappers' labels colluded to kill them both to play up the East Coast, West Coast rivalry stuff and make their recordings more valuable. The idea that at some point they decided that their artists were worth more dead than alive.
00:28:02
Speaker
And the weird thing about this is, a lot of these theories, some of which are mutually contradictory, all come from Shook Knight. Shook Knight has made a lot of claims. He says a lot of stuff. Yeah. And he claims to know who killed Tupac. I think at one stage he claimed that he was responsible for the test.
00:28:21
Speaker
The death, the death, the death, the death of Tupac. Sug Knight makes a lot of claims, although I believe he's currently in jail, so probably isn't making as many public claims at the moment. Yes, he's done a fair bit of time as that fellow. And also, I mean, the Wallace family, Notorious B.I.G.'s family, ended up bringing a lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles over the
00:28:47
Speaker
accusations of police incompetence in investigating both of their deaths, which from a conspiracy theory angle there were people who would say, look, they deliberately did a rubbish job investigating these deaths, which remain unsolved to this day, to cover up what really happened.
00:29:03
Speaker
Although there's a much more plausible theory there, which is based on a rubbish job investigating the deaths of African-American men because, you know, the police are racist. It's just kind of what they do. The last celebrity we talked about way back when, actually, I think we made a few general points about how pretty much any time a celebrity dies, someone will claim either the Illuminati did it or they were actually in the Illuminati and faked their death or something. In fact, I'm pretty sure
00:29:28
Speaker
At the time we'd recorded, Robin Williams had just died, or had died not long ago, so I think he was the latest Illuminati member at the time. And of course, that's one of those situations, it was only years afterwards did we actually discover what was going on with him with his Lew Body Syndrome, and the fact that he was actually suffering quite immensely.
The Lee Family Curse: Fact or Fiction?
00:29:51
Speaker
at the time there were conspiracy theories going on about so yeah why did the world's funniest man why did he come at suicide how could a man who brings so much joy to the rest of the world how could he be so sad and i think they would have always known he did he did suffer from depression but yeah yeah we didn't know the full extent of it definitely um but yes no the last we talked about was Bruce Lee
00:29:51
Speaker
So...
00:30:14
Speaker
Bruce Lee died in 1973, officially of an allergic reaction to medication slash hashish, and a couple different things. And some people just found it unbelievable that Bruce Lee was in just insanely good shape. If you've seen some of the stuff he got up to, how could somebody like that just drop dead from something that appeared to be relatively benign? But the thing is, that happens
00:30:40
Speaker
all the time does britney murphy was the last one i remember young you know young seemingly perfectly healthy celebrity who just kind of dropped dead then but then of course this gets muddied by the whole idea of the the bruce lee's family curse if you've seen the movie dragon starring uh jason scotley no relation
00:31:01
Speaker
as Bruce Lee. That goes into the fact that his family believed there was a curse on him. They gave him a girl's name and raised him as a girl as a child to try and confuse the curse and stuff like that. And then he died tragically at a young age in the movie.
00:31:18
Speaker
In the movie it suggests he has these dream sequences where he's fighting this evil warrior who's sort of the curse personified and in the end he's finally able to defeat it after it goes for his then infant son Brandon and while he dies he sort of saves his son but then unfortunately Brandon tragically dies 20 years later.
00:31:43
Speaker
So that was an interesting case of you get sort of conspiracy versus coincidence. And this was conspiracy versus coincidence versus evil curse, which you don't see a lot of. No. And of course, the thing about the death of Brandon Lee is that it's neither curse nor conspiracy. It's pure cock up.
00:32:05
Speaker
Yep, we know exactly why he died. It wasn't as much of a cock up as the recent case on the Alec Baldwin film, where live ammunition ended up getting inside a gun on a set where it had absolutely no reason to be. This was, this, Brandon's involved messing around with people creating their own blanks. And there was stuff from a leftover bullet lodged in the barrel. And so when a blank was fired, it fired that out into him and stuff like that.
