by PL

There are a number of people in Elvis World who closely follow the claims and accusations of/from Dick Grob, as they pertain to Ginger Alden. You all know who you are. These folks look to Grob for all the answers about Elvis’s death, his health, his relationship with Ginger, and the goings-on with Ginger immediately after Elvis was taken from Graceland to Baptist Memorial Hospital for the last time. I can visit Facebook at any random time, do a quick search on Grob or Ginger or some such related topic, and as sure as the sun will rise, I can find Elvis (Grob) fans ranting and raving about Ginger’s actions on August 16, 1977 (as Grob tells the story), about her machinations to get money out of the Presley estate after Elvis’s death (she was in cahoots with her evil mother!), and the intricate details of what went on at Graceland on the morning and afternoon of August 16. Recently I have seen comments about a “cold case,” suggesting that the Memphis Police Department should continue its investigation into Elvis’s death (a “cold case” indicates a case was opened but now lies dormant). I have seen a statement that Ginger is a money-hungry ******* and she let Elvis die so she could get a hefty pay-out for an interview. I have seen Grob fans tout his book as an investigative masterpiece, so confident in his work that they are flabbergasted how Ginger walks around today as a free woman. So, is any of this correct…logical…factual…? Let’s take a look:

Statement: “The Memphis Police Department should re-open this cold case and investigate Elvis’s death and Ginger’s role in it.”

First of all, there is no dormant “cold case” to re-open, as the MPD never actually investigated the death beyond the interviews conducted on the afternoon of the sixteenth. There is no “cold case” sitting in the MPD archives waiting, just waiting, for that one piece of critical information to come in, that smoking gun that will prove that Ginger Alden did nothing while her fiance died on the bathroom floor. No, “Aha!” No, “We got her!” The MPD did not further investigate this case because there was no case to investigate. It’s that simple.

Second, the only people who have ever said that Ginger had any role in Elvis’s death, or had done anything questionable that day, are fans of Dick Grob, who have taken the bread crumbs left by Dear Leader and come to their own Grobish conclusions:

Dick Grob: “Ginger Alden let Elvis…?”

The Grob fans: “Sleep late?”

Grob: “No, she let him…?”

The Grob fans: “Go read in the bathroom?”

Grob: “No, rhymes with ‘pie’…?”

The Grob fans: “Die! Ginger Alden let Elvis die!”

Grob: “Well, I didn’t say that, but if that’s what you think happened…”

And so the conclusion is reached, with Grob offering the clues and innuendo, and then allowing the fans to reach their “own” conclusions. In reality, these are Grob’s conclusions, but he’s got books to sell and a speaking engagement or two lined up.

Grob fans, here’s a challenge for you: If you truly believe that Ginger Alden is guilty of some criminal offense, and that there is a “cold case” awaiting action, please contact the Memphis Police Department and make your concerns known. Has anyone done this? Filed any papers? Contacted an attorney for advice? If not, why not, if you feel so strongly about this case? Or, is it possible that you just post this stuff on Facebook and really aren’t sure what you’re talking about?

If Dick Grob feels so strongly that he has proved his case against Ginger Alden, has *he* contacted the Memphis Police Department?

Statement: “Ginger found Elvis on the bathroom floor, then went to the other bathroom and put on her makeup and prepared herself for TV interviews.”

Let’s walk through this one very slowly. Here we have a 20-year-old girl who is the fiancée of the world’s most famous and beloved man, Elvis Presley. She is planning to marry Elvis within the next few months (maybe around Christmas 1977), and one might assume that she would then be swept up in a comfortable lifestyle, plenty of money, cars, fur coats (1977!), all with the man she says she loves…and we have no evidence to suggest that she doesn’t love him. So the married life she was looking forward to would have been full of very positive things…a very nice life. But wait: fans of Dick Grob would have us believe that Ginger did *not* have any interest in this life, and instead she was more interested in a one-off interview fee from the National Enquirer, or some local newspaper, or whomever. That is, she got out of bed, saw Elvis on the floor, and said to herself, “Ginger, that is your fiancé there on the floor, he may be dead, he might not be dead, but ya know, I think I should go shower and put on some makeup so I can be ready for the TV interviews even though I do not know if he’s dead or not.”

But wait. Ginger didn’t talk to the media that day. So, fans of Dick Grob, why did Ginger shower and get ready for TV interviews…as you claim she did…if she then gave no TV interviews…? She could literally have walked out on Elvis Presley Boulevard and announced, using a bullhorn, “Hello people with TV cameras! I was Elvis’s fiancée! Does anyone want to interview me!?,” and there would have been a million microphones shoved in her face. But that didn’t happen, did it?

Think about this, the core claim that holds the Grob world together: Ginger gets up out of bed, sees a dead/dying/ailing man, and does nothing to help him. He’s the man to whom she is engaged to be married. Grob fans, put your Grob-colored glasses aside…do you *really* believe this happened? Do you *really* believe Ginger (or anyone) could do such a thing? Think about this. Could this really have happened? Of course not. Of. Course. Not.

Now factor this in: Regarding Ulysses Jones, EMT Paramedic onsite at Graceland that day: “He [Jones] said that he noticed Ginger several times while they were there, and that, no doubt in his mind, she was not dressed and ‘made up,’ was very distraught, had obviously been crying a lot, and was still dressed in, he thought, either a very pale yellow or maybe light blue robe.  I asked him about three or four different times whether he was sure that she was not already dressed and he stated emphatically that there was no doubt in his mind about that.”

