Elvis Presley Suicide: Secrets Of His Drugged-Out Death Wish

Elvis Presley's death was a suicide — according to his stepbrother David Stanley, who told The National ENQUIRER that The King had personally prepared him for his shocking death. Two days before Elvis' death in 1977, revealed David, his stepbrother said: "Goodbye. You'll never see me alive again!" And his mother Dee, who had married Elvis' father Vernon in 1960, claimed that Elvis even left a suicide note!

The music legend's bloated body was found sprawled on the bathroom floor in his Memphis mansion on Aug. 16, 1977. A coroner's report said he'd succumbed to "cardiac arrhythmia" — but there were plenty of drugs to explain the heart failure. Thanks to his accommodating personal physician Dr. George Nichopoulos, Elvis (seen here with Linda Thompson) took more than 5,300 drug doses in the seven months leading to his death. The autopsy found more than 14 different medications in his body, including codeine at toxic levels!

"I believe Elvis killed himself by taking extra drugs," David (pictured) told The ENQUIRER. "I've never told anybody this before because we've tried to protect his memory. But I've always known it. He just couldn't take his life anymore. Two days before his death he shook my hand and said, 'Goodbye, David, you'll never see me alive again.'"

"On the night Elvis died, he didn't eat any food," David recalled. "Then he ordered an extra bottle of the narcotic Dilaudid and took it on top of his other drugs. Elvis was an expert on drugs, and I believe he knew very well that taking all those extra drugs on an empty stomach would take him out, put him out of his misery."

Dee, who passed away in 2013, had claimed that Elvis was out to kill himself after being diagnosed with bone-marrow cancer. David spent years as part of the Memphis Mafia who looked over every aspect of the superstar's private life before Elvis' sudden death at the age of 42. David's brother Billy was in charge of Elvis' "medicine kit," a black jewelry case where the star kept his pills, amphetamines, tranquilizers. sleeping pills and Quaaludes. Billy would later credit Elvis for saving him from his own suicide — years after Elvis' death!

Billy (at far right, with brother David, mother Dee, and brother Rick) told The ENQUIRER that he was visited by Elvis's spirit in 1981. "I had become like Elvis," said Billy. "I couldn't sleep without pills, or stay awake without them. I had also gotten into morphine. I was doing drugs every day — any kind I could get my hands on!" After Billy tried to commit suicide by an overdose of Quaaludes earlier that year, he said, friends in Tennessee put him on a plane and sent him to stay with David, who had moved to Texas.

"I had been with them about 10 days when I had the vision that changed my life," Billy recalled. "I was lying in bed. It was the night before the fourth anniversary of Elvis' death. "Suddenly I sat bolt upright in bed, in a cold sweat. It was about 3:30 a.m. Then a strange light began to glow in a far corner of the bedroom. Framed by the light was the figure of a man and I realized it was Elvis ... his ghost!"

"He was wearing a dazzling white jumpsuit with a gold belt," said Billy. "All I could think of to say was: 'What's it feel like to be dead, Elvis?' Elvis' eyes seemed to well up with tears as he looked at me, and in a deathly solemn tone he replied: 'You mean you don't know?' I asked him what he meant, and Elvis told me: 'Billy, you're destroying yourself the same way I did!'"

"He was wearing a dazzling white jumpsuit with a gold belt," said Billy. "All I could think of to say was: 'What's it feel like to be dead, Elvis?' Elvis' eyes seemed to well up with tears as he looked at me, and in a deathly solemn tone he replied: 'You mean you don't know?' I asked him what he meant, and Elvis told me: 'Billy, you're destroying yourself the same way I did!'"

Billy said that the shocking vision set him straight: "That night, I quit drugs, cold turkey. I got all the drugs in the house and flushed them down the toilet — and I haven't touched a drop of booze, either!"