A t 1:14 p.m. on June 25, 2009, an unconscious fifty-year-old man under the alias Soule Shaun was checked into UCLA Medical Center. Doctors attempted to resuscitate him, without success. At 2:26 p.m., he was pronounced dead.
But Shaun’s death isn’t a cut-and-dried DOA. Establishing the true identity of the person who died that day and accounting for events in the twenty-four hours leading up to that afternoon prove difficult—and there are also some who have patched together the following underreported events to point to a death hoax conspiracy of the highest order.
When Shaun’s bodyguard called 911, he never stated the name of the man going into cardiac arrest. When police took his live-in physician’s statement, he stated that he had attempted to administer CPR. But instead of transferring the body to a hard surface, per standard operating procedure, he had begun chest compressions right on the bed when the man’s heart stopped.
Relying on hard documentary evidence to establish basic facts also proves slippery. The two security cameras on the perimeter of the Holmby Hills estate where Shaun resided in the last years of his life show nothing: one of the cameras was inoperative, and some claim footage from the other was mysteriously destroyed by the Los Angeles Police Department. Some have noted that the ambulance that departed from the Carolwood Drive mansion transporting the body is not the same vehicle that arrived at the hospital. In a grainy video captured on a phone, you can see two figures jumping out of the back of the ambulance in the hospital parking garage and stealing away into the shadows. One news outlet reported that Shaun had actually expired six minutes before he was supposed to have died, at least according to the coroner’s report. The photo of Shaun on the stretcher looked phony. And the body that was transported from the hospital to the coroner’s via helicopter also shows peculiar discrepancies. Leaving UCLA, the body is secured with straps. But when the corpse is pulled out after arriving in downtown LA, those straps are gone.
Shaun had been dropping hints that he might be up to something for the past few years. He referenced Gilda , in which a man stages his death and later returns triumphantly, in one of his last public presentations.
At his eventual resting place, he wouldn’t be listed in the cemetery’s database. There would be no name engraved on his tomb.
And days before the ambulance carted away his body, a courier rang the doorbell of the mansion on Carolwood Drive. He was dropping off $2 million in cash to Soule Shaun.
Soule Shaun is the alias under which Michael Jackson was checked in at the hospital that fateful day.
For some, puzzling out what happened since has become a life’s work.
“I’M JUST GIVING YOU the facts,” Pearl Jr., a regally stunning African American woman, tells me. “It’s up to the interpreter to decide.” To understand Michael Jackson’s death hoax, she argues, one must look at the “accumulation” of “evidence.” Isolating a mere trifle, like the fact that, say, Michael Jackson has not been seen by any human eye or camera lens since June 25, 2009, is insignificant when you look at all the “clues” he has delivered to fans that he is alive. “As a stand-alone thing,” she explains, “it would sound ridiculous. But when you accumulate a thousand things, then it makes sense.” Which is why Pearl says she doesn’t waste her time proselytizing to people who won’t invest in examining the myriad anomalies surrounding his death. She’d rather not sound like a fool.
While Steve Rambam and Frank Ahearn approach death fraud as skeptics—they both believe it is nearly impossible to pull off, despite John Darwin’s success, albeit temporary—Pearl occupies the opposite end of the spectrum. She and many Believers, a fringe group within the complex and sprawling fan base of the King of Pop, trust with all their hearts that Michael Jackson faked his death with panache and aplomb, and that he even communicates with them from beyond.
As the public face of the Believers, Pearl is deft at marshaling and arranging her facts. I first stumbled upon the self-proclaimed “Michael Jacksonologist” while combing Netflix one night in 2011, when her homespun documentary Alive! Is Michael Jackson Really Dead? was one of the most popular titles streaming at the time. I was mesmerized by the way she peppily narrates the peculiarities around Jackson’s death with a broadcast-news smile on her face, all to the creepy, haunted-house background music of straining strings. She walks her audience through what she considers an insurmountable heap of evidence that Jackson is alive. Her exhibits range from the compelling (conflicting autopsy reports and discrepancies in legal documents); to the less compelling (brother Marlon Jackson wearing an FBI hat the day after “the death announcement,” to signal that the family and feds are in cahoots); to the absurd (if you examine closely Jackson’s face on the cover of his posthumous release Michael , you can make out the message “I Live” on his lips).
Pearl was just as chipper when we spoke on the phone the first time, pleased that someone in the mainstream media was interested in this bombshell of a story. She is evangelical about spreading the good news that He Lives and will return in a Christlike second coming. But oddly, I didn’t sense that I was speaking to a wackadoo with too much time on her hands. She’d done the work. She had an answer prepared to counter my every quibble. At the time, the Jackson family was still in litigation over his “death,” and she told me there would be big reveals coming soon. When I said that I’d love to tag along and watch her at work piecing together her clues, she said she would gladly show me how it’s done. I had already encountered people who were intimately enmeshed in the world of death fraud: those who had considered it, attempted it, or investigated it. There must have been others out there who had succeeded at it, though I hadn’t been able to track down any. I never got that anonymous phone call in the middle of the night from somebody assumed dead asking me to meet him at a Starbucks. But what about those who thought they’d done what I couldn’t and solved a mystery?
IT WAS IN THE Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel that I witnessed just how profoundly Pearl’s belief colors her worldview. With the hotel’s decades-long no-cameras policy, stars can sip martinis in repose without fear of swarming paparazzi. As a result, you can’t swing a Birkin bag in the lush mahogany-and-glittering-gold dining room without hitting a star, whether brilliant or burned out. We selected the overpriced restaurant for an early dinner this evening because Michael (first name only) used to take a lot of meetings here. We had Michaeled all day long (“Michaeling” is a verb, you see, which means something like half sleuthing and half stalking), and we were famished.
All three female onetime cast members of Friends were sharing appetizers in the crescent booth to our right. Lionel Richie was holding court at the bar. Even by slovenly LA standards, Pearl and I skewed casual in our sensible Michaeling attire: she, statuesque in a tropical pink floral dress, and me in jeans and heels (out of character for this hobo, but we were driving instead of walking, since helllooooooo ! This is LA!). We acted like we belonged. And in turn our waiter treated us, somewhat skeptically, like we belonged. Pearl’s self-possessed swagger was infectious. She exuded this plucky aplomb no more than when she accosted Cedric the Entertainer, who was outfitted inconspicuously in a lime-green polo and straw fedora.
“Hey, Cedric! How you doin’?!” she cooed as the comedian ambled past with his entourage.
They exchanged pleasantries, while I was simultaneously thrilled and mortified. Living in the haughty, nose-in-the-air celebrity climate of New York, I’ve learned to pretend to ignore movie stars in the wild. But Cedric the Entertainer! Enjoying a low-stakes nosh? In the words of Us Weekly , “Stars—They’re Just Like Us!”
