IT FELL TO INSPECTOR PETER DUCLOS to write a report, a dozen pages for the coroner. He was the lead detective investigating Michael’s death. Twenty years later in 2017, still searching, I reached out to him, asking him to recollect in his own words the events of 22 November 1997. And the aftermath. He kindly wrote back.
Although the Ritz-Carlton in Double Bay had called the police late that morning, Duclos reported that there was a simultaneous home invasion involving guns in the same suburb. The immediate threat posed by the arms made that case a higher priority, so he was delayed.
‘I attended Michael’s room sometime after the initial paramedics and ambulance attended,’ he wrote.
We were the first [police] responders; a car crew consisting of a sergeant, two detectives and myself from Rose Bay local area command. Double Bay did not have a police station.
I arrived about 12.50 p.m. Michael was lying on the floor, covered with a bed spread. We established a ‘crime scene’ immediately. This means we limit who comes into the scene to ensure integrity. There were no signs of a struggle or anything to suggest a suspicious death, i.e. a murder. Even so, I assumed, as I always did, that the death was suspicious until I could, on the evidence, be convinced otherwise. Regardless of who the victim is, I always kept an open mind, and this was no different.
‘There were no injuries to Michael that would suggest a struggle or self-defence wounds,’ continued Duclos.
There was a small laceration above his left eye, sustained when he lost consciousness and his face hit the door, and burn marks consistent with a cigarette burn on his left hand. Contrary to what has been reported, no hand was broken and there was nothing to suggest a third party was involved at all. A log of all officers attending; our forensic police, the medical team and so forth was commenced and maintained until the following Monday when we released the room back to the hotel.
On leaving the Ritz-Carlton Duclos set out to find a next of kin.
No doubt someone had notified the media, as there was … a large contingent outside the Ritz when I left … That was not unusual. We never found out who it was. Normal police procedure is to notify the nearest next of kin, and then leave it to them to call all other relatives. However, it was impossible to keep Michael’s death silent and within hours it was all over the press.
Just about everybody was in the local public telephone directory back then, including Kell.
‘As I was met at the door,’ Duclos remembered, ‘Kell was just hanging up the telephone from a newspaper asking about Michael.’
I had told Duclos when I contacted him about the way our family had been devastated to not only hear that Michael was suddenly, unbelievably dead, but to find out almost every part of it—true or false—through news reports. Duclos showed real sympathy and sorrow to hear that.
‘I’m sorry that happened that way,’ he wrote kindly.
He is a good man, retired now. He mentions he worked on a suicide hotline for some years.
I can’t help reflecting that Michael’s death—any suicide, any sudden, violent death, really—can leave indelible marks, scars, the claw marks of the grim reaper on the sides of many. Not just the survivors who are family and friends, but also the first responders and investigators.
The day that Michael died, it was like a great psychic car accident that crippled and burned. Everything happened so fast. There was no time for the heart to apprehend it. I was returning a missed call to Rhett. His usual, confident rapid-speak was so changed, so strange I couldn’t properly hear what he was saying. Have you ever been in such shock and disbelief that a firework goes off in your chest, robbing you of the ability to breathe? Something lodged in my throat—I couldn’t speak. I looked around and the world seemed underwater. Clogged ears, slow motion. As I held the phone to my ear, the large CNN screen in my living room flashed a long shot of law enforcement walking around a balcony with the words ‘Michael Hutchence, 37, found dead’.
I didn’t find out till this book was being written how the media actually found out so quickly that day, and how the news spread like wildfire around the globe so Michael’s far-flung family was blindsided. I think I’ve solved that bitter mystery now.
In 1989 Michael had befriended a sixteen-year-old schoolboy who asked for an autograph outside his then Sydney hotel, the Sebel Townhouse. He indulged Richard Simpkin’s desire to take amateur, then gradually more professional-looking photos—selfies or straight portraits. He and INXS let Richard haunt Rhinoceros Studios throughout their recording sessions for X. Richard would happily wait for hours for the chance to hang out with Michael in particular. His photographic skills improved and in 2015 he published his book Michael in Pictures.
Richard reported the following:
On Saturday the 22nd of November 1997 I went to the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Double Bay to pick Michael up to take him to ABC studios for rehearsals. Michael had told me on the Thursday that he was going to leave between 10.30 a.m. and 11.00 a.m. I got down to the hotel at approximately 9.30 a.m., as I did not want to miss the opportunity of driving [him]. Just after 12.00 p.m. a few security guards walked outside the hotel and waited near the loading dock. A few moments passed and an ambulance arrived and drove into the loading dock. I remember thinking that this was very strange as 3–4 security guards from the hotel escorted the ambulance inside.