00:32:35
Speaker
Which is why there's now a big push to just stop using blanks and guns. We've got the CGI now, we can actually just do everything in post. There is no need to have a weapon which is even loaded with a blank on camera anymore. Everything can be done in post.
00:32:52
Speaker
Yeah, some people say you don't get the kick. I think in a bit of very poor time, the corridor crew, the VFX guys, the YouTube channel, I remember them having a thing where they basically said,
00:33:09
Speaker
they're talking about you know because they do VFX and they do do VFX gunshots and stuff and they sort of ended up concluding yeah you still just can't do better than blanks though can you because you get that you get the kickback that you can't really simulate properly and you get the involuntary flinch or blinking and stuff like that and then a very short time after that something happened which made everybody say you know i don't think we should use blanks anymore but anyway all very tragic um
00:33:35
Speaker
Since then, we've had a couple of news updates and so on of not so much celebrities dying mysteriously, but celebrities being alive mysteriously.
Faked Deaths: Tupac and Steve Jobs?
00:33:49
Speaker
I can remember too, if we had more than that.
00:33:52
Speaker
No, I think it has been mostly Tupac and Steve Jobs. Now the Tupac stuff is interesting, because as we mentioned previously, Tupac has had a very successful career post-death, and there have been situations where they made music videos post his death.
00:34:09
Speaker
so using archival footage and songs he had recorded, because apparently he was a workaholic. He would just go into the studio, record for 8, 12, 16 hours a day, then go home. They only released some of his catalogue before he died, so of course they started making music videos using archival footage after he died,
00:34:30
Speaker
And people have pointed out that sometimes Tupac appears to be wearing shoes which weren't released by the time he died, which indicates that maybe this footage comes from after his death. And that would indicate that if this is so-called archival footage of Tupac and we are dealing with a kind of pre-digital age where it's easy to manipulate footage, maybe that indicates that actually this archival footage
00:35:00
Speaker
isn't as archival as people thought. Or possibly 90-0 VHS footage, it's hard to tell what sneakers are.
00:35:10
Speaker
or indeed, body doubles because, you know, you've only got a certain amount of archival footage and you still need to expect to be making those moves. So a bit of, you know, and it's not as if you need to live in a digital era to be able to manipulate images. As people like to point out, Stalin was very good at erasing people from photos, or at least Stalin's crew was very good at erasing people from photos.
00:35:40
Speaker
People have been manipulating images for a long time, and moving images have been part of that story. So yeah, every now and then you'll get a photo, a pop-up of an African-American guy who looks like what people think Tupac might look like now if he was still alive.
00:35:57
Speaker
And then, yeah, the Steve Jobs one. Steve's Jobs. Steve's Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. People have put up photographs of, here's this guy. He looks, why, that looks exactly like Steve Jobs. He's not dead. Or there's another guy who looks a lot like Steve Jobs.
00:36:19
Speaker
The one example which probably post-dates our original discussion was the constant talk of Kennedy's coming back. He's been seeing it. Of course, really. JFK Jr. Did we get to the bottom of where the hell that actually came from? Why do people believe it in the first place? Well, it came out of QAnon.
00:36:42
Speaker
It was a QAnon claim that JFK Jr was about to reveal the fact that he had faked his death in the past and was going to come back to endorse Trump to show that Trump was carrying on the Kennedy legacy. It was the legacy of Camelot that Trump
00:36:58
Speaker
was an emblem of. Which is one of those weird things which is if you look into JFK's private life, yes I actually imagine that Donald Trump has been carried on the way that JFK carried on. But I think from a political perspective, the Camelot comparison doesn't work as well.
00:37:22
Speaker
Now, I think we also must have mentioned the ever-living body double thing. I mean, it did get very complicated.
00:37:30
Speaker
There was the idea that Avril Lavigne had died and been replaced by a doublet son, which, again, I think was sort of the opposite phenomenon of people looking at photos from previously in photos more recently and said, no, that person's too different. That must be a different person. Yes, because a recording artist who starts off as a teenager and then sort of this terrible goes through maturation, so gets older.