Pearl, however, was unfazed by the encounter. After bidding Cedric good night, she leaned over and whispered, “Once you think you’re talking to the King of Pop every night, anyone else is like, ‘Who are you?’ ”
Earlier on our Michaeling itinerary, when we were crawling on the 405 freeway in rush-hour traffic on our way to Jackson’s last residence, Pearl revealed that she regularly communes with “a close friend” who goes by the name Peter Pan. The night before, when we confirmed our Michaeling plans, she mentioned that we might have occasion to rendezvous with this Peter, and that he is “very important.” She believes Peter to be Michael Jackson.
Though they have never met in person, they have spoken on the phone for “over a thousand hours,” and regularly watch movies together over the wire, pressing the Play button simultaneously. They talk about ordinary things such as work and family. He opened the Twitter account @PeterPanPYT one day before the “death announcement” and he predicts big Michael Jackson reveals. “I haven’t pinched his skin,” she admitted. “But the voice, how sweet he is—it’s him.”
If you are a Michael Jackson fan (and if you think you are a Michael Jackson fan—like, you throw your hands up when “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” comes on in the club—then you haven’t met a Michael Jackson fan), enjoying virtual hang-outs with your idol would be the pinnacle of your earthly existence. And since Michael Jackson died (or didn’t, depending on whom you talk to), chittychatting with him on the phone would be a transcendent ecstasy. Given the squeals of unmitigated joy that pour forth from Pearl when discussing her love for Michael, it’s hard to overstate just how much his attention means. No wonder enduring boring, old, fully sentient Cedric felt anticlimactic.
It’s not that Pearl doesn’t realize how crazy all of this sounds. “I’m not the kind of person who believes in death hoaxes! I’m a very sensible, logical, feet-on-the-ground type of girl,” she says. She is so pragmatic that her nom de plume (or nom de guerre, as she is also the target of much vitriol), Pearl Jr., doesn’t include her surname. She keeps her Michaeling life and her professional life in sales in two separate hemispheres. “I don’t want to be the Michael-Jackson-Is-Alive lady!” she said.
And how did Pearl and Peter become acquainted? “I believe that Michael has been watching me from afar for years and years,” Pearl explains. In some ways, everything in Pearl’s life—all the divinely ordained synchronicity and coincidence guiding her to be in the right places at the right times—has been propelling her toward Jackson. And Pearl is one of the most vigilant Believers. Michael would be remiss not to reach out to his staunchest defender.
Eight months after Jackson’s “death announcement,” Pearl saw the evidence mounting that he had actually staged the greatest caper of all time, and she could be silent no longer. Since February 2010, she has been on a mission to spread the good news. She is the auteur behind her own multimedia lifestyle brand, which is equal parts freelance detective, investigative journalist, and Twitter provocateur. She is the author of the first-ever “emoviebook,” which is entitled Pseudocide: Did Michael Jackson Fake His Death to Save His Life? and available on Amazon. Released in May 2010, it is a 442-page stream-of-consciousness tome chock-full of links to her YouTube videos.
Listen to her, and the world starts to look like one big scavenger hunt. Forget about banal, everyday life. Take, for example, the spate of previously unreleased songs made public since the so-called death announcement. Michael’s 2013 single “A Place with No Name” is a wink to his alleged final resting site at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, where his grave is unmarked. Pearl urged me to look at this in chorus with other oddities: “You need to ask yourself, why is there no name on his grave? Why does Forest Lawn not have him listed in the database? Why are all his death documents in the wrong name?” She was referring to the fact that his death certificate was made out to “Michael Joseph Jackson,” when legally he was only “Joe.” To Pearl and the Believers, that holy trinity of peculiarities—no name on his grave, no listing in the cemetery’s index, and the wrong middle name—are the crux of his death hoax.
Pearl was not always “the Michael-Jackson-Is-Alive lady,” but she has always been an agitator. She has an unrelenting can-do attitude and supports several causes. She described herself as “an activist, first and foremost. I’m flighty, but I get things done!” The mother of two adult children, she lives in Palmdale, California, a dusty suburb an hour north of Los Angeles. In 1989 she graduated with honors from California State University at Northridge, having majored in broadcast journalism with a minor in African American studies. She is the author of three non-Michael books: The Climate: A Perspective Unvisited , which argues that “the prehistoric climate created racial mentalities”; the dating advice book How to Tame a Dawg: The Pussy Kat Ain´t Doin´ It! ; and Black Women Need Love, Too! , which “exposes the conspiracy to keep Black Women single.” The writer and pundit Dr. Earl Ofari Hutchinson mentored her when Pearl hosted her own local TV show TRUtalk: Straight Outta L.A. , which is how she initially fell into the Michael world. Hutchinson had served as a TV commentator on the 1995 O. J. Simpson trial and hoped to lend his insight into Jackson’s 2005 molestation proceedings. He sent his protégée Pearl Jr. to the Santa Maria courthouse to pass out flyers.
She was less than impressed. She had no desire to lurk around, but said, “Earl had helped me so much, he was one of those people I couldn’t say no to.” Her videographer, Cecil Rhodes III, suggested that they tape an episode of TRUtalk reporting from the trial. Unexpectedly, she gained full press access and attended the trial almost every day until Jackson was acquitted of all charges. Pearl and Cecil went on to self-produce a documentary film about the trial, called Michael Jackson: The Trial and the Triumph of the King of Pop . And thus a Jacksonologist was born, or, rather, anointed. “God made all these things work,” Pearl said.
In the years between her up-close-and-personal access at the 2005 trial and the “death announcement” in 2009, Pearl became more enmeshed in the fan community. In the months when Jackson was living with his three children in a French château–style mansion on Carolwood Drive in Holmby Hills while rehearsing for This Is It!—his fifty-date residency at London’s O2 arena, scheduled to open on July 13—Pearl hung out by the gate, listening to music and chatting with other hard-core fans. A handful of those ubiquitous fans were known as the Followers, who trailed him across the globe and camped out wherever he slept. Pearl got a tip from a friend who sells star maps and happened to be in front of Jackson’s home when the ambulance arrived on June 25. She says she issued the first tweet alerting the world to the trouble. Pearl then drove to UCLA Medical Center to see what was up. “I was there at the hospital when I saw his mother rush in, I saw the SUVs, I saw the ambulance,” she said. She spent the next eight months in a trough of depression, mourning her idol. “I cried every day,” she said. “Every day. I took it as a personal insult. I said to God, ‘How could you bring me so close to him and then kill him on me?’ I didn’t deserve it.”
Pearl would eventually become a spokeswoman for the Believers, but she was not the first to suspect that he’d faked his death. She started receiving tips from fans who had liked her work on the 2005 molestation case. She had been a sympathetic, “independent” journalist, unlike the other media hounds, who, in the fans’ opinion, had been out to crucify the singer just to sell newspapers. Soon fans across the globe were sending her daily clues pointing to suspicious circumstances. Such as: the ambulance that arrived at UCLA had different hubcaps than the one that left Carolwood Drive; the photo of Michael on the stretcher looks suspiciously Photoshopped from an earlier image of the artist lying onstage; and Jackson’s name was never mentioned in the 911 call. But under a heavy blanket of mourning, Pearl could easily explain away these speculations.
