Original subtitles

I like interviews because it's that strange area

where you try and pin down something that happened in the past.

Those who insist the legendary Jim Morrison died at age 27 in Paris, France,

on or around July 3rd, 1971,

are speculating or withholding information.

That, combined with a lack of autopsy,

no verified corroboration substantiating

the French medical practice of Dr. Max Vasile,

his purported French death certificate signature,

or his presumed cause of Jim's death as, quote, "heart failure,"

as well as a sustained absence of Morrison's reputed 1971 United States passport,

raises the question of collusion, places the burden of proof on those in the know,

and renders the variable, quote, "official story," a cold case mystery.

Fifty years later, as of the year 2021,

testimonial evidence, the type admissible in a court of law,

and probatory information supporting Morrison staging his death

has never been brought to light.

Until now.

...of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the--

Jim Morrison, the lead singer for The Doors, a rock music group, is dead.

He was 27.

His personal manager said he died in Paris, probably of heart failure, last Saturday.

His manager said Morrison died six days ago in Paris, either of a heart attack or pneumonia.

Jim Morrison is dead, and they say natural causes,

which is really a strange thing in a 30-year-old person, or thereabouts.

Natural causes.

Which natural causes, in specific, he wasn't sure. Someone else...

We are awaiting Mr. Siddons' arrival here to make it official.

They said that the reason they didn't announce it

prior to the middle of the night

was because they wanted to avoid this sort of circus carnival.

But the death was kept secret to avoid a sensation.

He was buried in Paris in the same cemetery

where Balzac and other French immortals lie.

My name is Jeff Finn, and I'm a lifetime fan of Jim Morrison,

most well known as the infamous lead singer and lyricist

of groundbreaking 1960s rock band, The Doors.

Legendary though he may be, there's far more to Morrison's story.

I've made it my life's work to extract the truth from a 50-year-old tale

that's been riddled with rumor, lies and myth.

Who was the real James Douglas Morrison?

Join me as I dive down the Morrison rabbit hole.

But I can't guarantee you'll make it back out with your sanity fully intact.

Because as I've found, the walls of the rabbit hole are lined with coincidences,

often too many to explain.

From July 1965 to April 1971,

a short span that bookended the turbulent late 1960s,

Jim dragged the innocuous era of rock and roll

kicking and screaming into the more mature realm of rock,

which quickly evolved from John Lennon sweetly singing about wanting to hold your hand,

to Jim howling about wanting to kill his father and fuck his mother.

In the spring of 1966, The Doors scored their first big break

when they became the house band at the Whiskey a Go Go on Sunset Boulevard.

Deriving cinematic inspiration from the shared UCLA film school education

of Jim and fellow student Ray Manzarek,

The Doors also wielded the techniques of avant-garde theater

via the orgasmic tension and release of surreal pregnant pauses.

As a band, they employed the unorthodox approach

of Manzarek's carnivalesque organ...

John Densmore's dynamic jazz-influenced drum accents...

and Robby Krieger's eerie bottleneck guitar and unique songwriting ability.

Jim, who had no formal musical training,

had a natural aptitude for vocal melodies and song composition,

which he wedded to his immersive poems in the form of lyrics.

♪ Before you slip into Unconsciousness ♪

The Doors, the first dark band to seize the mass postmodern consciousness,

enjoyed many firsts,

from having their debut album promoted via the first rock billboard

on Hollywood's Sunset Strip,

to Jim infamously ignoring a censorship plea from The Ed Sullivan Show.

The Doors, who had number-one singles in the US

with 1967's "Light My Fire" and 1968's "Hello, I Love You,"

truly were a groundbreaking unit.

The Doors also helped usher in arena rock,

and Jim, as if in defiant reply,

promptly became the first rock star arrested on stage.

By the time of Jim Morrison's alleged death, The Doors had sold nearly five million albums,

and they went on to become the first American band

to accumulate eight consecutive gold records.

In 1993, The Doors were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

And by 2021, they had sold over 100 million records worldwide,

earning them the title of one of the best-selling musical artists of all time.

Taken together, this is truly remarkable,

especially given the erratic nature of Jim Morrison,

who single-handedly created the post-James Dean archetype

of the "live fast, die young" rock frontman.

Jim Morrison accomplished all of this in just under six years

and before the age of 27.

