Haunted By Hollywood Demons: The Last Hours Of Whitney Houston

This is security from the Beverly Hilton. “Hi, what’s going on?” “I need the paramedics. Apparently I’ve got a 46-year-old female found in the bathroom. She wasn’t breathing.”

She said four three four. Yes, she was not breathing. Okay, but she is breathing now, but I don’t know.

Singer Whitney Houston, one of the greatest voices of our generation. CNN has gotten confirmation from her representative that she has died. In her lifetime she sold more than 200 million records, propelling her from a gospel choir to global stardom.

But at 3:36 p.m. on February 11, 2012, Whitney Houston was found unconscious in a bath in a Hollywood hotel. They attempted life-saving resuscitation measures. Unfortunately they were not successful, and at approximately 3:55 p.m. Whitney Houston was pronounced dead at the Beverly Hilton.

We have detectives upstairs and crime scene investigators conducting an investigation right now to try and determine the cause of death.

The coroner’s autopsy report on the body of Whitney Houston is revealing. The thing about autopsy reports is that if you know how to read them, they can tell a whole story of someone’s life. But crucially, they can tell you about the days and hours leading up to their death.

World-renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Richard Shepherd has been performing high-profile autopsies for more than 25 years. His expertise has been called on for the Bloody Sunday inquiry, the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, and the inquest into the death of Princess Diana. The coroner ruled that Whitney Houston’s death was an accident.

But there was nothing about the first examination that gave a particular cause of death. There were a number of minor injuries: bruises, grazes, and abrasions on the face and other areas of the body. It wouldn’t have been immediately obvious whether they were caused before death, after death, or during resuscitation.

To begin to understand those injuries, two things must follow. Firstly, a further examination of the body. And secondly, a better understanding of the circumstances that surrounded her death.

Five days before she died, Whitney Houston was in LA for the 2012 Grammy Awards. She checked into room 434 of the Beverly Hilton Hotel under the pseudonym Elizabeth Collins. After a long, highly publicized battle with drug addiction and numerous abortive comeback attempts, Houston was finally making progress on a proper return to the limelight.

Nine months out of rehab, she had just finished filming the lead role in an upcoming movie. In a few days’ time, all eyes would be on her at the annual pre-Grammy party hosted by legendary music mogul Clive Davis, the man who discovered her and shaped her career. Despite years of negative headlines, she still had an army of fans.

If she could resist falling back into her old habits, Clive Davis’s party and the Grammys the following night would send a firm message that Whitney Houston was back. But for a former addict, a week in the city of temptation can be a very long time.

The further examination showed that actually she was in pretty good shape. She was wearing a wig, but she did also have a full head of hair underneath it. She’d had minor breast augmentation surgery and some dental work, but for a Hollywood star she was remarkably natural.

In the 1980s, under Clive Davis’s guidance, Houston’s unique talent made her the biggest female recording star on the planet. Pop music was going through a little bit of a dearth. You had a lot of electronic music and artists essentially working on image.

Suddenly along came Whitney Houston. She had the voice, these astonishing looks, and the songs which made everyone get up and dance. She was the ultimate package.

Aretha Franklin had been the voice of soul, but by 1985 Whitney had taken her crown. The world was fascinated by her. In any autopsy, you perform an internal examination to look at the body’s organs and try to understand what is occurring in them.

A particular area of interest with Houston would of course be the throat, because Whitney was known to have an extraordinary voice. Yet there was nothing about her vocal cords that would indicate the voice that she had. Houston’s autopsy is proof that her legendary voice was due to something other than physical prowess.

Part of the reason why Whitney Houston was so great is because she was raised in the gospel tradition. The way that you sing has an effect on your voice. Because of her gospel singing, she was sort of doing early vocal exercise.

Her gospel training was crucial. Dr. Shepherd looked at her as one of the models that people should look to if they wanted to become a great singer. She had all the qualities that great singing involves, powerful sound, big high notes, resonant singing, but she also could sing very delicately and seduce you with the beauty of her voice.

It’s that combination, combined with her passion and her soul, that made her special. Three days later, Houston is heading out to a nightclub and she has good reason to celebrate. She and Clive Davis have agreed that she will record a new album in August.

But the voice that catapulted her to stardom has been in trouble for years. The influence of hard-living R&B star Bobby Brown during their stormy 15-year marriage was catastrophic. Their lifestyle took a heavy toll on Houston’s voice.

At times it left her struggling even to speak. To deal with the problem, she sought the help of specialist voice coach Gary Catona. You can imagine how shocked he was to hear her voice in that condition.