00:37:59
Speaker
they are going to look different. Because the thing is, teenagers and adults look different. They just look different. Yeah, you always get that. I'll give the minute detail. Look at the curve of her ear. It's different. Your ears are like fingerprints. Look at these teeth. It's slightly different shaped teeth in this photograph. So it must be a different person. All the bollocks they'd say about Melania
00:38:24
Speaker
the supposed Melania body doubles and stuff. And I know we've talked plenty of times in the past about the fact that there's all sorts of crap that can make people look different in photos, different lenses, different focal lengths, different lighting. Different lighting, yeah. There was a great video that was doing the rounds when the Melania body double theory was being laundered on Facebook and Twitter.
00:38:48
Speaker
and simply a person's face and a flashlight, and they're just moving the flashlight around their face. And depending on the angle, you can make cheekbones look really pronounced or really flat. You can make a jawline look really striking or make it look as if someone has multiple gels, all by just changing the position of the light. You change how a face looks in a camera lens.
00:39:14
Speaker
But speaking of Trumps, that is another more recent, quite recent theory about the death of Ivana
The Ivana Trump Coffin Mystery
00:39:24
Speaker
Trump. Ivana Trump or Ivanka Trump? Ivana was the mother, wasn't it? Wasn't Ivanka the daughter?
00:39:30
Speaker
Actually, maybe you're right. Maybe I'm just confused at my job. Yeah, Ivana was the mother, Ivanka is the daughter. There are all the ideas that Ivana Trump's... The rest I got confused there is of course Donald Trump has expressed how he finds both his daughter and his former wife very beautiful and sexually attractive. Yes, yes. The less said of that the better, I think.
00:39:56
Speaker
Yeah, there was the theory going round that Trump had buried a bunch of incriminating documentation or other evidence with Ivana, because the only sensible way to dispose of damaging material is to bury it in a coffin under the ground and not say run it through a shredder or set it on fire.
00:40:20
Speaker
or blow it up. But Josh, the coffin was so heavy it required 10 people to carry it. I mean, surely, surely if there's something suspicious going on there, there wouldn't be so many pallbearers.
00:40:34
Speaker
Indeed, yes, that was one of the things. There were a whole bunch of sort of like, you could see quotes on Twitter of people saying, you know, who needs, how, why does it take 10 people to carry the body of a small old woman? And in fact, there were also, there were also hundreds of people claiming that she'd been cremated. So the coffin wouldn't have contained anything. I don't know if that's true or not. But one thing people pointed out is that in typical Trump fashion, the coffin was like covered in gold. It wasn't a simple wooden coffin.
00:41:03
Speaker
there was a hell of a lot of metal in it. So it would have been relatively heavy, but also pall-bearing is kind of a symbolic, kind of an honor at times. The people you choose to be the pall-bearers at a funeral, there's usually some nice meaning for who gets to do it. And so it's entirely possible they didn't need 10 people to carry it, but there were 10 people who wanted to be pall-bearers, basically.
00:41:27
Speaker
And also, given the way that the Trump family dynamic seems to work, you might also think that even if they weren't particularly well enamored of their mother, they had to be seen to carry that coffin. So, no, I want to carry it. You can just all carry it. It's fine. Just all of you carry the coffin.
00:41:48
Speaker
And then, leading on from that, there were the conspiracy theories around the fact that she was buried on one of Trump's golf courses. And you can see the photos of the grave. It's nothing special. This theory is interesting because on one level people are going, oh, it must be some kind of tax avoidance thing. Somehow he's going to convert the golf course into a cemetery. He'll get some kind of tax rebate. There'll be some kind of rationale there.