I've always found Jim's untimely death at 27 highly suspicious.

Exasperated by the ravages of fame,

Jim and his on-off soulmate Pamela Corson fled to Paris.

Pam flew out of L.A. around Valentine's Day,

and Jim joined her a few weeks later in March.

Their French sabbatical lasted less than four months.

He seemed to enjoy living as an outlaw

in self-imposed exile for a while.

Paris was Jim's most romantic option,

but a fresh identity was his most realistic way out

after having been pigeonholed as a rock star.

For Jim, it was either a new life or death.

Pam claimed she had a French doctor prescribe asthma medication for Jim,

but no proof has materialized.

In any case, like the apparent doctor who signed Jim's death certificate,

there's been no trace of the asthma doctor.

Jim and Pam were said to have been platonic for more than a year, pre-Paris.

And in the City of Light, they seem to have spent as much time together as apart.

Pam spent time with her periodic lover and drug dealer, Jean de Breteuil,

while Jim enjoyed the company of his close friend, Alain Ronay, and others.

Arnold Derwin, Jim's Los Angeles doctor,

told me that other than his drinking, Jim was, quote, "healthy as a horse"

in the year before he left L.A.

Another source that shall be revealed informed me,

quote, "Jim was no alcoholic when I knew him in Paris, and Pam was no junkie."

That same source stated that the rumors of Jim dying of heroin

were, quote, "ridiculous."

But back to the official story.

Jim purportedly died of any number of maladies, with alcohol winning out.

A coffin was delivered to Jim and Pam's apartment,

where his corpse was placed inside and the coffin was sealed

before any Morrison family member could travel to identify the body.

Assuming a coffin was buried, it would be just like Jim, a notorious prankster,

to hide behind a tree at his own funeral.

A grieving Pam flew back to L.A. with a unique carry-on item,

a metal strongbox full of Jim's poems and the cryptic phrase, "127 fascination."

The more I learned about Jim's reported death,

including the various rumors and alternate stories

regarding his supposed heroin overdose

at the Rock 'N' Roll Circus,

with its altruistic bouncers and-or drug dealers

apparently having transported his body across town to his Paris flat,

the more I found myself with infinitely more questions than answers.

For this docuseries, I traveled across the United States several times.

I contacted nearly a thousand people

and interviewed hundreds who are connected to Jim.

So while I ultimately may not prove anything,

it's my goal to leave you, my fellow detectives,

with enough scenarios and evidence

to form your own opinions and draw your own conclusions.

But a word of advice:

Never take anyone or anything at face value.

And that includes the face of a ghost.

So, and that's how he shows up as deceased.

Because the last name is spelled incorrectly.

That's totally possible.

Following nearly a year of positive and friendly communication

with Morrison insiders

regarding potential interviews for this documentary,

including some of the most high profile figures related to The Doors,

one by one, like dominoes, nearly two dozen stopped speaking with me.

I thought it was strange that each of them went radio silent around the same time...

until much later, when I learned the usual suspects had shut down my talks.

And to add to the film noir-like air that reeked of collusion,

that particular information was imparted to me by my movie's very own Deep Throat,

who prefaced their ironclad evidence with the telling phrase:

"You didn't hear this from me."

Initially, this docuseries was completed in late 2016,

but a sudden and unexpected development took my search for Jim Morrison, the person,

on a surreal trip I never could have imagined.

The Facebook page for Before the End was the early headquarters for my project

before it was tainted by the obligatory haters and trolls.

Nevertheless, I'll always be grateful for the true believers

who supported my vision with their patience, understanding and good humor.

A follower of my Before the End Facebook page

saw a post on my personal Facebook page that I had made public.

The person who I didn't know liked and shared my post.

When I checked out the stranger's profile photo, it was surreal:

a picture that was cropped, revealing only half his face.

I opened the photo and the image I saw haunted me.

The right side of the photo showed someone I was very familiar with,

John Densmore, the drummer of The Doors.

And on the other side was a man who looked to be in his 70s.

I recognized his face.

Was this the man I'd been researching for over half my life?

Could this be Jim Morrison?

Skeptical that it might be a hoax,

I took the images to Cheryl Bombaugh, my private investigator,

to trust in her professionally trained eye and objective opinion.

My cases vary a lot, but I've never had a case, you know, at all like this.

I mean, the guy doesn't have a wrinkle on his face.

