Thursday, September 3, 2009

Jack Kerouac was murdered

I've been reading Empty Phantoms: Interviews and Encounters with Jack Kerouac (see sidebar on the right). The last entry I read before falling asleep last night was a piece by Larry Vickers called "Jack Kerouac - End of the Road" from the book by John Montgomery, Kerouac at the 'Wild Boar' and Other Skirmishes. While I'd read this fact many times before (e.g., in bios), it struck me that the beating Kerouac took one night in a St. Petersburg bar preceded his death by only a short time.

The coroner's report said that Kerouac died of "gastrointestinal hemorrhage, due to bleeding gastric varix from cirrhosis of liver, due to excessive ethanol intake over many years." In an interview for Esquire in March 1970, Kerouac told Jack McClintock, "I got a goddamn hernia, you know that? My goddamn belly button is popping out."

If someone beats the shit out of a person who has a predisposition to gastrointestinal hemorrhage and an umbilical hernia, and the person dies soon after the beating - couldn't that be murder?

Makes sense to me. I say we re-open the case. Anyone want to file a complaint with the St. Petersburg police? Murder has no statute of limitations, right? I bet it'd make the news.

P.S. I came up with this theory myself, yet it's not the first time the murder supposition has surfaced. See this article.


5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree!

Rick Dale, author of The Beat Handbook said...

I also just finished reading Jim Christy's The Long Slow Death of Jack Kerouac and, while he doesn't come out and say Jack was murdered, he does intimate that the beating connected to his death.

brcanson said...

If I'm not mistaken, the beating that Kerouac took was at the hand of Blacks. It's really kind of amazing that almost nothing has ever been said about this all these years. But, considering the leftist tyranny we've been living under for so long, maybe not so amazing. I wonder if there was even that slightest investigation into the matter.

Joseph Price said...

I just asked two funeral director/embalmers across the room who are well-versed in the direct causes of death associated various ailments as they shepherd the death certificate filing process involving the establishment of those causes between the attending physicians and the county and they said the cause of death associated with cirrhosis of the liver is multiple organ failure, not hemorrhage.

Unknown said...

About the last comment. Jack's grandson died from ethanol abuse. How does that happen to a 28 year old healthy happy father that drink bud lights?