00:36:
Shortly after the announcement of Elvis’s death, Joe Esposito responded to several questions at a makeshift press conference at Baptist Hospital. Esposito made the following comments:
Joe Esposito, at BMH: “He was upstairs in his bedroom and I went upstairs to talk to him and he wasn’t breathing when I got up there.”
Question: “Was he lying on the bed?”
Joe Esposito: “Yeah.”
This is a very revealing exchange and tells us quite clearly that something was going on in Joe Esposito’s mind, we just don’t know exactly what it was. Consider the specific words and wording:
“He was upstairs in his bedroom”: How did Esposito know this? According to his own later account, he arrived at the mansion sometime between 12:noon and 2:00pm, and upon his arrival we can assume he would have known that Elvis was upstairs, and most likely sleeping (remember the wake-up call?), but this was not a certainty. Was he told that Elvis was upstairs? Perhaps. But at this time he would have expected that Elvis was sleeping, so why did he “[go] upstairs to talk to him”?
[Note that these questions are based on Esposito’s later statements and accounts, and at the time of the comments in question none of the subsequent statements existed.]
If Joe Esposito went upstairs at ~2:20pm to talk to Elvis, and at that time Elvis was found to be in some sort of serious medical distress, then the entire story of Ginger Alden finding Elvis’s body cannot be true. If Joe Esposito did not go upstairs at ~2:20pm to talk to Elvis, then Esposito was lying.
“I went upstairs to talk to him”: Why? From several sources we know that Joe Esposito had said that Elvis told him to wake him up at 5:00pm. He had also said (on CNN) that, “I was supposed to wake him up at four o’clock.” If Esposito was at the mansion at 2:20pm and he “went upstairs to talk to him,” we’d have to ask why he did this, since he supposedly knew that Elvis would be sleeping. After all, Esposito says that he was supposed to wake up Elvis at 4:00pm or 5:00pm, and if that was the case, then why go upstairs when Elvis would have been asleep? Did Joe know that when he went upstairs Elvis was awake and perhaps awaiting his arrival? Possibly. Finally, do we know when Esposito “went upstairs” to talk to Elvis? In this account, no, we do not.
Further, if Elvis was sleeping, then he didn’t call for Esposito to come upstairs. That means Esposito went up there on his own, right? But what about the “do not disturb me” instruction as described by both Rick and David Stanley?
“…and he wasn’t breathing…”: The way Esposito describes this sequence of events/actions, we see that he was at the mansion, he knew or assumed that Elvis was upstairs in his bedroom, and Esposito went upstairs to speak with him. Upon entering the bedroom, he found Elvis on his own bed (presumably), and he was not breathing. Did Esposito knock on the bedroom door before entering? Or did he just enter without knocking, while Elvis was in the bedroom with Ginger? What was the typical way one entered Elvis’s bedroom, and Joe Esposito in particular?
Esposito answers “Yes” when asked if Elvis was lying on the bed in his bedroom: If Esposito entered the bedroom and found Elvis lying on the bed, how did he come to notice that Elvis was not breathing? Did he touch Elvis? Shake him? Verbally announce his arrival to which Elvis was unresponsive? Where was Ginger? Why does Esposito not mention her? A key question arises: Which bed was Elvis lying on? Could Esposito have gone upstairs, entered the second bedroom and found Elvis lying on that bed, and then noticed Elvis was not breathing? Is Esposito referring to a specific bed when he actually means a different bed?
Joe Esposito, in making these remarks, knew, with absolute certainty, that this was not the account he would later offer (and that he had earlier described), and that many others would later expand upon, and yet he said these things anyway. Why? At the moment of this exchange with a reporter, what was Esposito thinking?
This account from Esposito cannot simply be “wrong.”
Keep in mind that the story he subsequently told, with details that seemed to change over the years, goes like this (from Good Rockin’ Tonight): Elvis told Esposito (early on August 16) to give him a wake-up call around 5:00pm later that same day; Esposito arrived at Graceland at approximately 12:30pm on the sixteenth; around 2:30pm Ginger called and asked who is on duty; Al Strada ran upstairs; Strada called downstairs for Esposito; Esposito ran upstairs to the bathroom off of Elvis’s bedroom and found Elvis’s body on the floor in front of the toilet, frozen in a sitting position.
Does any of this account resemble what he said at Baptist?
Joe Esposito, at BMH: “He was upstairs in his bedroom and I went upstairs to talk to him and he wasn’t breathing when I got up there.”
Question: “Was he lying on the bed?”
Joe Esposito: “Yeah.”
Does everyone see what’s happening here?
[Re-post]
ElvisDecoded 