It was sort of an embarrassing situation because here she is, this world-famous singer with this unbelievable voice, with no voice at all. So obviously she made some, you might consider, very bad life choices. If the damage to Houston’s voice was caused by her lifestyle, it would be reasonable to expect that there would be some physical evidence on the vocal cords that would show up in the autopsy.

But the results there are surprising. There was nothing in her throat and neck that would indicate any particular damage to explain why her voice was lost. But when they looked lower down the air passages, there was some damage to her lungs, damage called emphysema that’s commonly associated with smoking.

Of course smoking damages the whole of the air passages and is well known to affect the vocal cords and cause changes in the singing and talking voice. In preparation for her new album, Houston has promised Clive Davis that she will finally quit smoking. Numerous full ashtrays found in room 434 tell a different story.

The autopsy evidence tells us even more. We know from the toxicology results that it’s not just cigarettes she’s been smoking. She’s also been smoking marijuana.

A former driver of Houston’s remembers she was no stranger to weed. He first realized she was doing drugs at The Bodyguard. He didn’t know if that was Bobby and his security people or whatever, but it was that strong-smelling pot.

But by ’98 on that airport run that he did, it was bad. Whitney could hardly talk. She was very hoarse. She was like, “Oh hey baby, how you doing? Good to see you again baby. Yeah, you gonna get me to the airport safe and sound in one piece? I’m not feeling so good right now.”

Aside from the damage it could cause to her voice, for an ex-addict to be smoking marijuana may be more serious than it seems. Marijuana use isn’t uncommon; however, if you’re less concerned about other drugs, you go to one dealer. That dealer gives you marijuana and they also deal in cocaine, for example, which means you might move back onto stronger drugs.

By returning to drug use, Houston was risking more than her comeback. Marijuana lingers in the bloodstream for a long time, so all the toxicology can tell us for certain is that she’s been smoking marijuana in the days leading up to her death. But in fact that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Two days before her death, Houston is celebrating a deal to record a new album. She is seen arriving at Tru Hollywood nightclub for a party hosted by Grammy nominee Kelly Price. Whitney Houston was tabloid gold.

She sold millions of magazines and millions of newspapers, so it was the job of one reporter to follow her around for the week she was here to monitor anything she did and what was going on in her life. Later that evening, Price makes a speech honoring Houston. Houston responds by unexpectedly joining her on stage to sing an impromptu rendition of “Jesus Loves Me.”

All the reporter can tell you is that over time she was getting better. It wasn’t 100 percent back, but she was able to sing and do a decent record. Spontaneous gig over, Houston rejoins her entourage in the VIP area with a new man in her life, 31-year-old musician Ray J.

Houston had divorced Brown in 2006, seeking a quieter life as she battled her addictions. A romance with Ray J was a cause for concern. A party lifestyle in his circle of friends was no secret.

During the internal examination, the first thing that would have caused the coroner some concern is what we term a fatty liver. A fatty liver occurs when the metabolic processes in the liver are disturbed. Fat globules form within liver cells.

This makes the liver bigger and pale. A fatty liver indicates that someone has been abusing alcohol. It tells you nothing about their drinking habits many years previously.

It tells you about the time, the weeks and days prior. The changes we see in Whitney’s liver may be heavy drinking over several weeks prior to her death or a single large episode of binge drinking very close to her death. And for Houston, drinking was only ever a small part of the problem.

Binge drinking clearly lowers inhibitions. So if you’ve been an addict, when you are drunk you may think it’s a good idea to do something that sober you wouldn’t. And that’s how you can end up having a relapse.

The next major finding by the coroner about Whitney’s lifestyle was the fact she had a perforated nasal septum. The septum is the piece of tissue that runs up the center of the nose, and perforation of this septum is typical of insufflation snorting of cocaine. Cocaine that’s snorted is the cocaine hydrochloride salt of cocaine.

It is an irritant, but that’s actually not what causes the perforation. What causes the perforation is the direct effect of the cocaine drug on the blood vessels in the nose. Cocaine causes the blood vessels to close up tight.

When that happens, the tissues of the nose are deprived of blood and oxygen. Over time they die and a perforation occurs. And that’s what Whitney Houston had.

A perforated septum is conclusive proof Whitney Houston had a chronic problem with cocaine. That night at Tru Hollywood, however, as far as anyone close to her is concerned, Houston has been drug-free for months. But evidence found in room 434 suggests this wasn’t the case.

