Conspiracy theories abound when it comes to celebrity deaths... Join us as we explore the controversial claims surrounding famous figures whose deaths have been linked to potential FBI involvement. From civil rights leaders to music icons, these cases continue to spark debate and speculation decades after their tragic ends.
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00:00Good morning, everyone. I'm Tom Brokaw. This is today, December 9th. I'm here with Jane Pauley,
00:04and this entire half hour will be devoted to the murder of John Lennon.
00:09Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're looking at celebrities whose tragic deaths have been
00:14attributed by some to none other than the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
00:18Good evening. Dr. Martin Luther King, the apostle of nonviolence in the civil rights movement,
00:24has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee.
00:26Marilyn Monroe.
00:27Her international appeal took her from command appearances to the other side of the world
00:32and entertainment for Korean GIs. The star led a far-from-normal childhood and had 12 sets of
00:39foster parents, leaving her to say in her last interview that she was never used to being happy,
00:45so it wasn't something she ever took for granted. Possibly the most iconic actress who ever lived,
00:50the woman-born Norma Jean Mortensen helped to revolutionize the silver screen for a new
00:54generation of film fans. However, despite her beloved status, Monroe's personal life was anything
01:00but glitz and glam. Her love affair with Arthur Miller put her directly in the FBI's crosshairs
01:05and led to them opening a file on her.
01:09Why did she have to struggle, do you think, in the way that she did?
01:12The legendary playwright had been under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee for his suspected Communist
01:24affiliations. Although Miller and Monroe had already separated by the time of Marilyn's 1962 death, that didn't stop author Norman Mailer from accusing the FBI of orchestrating her death as retaliation for her supposed affair with John F. Kennedy.
01:29An accusation Mailer later retracted.
01:30An accusation Mailer later retracted.
01:31He describes her obvious charms with salivating relish and having a
01:35and hates the men she married Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller with a passion of an unsuccessful rival. What it tells us is that the
01:40woman who had been asked to do the House Un-American Activities Committee is the
01:42woman of the House Un-American Activities Committee for his suspected Communist affiliations.
01:43Although Miller and Monroe had already separated by the time of Marilyn's 1962 death, that didn't stop author Norman Mailer from accusing the FBI of orchestrating her death as retaliation for her supposed affair with John F. Kennedy.
01:53An accusation Mailer later retracted.
01:55He describes her obvious charms with salivating relish and hates the men she married, Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller, with the passion of an unsuccessful rival.
02:03What he tells us about Marilyn Monroe is not at all new. Indeed, he cribbed nearly all of it from other biographies.
02:09But what he tries to do that's different from the other biographies is to analyze and explain this paradoxical creature.
02:15Gene Seberg.
02:16Where are you, Montecarole?
02:18No, Marseille. I stayed Sunday and Sunday to Monte Carlo. I had to see a little bit.
02:23I tried to call you from Marseille.
02:25Sunday and Sunday, I wasn't in Paris.
02:27New York Herald Tribune!
02:30I'll take you.
02:31It's nice.
02:32Revered for her globe-spanning career in film, Seberg's most famous role was one of the leads of the French new wave crime drama, Breathless.
02:41Off screen, though, Seberg was perhaps best known for her social activism in the fight for civil rights in America.
02:47I guess the movie business pays pretty well.
02:49Yes.
02:50It does.
02:51But compared to what you're doing, I feel so frivolous.
02:56You're wrong.
02:57You're wrong.
02:58The revolution needs movie stars, and that's a responsibility right there.
03:02We have to wave a shotgun to get people's attention.
03:05You get your hair cut, and you're on the cover of Life magazine.
03:08A frequent donor to the Black Panther Party, the FBI targeted Seberg as part of their widely condemned COINTELPRO program, which cracked down on individuals and organizations the Bureau deemed as subversive.
03:20Seberg was subsequently harassed and defamed by the FBI, and the 1979 discovery of her body in the backseat of her Renault has variously been attributed to the Bureau directly or to her own hand as a result of the mental distress she had been put under.
03:36The intertwining of those lives, the watcher and the watched, is the glue of the storytelling, and for the audience to experience the surveillance thriller, in a way, via the FBI story, but to see the mechanics of surveillance and see that turned against Gene.
03:53Jimi Hendrix.
03:54The guitarist's untimely 1970 death raises questions even to the present day.
04:07Hendrix, a hugely important musician whose influence on rock can't be understated, was found dead on September 18th, ostensibly due to asphyxia caused by a barbiturate overdose.
04:18He had also struggled with substance use disorder, as well as fatigue caused by his notorious touring schedule.
04:24This is Jimi Hendrix's autopsy report, and one thing that this report concludes is that Jimi Hendrix died aspirating on vomitous material.
04:32One thing you need to know about this report is it's very short. It's barely more than a page in length.
04:38The amount of information in here is very sparse, and I think it can also be misleading.
04:43So I don't buy this as a cause of death.
04:46While it seems as though Hendrix's death was simply a tragic accident, naysayers point to Hendrix's 1969 arrest on possession charges in Toronto, after which the FBI compiled a file on him.
04:57Conspiracy theorists have accused Hendrix's manager, Michael Jeffery, of colluding with the FBI and CIA to cut his life short in connection with his alleged ties to the Black Power movement.
05:09The Jimi Hendrix experience is over. The acid rock musician died today in a London hospital, apparently from an overdose of drugs. During his short career, Hendrix flailed his electric guitar into some of the most unusual sounds of an unusual music.
05:25Tupac Shakur
05:32Widely considered one of the greatest rappers of all time, Shakur's lyrics thoughtfully reflected the historical and contemporary struggles of black Americans.