Then one afternoon Pearl happened across the book Is Elvis Alive? by Gail Brewer-Giorgio on Cecil’s bookshelf. In the 1988 book, which has sold over a million copies, Brewer-Giorgio examined the fishiness surrounding the King’s death: his middle name, Aron, was misspelled “Aaron” on his grave; mobsters were out to kill him for collaborating with the FBI; funeral attendees reported a dummy body with pasted-on sideburns in the casket. Reading this book was Pearl’s epiphany. She remembered “throwing it across the room” when she realized “Michael had followed Elvis’s plan to a T.” The truth could no longer be denied.
Since that fateful day, Pearl has spent the bulk of her leisure time piecing together the codex of clues Michael left behind for devotees to solve. “Evidence, proof, conjecture, coincidence, synchronicity, and facts. That’s all we have,” she said. Some might be troubled by the wide chasm between “conjecture” and “proof,” but that does not dampen Pearl’s intrepid investigatory spirit. The Forest Lawn cemetery, where Jackson is not buried, is a main target for her ire. Because after years, there is still no name on the side of the Great Mausoleum where he allegedly dwells, alongside actors Elizabeth Taylor, Jean Harlow, and Red Skelton. All of those other names are emblazoned proudly across their tombs. But if you search the cemetery’s interment records for “Michael Joe Jackson,” nothing shows up. Pearl finds this highly suspicious.
The majestic Disneyland of death was key on our Michaeling itinerary. We drove through the strip malls, manicured lawns, and big-box stores of Glendale in Pearl’s comfortable black Chrysler up to the Forest Lawn security booth. The man inside, a bored twentysomething in an ill-fitting gray suit, asked if we needed assistance.
“Excuse me!” Pearl shouted. “We are here to see Michael Jackson! Is his name up there on Holly Terrace yet?”
“Uh, no, not yet.”
“Well, why not ?”
“I don’t know, it’s just not there yet. Do you want a map?”
He handed us a photocopied key to the stars’ graves, and we drove up the crest of the hill to the mausoleum where Michael isn’t. “They still have no name! ” Pearl exclaimed, punching the steering wheel and pressing on the gas. Earlier in the day, we had driven out to the Jackson family estate in Encino, where we lingered outside the gate until security came to shoo us away. A delivery truck carting pink and purple petunias arrived, and we stood aside to behold the gate opening onto the compound of show business’s greatest family. “Those were dinky little flowers! Someone is moving in soon!” Pearl said definitively. Could that someone be the King of Pop? Later that night, she tweeted this “clue” to her 9,600 followers.
We parked outside the Romanesque mausoleum at Forest Lawn, where fans from all over the world have left behind a shrine of stuffed animals, flowers, and construction paper cards. Pearl declined to have her photo taken. “I don’t want to be associated with that,” she said, waving her hand over the trinkets. “Still no name!” she muttered as we climbed back into the car.
We were on to our next stop: the afternoon court session of the negligence lawsuit Katherine Jackson filed against AEG Live, the promotion company responsible for the This Is It! concert series. The Jackson family matriarch charged that the company did not properly investigate Michael’s physician, Dr. Conrad Murray, before hiring him. I had watched all of Pearl’s YouTube videos, in which she collages together granular pieces of evidence like this, and yet I still hadn’t quite figured out some more plaguing fundamental questions, such as: How did he do it?
“Cryonics,” Pearl stated plainly on our way downtown. “Michael was obsessed with the process of cryogenic freezing, like Walt Disney. All he would have to do is find a cryogenically frozen body around the same height and weight, a body of a person who had died from a drug overdose, and switch them out.” That’s all! Picturing MJ dressed as a cat burglar, I imagined him sneaking into a climate-controlled vault and holding up a cryogenically frozen corpse (three hundred or so exist in the entire world) as if he were considering an expensive Italian suit.
One imagines that Jackson could not single-handedly carry out all of the preparations to fake his death. So who was in on it—other than the FBI, of course? “It’s kind of like a terrorist cell,” Pearl explained. “One cell has a job and a duty, but they don’t know what the whole plan is. I don’t think Michael shared his plan with many people. Everybody had roles, but nobody had the perfect plan.”
And where might he be today? “He could be on Marlon Brando’s private Tahitian island! It would be his payback for making Michael pay him a million dollars to appear in the ‘You Rock My World’ video.” Brando predeceased Jackson in 2004, but perhaps they are relaxing in the South Pacific sun together?
And how would Michael Jackson negotiate airport security?
“His passport doesn’t expire until his birthday this year,” Pearl said.
“But wouldn’t customs or immigration flag it?” I asked.
“The FBI! Now go back to Marlon Jackson in the FBI hat! The FBI is in on it.”
“He must have had a very high security clearance,” I said skeptically, yet trying on the cockeyed logic.
“And lots of people are named Michael Jackson.”
“But if it’s a picture of the Michael Jackson on the passport—”
Pearl cut me off. “I don’t know. I’m just here to tell you he’s doing it.”
When we arrived at the 111 North Hill Street Courthouse in downtown LA, Pearl briskly led the way up to the courtroom. She tries to come to the Katherine Jackson versus AEG Live trial whenever she can, which often means using a vacation day from work when she knows a high-profile witness will be testifying. I thought for sure I would need some kind of press credential to get into this trial, which was receiving national coverage, but we breezed right in. Seated in the front row was Katherine Jackson herself, in a long floral skirt and blue blazer. Several other Jackson family members flanked her. Paul Gongaware, co-CEO of AEG Live Concerts West division, was testifying, and he didn’t seem to recall much of anything. But I was not interested in the particulars of this lawsuit, or the brash attorneys up front billing thousands of dollars a day for the duration of the months-long proceedings.
What enraptured me were the dozen or so fans in the gallery. One birdlike white woman crocheted the whole time. An African American woman with a bleached buzz cut like SisQó’s took notes in a small diary. And there in a white fedora was William Wagener, CEO of the M.J.J. Innocent Forever Foundation. Its mission? To prove that Jackson was a “singing, dancing saint.” Pearl and I sat next to an attractive younger woman who, I later learned, harbors perhaps the most peculiar theory about Jackson’s untimely demise: that he was kidnapped and is being held hostage by his record label, which is forcing him to pen songs for other artists.
Pearl rolled her eyes when Taaj Malik entered the courtroom with long, colorful scarves trailing behind her. Malik, a Pakistani-British woman with kohl-rimmed eyes and Love tattooed across her knuckles, is the leader of Team Michael Jackson, which supports the Jackson family’s desire to hold AEG accountable for the singer’s murder and wants to preserve Jackson’s good name. Larry Nimmer, a videographer who testified at the 2005 molestation trial for Jackson’s defense team and subsequently earned minor fame in the fan community, described Malik lovingly as “a passionate Michael Jackson fan” and “a gangster girl with an English accent.” Pearl was visibly annoyed by her dramatic entrance. “I’ll tell you later!” she mouthed to me as court carried on.