- Right. - You know?

And his eyes do resemble Jim's, I think.

Just the way they look.

I know that they're not the same color, because Jim's eyes are blue.

Um...

I don't know. I don't even know what to say.

I mean, I really could be led either way.

Armed with this information,

I went home and began digging deeper into the man I nicknamed Frank X.

I was intrigued to learn he was Facebook friends

with a number of Morrison and Doors-related people,

some of them insiders, including Julia Negron,

Doors drummer John Densmore's ex-wife,

Tony Funches, Jim's former bodyguard,

and Hervé Muller, one of the few friends Jim made

during his brief time in Paris.

I was enticed by Frank's scant Facebook photos,

so I messaged him because I suspected he was Jim.

And to my surprise, six days later, he replied.

He told me he shared the same love for The Doors and Jim's music and poetry.

Then Frank joked about bumping into The Doors at the Eastman Theatre

in Rochester, New York in 1968.

So I asked if he'd send me another photo of himself from when he was younger.

He said he would look around, but then he went dark on Facebook for a spell.

It felt like a game of cat and mouse.

Then Frank sent me an old photo of a signed ID card from 1978.

In my research, I found another Frank in Syracuse, New York,

with the same first, middle and last name.

But he apparently died in 2015.

I took the photos to a photo lab to see if they could be the same person

nearly 40 years apart.

I learned about rosacea and scarring, and was told that,

like thinning hair, eyebrows can fade,

but their shape remains.

Whether or not the two Franks were the same,

I imagined Syracuse ID Frank met Jim, perhaps at the Eastman Theater,

and Jim made Frank an offer he couldn't refuse.

Cheryl said, like identity theft,

the consensual use of another's identity is known as piggybacking.

Upon closer inspection, it appeared where Jim had a mole, Frank had a scar.

I decided the only way to uncover what was really going on

entailed my paying a visit to Frank X in person.

So I enlisted Cheryl's help, and we were off.

- Let's go find... - Let's go find Frank.

Yeah, or as we might be referring to him, Mr. X.

Yes, Mr. X.

I tried to get some rest on the plane,

but was having a difficult time because all I could see were two images.

One was Jim's face with a mole near his nose.

The other was Frank's face without the mole,

but there appeared to be a small scar.

Here it is, finally happening.

Welcome to Syracuse, New York.

Let's do this.

After doing some preliminary recon, we checked into our rooms.

The gravity of what was about to go down the following day was overwhelming.

I have spent a better part of my life since I was 18

searching for Jim Morrison, literally and figuratively.

And to now be this close, it's a strange thing.

I don't want to ever bring, you know, pain to him or Jim or anyone.

At the same time,

I want to share the joy in knowing that Jim survived.

All right. Here I am.

Somewhere in New York.

I've, uh... I'm waiting.

I'm now waiting.

There we go.

Here he is. Frank.

Hello?

Frank?

Yeah.

Hey, how are you?

- Yeah. Okay. - Okay.

- Thanks, man. - See you then.

- Okay, bye. - Okay.

Holy shit.

Well, we're gonna meet.

I can't believe there's a thunderstorm outside. It's amazing.

Riders on a storm.

All right.

Last interview for Before The End: Searching For Jim Morrison.

And amazingly I call Frank,

and he's been kind enough to allow me to do this interview.

Frank and I have been friends on Facebook...

I decided to throw Frank a curveball right off the bat to see if he was legit.

Poetry was key to James Douglas Morrison.

It would be one thing for a maintenance man

living in middle-of-nowhere New York

to have an appreciation of classical poets.

But for those poets to be the exact ones Jim favored stretched credulity thin.

And only added to an already absurd amount of growing coincidences.

And who would you say is your favorite poet?

I like Baudelaire.

I don't read a lot of, uh, new poetry that I can think of.

He said that pleasure cannot be possible without the presence of evil.

And forgive me, whose quote was this?

Baudelaire.

Jim was always a reader and I think poetry or romantic in some ways and, uh...

He had some vision, I can't imagine what.

He wanted to commune with nature or be closer to the heavens or whatever.

But he had me climb the tree because I was more of a handyman than he was.

And anyway, if he could get me to do something,

he could be on the lazy side and why not have your little brother do it?

But I climbed high up in the tree

and I had some nails and a hammer that I drug up in some wood

and built him a little seat, like a little nest up in the tree.