Soon after the ambulance arrived, a police vehicle turned up at the hotel. About 45 minutes had passed since the police arrived and I was beginning to become slightly nervous. There was no sign of Michael; instead there were police and ambulance officers. A few minutes passed and I saw a man running towards the hotel with a news camera on his shoulders. The man ran up to me and asked ‘what is going on?’ I told him that I didn’t know and asked him ‘why, what is going on?’ He then told me that he was sitting up the road in his news vehicle and was listening to the police radio, when he heard that ‘an Australian international rock star had been found dead in one of the hotel rooms’. He then asked me ‘do you know who that could be?’ From that moment I knew that it was Michael, however I told him that I didn’t know … The first thing I did was ring my girlfriend at work. When she answered the phone I said to her ‘I think Michael is dead.’
As Richard said those words the department store his girlfriend was working in experienced a complete blackout.
Despite all her generosity, all her efforts and the depth of good in her heart, Michele would bear the brunt of the hurricane. But she didn’t know it yet. She had been shut out by the cruellest handful of minutes, locked a few centimetres of heavy timber away.
She arrived home after her fruitless attempts to meet and comfort Michael that morning just before noon. Around 1.00 p.m. many things happened in quick succession. She got a phone call from her old friend Jenny Morris with the terrible news. No, Jenny, said Michele; it couldn’t be Michael. She’d spoken to him less than three hours before. All the same, Jenny dispatched her husband, Paul, to Michele’s apartment to help if need be.
Now Michele desperately tried to call Michael. There was no Murray River registered at the Ritz-Carlton, suddenly. She called the police. They wouldn’t say anything. Rhett phoned from Mother’s, told her what had happened, but she wouldn’t believe it. She had spoken to Michael, she insisted, and, although he was exhausted and upset, she didn’t think he was suicidal. Rhett told her to call Kell, who asked her to come to his apartment.
The police were there. They took Michele down to the Rose Bay police station and interrogated her and she realised then they thought she’d been with Michael all night. Was she a suspect now? But he wasn’t dead! Only seeing Michael’s body, she said, would convince her he was lost. The police complied.
On camera Paula said that she had proof that Michael’s death was accidental. She was positive that he was involved in kinky sex that went wrong. Autoerotic asphyxiation. It was impossible that Michael would choose to abandon her or Tiger. When pressed as to their sexual practices, she described Michael as a risk-taker who would ‘do anything’. Her claims went around the world.
But to Inspector Duclos she never once mentioned autoerotic asphyxiation as a possible cause of death. Her statement, taken four days after the tragedy, goes into Michael’s despair at not seeing Tiger before Christmas and the battles with her ex-husband at length.
Kell was incensed that Paula continued to keep this story alive. He wrote to the New South Wales Coroner’s office, asking if Paula had made an application to overturn the verdict, or if there was to be an inquest.
Their letter of reply included the following:
I am able to see by the tenor of your three recent letters that you are extremely distressed and apprehensive … I stress that no application [from Paula Yates to overturn the findings of the state coroner] has been made. You, of course will know if and when that occurs. I would like to reassure you that the State Coronial system in New South Wales has stood the test of time. The investigation of the death of your son was most thorough and the State Coroner was in no doubt as to the manner of his death. Should Ms Yates make an application it will probably be considered either by Mr Hand or myself. Let me assure you that the person who handles the matter will proceed not only according to law but according to the evidence, not according to the profile of either your late son or Ms Yates. The Coroner will, I know act according to his oath of office.
The local Rose Bay detectives painstakingly investigated not only Room 524 but its balcony, the room above Michael’s, the gymnasium and the roof. They couldn’t find any evidence of forced entry.
‘I’ve never wavered from my opinion regarding Michael’s death,’ Duclos wrote to me.
I guess all of this is extremely hard for you, especially dealing with all the innuendo surrounding such a sad event. For me, it was a part of what I was paid to do and my sole intention was to present as thorough and truthful investigation as I could. Not only as that was my job, but because the dead can never speak for themselves. I hope I have done justice for Michael in that respect.