Most of the Jackson superfans I talked to agreed that prior to his death/“death,” fans were united in “clearing his name” and protecting him. They remain deeply troubled by the unfounded molestation accusations tainting the singer’s reputation and blame “the media” for twisting Jackson’s innocent, childlike nature into something much more sinister in the name of a salacious story. Bullying is a verb they use often to describe the treatment “Wacko Jacko” got in the press. The fans seek to undo the media narrative popularized by British journalist Martin Bashir in his 2003 Living with Michael Jackson documentary of Michael sharing beds with children. Jackson cooperated with the documentary (though Bashir was accused of manipulating Jackson by pretending to revere his lifestyle) and sat for extensive interviews over an eight-month period. Instead, fans want to emphasize his charity work and benevolence.
When I asked Pearl what “clearing his name” would look like, she said it would involve retractions from journalists like Bashir and raising awareness about Jackson’s good works. For several years, William Wagener has been trying to raise money to fund a full-length feature film to educate laypeople on the graft and political corruption he claims caused the Santa Barbara County District Attorney’s Office to put Jackson on trial in the first place. One Jackson fan, who wished not to be named, likened the impulse to clear his name to protecting a loved one. “Imagine a family member,” she said. “A father, brother, or son was accused of child molestation. Wouldn’t you do everything in your power to bring the truth to light?”
Since June 25, 2009, the formerly tight-knit fan community has splintered into factions (though Malik told me later, “There have always been fights over who is a better fan”). As soon as the ambulance left Carolwood Drive, fissures erupted, and even some years-long friendships dissolved. Every fan asserted that she (hard-core Jackson supporters are almost inevitably female) alone had the right story. Larry Nimmer walked me through the schisms at the time of the 2013 trial: “Some individuals think it was murder, because Michael owned the Beatles catalog. Most fans think it was really AEG’s fault, and that Conrad Murray was negligent.” It was Dr. Murray who administered the lethal intravenous dose of the general anesthetic propofol.
Nimmer identified two main groups that polarized the fan community: “One group defended the estate, and the other group defended Katherine Jackson.” The estate group believes that the executor who carried out Jackson’s will, powerhouse entertainment attorney John Branca, acted within his rights and had Jackson’s children’s interest in mind. The Katherine Jackson supporters, led by Malik, vociferously seek to punish AEG for his murder and to reveal Branca as a criminal. In Malik’s words, the estate side “sees Michael as a product. We are the only ones who see him as a human being, as a man, as a father, as a son, as a sibling.” The estate group declined to comment.
To an outsider, these distinctions might seem like splitting hairs: Jackson, whether dead or alive, is gone (for now), so why can’t they all just get along? But within the über-fan community, owning the right narrative is a matter of grave consequence, so to speak. Most of the infighting happens online, in the form of websites, blogs, Twitter accounts, and Facebook groups. But the differing online opinions have real-world outcomes.
Malik described the vitriol that opposing fans lob her and Team Michael Jackson’s way: “They call us conspirators, they call us crazy people. There is a lot of adversity against me in the community. There are a lot of hate blogs against me. People target me with daily attacks. In the last three days, I’ve had four people calling me a thief and a con artist.” A Jackson fan from a warring faction nabbed photos of Malik’s daughter from her Facebook page and edited them into several videos posted on YouTube under the pervy title “Aspiring Model to Be.” The videos were receiving thousands of hits a day, and Malik had to involve the police in order to have them removed. Because of Malik’s active support for the Katherine Jackson camp—she attends court and purchases transcripts with fan donations to post on her website, and was the subject of a profile in the Los Angeles Times —she has become friends with certain members of the Jackson family, which does not sit well with some fans. “When I started associating with Joe,” the Jackson family patriarch, Malik said, “the fans accused me of having sex with him.” Proximity to their idol is everything, and jealousy runs rampant.
But as contentious as the estate versus Team Michael Jackson division is, no group within the fractured fan community is more reviled than the Believers. Fans are quick to condemn Believers leadership for propagating what they see as a bogus story for personal gain. “I think Pearl Jr. is a horrible person,” Malik said plainly. “She’s exploiting fans and using their grief, and benefiting from it financially.”
I asked Pearl if she profits from her death hoax products. She said she doesn’t, explaining that she got a bad distribution deal for Alive! and that her self-published “emoviebook” only “sells a few copies here and there.” She keeps up with her Michaeling as a public service. “It’s a sacrifice,” she said. “I just want to get the information out there.” Whether Pearl profits from her efforts or not, many in the fan community find her work distasteful. One fan expressed concern for Pearl’s devotees, saying, “If Michael Jackson was your whole life, you can’t let go of him. I’m actually worried that those people who are following Pearl Jr. will hurt themselves when they realize he’s not coming back.”
Larry Nimmer remembered a contentious scene at the 2013 Conrad Murray trial, where Michael Jackson’s doctor was found guilty of manslaughter: “Pearl Jr. was reporting at the trial, and she got into a lot of arguments with people because they felt what she is doing is cruel. She’s giving Michael’s kids hope that he’s alive, and other fans think that’s hurtful.” Debbie Kunesh, the creator of the Michael Jackson site Reflections on the Dance , added: “In some ways, I feel the hoax makes a joke out of his death and the mourning his friends and family have gone through.” I think another resentment Pearl’s detractors hold on to is that she espouses a counternarrative, and there is no room in the estate versus Team Michael Jackson debate for another, far more extreme story.
“THERE WERE A LOT of anomalies around June 25, 2009,” William Wagener, the fedora’d independent journalist, was telling me as we stared out at the sun going down on the Pacific. “Things were weird, and I’m not talking about the fans this time,” he added, laughing. I first spoke to Wagener at Larry Nimmer’s birthday party at his family beach house in Carpenteria, California. Wagener that day was wearing a polo shirt emblazoned with a print of the Constitution. He has the light eyes and sandblasted tan skin of a Californian, and looks like he could have been a Beach Boy. He became enmeshed in the Michael Jackson world during the 2005 molestation trial, when he claims to have seen widespread corruption originating in District Attorney Tom Sneddon’s office. Like Pearl, he too had a local cable-access TV show. He received full press access and attended the trial every day.
When it comes to the myriad “anomalies,” as he describes them, around Michael’s death/not death, he does not believe the fans are asking the right questions. “Why did Dr. Conrad Murray call Michael’s assistant instead of 911?” Another thing he told me that I had never heard before: “A courier delivered over two million dollars to the house just days before” on June 25. “And I talked to that courier. Nobody has talked about that money: not Conrad Murray, not La Toya”—Michael’s second oldest sister—“who claims to have gone to the house shortly after Michael was declared dead. Nobody.”