05:40It didn't hurt that his mother, Afeni Shakur, was a well-known member of the Black Panther Party herself, although her active association with the party ended after her acquittal on several counts of conspiracy.
05:51The outspoken lyricist was murdered on September 7, 1996, and questions as to the identity and motive of the shooter persist.
06:00Rap star Tupac Shakur died last night after a brief life in a rough business. He was 25. Here's NBC's Stan Bernard.
06:08Tupac Shakur wrote to fame and riches on his often violent vision of life in the inner city. That vision turned out to be prophetic, his own death from multiple gunshot wounds.
06:22However, among other conspiracy theorists surrounding Pac's death, one posits that the FBI had him killed for his anti-authority attitude, as well as his involvement with a 1993 Atlanta shooting of two off-duty police officers.
06:36I like rappers who are going to say what they have to say. I really like that. He didn't hold nothing back, he didn't bite his tongue, but like I said, Tupac took things a little bit too far.
06:47John F. Kennedy.
06:48From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time, 2 o'clock Eastern Standard Time, some 38 minutes ago.
07:02We likely don't have to tell you about the proliferation of conspiracy theories surrounding the killing of 35th U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
07:09Kennedy was shot during a November 1963 motorcade in Dallas, Texas, and Lee Harvey Oswald was almost immediately charged with his death, before being shot himself by Jack Ruby just days later.
07:21He's been shot, he's been shot, Eddie Oswald has been shot. There's the man with a gun, absolute panic, absolute panic, here in the basement of Dallas police headquarters. Detectives have their guns drawn. Oswald has been shot. There is no question about it, Oswald has been shot.
07:41Investigations into President Kennedy's murder yielded countless more questions than answers, and have led some to conclude that an FBI or CIA cover up took place.
07:51Critics point to the organizations being allowed to investigate themselves rather than the independent Warren Commission.
07:58Journalist Jim Mars' book Crossfire also alleges that the FBI intimidated witnesses to the assassination into silence.
08:06He was a longtime reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the author of a dozen books from Alien Agenda to a book called Crossfire, the plot that killed Kennedy, the conspiracy narrative that became much of the motivation for the Hollywood movie by Oliver Stone.
08:20Jim was one of the first people who found his niche, stuck to it, and found a great audience.
08:25John Lennon.
08:26John Lennon arrived at the emergency room at the Roosevelt Hospital. He was dead at the time of his arrival. Numerous resuscitative efforts were made after his arrival in the hospital, including transfusions, surgical procedures, other procedures.
08:42But in spite of the effort of many physicians and after many procedures, we were unable to restore the life of Mr. Lennon.
08:50As the official story goes, the former Beatle and lifelong advocate for world peace was murdered in December 1980 by 25-year-old Mark David Chapman, who held a personal vendetta against Lennon.
09:02However, some have argued that Lennon's history of left-wing activism made him a target of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
09:08Declassified documents released by the CIA in the 1980s revealed that, according to historian John Weiner, they asked the FBI for information about Lennon's ties to a group planning demonstrations at the GOP convention in 1972.
09:32As such, conspiracy theorists allege that the two organizations cooperated to have Lennon killed so as to discourage high-profile individuals from speaking out.
09:42Ex-Beatle, one of the best-known musicians and most influential people of his time. As you heard Dr. Steven Lin at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City say, Lennon was shot and killed at about 11 o'clock last night outside his apartment building.
09:56Malcolm X.
09:57You can't do for yourself what the white man is doing for himself. Don't say you're equal with the white man.
10:03That's right.
10:04If you can't set up a factory like he sets up a factory, don't talk that old equality talk.
10:08The revolutionary and human rights activist born Malcolm Little remains the subject of heavy controversy 60 years after his death in February 1965.
10:18As part of the FBI's aforementioned COINTELPRO program, Malcolm X was surveilled until the end of his life, accused by the Bureau of Subversive, Anti-American Activities.
10:29His departure from the Nation of Islam in 1964 led to an escalating feud between him and the organization, exacerbated by the FBI's efforts.
10:38Any black leader with charisma was a target of the government's COINTELPRO program, and that's stated in their own objectives of the program.
10:47Who are you? You don't know? Don't tell me Negro, that's nothing. What were you before the white man deemed you a Negro? And where were you?
10:57Malcolm's assassination, while mostly attributed to the Nation of Islam, has also drawn accusations of misconduct on the Bureau's part.
11:05The enduring main theory is not that the FBI killed Malcolm directly, but instead engineered the circumstances for it to happen.
11:13They were articulating that goal, and they were taking steps in furtherance of that, trying to cause the exact same thing to happen, which happened.
11:22So, we can step back from it and say, regardless of their success, whether they were the ones who pulled the trigger, this gives us an idea of what their intent was, what they were willing to do.
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11:48Martin Luther King Jr.: We must also realize that the problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.
12:07Speaking of COINTELPRO and the fight for civil rights, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was perhaps the FBI's most despised enemy.
12:15The Baptist minister and pioneer of non-violent protest had his phone lines tapped by the FBI, under the direct orders of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in 1963,
12:26and used every weapon at their disposal to discredit King and his involvement in the civil rights movement.
12:31In fact, King was even the recipient of a letter sent by the FBI that intended to intimidate him into taking his own life.
12:55While King persevered, it's perhaps not shocking to learn that his 1968 assassination has been theorized as being the work of the Bureau,
13:03owing to insufficient police presence and failure to issue an all-points bulletin in the wake of his killing.
13:09What we can say for sure is that the FBI had an intent, shown by their programs against Dr. King,
13:15showed by the document I talked about, about preventing the rise of messiahs like Dr. King,
13:21that they wanted that to happen and that they had again taken very active steps to do that.
13:28Which celebrity death shocked you the most? Be sure to let us know in the comments below.