Michael’s toxicology report was dated 24 November 1997 and signed by Lyn Hunt from the State Coroner’s Court of New South Wales. The report found cocaine, Prozac, Keflex, traces of Valium and codeine and a blood alcohol level of over 0.1 per cent—double the legal drink-driving limit in Australia. Quinine traces in Michael’s urine indicated he drank gin and tonic that evening. Reported drinks from Kell’s dinner included wine and several beers, before returning to the hotel to drink further. There was a small quantity of diazepam, or Valium, found circulating in his bloodstream—a widely used antidepressant, anti-anxiety sedative. Keflex, one of the strongest antibiotics available to treat bacterial infections anywhere in the body, can be bought over the counter in LA. It was probably taken to treat the deep burns between Michael’s fingers.
A ‘tiny amount’ of codeine was present, suggesting he used codeine as a painkiller some days previously. The chances of adverse drug interactions rise with each extra drug taken, the mixing of Prozac and alcohol unpredictable.
Michael was prescribed Prozac in December 1995, probably took it unprescribed earlier, and had been off and on it since then, dosing himself according to how he felt, rather than his prescription. There is an increased risk of suicide in the early use of the drug. His last script for Prozac was written exactly three weeks before his death.
There was no suicide note, but this is not uncommon in suicides.
Anyone who thinks those hoping for fame ‘bring it on themselves’ should watch a televised interview with Michael included in the television program Autopsy: The final hours of Michael Hutchence. Although he retained his dignity, Michael appeared to be quietly seething with a kind of incredulous, impotent fury as he described ‘seeing the photographers, in the distance push Pixie, six years old, over—to make her cry, to take a photograph’.
A headline, ‘InXcusable’, flashed on screen.
‘And then,’ Michael continued, ‘print a front-page headline: “Life with Paula and Michael for Pixie”.’
The Channel Seven Australia production The Last Rockstar claimed to have a copy of the last set of lyrics Michael ever wrote, found screwed up and thrown into the wastepaper basket of the Ritz-Carlton’s Room 524.
But I know, as many fans of Michael would, and those who profess to be expert in his career most definitely should, that the drafted, partly crossed-out lyrics scrawled in Michael’s hand on a sheet of paper, supposedly written on his last night on earth, were part of the lyrics to ‘Baby It’s Alright’. He had already recorded that song with its co-writer Danny Saber prior to coming to Sydney. ‘Baby It’s Alright’ was released in December 1999 on Michael’s posthumous, self-titled album. It would appear that the so-called ‘last lyrics’ were just an old draft that Michael had thrown out. The Four Corners program, like The Last Rockstar, failed to investigate this anomaly; both programs failed to identify they belonged to a song already recorded and released by the time they went to air.
Danny Saber and Michael had recorded ‘Baby It’s Alright’ and some other last songs of Michael’s in Los Angeles before Michael flew to Sydney for the last time. They were rough, but Danny had them; they wrote the songs together before he left.
Michael told Danny he would return after the Australian tour, as he was not going back to London, and asked him to put a band together to try out some stuff in some local clubs when he returned in the new year. He told me he’d be back in California on 5 January 1998.
But deep depression can cause someone like Michael to feel hopeless, and helpless, stranded from the rational thought processes that should have kept him going till Michele reached him that final morning. In my mind I have gone over and over this. I believe that Michael knew that even though Michele would comfort him in the immediate future, he would always be at the whim of others. He would never be in control.
Maybe, confused and deranged by fatigue, alcohol and other drugs, the mood swings, frustration, cognitive impairments and anxiety of even small things brought on by his traumatic brain injury, he simply lost his mind. We will never know exactly how many phone calls he received and what was said in them. But it is obvious that Michael was pushed beyond his limit. He was already a man on a ledge. Many people were aware of this and the police statements confirm it. He had been mixing both prescription and illegal drugs for at least two years and, legal or not, drugs and alcohol distort the mind. His perception of his life and future that morning was contorted beyond his capacity to handle it.
Michael had many people watching out for his needs. A personal manager, an accountant, several lawyers, an investment adviser, a tour manager, a bodyguard, a publicist, a record company, a management company for his acting career, not to mention roadies and assistants. More importantly he had many friends and family who loved him but were unable to get beyond the frenzy in his mind.
Mother and I agreed it was a split-second resolve, made in anger and despair. In his own words, uttered repeatedly in the last five months of his life, he just couldn’t take it anymore.
There is a powerful moment in the film The Dark Knight when the Joker turns to Batman, who has just saved him from plunging to his death.
‘Madness is like gravity,’ he says. ‘All it takes … is a little push.’