The list of items recovered from her room includes a portable mirror with what is described as remnants of a white powdery substance on it, which was later found to be cocaine. On top of the circumstantial evidence, the toxicology leaves us in no doubt that Houston had returned to cocaine use in the days before her death.

In a never-before-seen interview given just days after her death, the drug dealer who sold cocaine to Houston in her final days came forward. She looked a lot older than he would think. She looked like she’d been rode hard and put away wet.

She’d been through a lot, but no more than any other semi-washed-up Hollywood chick. The dealer reveals that in the last week of her life he sold Houston drugs both at a hotel and that night in the club. It was around like 12:31-ish or something like that.

Later in the night in their little VIP area they got free bottles and they were drinking all night. He goes on to describe a well-practiced routine that he says he and Houston used for doing drug deals in full view of onlookers, unnoticed even by members of her own entourage. Basically what happens, she’s already there.

If he shows up, ask for an autograph and he’s got a pen ready full of coke. She’s already got the money ready. She knows what’s going on.

Hand it to her, she signs, she keeps the pen, gives him the autograph, and the money’s in there. Works out pretty good. Thank you.

In the club, after scoring cocaine, things for Houston start to go downhill. An argument breaks out with an X Factor contestant named Stacy Francis, who Houston feels is getting too close to her new man. Another finding from the toxicology that makes interesting reading is the presence of cocaethylene in the blood.

Cocaethylene is a drug that’s formed in the body when both cocaine and alcohol are present at the same time. One of the interesting things about finding cocaethylene in the blood is that it has been linked with causing aggressive behavior. Houston explodes at Francis and has to be pulled away by members of her entourage.

She is still fuming as she leaves the club. When Whitney leaves Tru nightclub, she walks out into the glare of the paparazzi scrum. That was always going to make a huge splash in the paper the next day.

Another embarrassing episode making headline news is the last thing that Houston’s comeback needs. A hard drug and by saying that I mean that if you take it and you like it, the likelihood is you’re going to want more of it. This can lead to lots of bad life decisions.

It has a potential to cause you much damage emotionally when you’re coming down from it and also physically, the impact it has on your body. The coroner’s report shows that the right coronary artery of Whitney Houston’s heart was narrowed by 60 percent due to atherosclerosis. Atherosclerosis is the furring up of the artery and is caused when the lining of the artery is damaged.

That damage is stuck to by platelets, tiny cells within the bloodstream, which then attract globules of fat. As the wall gets thickened by this fat and platelet, it narrows down to just a tiny pinhole eventually. It’s very common in the elderly.

It is very strongly associated with the smoking of tobacco. But to find it this severe in someone aged 48 strongly suggests that other factors have played a part. In the early ’90s we were en route to the Shrine Auditorium and she says, “Okay, get off at Gage Avenue.”

Gage Avenue off the 110 is the crappiest part of LA, not the kind of place you see a big white stretch limousine very often. The usual guys on the street corners. She’s like, “Okay, now pull up over here.”

She goes, “Come here baby. What you got for me?” He’s like, “Look who it is. Damn girl, what you need?” She says, “I’ll take that.” He has a bag with a bunch of little rocks in it.

She says, “You got some money for me girl?” She hands him a big roll, hundreds. Drugs bought in rock form from a street dealer are unlikely to be anything other than crack.

Houston adamantly denied using the drug, infamously coining the phrase “crack is whack” when confronted about it in 2006. However, Houston’s sister-in-law publicly outed her as a crack user. Despite this, in 2009 Houston was still denying crack use.

But in an interview with Oprah she did admit to lacing her joints with freebase cocaine. This continued a pattern of Houston apparently admitting to something but only as a cover for something worse. Houston was also relying on the audience’s ignorance of illegal drugs because the distinction between freebase cocaine and crack is largely one of stigma rather than substance.

Freebase cocaine is cocaine with the hydrochloride salt removed so that users can smoke it the same way as crack, usually by heating it in a spoon or a glass pipe and inhaling the fumes. As the driver’s recollection proves, Houston wasn’t just lacing her joints. The year was 1997.

He noticed that smell, there’s a certain smell of a mixture of butane, burning glass, and those chemicals that are in crack. He’s going, “Oh my God, I can’t believe what I’m witnessing.” These guys are hitting a crack pipe.

That’s when he rolled down the divider and sees the glass pipe with Whitney with her lips on the stem. He was mortified. He had seen Motley Crue snorting cocaine, rock stars smoking pot, but this was a little shocking even for him.