Does anyone believe that one of the paramedics that day had any sort of pro-Ginger agenda…? That he would lie about what he witnessed? Of course he didn’t have an agenda, and of course he wouldn’t lie. So how do the Grob supporters reconcile this statement from Jones with what Grob claims and they believe?

Sidebar: Do people understand where the anti-Ginger crowd has ended up after all these years of the red meat Grob feeds them? I will tell you: fighting for position with the aliver crowd. There is no question about it, the similarities are plain as day: suggestive yet ultimately specious claims and information, innuendo, the suspension of disbelief, incomplete “investigations” based on predetermined conclusions, the dismissal of any fact that runs counter to the established narrative…the whole nine yards. The word “aliver” was coined in reference to these people, those who believe, against all logical and rational and known evidence, that Elvis faked his death. Any ideas on what the anti-Ginger Grobists should be called?

The other day I read an exchange on a Facebook comments section where fans went back-and-forth on the pros and cons of Dick Grob’s books and his investigative skills, some suggesting the two books he’s published are Sherlock Holmes-level investigations. A few folks pointed out some flaws in his work, but the conversation after that was difficult to follow because the critical comments were removed. Think about this: someone who has admin access to that Facebook page saw something that ran counter to the Grob fans’ anti-Ginger narrative, and immediately went to the admin console of the page and actively removed the posts critical of Grob. That means the person recognized that the critical post was accurate; otherwise, why remove it…right…? “Quick, someone’s telling the truth about Dick Grob, hit the delete key!” Again, you know who you are.

I will not go over the many, many issues with Grob’s so-called “investigation” (which didn’t really happen*), but suffice it to say, his book reads like a 7th grader’s attempt to write a spec script for “Law and Order.” Anyone who believes otherwise needs to re-evaluate the book, and re-assess his/her biases. Maybe take a 100-level Basic Logic course, as well. And if Grob really had been asked to investigate the death, he would have looked into a lot of other angles, and he would not have focused solely (or at all) on Ginger Alden.

* Vernon Presley likely did not ask Dick Grob to investigate Elvis’s death. Vernon was told, to his face, in a meeting with the BMH pathologists, the circumstances of Elvis’s death, and shown the medical evidence, and those circumstances had nothing to do with Ginger or a karate chop to the neck or suffocating in the carpet or bone cancer (another whopper from Grob) or any other silly claim that has been floated out there over the past four-plus decades.

Finally, where are those phone records that Mr. Grob promised 20-something years ago?

*****If you have information implicating Ginger Alden in the death of Elvis Presley, please contact me directly at elvisdecoded@gmail.com and I will personally take your research and fact-based evidence to the appropriate Memphis law enforcement authority.*****

UPDATE (04/30/20): I would like to add one more logical take on the Grob Conspiracy, regarding the alleged phone calls that Grob and his followers have promoted all these years.

The Claim: It’s August 16, 1977, and Ginger Alden finds the body of her fiancé, Elvis Presley, dead on the bathroom floor. Instead of calling for help, she calls Jim Kirk (a reporter affiliated with The National Equirer) and tells him, over the course of two separate calls, to “watch the mansion,” to “bring money,” and that “something” would be happening. Kirk later claimed that the female caller “sounded like” Ginger, whom he had allegedly spoken with before. (My own view is that Ginger Alden has a very distinctive speaking voice, and Kirk should have been able to declare that it was Ginger he was speaking with, or it was not Ginger he was speaking with. “Sounded like Ginger” doesn’t cut it.)

Let’s consider these points:

The Grobists claim that Ginger made these calls, to a reporter she already knew. By calling a person familiar with her voice, she would be revealing her identity, and later she would have certainly expected Kirk to publicly identify her as the caller. Now, why on earth would Ginger do this?

The female caller did not identify herself to Kirk, and yet it would make sense, given the nature of the call, to say, “Jim, this is Ginger Alden,” at the outset of the call. But the female caller didn’t identify herself. Why not?

While the female caller did not identify herself, neither did Jim Kirk inquire as to the identity of the caller, at the very least to confirm her identity if he believed it to be Ginger Alden. Why didn’t he confirm the identity of the caller?

After the events of that day, Jim Kirk, at least in a public setting, has never asked Ginger to confirm that she was the caller. Why didn’t he follow up? The calls were very unusual, and yet they seem to have existed only for that one moment in time. After 1:30pm that day, this bizarre set of two phone calls seemingly vanished into thin air.

This central point needs to be emphasized: to reveal herself by making two phone calls to a reporter 1-3 hours before the body was discovered is literally like offering up a confession of some sort. The calls indicated to Kirk that Ginger Alden was calling from Graceland, and that she knew something “big” was happening, or about to happen. Given the circumstances, that Elvis Presley had passed away and presumably a police investigation would follow, revealing any role in the incident would have been so incredibly stupid as to render such a notion impossible. One does not call a reporter before robbing a bank and say, “Watch the bank.”

These two phone calls, which Ginger Alden is accused of making, are so illogical and absurd that anyone who believes this story is trying too hard to fit a square into a circle.