And he went up one day and sat there for about an hour,

blowing in the breeze,

and I think he kind of gave up on that

as being that romantic and inspirational or whatever he was,

and I don't think he ever used it again.

He read voraciously.

He dragged his books around with him when they moved.

He read far more challenging books than were required in his classes

and sometimes his teachers were amazed at the stuff he said he had read,

and then to find that he actually had read

and could carry on an intelligent conversation about it.

He was known for being intellectually advanced

anytime we got into topics like anything literature.

It just wasn't a question, you know,

that I think he pretty much whapped everybody else in school for that.

He was number one.

Obnoxious most of the time, but he was number one.

If you're number one, you can be obnoxious about it.

When I asked Jim's high school classmate, John Huetter,

if Jim ever submitted writing to the student newspaper, this was his response.

No.

No, he thought that was...

Heh, I'm not trying to use the term loosely, sophomoric.

I mean, he thought that was really not interesting.

That was something that would-be English majors did, you know.

But yeah, I forgot about that.

Wow, you did some research here.

I was the editor of The Little Hatchet too. Yeah.

Some of Jim's old friends agreed to let me interview them in the house where Jim lived

while he attended George Washington High School in Alexandria, Virginia.

So I headed over to meet them.

I followed the four of them down to Jim's former bedroom,

which occupied the entire basement of the house.

I'll just fall down for dramatic effect.

Yeah, right.

We shared a stair narrower than this.

Now, look at this, Jim.

- I mean, it's all open. - Oh, my God.

- Yeah. Where are all the books? - Jesus.

- Trying to remember what it looked like. - I remember that.

This door here, it was open for anybody to come in. But this is where everybody came in.

And doors were open. It was open for anybody.

That's the only way I ever came in was through that door.

- Exactly. - I was never upstairs.

I was just gonna ask you, did you guys generally

enter and exit through the exterior door?

- Yeah. That was it. - That was the way to get in.

- And so did Jim. - Yeah.

Yeah. It's true.

So he was pretty much free to come and go as he wanted.

Jim, this is how he came and--

You know, came and went from the house.

- He was on foot most of the time. - Yeah.

This was like his apartment, if you really think about it.

I don't know how much time he spent upstairs at all.

This place was full of books.

- It was all books. - Had a lot of books. That's for sure.

- And he read every one of them. - Yeah.

So we go to the bookstore.

Everybody says, "Jim."

Go to another bookstore. "Hey, Jim."

- Everybody knows this guy in the bookstores, you know? - Yeah.

And a few little taverns and mostly coffee shops.

Yeah, there were liquor stores there and bookstores there.

He drank. Now,

I saw him drink half a fifth of whiskey one night down in my basement.

And I mean...

you know, and then a few minutes later...

like that, you know, and then it was like...

He drank out of the bottle.

How many people drank out of the bottle when we were in high school?

- You know? - Well...

Yeah.

Well, he would come over, I had an art studio in my basement,

and he'd come over there and I had this huge piece of canvas I tied across the room

and he would sit there and look at this canvas

and then he would get some paint and get up and...

he would start putting these Oriental designs on it.

It's what he said.

He tried to convince me that he could write Japanese.

That's so Morrison.

He had this one picture that he made it over and over and over again

and it really made-- I just thought this was the best.

It was Christ on the cross and of course he looked like a shmoo.

And below him were these Roman soldiers with beers.

You know?

And they're like, glug, glug, glug, and pointing...

And there's, you know--

And I thought, "That's fabulous." You know?

Only Morrison could take something that...

- Sacred. - Yeah, thank you, sacred, and make it funny.

And I just thought, "This guy's really out there."

- Well, I'm interested in seeing this picture of Morrison. - Yeah.

Yeah, should we do it? You want to do the honors?

You do it. You've got it. I mean...

Yeah.

- And there it is. - You've had it all these years.

Yeah, all these years.

It's kind of, once again, the Christ thing, you know?

- Yeah. - With his little joke, Christ on the cross.

Now, Jim, can you describe for us how you came into possession of the painting?

Well, Morrison was going to throw it out, and he tossed it out here in the...

Where's the garage?

I think there was a garage out here at the time.

The garage? Yeah, there was, in the back.

You know, he was going to throw it out, and I retrieved it.