Given Houston’s huge wealth, it seems likely that freebase cocaine was indeed her primary addiction. But like any addict, when her drug of choice was in scarce supply, Houston would take whatever she could get to stave off withdrawal. It’s hard to describe how dangerous smoking free-based cocaine is.

It causes damage to almost every organ in the body. What’s more, it’s a highly addictive compound. Once taken, it tends to be used over and over again and the damage is caused again and again.

It’s one of those drugs that is so highly addictive that you form your world around it. Starting to break out from that is incredibly difficult. In the early hours of Friday morning, an exhausted Houston returns to her room.

In less than 36 hours she will be dead. Later that night, in the early hours of Friday the 10th, a calmer, more sober Houston uses a pair of broken glasses to read passages from the Bible with a member of her entourage. Houston had often turned to God as a way of overcoming her addictions.

So Houston reading the Bible is a good sign. If she can find the strength to stop what she’s doing, her looming public appearances may yet not end in disaster. This is her last chance.

The following day, Houston spends time with her daughter Bobbi Kristina. But her relapse and public meltdown have not gone unnoticed by the press. The week before Whitney died, one reporter worked on a story with the Inquirer where they predicted that she was on the downward spiral and ultimately headed towards death.

That was something that she caught upon and she saw in the gift shop. It obviously freaked her out and she went absolutely ballistic at the sales clerk. Furious, Houston has to be pulled away and calmed down by her daughter.

Back in her room she has more direct methods of calming down. The toxicology report shows there were also benzodiazepines present in the bloodstream, a drug called Flexeril and another called Xanax. Benzodiazepines are anti-anxiety, antidepressant drugs that cause sedation.

Benzodiazepines, when correctly administered for the right reasons, are useful. The problem is they are highly addictive drugs. Realistically as well, you have to question whether somebody should be prescribed drugs at all if they’ve had a history of addiction.

Because the reality is that people will look at forming other addictions if they have had an addictive past. In room 434, scene investigators discovered eight different prescription drugs from five different doctors, all prescribed to Whitney Houston. In America, using multiple sources to obtain the same types of drug is referred to as “doctor shopping” and is often used by addicts to get the quantity of drugs they need without arousing suspicion.

One of the problems with medication is very often it bypasses the essential need within the patient, that’s an emotional one. You can medicate, you can sedate some issues, but the reality is you need to work through them. Giving them something that numbs the pain isn’t actually helpful to their process.

So sometimes you have to ask yourself: should we medicate or should we actually work with that person therapeutically? By the evening of Friday the 10th, celebrities from across the world of music have gathered in LA for the Grammys. Houston is spotted in the hotel bar.

She put so much pressure on herself with this comeback. She was so adamant that she needed to impress all her fans and anyone that was watching in the waiting world. She is not drinking with fellow Grammy girls.

The people she is with are ordinary hotel guests amazed to be drinking with a superstar. It was quite clear that they were hangers-on. They didn’t really know Whitney that well and didn’t really have the best interests of Whitney at heart.

But not everyone in the bar that night is a stranger. She didn’t appear wasted. She had been drinking.

The dealer met her in the lounge real quick, asked for an autograph, did the pen trick again. A lot of these kind of has-been type celebrities, if you will, they’re fading away. They’re not really in the spotlight anymore, so they just need something to pep them up and get that feel-good feeling again.

The problem with addiction is that you have to recognize that you are an addict. The reason that a lot of people realize they’re an addict is because they lose their home, they lose their families, they don’t have accessible funds. When you are rich, when you are somebody like Whitney Houston, you literally have the means to get whatever you want.

This means the likelihood is you won’t recognize it even though it’s destroying your health, your home, your family, your career. You will feel in control. An addict who feels in control is an addict who is in the most dangerous situation of all.

Saturday morning, Whitney Houston is asleep in room 434 of the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Tonight her mentor Clive Davis will throw his annual pre-Grammy party. Houston will be the focus of attention for 800 guests.

But her recent behavior has shown she is far from ready for a public comeback. At the time, the word around the Whitney camp was that there were problems. While publicly her image consultants were saying everything’s fine, she’s going to have a great comeback, in reality we knew there were deep-seated issues.

It was more about dreaming about the comeback than actually making it really happen. After days of partying, Houston awakes feeling unwell. Again she turns to medication.

The toxicology report shows there was a cough medicine, Benadryl, in her bloodstream. She also had high levels of ibuprofen. So on top of the benzodiazepines, the cocktail of drugs she’s taking is starting to mount up.

