Bruce Lee Autopsy/ Inquest

[sdog2006]

Hi Guys

I was directed to the Bruce Lee forum group and on page 64 there are various documents covering Bruce Lee's death including the autopsy report and inquest minutes:ooh:

Not much shocks me but that blew me away as I was of the impression that this stuff would never see the light of day. The inquest seems incomplete, has anyone got all of it?

Warm Regards

[The Dragon]

Talk to members of the social. If you're nice, there's a wealth of info to be obtained.

[sdog2006]

Talk to members of the social. If you're nice, there's a wealth of info to be obtained.

Thanks a lot bro. I popped an email to JKL.

[Cognoscente]

Thanks to Marcos Ocaña's book, we can now poke holes at the official story.

In her first book, Linda Lee said this about the inquest: "I personally testified that I had only heard of Bruce taking cannabis after his collapse in May."

In the King of Kung Fu book, part of the inquest's transcript is displayed on page 85: "In reply to Mr. David Yapp (representing the American International Assurance Company), she said Lee had told her that March or April was the first time he had tried the drug."

Linda was disingenuous. She told the police that Bruce had no enemies when he was alive (the local press for starters). At the inquest, she denied him having any financial problems (no reference to the Concord dispute with Raymond Chow?), and she claimed that he didn't consult any doctor in his last two months (despite Langford telling the police that Bruce relayed to him the results of the U.S. tests). What's also suspicious is the removal of the following bits from her '80s book...

Around noon on July 20: "Bruce was in his study at the time dictating to his secretary."

About the inquest: "I saw Betty and talked to her and satisfied myself as to what had happened."

It's funny how George Lazenby wasn't interviewed as part of the police investigation and inquest. There was something that Chow said in the inquest that reflects the time which Bruce had supposedly spent with George: "Prior to his death, I saw him almost every day for 3 to 4 days."

Lazenby told Bey Logan: "He never forgot the way Hollywood treated him, the way they didn’t trust a Chinese guy to star in a film. I was there in his house in what turned out to be the last days of his life, and he had Warner Bros calling him on the phone everyday, begging him to sign a three picture deal, and he was turning them down. Huge money. They were offering him whatever he wanted, but he insisted that he had to make it on his own terms. He really was the biggest star in the world when he died."

Oddly, Linda didn't have any domestic Lazenby anecdotes in either of her books. In Unsettled Matters, Bleecker addressed her involvement in the inquest: "Linda had earlier said that Bruce told her on the day of his death that he was having dinner that evening with Chow and Lazenby, the primary purpose being to coax Lazenby into doing Game of Death. Two years later, however, Linda told reporters in Hong Kong that on that fateful day, Chow, Lazenby, and Bruce had met at Betty’s."

In Betty Ting Pei's statement to the police, she mentioned that Chow left her apartment with the intention of inviting "some friends" to the dinner at the Kam Tin Chung restaurant (I guess that explains the source of the Chan Wai-Man rumour). She didn't mention Lazenby neither did Chow when he made his statement to the police. At the inquest, Chow mentioned that he left Betty's flat and picked up Lazenby at the Hyatt Hotel before driving him to the Miramar Hotel where the Kam Tin Chung restaurant was. No reference to who else was there. When it was Linda's turn to speak, she didn't reference Lazenby and she didn't seem certain that the restaurant appointment was a definite thing. When talking about Bruce when she last saw him alive, she said: "He appeared to be fit and well at that time. He was in a happy state. He told me that he would discuss a new film with Raymond Chow in that afternoon and probably would not come home for dinner."

There's something not right about Chow having no clue about Bruce's cannabis use until the inquest. In Matthew Polly's book, Andre Morgan recalled Bruce being slightly stoned when he threatened Lo Wei on July 5. Also, Andre claimed that Bruce was munching on hash at Golden Harvest on the morning of July 20. With the drugs being sent to Wu Ngan at GH, there's still the possibility that Chow could have tampered with them since himself and Bruce were increasingly at odds with one another. Notice how the official story in the inquest tends to ignore that Bruce spent time at GH on the morning of July 20.

Dr. Donald Langford claimed to have deliberately removed files that would hinder Linda at the inquest, but I find it odd that he didn't have any documents that would confirm what Chow said about Bruce receiving blows to the head during filming. In Ocaña's book, Langford mentioned that February 17, 1973 was when Bruce was accidentally cut by Bob Wall during the making of ETD. He also mentioned that he had treated Bruce on March 29 (btw: three days after Clouse's birthday) because Bruce's right leg had excessively bled for an unspecified reason.

At the inquest, chemist Lam King-Leung said: "I could not find any plant tissue of cannabis but I did find some vegetable and black peas in the stomach."

This was on September 18. On the previous day, Brian Tisdall asked Linda: "Do you know what your husband had for lunch on the day he died?”

She said: “I don't know.”

Linda's memory is certainly strange. At the inquest, she claimed to have moved to H.K. in February '72. Perhaps she lied so as to justify the AIA insurance policy that came into motion on the following February, as if it was some sort of anniversary for their love or something.

In Robert Clouse's biography, Charles Lowe claimed that Bruce and himself would go to a Japanese restaurant in Kowloon called Kanetanaka. Lowe never referenced Lazenby and ditto vice-versa. If Bruce wanted to talk to Lazenby and Chow about GOD in a quiet setting, Kanetanaka would have been a better place than KTC because there was a private room. In that interview on the Death by Misadventure disc, Charles mentioned that the last time that he saw Bruce was in Kanetanaka on the day before he died. Bruce was supposed to meet him there on the day that he died.

In Fiaz Rafiq's Bruce Lee Conversations, Ted Thomas was quoted as saying: "I had a phone call from one of my Inspectors or Superintendent friends, because I had told them if any news story broke that was likely to end up on television or in newspapers, I was to be told about it at once. All enquiries would then be passed on to me, then we would decide what was said about it. So I got a call at Johnny Sutcliffe's house - it was nine or ten at night - and I had to go down to headquarters and start preparing some material. Luckily I did because Bruce Lee had not been reported as walking up and down the garden."

In Bruce Lee: A Life, Polly wrote: "It took seven minutes for the two paramedics and the ambulance driver to arrive at the scene around 10:30 p.m. The senior paramedic, Pang Tak Sun, found the patient, who he didn’t immediately recognize, lying on his back on the mattress on the floor. Pang couldn’t find a pulse and the patient wasn’t breathing. He performed CPR and gave artificial oxygen. There was no change in the patient. The paramedics carried him to the ambulance. Raymond Chow and Dr. Chu jumped in back with them. At 12:30 a.m., the police arrived at Betty Ting Pei’s apartment. They did not tell her that Bruce was dead. Deeply upset, she could not bring herself to ask about his condition. After the ambulance had left her apartment building, she had called her mother and her younger brother, who were there comforting her as the police searched the premises."

Edited July 18, 2022 by Cognoscente