And, you know, I'm going to take this home and, you know, save it.

And he's like, "I don't care what you do with it."

You know, "I don't want it."

So, um, that's what happened.

But the thing about Jim in high school is, compared to most of us,

he was in the here and now, you know?

When you would encounter him, some of the time, there was this presence about him.

And here we were just trying to belong and feel like we were cool.

And Jim was in another space altogether.

- He didn't care if you were there. - He did not care.

Like I said earlier, when Morrison said, "I'm gonna do this," I knew he would do it.

You know, and a lot of other people thought he was just joking.

Yeah, the railing over the Potomac, by the Potomac at Hains Point,

- he would get up and walk on that railing. - No kidding.

And of course, if you fell off,

because the wall comes straight up and then there's a railing

so you don't fall into the river,

and he'd get up and walk on it, and if you did fall into it, you were history.

If he had fallen off left, he would have gone down many, many feet,

we'd have never been able to get him out ourselves, I don't think.

No.

He would switch gears from this very solemn somber demeanor. He'd switch gears, right?

You could tell when he was gonna switch gears, "Uh-oh, what's he gonna do?"

- Right. That's true. - Next thing you know,

he's jumped up on something, he's performing.

He liked to take risks. Basically, he was a show-off, if he could get an audience.

You know, you could see where this was gonna go eventually.

I always thought his IQ was so much higher.

I mean, like you said, he's different. It was just a different level.

So maybe it was that whole...

ball of wax.

- I think he escaped into that stuff. - Right.

And so he escapes into literature

and becomes the characters he's reading about and tries it out.

But I discovered this guy Huxley.

I said, "Jim, you really ought to read this book, Brave New World, you know?

This guy is a real-- And some of his other stuff."

And he was kind of taken aback that I suggested something to him

- that he wasn't as familiar with. - Oh, man.

Every so often, I was curious about what he thought about stuff.

And so I was trying to move a conversation--

Maybe you were the genesis for the name "The Doors," because Aldous Huxley wrote something--

- Well, The Doors of Perception. - The Doors of Perception.

- They were some essays about mescaline and peyote. - Yeah. Right.

But "The Doors," that all came out of Blake.

Oh, yeah, yeah, "The Doors," the expression comes from Blake.

- It comes from Blake. - Right. That's true.

- Who knows? - Yeah. Yeah.

The conversation turned to the topic of Jim's first girlfriend, Tandy Martin,

who I believed held one of the keys to understanding him as a real person.

Did he ever have a date that you know of?

Other than Tandy?

- Well, Tandy. - Yeah.

He didn't date anybody that I know.

With Tandy, I don't know what kind of a relationship it was, but...

- According to her, it wasn't much. - Is that right?

- They were friends. - Yeah.

I remember having a conversation with Tandy about Jim's future,

and she was certain that he was going to become something bigger than life.

And I said, "Yeah. He's going to be in prison."

You know?

And she got really upset.

"No, no, no. He's not going to go to prison."

I said, "Yes, he is. He's going to jail."

And I believed it.

- I thought, "This guy's a nutcase." - Yeah.

"He's capable of doing anything, and it'll probably land him in jail."

What are your takes on Jim and Tandy?

I think she liked Jim a good bit, but I think he liked her a lot more.

You know, because Tandy just jerked people around, men.

She just...

That's what she did.

Tandy was no fool.

She was well-read.

That was why Tandy, I think, had such an effect on him.

Because, you know, he couldn't control her.

- Yeah. - Can you guys share your memories of the first time?

Like, where were you or what was your reaction when you first heard that Jim

had gone on and he was in The Doors.

I wasn't surprised he got famous, but I was surprised he got famous as a singer.

Because I saw nothing that led that way.

- Ever. - He never sang in high school.

- No. - Apparently not.

- It was all literature. - Yeah.

Well, he did give us a couple lectures, though, about, at least twice, I think,

about he was going to be famous someday.

- Well... - Oh, yeah.

- But that's... - Yeah, right, right.

Didn't want to have anything to do with us.

He did. He did. I remember that.

You have to figure out whether you're going to take him seriously

when he says stuff like that, or whether he's just putting you on.

- And I never knew. - Yeah, yeah.

I guess I had a reaction somewhat like yours.

You know, the guy was capable of anything.

- Music? - Yeah.

- Go figure. - Yeah.