All of these drugs have the potential to cause the same side effect: drowsiness. The problem with mixing drugs like benzodiazepines and Benadryl is it increases the effect, and that means that the user is unaware of how much is too much. In the early afternoon, Houston speaks with her cousin, the singer Dionne Warwick.

At this point apparently there were no signs of trouble. Warwick later said that Houston seemed upbeat and happy. Houston’s personal assistant Mary Jones lays out a dress for her to wear at the evening’s event and suggests that Houston takes a bath.

At 2:45 p.m. Jones heads off to do some errands, leaving Houston alone in room 434. The last phone call that Houston makes is to a pastor friend who she had turned to throughout her problems with addiction. Her friend doesn’t answer.

There were no witnesses to what happened next except Houston herself. Key card records from the hotel showed that Mary Jones re-entered room 434 at 3:36 p.m. As she goes back in, Jones notices that the floor of the bathroom is soaking wet.

She calls out to Houston, getting no response. She makes her way towards the bathroom and finds Houston face down in the bath. Jones desperately tries to lift Houston out of the water but can’t do it on her own.

Frantically she calls bodyguard Ray Watson to help her. Together they succeed in pulling Houston out. “I need the paramedics. A 46-year-old female found in the bathroom. Apparently she wasn’t breathing.”

Paramedics from Beverly Hills Fire Department arrived to room 434 within minutes of the emergency call. Whitney Elizabeth Houston is pronounced dead at the scene at 3:55 p.m. Singer Whitney Houston is dead.

One person was dressing and watching TV when it flashed across the screen: Whitney Houston dead. It’s one of those moments that you read the words and you can’t believe it’s really true. With Houston’s death shrouded in mystery, in the hours that follow the unexplained circumstances are investigated by the LAPD.

So Houston’s body remains in the room. Despite this, Clive Davis’s party goes ahead in the hotel ballroom downstairs. The world now knows Whitney Houston is dead.

A few notable guests stay away, but the majority of the 800 invitees attend. People at the party were asking why are we here, what should we do? You have people trying to have a party with a deceased body in the hotel.

No one really knew what to say. Some were embarrassed by being there. Others thought the show must go on.

It was a very strange mixture of emotions. Ten hours after Houston’s death, the coroner finally removes her body from the hotel and takes it for examination. In trying to determine the cause of death of someone found in the bathtub, of course the first thing you would look for is water logging of the lungs.

In Whitney’s case that was present. However, it can be caused by so many things that on its own it can’t tell us why Whitney Houston died. So can the autopsy evidence actually determine drowning as the cause of Houston’s death?

There are other features of the lungs that do pinpoint drowning as the cause of death. This is crepitation of the surface of the lung, which is caused by water entering the air passages, mixing with the mucus, which then traps air in the periphery of the lung, giving it a crackling texture. This is significant because it shows that the individual was alive and breathing when their air passages were submerged under the water.

So why was she unable to save herself and what did happen in those few critical missing minutes? Having established that Houston had relapsed into addiction in the days before her death and that she was under the influence of a number of drugs that can cause drowsiness when she died, Richard Shepherd turns his attention to the scene evidence. He wants to see whether anything found by investigators can shed light on what happened when Houston was alone in the bathroom and reveal what caused her to drown.

When they arrived and made entry into the hotel room, it was found to be somewhat in disarray. There was furniture moved, empty food plates, a number of prescription bottles and packages of pills, some empty bottles and beer cans, and ashtrays filled with cigarettes. The carpet was wet.

It wasn’t the neatest. The discovery of open alcohol in room 434 pointed to a possible explanation. The scene findings and the history of chronic alcohol abuse strongly suggested that Whitney Houston was likely to be under the influence of alcohol at the time of her death.

This led investigators to speculate that Houston may have overdosed on alcohol and prescription drugs and fallen asleep in the bath. Despite the findings at the scene, the toxicology shows that there was no alcohol present in Whitney Houston’s bloodstream at the time that she died. So she wasn’t drunk and alcohol hasn’t played a part in her death.

The first clue to what actually happened comes from a seemingly insignificant detail in the witness reports. Mary Jones stated that when she entered the room there was already water on the bathroom floor and yet the taps were turned off. If Houston had fallen asleep in the bath, that wouldn’t explain how the water got there.

But her external injuries might. Bruising to the knees and face suggests a fall into the bath. As the bruising is all to the front of the body, it suggests a fall forwards.