But Wagener has a different theory from Pearl about Michael’s motivation for faking his death. Rather than simply laying low to recoup time to “clear his name,” Wagener suggests that Michael was at the center of a plot orchestrated by defense contractors and other evil sorts. Because Wagener reported each day from the 2005 trial and always contended that the star would be acquitted, he received a call from Michael himself one day while he was driving down the freeway. “Michael called me on the phone and wanted to know who was behind Tom Sneddon,” he said. “I told him his enemies are in London, and if you go there, they’ll kill you.” Coincidentally or not, London is where the This Is It! engagement was to run.
I asked him who Michael’s enemies were.
“His real enemies are the people making profits from wars, while he’s singing about healing the world. Michael is trying to stop the wars. Princess Diana isn’t talking about stopping wars anymore now, is she?” He paused to let that sink in. Then he continued. “There’s a great motivation for a hoax. When you know you can’t win, and they’re going to kill you anyway, and you know they killed Princess Di, and now you’re going to die . . . maybe it’s time to disappear. This is about Michael trying to stop World War III and the people who continually gain more control over us. And that is the key that the fans are continually missing.”
When I asked Wagener if he believes that Michael did indeed fake his own death, he is a bit more temperate. He hedged, saying, “In this kind of world, you ask me to prove if Michael is dead or alive based on official records? The only way I would know he’s dead is if I saw the autopsy, if I saw them peel back his skull. When you’re dealing with a system that’s this corrupt, how can you believe anything you don’t see with your own eyes?”
Total distrust and disenchantment with the official narrative is a grievance that all of the Believers—and, really, everyone I spoke with from Sam Israel to Frank Ahearn to Steven Rambam—agreed on. Things are not as they seem. But Wagener sees the problem as much more sinister than simply Michael’s self-exculpation. He sees uncovering the truth about the plot against Michael as arming himself with authentic knowledge. “It’s like The Matrix ,” Wagener contended. “Do you want the truth, or do you want to remain ignorant?” Wagener also takes a keen interest in the “truth” behind 9/11 and President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. He explained the real reason why the government gets away with such malfeasance.
“They’re doing things that are patently illegal because people are too busy watching American Idol or The Voice or Dancing with the Stars . Women are busy doing their lesbian porn, and men are busy doing sporn.”
“I don’t know what that is,” I confessed.
“The substitute for real porn is sports. Men get all thrilled on basketball and football games, and then a month later it doesn’t matter.”
Now, I agree with him regarding the epidemic of amateur lesbian erotica sweeping the nation. Lately I can barely get any of my lady friends to keep dinner plans, so consumed are they with creating sapphic cinema. But men obsessed with sports? Not ringing any bells.
Wagener listed some of the more outlandish Believers theories he encountered while attending the Conrad Murray trial, although ranking them as to their weirdness was beginning to seem a fool’s errand. “People have made allegations that they saw pink elephants and toys around the judge, and indicating that this was all a hoax by Michael. I had dozens of fans tell me that when Murray is convicted, before he’s sent out in handcuffs, Michael is going to walk into the courtroom and say, ‘See how easy it is to get somebody convicted of something he didn’t do?’ So that would teach the non–Michael Jackson fans a lesson.”
I asked Wagener what he thought of Pearl Jr.’s work around the death hoax, and some of the critiques in the fan community against her methods. He’s known Pearl since the 2005 molestation trial, and she interviewed him for her documentary Michael Jackson: The Trial and the Triumph of the King of Pop . “When you start talking to Pearl Jr., the moon might indeed be made out of green cheese,” he said. “She is trying to make money. She was selling her DVD about the ’05 trial for thirty bucks a pop, and it didn’t tell you anything. I don’t dislike the woman; I just think she does real shoddy journalism.” (Pearl maintains firmly that she is not making money from her Michaeling. “I’m not earning a living off it, though I wish I was,” she told me.)
Because Pearl Jr. has positioned herself as the public face of the Believers, she bears the brunt of antipathy. But the theory that Michael Jackson faked his own death extends far beyond Pearl Jr. Olga, an elfin young Uzbek woman with doll-like features and a dry sense of humor, explained Jackson’s death hoax to me as a portal into an alternate reality that unlocks doors to wisdom that far transcends squabbles in the fan community.
“I don’t follow Pearl Jr. much,” she told me at a chain café one Friday afternoon after clocking out of her office job. “Basically, she’s the last person I would look to.” Olga doesn’t consider herself a fan but rather “an admirer.” When Jackson’s death was announced, she was surprised that she “didn’t feel anything.” But a few days later, she found herself overwhelmed with grief—and questions. “It felt like such a huge betrayal of universal law,” she said. “He’s such a great person; how could it be this way?” She found her way to a website devoted to pseudocide theorists known as the Michael Jackson Death Hoax Investigation. Poking around the “facts and evidence” culled by investigators from all over the world, she was floored by how many things seemed prestaged. There were website domains for the hoax registered on June 23 and June 24, mere hours before he supposedly died. There were two different helicopters transporting him, with two different bodies inside. “It was like a Russian doll,” she said. “You can open it and open it.”
The secrets nestled inside surpassed even the hoax itself. Like Plato’s cave, like Wagener’s matrix, Olga sees Jackson’s faked death as a warning to question what we accept readily as fact. “It’s not just an escape from reality,” she said, countering a common dismissal of hoaxers. “It’s opening up to a new reality.”
Because if Jackson could pull off this elaborate plan right under our noses, what other subterfuge might be waiting to be revealed? In her understanding, and similarly to Pearl, Olga believes that Jackson left behind a series of clues for fans to crack. But they can decode his messages only through educating themselves in “psychological, philosophical, metaphysical, New Age literature,” as well as the histories of the Egyptians and the Maya. According to many Investigators, guiding people to this wisdom was Jackson’s most profound gift to his fans: “He had a humanistic interest in mind, not just to be the greatest of the great. He wanted to affect society, to make them believe, and to shock them,” Olga said. The clues that Jackson is leading his fans to, then, are actually tools for survival. The death hoax is not just the set of coincidences and conjectures that Pearl puts forth but rather a sacred text. “It’s not about Marlon wearing an FBI hat; those are silly things. It’s about life, history, art, religion,” Olga maintained. “You don’t just discover the death hoax of Michael Jackson. You discover yourself.”
But while discovering the death hoax was a momentous breakthrough for Olga, she doesn’t discuss it with friends. Like Pearl, she keeps this area of her life cordoned off. Believers find respite and kindred spirits online. Using complex numerology equations, they calculate the next “Bamsday,” an acronym for Back Again Michael Day. As one Believer put it, “ ‘Bamsday’ means, like, bam! He’s back!” Many death hoax investigators pointed to June 25, 2013, as Bamsday, because in his 1995 ballad “Earth Song,” Jackson sings, “We’ve got four years to get it right,” which would be four years after the death announcement. Pearl Jr. predicted that his return would be on December 21, 2012, to coincide with the end of the Mayan calendar, which to some also heralded the end of the world. As soothsayers, they continually forecast the second coming of their King—like the Millerite Christian movement in the nineteenth century, which waited for the rapture to come sometime between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844; or more recently, evangelist Harold Camping, who foretold that the Day of Judgment would come on May 21, 2011. Camping quickly pushed the date back to October, then suffered a stroke. When October came and went without any apocalyptic activity, he gave up on his predictions. His personal Judgment Day came on December 13, 2013. You’d think Believers, too, would have been disappointed that Bamsday has thus far failed to arrive. I asked Pearl if these false leads felt taunting—even cruel. “It can be frustrating, but I’ve gotten used to it by now,” she said. “He sets up many comeback dates, but that’s to keep you on edge. He’s giving you intervals of time so you stay engaged and hopeful.”