But the thing that really blows my mind is you guys, apparently, you,

upon learning of his alleged death,

each of you, is that correct, that each of you thought right then and there

that, "Oh, no, he may have faked it"?

Because those rumors didn't really start to trickle down

to the public until, you know, a little later.

So is that correct that that was--?

- Absolutely. - That's correct.

- Absolutely. - Yeah.

That's amazing.

Because nobody else in high school talked about disappearing,

taking on another life and stuff.

We were all like, huh?

So and then to have him actually do it,

because if anybody in the world could do this or would do it...

Well, he was smart enough with that--

Think about it with that intelligence.

Maybe he figured out a way so that all those French police documents looked bonafide.

And, uh, he slipped away.

At least once he talked about how neat it would be to, like,

disappear and become a whole different person and all this stuff.

- Didn't he? - That doesn't surprise me.

Yeah, well, that's exactly right, because I figured he'd... I wasn't the only one.

I figured he'd faked the whole situation and he was gone for a number of reasons.

A lot of people felt that way.

First of all, he'd just been convicted in Florida

and he was facing a six-month sentence

and he was on appeals.

If that wasn't successful, then he was in jail.

But mainly, I think he didn't like, I thought at the time,

and I have absolutely nothing to base this on other than my recollection from high school,

he didn't like his lifestyle and he wanted to disappear

and do something else.

And he said stuff in high school about doing that very thing.

- He talked about doing that very thing. - Yes.

Yes. Yes, he did.

All I know is if anybody in the world could have done it, pulled it off,

- I think it would have been him. - Absolutely.

It wouldn't surprise me today to learn that he'd gone over there to fake his death.

Unfortunately for him, in the intervening time,

- he died before he got to pull it off. - Yeah.

That wouldn't surprise me at all, but I don't think he's alive.

This is when we need Tandy around,

because she might have some insight.

- She might. - Did Tandy have any role in this conflict?

Tandy was always a... She's like a ghost in this whole thing.

I couldn't figure out how he died.

He's supposedly in a bathtub, right, with a smile on his face.

But... of what?

- How do you die when you're-- - I think he died of a drug overdose.

Well, you don't die of a heart attack and look like that when you're 27 years old.

Well, does anybody know how he looked?

You know, there's this shroud of secrecy.

There was no autopsy, right?

And so this has been analyzed and analyzed and analyzed forever, right?

- No one knows. - Yeah.

As I left Jim's Alexandria-era home, I reflected upon what his friends said.

Tandy Martin's name kept appearing in regard to Jim's high school years in Virginia.

I'd reached out to speak with her, but she agreed to only appear via cameo.

During my research, I found in the 1980 Morrison biography, No One Here Gets Out Alive,

that Tandy was referenced as someone to whom Jim hinted at a dark secret.

Tandy and her mother went so far as to take Jim to talk with a youth minister

at the nearby Westminster Presbyterian Church.

But it's unclear if Jim and the minister actually met.

Further complicating matters,

Linda Ashcroft, one of Jim's lovers

during the late 1960s and early '70s,

published a 1997 book called Wild Child: Life with Jim Morrison.

The book alleged Jim had been sexually abused by his father,

apparently in part, during his time in Alexandria.

Although the molestation was said to have begun years earlier when Jim was a small boy,

Incidentally, the first edition of Wild Child was quickly censored

and copies destroyed after Jim's parents sued Ashcroft's publisher.

The book later reappeared with the chapter in question expunged.

Given all this,

my plan was to locate and interview

Linda Ashcroft in an effort to learn more.

Well, I like Artificial Paradise.

Uh, I like interviews because...

Well, I like Artificial Paradise.

Uh, I like interviews because...

- I like interviews because... - Well, I like Artificial Paradise.

Back with Jim's classmate, John Huetter,

I asked which books Jim would buy

or permanently borrow from bookstores or libraries.

Like Céline, uh, French poets,

Baudelaire maybe even, is that Flowers of Evil? Yeah.

Flowers of Evil, I just kind of scanned that before

and I'm getting ready to read that again...

...which is obviously about, uh...

opium.

As Frank continued to expound uponFlowers of Evil,

he shocked me once again with a turn to a different subject,

one near and dear to Jim, his college sweetheart.

And this time, Frank was asking the questions.

Not to pick the book up, never pick the book up.