This matches the position described by Mary Jones when she found her. The most plausible explanation for the water on the floor then would seem to be displacement caused by the impact of Houston falling and pushing the water up and over the edge of the tub. But a fall alone would not explain why she drowned.

Whitney Houston was five foot six inches in height, so it’s unlikely that she could fall into a bathtub without making contact with several surfaces on the way down. In fact there is a mark on the left side of her forehead which indicates that she hit her head as she fell down. The blow to the head rendered Houston unconscious.

It would provide the answer. So the next stage in the examination of this injury is to look beneath the surface. There was a small amount of bruising on the undersurface of the scalp but not extending into the orbit or into the temporal muscles, which showed this was a minor injury and very unlikely to have caused unconsciousness.

So this injury was not the reason why Whitney Houston was unable to save herself. Something else affected Houston when she was getting into the bath, and the toxicology holds the key. Cocaine is metabolized very quickly within the body.

The presence of cocaine and high levels of the metabolite within the bloodstream of Whitney Houston suggests that one of the last things she did was take some cocaine. This evidence is backed up by the discovery of a small spoon with a white crystal-like substance in it alongside a rolled-up piece of paper on the bathroom counter. Houston had once again succumbed to her biggest fight.

On top of the drowsiness caused by the prescription drugs, the anesthetic properties of free-based cocaine would have had a disorienting effect. The piece of evidence that helps us best to understand what probably happened in that bathroom are some injuries that the autopsy report calls scald burns. When the temperature of the bath water was measured six hours after Houston’s death, it was found to still be 93.5 degrees Fahrenheit.

 

At 3 p.m. when Houston got in, it was far higher. In trying to understand what happened when Whitney Houston got into the bath, we have to understand it was a very hot bath and that all her senses were dulled by the combination of drugs she had circulating within her bloodstream. Her response to pain would have been very significantly reduced.

The response of her tissues in her legs would not have been reduced, and the damage would have been the same. There is a disconnect between what her brain is perceiving is happening due to the effects of all of the drugs dulling the senses and what the tissues of her leg are responding to which is the heat and the damage caused by that heat. The legs cause shock.

The shock causes the blood pressure to plummet and she faints and falls into the bathtub. This is a known effect called syncope or the faint. It’s caused by shock from immersion of the legs in water causing lack of blood to the brain.

It causes the individual to black out. With Houston’s blood flow further constricted by the effects of the cocaine and the blocked artery in her heart, her susceptibility to faint was dramatically increased. These things combined together to mean that she is unconscious before she hits the water, and that is the reason why she’s unable to save herself.

So what then of the bruising and other marks on Houston’s body that Richard Shepherd first identified? It would be very difficult to get an adult woman out of a bath, they would be a dead weight. It’s likely the efforts made to lift Whitney Houston out of the bathtub were the cause of the bruises to the arms and shoulders.

Of the other injuries that Whitney Houston had, there are some areas of skin slippage. Skin deteriorates when it spends time in water. The longer the time or the hotter the water, the greater the effect upon the skin.

If that skin is handled, it may be damaged, and this is skin slippage. These findings prove that the majority of Houston’s external injuries took place after her death. Perhaps we can take comfort then from the fact that although Whitney Houston died drowning in a bath of very hot water, which sounds like an awful way to die, the evidence suggests that she wouldn’t have suffered for more than a second or so.

Just days after Houston’s death, her drug dealer showed no remorse. “I never thought it was my fault. Nobody’s going to pass out in a fucking bathtub being spun out on cocaine. Let me fucking clean in the bathtub.

If anything, he’ll remember Whitney as a legendary icon in music, but at the same time he’ll remember her as just another customer. Houston’s illustrious career will never be separated from the addictions that she was mired by. But for her army of fans and the people she worked with, her legacy is undiminished.

A lot of people who get what she got tend to be thinking it’s all about them, but Whitney Houston was profoundly humble and so spiritual. One person believes that Whitney has a very strong place in heaven. She’s probably conducting the choir up there.

For someone of her superstar status, she would always talk to fans. She would always acknowledge people personally. If there were a hundred hands reaching out to touch her, she would do her best like a politician to shake everybody’s hand and always say thank you to everybody.

She was wonderful. Tragically, despite the dizzying heights Houston ascended in her career, in her personal life she was never able to free herself from the dark undertow of addiction. In the end it destroyed her.

Whitney Houston did die as a result of an accident, but that accident was contributed to by her lifestyle, her chronic cocaine abuse causing the damage to her heart muscles, the cocktail of drugs that was present in her body at the time she got into that bath. Without those, perhaps she’d still be with us today.