All Believers seem to take quite a beating in the court of public opinion, even among friends and family. Natalie, a Believer from England, described the derision she has received when describing Jackson’s death hoax to outsiders: “My mum thinks I’m daft, and most of my friends do too.” Diane, a British grandmother, echoed these sentiments. When discussing her death hoax theories with non-Believers, she has “been laughed at and ridiculed. It hurts, and makes me feel very silly and immature. So I say very little. I am not a confrontational person and can’t think of how to answer. They all bombard me with the same questions, and I can’t cope with it. They believe the media and don’t look deeper.”
If you want to “look deeper” than the mainstream media’s story, Google is the go-to place to find “facts and evidence” that, say, the 9/11 attacks were part of a US government conspiracy; or that the Beatles’ Paul McCartney was killed in 1966 and replaced by a look-alike (and prodigious talent–alike) known as “Faul”; or that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, was orchestrated by President Barack Obama to make the case for imposing gun control laws. But instead of seeing them as a web of readily manipulated stories as pliable and subjective as those they condemn in the mainstream media, many Believers view the shoddiest sites as immutable canons of fact and fear. The words we string together as search terms inevitably turn up information that supports our own confirmation bias—the tendency to give more weight to data that support our beliefs rather than ideas that run contrary to our personal assertions. With its limitless resources to help people “look deeper,” and the support groups that can form over laptops and across oceans, infinite online information is what has made the Michael Jackson death hoax theory as popular and developed as it is today. The auspicious timing, with social media’s vise grip on our consciousness, has made this particular death hoax theory one of the most prominent in history.
BUT CELEBRITY DEATH HOAXES have always captured our imaginations. It just doesn’t seem fair that people who are so talented and usually at the peak of their careers can be snatched from us so soon. Like Olga said, it feels like a violation of universal law. Infamous figures, too, refuse to die. For a TV special, Steve Rambam once conducted an investigation of Adolf Hitler’s suicide (he shot himself while longtime mistress Eva Braun bit into a cyanide capsule) as if it were an insurance fraud. He examined all the documents and interviewed witnesses in South America who claimed they had spotted him. Hitler death fraud fascination, though, remains fringe compared with the Believers.
When Tupac Shakur was shot to death in Las Vegas at the age of twenty-five in 1996, theories swarmed about his faked death and escape to Cuba. According to Icons of Hip Hop: An Encyclopedia of the Movement, Music, and Culture , edited by Mickey Hess, Shakur read The Prince. On his posthumous album The Don Killuminati: The 7-Day Theory (released two months after his death) he assumes “the name of Makaveli and [foreshadows] his own death. . . . The album was an homage to Niccolo Machiavelli . . . who spoke of staging one’s own death in his book The Prince .” Following a familiar formula, proponents claimed he used numerology to clue in his fans, and that he was wanted by the FBI. But in 1996 these theories had no place to go save a few primitive GeoCities. Today a few flimsy websites discuss his pseudocide, but because Tupac’s death preceded the advent of social media, there’s no real steam behind the movement. But it was reinvigorated in 2015 when retired LAPD officer David Meyers claimed from his deathbed that he was paid $1.5 million for his part in the cover-up the night Shakur was shot four times while sitting in the passenger seat of a BMW.
The death hoax theory that provided a template for Tupac and Michael is, of course, the one spun around Elvis Presley. Fans simply would not believe that the King died unceremoniously from a drug overdose on August 16, 1977. Writer Gail Brewer-Giorgio has penned four wildly popular books on certain discrepancies surrounding Elvis’s death, including the novel Orion , about a masked man who bears a striking resemblance to the King, as well as the nonfiction volumes Is Elvis Alive? (which inspired Pearl’s conviction that Michael Jackson lives), The Elvis Files: Was His Death Faked? , and Elvis Undercover: Is He Alive and Coming Back? Brewer-Giorgio pointed out suspicious circumstances in Elvis’s death that Jackson fans co-opted in their theories: his middle name was misspelled on his gravestone, and he later communicated with loved ones, and even the writer herself. If Michael Jackson “followed Elvis’s plan to a T,” as Pearl told me, then she has also followed Gail Brewer-Giorgio as a model, including claims of fielding phone calls from the stars from beyond the grave.
The business of the middle name has been paramount to both Brewer-Giorgio’s and Pearl’s arguments. “Elvis Aaron Presley” is on Elvis’s grave at Graceland, but this was not how he typically spelled his middle name. Brewer-Giorgio tried to find evidence to support the double A spelling: “I went through all the documents,” she told me over the phone from Georgia, “his birth certificate, his RCA contracts, his army discharge papers, everything. Even Priscilla Presley sent out thank-you cards from their wedding with ‘Aron.’ ”
So why, and how, does a misspelled middle name equal a faked death?
“Originally, I thought if you’re alive and you have your own tombstone, it might be a hex to have your own name there. But Elvis told me I was wrong. Elvis liked numerology, and he thought our whole system revolves around numerology. So by adding an extra a , he was able to change his numerology feeling from an eight to a nine,” she said.
Michael Jackson’s mysterious “Joseph” rather than “Joe” has been fodder for Pearl’s campaign. But Jackson’s misspelling his middle name is for reasons more practical than spiritual. “California law says that you must use the legal name on a death certificate,” Pearl acknowledged. “Then he released a song posthumously with Barry Gibb called ‘All in Your Name.’ So he’s giving us clues, and he’s finding these loopholes. I think he hired lawyers to help him go through these uncharted territories.”
Elvis might have inspired longtime impersonator and avant-garde comedian Andy Kaufman to fake his death. Comedian Bob Zmuda has spent a good part of his career advancing the theory that his friend and partner in crime Andy Kaufman did not die of lung cancer in 1984 at age thirty-five. Instead, he committed pseudocide as part of his performance art, or as Zmuda put it, “to pull off the ultimate prank.” And according to Zmuda, Kaufman talked openly about his plans to do so. “I remember right around the time Elvis died, and the rumor went around that Elvis faked his death,” Zmuda told me over the phone from Burbank, California. “Kaufman was a huge Elvis fan. That’s when the idea started to jell in his head. He said, ‘Can you imagine if he did fake his death, and he returned one day? This would be the biggest thing in the history of entertainment ever.’ ”
Like the Believers waiting for Bamsday, Zmuda and Kaufman fanatics anticipate Andy’s return. “Every ten years we have a big event, thinking he might come back on the tenth or twentieth anniversary of his death. We’re going to do it again on the thirtieth anniversary, and then that will be it. Every year, I take out ads in newspapers all over the world, saying, ‘Andy, if you’re out there, we’re doing this show in your honor.’ ” Unfortunately, the thirtieth anniversary in 2015 passed, and still, no Andy. Zmuda has been advancing this faked death theory in his book Andy Kaufman Revealed! on TV and as a guest on radio shows. The theory got a boost in the zeitgeist recently when a young actress went onstage at the annual Andy Kaufman Awards at Manhattan’s Gotham Comedy Club, claiming she was the comedian’s daughter and that she spoke with him regularly. A few days later, Michael Kaufman, Andy’s brother, revealed that he had sanctioned the prank. Nonetheless, the stunt catapulted Kaufman’s name beyond the realm of fan boys and conspiracy theorists and onto the six o’clock news.