00:42:14
Speaker
Now, people have looked into this. In case of note, turns out that's not how things work. Indeed, there is a family plot in this particular area anyway, so it's kind of expected all the Trumps are going to be buried there. But at the same time,
00:42:30
Speaker
You can kind of see why people are going, I mean, it's just another odd thing that the Trumps do, okay? So where do you keep your family? Oh, we keep the corpses at the golf course, because of course that's what we do. We just bury all of our people in golf. You know, when you get a hole in one, it's a hole in one's wife. Yeah, exactly. I'm not sure I like the sound of that, but I'll let it stand for now. That's right. You're not even married. No, but technically,
00:42:58
Speaker
Technically. So, of course, depending on your definition of celebrity, I guess the biggest celebrity death involving a whole lot of conspiracy theories was Jeffrey Epstein.
Jeffrey Epstein: Murder or Suicide?
00:43:11
Speaker
Certainly a public figure.
00:43:13
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, yeah, the definition of celebrity here is actually quite interesting because he's not a celebrity in the sense of star of stage and screen, but definitely was a major public figure given his philanthropic and pedophilic outreach.
00:43:35
Speaker
But we've talked about Jeffrey Epstein plenty of times over the course of this particular podcast. Although it probably is the most plausible conspiracy theory for a public figure dying, because even if you don't think he was killed by the state,
00:43:52
Speaker
You can think that there probably was a cover-up by the prison officials to cover up exactly what went wrong that an incarcerated inmate was left unobserved for so long they were able to commit suicide. Yeah, it could be murder. Yeah, as you say, it could be people covering up the fact that a guy committed suicide on their watch when they're supposed to specifically prevent that from happening.
00:44:21
Speaker
Or it could be, you know, people, you could run the line that, yes, he committed suicide entirely of his own volition, and the people who would have been there to stop it, saw it happening, or actually, you know, screw that guy. You can kill himself, I'm going to pretend I wasn't watching. Or even the encouraged it, because, you know, Jeffrey, a way out of this would be, I mean, we're not really watching the cameras. I mean, yeah.
00:44:47
Speaker
Yeah, there's a number of plausible conspiracy theories here. Now that's not saying that I think he was killed, but I do think there are legitimate questions to be asked about what happened in that case. So I did a quick bit of Googling before this episode just to see if there were any other celebrity deaths that we might have missed talking about. The only one that I turned up
00:45:10
Speaker
After a quick search was Bob Marley. Apparently, there are people who think that Bob Marley died of cancer in 1981. He was only 36. But I mean, how old was Chadwick Boseman? He was only in his 30s. He was pretty young as well. It's a thing that can happen.
Bob Marley and the CIA: A Cancer Conspiracy?
00:45:30
Speaker
He died from melanoma, but there were claims that he had been given cancer by the CIA.
00:45:40
Speaker
essentially. Some ex-CIA agent, there was claims that this CIA or former CIA agent made a deathbed confession that he killed Bob Marley and apparently this CIA agent doesn't appear to have existed. It seems to be a story that was just plain made up.
00:46:08
Speaker
of course then you could say, of course he quote unquote never existed, if you ask the CIA about it, but anyway. What sort of complicates the matter is that Bob Marley had been the target of an unsuccessful assassination attempt
00:46:27
Speaker
earlier in his life. He was shot. He was actually shot by a gunch of bun. What is going wrong with not a gunch of bun men? I quite like the sound of that. It sounds like a much more cheery phenomenon than a bunch of guns. Who can bring the sunshine? Sparkle it with rain.
00:46:49
Speaker
Nevertheless, Gunmen did indeed burst into his hotel room and shoot him, and a bunch of them managed to not kill any of them, interestingly, including his wife was shot in the head, but didn't die. So I don't know if...
