
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, May 26, 1990                   TAG: 9005260214
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NEW YORK                                LENGTH: Short

ELVIS KILLED HIMSELF, SAYS WRITER

Call off the hunt! Elvis is really dead - and the "king of rock'n'roll" committed suicide with a huge drug overdose, Presley's controversial biographer claimed Friday.

"It's the dream gone to nightmare. It's perfect. It's the archetypal rags to riches to rot story," writer Albert Goldman said as advance copies of his Life magazine cover story were released to the media. A Friday morning phone call to Graceland, Presley's Memphis mansion, for comment on Goldman's claim from the Presley estate was not immediately returned.

Goldman stunned and infuriated millions of Presley fans around the world with his 1981 biography, "Elvis," which portrayed the King as an obese, impotent drug addict incapable of taking care of himself. Later, an unflattering Goldman book on the late John Lennon had the same effect on his fans.

Goldman had written in "Elvis" that the singer died of an accidental overdose.

But his conversations with David Stanley, Elvis' stepbrother and a fixture at Graceland, convinced Goldman that Presley had taken himself out.

Goldman points to Elvis' physical deterioration, his drug addiction and his depression over a tell-all book written by ex-bodyguards Red and Sonny West as three factors in the alleged suicide. Presley had also attempted suicide once before - on the eve of his marriage to Priscilla Beaulieu, Goldman said.

by CNB