NOT EVERYONE AGREES THAT a good old-fashioned death hoax is a wise career move. On February 14, 2013, ShaBe Allah, a staff writer at The Source magazine, broke the story that nineties rapper Tim Dog had died. Allah had received a phone call from a personal friend who happened to be an associate of the rapper, saying that Mr. Dog had passed. The New York Times and the New York Daily News followed, reporting the story, and then MSNBC called Allah requesting additional verification. So he began investigating. “I called the hospital in Georgia where he was supposed to have died,” he said, “and there’s no record of him being there, no death certificate, no burial records. If he did fake his death, he did a real good job. He’s a tall black guy with gold chains from the Bronx. He’d be hard to miss in Georgia.”
Allah, though, disagrees with the idea that a death hoax could make Tim Dog more popular. “If he isn’t physically dead, then he’s definitely mentally dead, because nobody is thinking about Tim Dog either way. Out of sight, out of mind.” And like the Believers’ detractors in the Jackson fan community, Allah, too, feels indignant about faked death enthusiasts and co-conspirators: “The type of person who would help perpetuate the idea that Tim Dog is alive is the worst type of human there could be. Life is so precious. I’ve seen people lose their lives in the blink of an eye, so to say someone is really alive is nothing to play with.” Dog’s death certificate surfaced a year and a half later, though some still have their doubts. Pearl disagrees with Allah’s perspective, saying, “It’s freedom of speech! I can do what I want as long as I’m not destroying anyone’s reputation. A death hoax is beneficial only to Michael. It’s better to be alive than dead any day of the week!”
None of the Believers I spoke with seemed especially crazy; rather, all were gainfully employed, properly dressed, and even eerily normal. Within the fan community, Jackson’s death is like a great work of art: you can analyze it from many distinct angles, and it is complex enough to support multiple interpretations. And while it’s easy to dismiss them as fanatics who can’t let go, there is something quite noble about their worldviews. It’s easy to overlook the determination that such a belief requires. In that sense, they are a resistance movement. Like faking your own death, believing in a death hoax is a way to rewrite the script vicariously. Why rehash the negative (he’s gone), when you can have faith in the positive (he lives!)? Maybe letting your imagination unspool is a normal—even healthy—way of coping with and making sense of our nonsensical world. Combing cyberspace for clues and decoding secret messages transform dismal reality into an adventure. No longer grief stricken, the true Believer is now enlightened.
LATE ONE SATURDAY NIGHT, I received a voice mail. “Hi, how are you doing?” a breathy voice asked. “I’m calling to check up on you and see how you are doing because I heard you are writing a book, and I wanted to contact you. So I hope to hear from you very soon. Take care, and God bless you.” Though he didn’t identify himself, I knew instantly that this was the legendary Peter Pan, or the undead Michael Jackson.
When Pearl had revealed that she spoke with him regularly, my first question was not “Are you out of your mind?” but “Do you think he’d call me?” And now he was delivering. The voice on the other end was a poor facsimile of Jackson’s. A little too much falsetto, and some awkward phrasings that made him sound more like a recent immigrant to America than a native of Gary, Indiana. But maybe one acquires an unusual dialect when hiding out on Marlon Brando’s private island?
Despite all that, I admit I got chills. Not because I thought I was hearing the most famous undead star of all time panting into my phone, but because there is someone in the San Fernando Valley attempting to convince me that He Lives.
The next afternoon, the same 661 area code popped up on my phone screen. My then-boyfriend, Elijah, and I were babysitting his nephew in Brooklyn, and we were getting ready to go to the park. I rushed to answer my phone.
“Hi,” the voice on the other end of the line said coyly.
“Hi. Who is this?” I asked.
“This is Peter.”
Elijah was making crazy faces at me, slicing his hand across his neck in an attempt to make me cut the conversation. Later he lectured me for talking to a potential serial killer hunting down his next victim. Elijah was always the more sensible (or paranoid) one, on the lookout for looming dangers: sinkholes in the sidewalk, toxic mold spores sprouting in the shower, fatal salmonella poisoning we could contract from undercooking dinner. Talking on the phone to someone who might or might not be Michael Jackson signaled stranger danger of the highest order.
But I had a pleasant chat with Peter Pan. We discussed movies we like and books we’d read lately. Peter said he reads a lot and prefers books on positive thinking, such as The Master Key System , a self-help book from 1912, which was originally a twenty-four-week correspondence course. He had recently watched the 1979 TV miniseries Backstairs at the White House and thoroughly enjoyed it. He’s been working on “a music project to be released.” As our conversation progressed, I found myself more and more engaged. He was so charming! “It’s been an honor meeting you, Liz,” he said as we got off the phone. No one has said that sentence to me before or since. I felt dizzy. A part of me wanted to believe that I was talking to Michael Jackson and that he had taken a break from producing his next hit to chat with me, a nobody.
I finally understood what Pearl and Olga and the Believers must feel when they are Michaeling.
But I wanted to do a more formal interview, to get to the bottom of some of the rumors circulating even in the Believers community itself: that Peter Pan is, in fact, Pearl. This Peter, or whoever s/he is, will contact Believers through Facebook or Twitter to alert them to a TinyChat—a kind of schizophrenic online group therapy session—where he will be present. Even diehards have their questions. I sat in on one of these forums and witnessed some Believer skepticism:
4love: lol no you’re not Peter
ringell_jackson: YEAH PETER IS HERE NOW
peter_panpyt: i as real as it gets
newuser6098: Pearl is up her own Ass
Peter is a Poser
you are all mental
is that right
to trick others
4love: ppl believe what they need to believe
This is where it gets really meta: Michael Jackson uses Peter Pan as a proxy, who many believe is a fake. But in the TinyChat, fans were questioning whether peter_panpyt was the real fake Michael Jackson, or a fake fake Michael Jackson. And then there was the metaphysical question of whether Pearl was indeed up her own Ass, a derriere so influential that it received proper-noun capitalization.
I asked Peter if he would go on the record with me. He called me several times in the middle of the night when I did not pick up, and once in the middle of the night when I did pick up, because I was drunk, in a cab, on the way home from a bar.