00:47:08
Speaker
what their firearms were like or what their aim was like. But one way or another, it wasn't very good. This was 1976, by the way, five years before he actually died. That appeared to have been politically motivated. There was an election in Jamaica. Apparently, he had tried to stay
00:47:29
Speaker
completely neutral in it, but people thought he was sort of tacitly supporting the People's National Party, whereas people from supposedly the Jamaican Labour Party
00:47:43
Speaker
tried to have a go at them for supporting their opponent. But this again gets a little bit extra, extra conspiratorial, obviously. Planning an assassination attempt meets the definition of conspiracy, I'm sure. But there were some people had claimed that one of the gunmen had claimed
00:48:02
Speaker
that he was working for the CIA. Supposedly, one of the gunmen were tried and executed. Apparently, one of the gunmen before he was killed said that the job had been done for the CIA in exchange for cocaine and guns, which if you know what the CIA was up to in the 1970s, I mean, that tracks.
00:48:25
Speaker
One guy making second-hand claims about what one of the guys said unfortunately is not the most persuasive of evidence. No. I'm not convinced. No. And apart from that, I haven't had a particularly good look.
00:48:44
Speaker
The biggest death, obviously, of the year would be the Queen.
The Queen's Death: No Conspiracies Here
00:48:48
Speaker
Yep, died at the young age of 96, taken from us before her time. So, I mean, I assume you'd have trouble coming up with something sinister about the death of a 96-year-old woman, who I believe her cause of death was officially announced as old age.
00:49:07
Speaker
Yes, I mean, she was visited by Liz Truss the day before and that might have been, oh for the love of God, I do not want, I do not want to have another meeting with this current Prime Minister, but if she just waited 44 days, then she would have had another Prime Minister. I mean, really.
00:49:27
Speaker
But yes, I have not heard any conspiracy theories about the Queen's death specifically, have you? No, I mean, I'm sure David Icke must have made some claim about the royal family and passing on the lineage and how she hasn't actually died, she's transcended to another plane. But they don't appear to be any plausible conspiracy theories.
00:49:50
Speaker
This is a conspiracy series coming from other places which put forward physically relevant ways of describing how the Queen could have died because a 96-year-old dying is not really the subject of Mini-A conspiracy theory. Exactly.
00:50:10
Speaker
And so I think that's where we, I think that's where we leave it. I don't want to tempt fate, but I can't imagine we'll have a more significant death than that of the Queen this year, at least. I mean, who knows? And I know in previous episodes, we have talked about the fact that for a while there, it seemed like celebrities were dropping like flies when we lost David Bowie in Prince and Quick Succession, and there were a bunch more after that. But I think as a lot of people pointed out, there was kind of an explosion
00:50:37
Speaker
In what qualified a person to be a celebrity, starting around the 60s, sort of where previously it had only really been movie stars, it started, you had TV celebrities and music celebrities, and then these days you have sort of the famous for being famous set as well. TikTok influencers. There's going to be a spate of TikTok influencer deaths in about 60 years' time.
00:51:02
Speaker
You can count on it. So, death, death, death, deathity, death, death. I think we've... I don't know about you, but I'm all death-ed out now. I think it's about time to call this episode to a close. And you call yourself a goth. Right, and I don't. Which apparently is what makes me the gothiest goth there is, but... Yeah, I don't know.
00:51:25
Speaker
I think there's nothing else to say apart from RIP, all of those dead people, maybe Epstein. And also Kurt Cobain. You shut your mouth. I am slowly whittling you down on this because in the old days, you used to get very angry with my auntie Kurt Cobain sons. I don't think we've ever gotten very angry. Now you just... You're a rebel and you'll never be any good.
00:51:52
Speaker
And there's no point in me trying to change you now. Actually, that's true. We haven't we haven't even talked about James Dean conspiracy. James Dean. Yeah. Maybe we can add that to the list. For next time. Next time we revisit this topic in another who knows how many years. But until then, I think we'd better we'd better just say a good old fashioned goodbye. Lassitude.
00:52:21
Speaker
You've been listening to a podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, hosted by Josh Ederson and Imdentit. If you'd like to help support us, please find details of our pledge drive at either Patreon or Podbean. If you'd like to get in contact with us, email us at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com.
00:52:53
Speaker
Marty, we gotta go back to the conspiracy.