When I finally got the vaunted Mr. Pan on the phone with my recorder, he again called me from a 661 area code. Pearl has the same area code. But what Pearl said about his inaccessibility is true: when I tried to call the number back, I got a message saying the call could not be completed. I asked him about the similarity in area codes, and therefore proximity, between him and Pearl.
“Ummmmmm . . . it’s a coincidence. I have a lot of numbers,” he said. When I asked where he was calling from, he said, “an ‘unclosed’ location.”
He peppered Michael Jackson clues throughout our conversation without ever saying “I am Michael Jackson” or even “I am an unusual person pretending to be Michael Jackson.” Rather, he used thinly veiled references: “I wake up late because I’m a night person; I can never sleep at night.” Jackson was known to be nocturnal. “God blessed me with a great family,” he said, which could read as a prosaic platitude or a nod to the greatest showbiz family of all time. Peter seemed to spend a great deal of time online, posting rare Jackson photos to his Facebook page. Our conversation was punctuated every few seconds by a high-pitched dinging, which was the sound of his chat alert on Facebook. (I sheepishly admit that I was a teensy bit crestfallen that the legendary Peter Pan was multitasking during our exclusive interview.) I asked him why he stuck his neck out so much, communicating with fans through different social media sites, if he was simultaneously trying to keep a low profile.
“I’ve always been around on the internet,” he explained, “but I’ve always been very quiet. I guess anybody who starts getting inquisitive about me asks, ‘Hey, where did you get that picture from?’ They ask me why I sound so much like a certain person. I say, ‘Because I’m Peter Pan, that’s all I can tell you.’ ” He was coy like this. William Wagener had mentioned that he and Peter had communicated in the past. I asked Peter about these interactions.
“Yeah, we’ve spoken on the phone a few times,” Peter said. “I had heard a lot about him, so I had contacted him, and we became pretty good friends. He’s a very sharp person, very intellectual. He likes to talk about court cases and injustice. I can relate to the injustice he talks about. I had gone through an injustice in my life, so I can relate to other people’s injustice.”
“What injustice have you experienced in your life?” I asked, ready for him to delve into the ’05 trial.
“Well, it’s a very touchy subject,” he said, in a classic evasion. “I don’t like to talk about it. It pains me.”
I had asked Wagener his thoughts on Peter. “Oh, I know Peter Pan,” he’d said. “Of course it’s not Michael,” he said sharply.
Peter and Pearl’s intimate relationship disturbs would-be Believers. They might find Pearl as a gateway to the subculture but then get turned off by what they see as carpetbagging on his death. Since the pair are “close, close, close friends,” as Pearl put it, I asked Peter what was up with the accusation that she profits from the death hoax.
“The people who say that are speculating. They don’t know Pearl. Pearl is a sweet person. She doesn’t make any money. She has a normal nine-to-five job. That’s how she makes her money. She loves sharing information she comes across; that’s one of her passions. People have a negative connotation about her, and I don’t know why,” he said.
Then I asked him straight up if Michael Jackson had faked his death.
“Wow!” he exclaimed with mock surprise, like he didn’t know this was where we would end up. It was like Taylor Swift’s “Who, me?!” face as she collects her umpteenth Grammy. And then he hedged again: “That’s a very, very touchy subject. What do I say about that? I know there are people going around saying they’re Believers. To believe in something is without reason or fact. These people are knowers, because they have facts, they have proof. That’s something that’s different than believing.”
It really didn’t matter if Peter Pan was Michael Jackson or not. When I was talking to him on the phone, for a moment I was totally outside myself, in something bigger than myself, my cranium dislodged temporarily from my own rectum. I was getting a phone call from the King of Pop. Or someone who cared enough to pretend to be. To me. I mattered. I understand why Taaj Malik and other Michael Jackson fans find what the Believers say to be hurtful. But to pick on them is to point out the blatantly obvious. When people take the time to comment on Pearl’s mispronunciation of words (she often says Jackson is hiding out on “Marlon Brandon’s” private island), the ridiculous haunted-house music she plays in every YouTube video, and the fact that she references the Weekly World News as a source, they are taking the death hoax both too literally and too superficially. It would be like going shopping with Tammy Faye Bakker and mocking her gaudiness. It’s philistinism masquerading as connoisseurship. It’s taking a cheap and dreadfully obvious shot. Believers harbor bizarre theories. But that’s what makes them great. It takes a lot more courage to believe doggedly in something so outlandish and so weird. The believing itself is the point more than the outcome. It’s faith.
When Pearl dropped me off after our day of Michaeling and our star-studded dinner at the Beverly Hills Hotel, she turned to me and said, “Please be kind. It took me a long time to get here. If I believe this stuff, I have a reason.” After listening to every piece of evidence, trivia, and gossip, I wasn’t exactly sold that Michael faked his death. I was a little shy about revealing this to Pearl. She’d generously invested a vacation day from work in patiently walking me through it all, in reconfiguring the timeline, in showing me the scenes of the crime. I didn’t want to let her down or have her think it was because she hadn’t done her due diligence. I don’t Believe. But I love that she does, and it felt exhilarating to be around someone who was so sure about something. Earnest conviction is in short supply, and Pearl possesses it. If this is the way she has decided to spend her days and energy, it doesn’t seem so bad to me.
I CAUGHT UP WITH her a year later. I wanted to know if she still maintained faith in the death hoax, now more than five years after the death announcement. “Oh, it’s still going strong!” she told me over the phone in her characteristically chipper voice. She reminded me that I had only begun to scratch the surface of the proof and evidence that Michael faked his death. “There were a lot of clues on the last [posthumous] album, and I’m up to almost two and a half million views on my YouTube channel!” I asked her if his failure to return to his fans has frustrated Believers. “Some people have fallen off already, but there are always new people!”
Then I asked her if she was still in touch with Peter.
“Oh, the drama of all that!” she said with a sigh.
Turns out that Peter Pan had been identified as one Bobby Anderson from South Carolina. Anderson is a rotund African American man in his early thirties, and since his outing, he has become the subject of much scorn and ridicule for manipulating fans. He sounds like a guy with too much time on his hands.
Pearl, though, had a different theory:
“Michael can do whatever he wants to do! You think if he can fake his death, then he can’t fake a Bobby Anderson? Or could Bobby Anderson be hired by the estate to fool people? Is he part of the Jackson family? Is he a setup? He still does wonderful things.”
Rather than contradicting her ideas or validating her detractors, Pearl sees him as an operative in the greatest prank the King of Pop ever pulled. And if I squint, I see her point. Once you’ve invested in seeing the ropes and pulleys of such a fantastic behind-the-scenes operation, why would you suddenly discount the source? Peter Pan doesn’t blot out the accumulation of facts that make up the mosaic proof of the death hoax. Though I was bummed momentarily that I wasn’t actually talking to the Michael Jackson those few times, I don’t find it sad.
I asked Pearl how she felt about her mission now, in light of this recent revelation.
“I don’t want to let the fans down,” she said. “I want to be there when he comes back. I want to be there when the fat lady sings.”