I was concerned, if you want me to bring it up,

about his girlfriend that he sent there from Florida.

And what happened with that?

I mean, why would he send his girlfriend all the way from Florida?

And then, well, I guess she couldn't put up with all the...

...you know, everything he was doing.

You're talking about Mary Werbelow?

- Yeah. - Right.

Yeah, I'm very interested in what happened to her.

And you said she kind of went down the tubes.

She's got a-- I mean, I met with her.

She lives in a mobile home facility in L.A.

Was she-- Did she want to talk about him at all?

She did. She talked at great length.

We talked for like three and a half, four hours that day. It was incredible.

And said she was gonna do an interview, then she wasn't, then she was,

and she went back and forth for quite a while.

What did you think of her as a person?

I thought she was wonderful, but I also was, you know...

She was a lot older.

Broke my heart because she has, and these are her words,

she has multiple chemical sensitivity disorder.

So she can't-- So she can't, you know, touch certain fabrics.

Frank's concern for Mary Werbelow amazed me.

I felt he knew Mary from the past.

His feelings seemed genuine, as if she were an old lover.

This, more than anything else, confirmed my instinct that Frank was Jim.

No one would care and want to know so much about someone they never met

unless they had met and knew each other intimately long ago.

Hi. It's Mary Werbelow.

Mary was later, quite a few years later, that he met down at St. Petersburg.

I think it was at the junior college.

And she came out to California, and I guess they...

went different directions after a while.

But they were tight.

I knew that Jim was in Florida.

I knew he was going to school down there.

And I knew he was doing what he always said he wanted to do,

was something to do with movie making.

And so, I mean, I knew he had gone to do that.

So what happened?

How come my parents or the state or the university didn't look ahead?

In September 1961, Jim began classes at St. Petersburg Junior College,

to which he commuted via city bus.

For one year, he lived with his conservative paternal grandparents,

Paul and Caroline Morrison, in a small house

at 314 North Osceola Avenue in nearby Clearwater.

While his bedroom was stacked with books, his grades were average.

Shortly after he finished the school year in the summer of 1962,

Jim first met Mary Werbelow

at Pier 60 on Clearwater Beach.

They instantly became inseparable,

but Mary's father later banned Jim from the Werbelow home

for reasons still unknown.

Do you have any idea why Mary's father

allegedly banned Jim from the Werbelow household?

Well, probably because he didn't want her dating him.

He didn't think he was her type, I'd say.

Bad influence.

When did you first meet Jim Morrison and what was your initial impression?

I met him in the summer of 1963.

I was teaching summer school

and he took a course in Medieval History that I was teaching and...

He was in the class and he came to my office one day.

I had assigned, as part of the coursework,

three short papers on set topics

and he came to say that he just couldn't bear to write on those topics.

He didn't find them interesting.

And he wanted to do a different paper.

And he explained to me that he was very interested in the heresy of the free spirits,

which is a late medieval heresy.

And he wanted to connect that heresy to the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.

And I thought, "Well, that's interesting and rather original."

And I thought, "Well, why not?"

So he wanted to write one large research paper instead of the three papers.

So I said, "Okay."

And then after that, he'd come in and talk to me about the paper.

And I had to walk from my office to another building to the class.

Sometimes he'd walk over with me and we'd talk some.

Jim was a student at St. Pete Junior College,

and Beaux Arts was well-known in the area

as a center for the arts and bohemian type activities,

which Morrison was a big fan of.

It was actually on the off-limits list for St. Pete Junior College

from what I understand.

But that was probably even more of a draw for Jim to come here.

So it was in early fall of '61

that Morrison came here

to Beaux Arts Coffeehouse and first met with Tom Reese.

I was at Beaux Arts art gallery in St. Pete.

I frequently went there because it was sort of an old-fashioned '60s coffeehouse.

And they had an art film theater,

a room for checkers and chess,

a place for folk singers and poetry reading and that sort of thing.

And Tom Reese, who was the owner of the place,

met everybody at the front door,

announced all the events, showed all the movies.

So in terms of their--

With all due respect to both of them,

do you know, did they have an actual relationship in that regard?

Not that Tom would admit.

Tom was always very elusive about that.

And so he never admitted that to me,

although I suspect that that may have happened.

Uh, Morrison was young.

Tom, at the time, probably had coerced him somehow.

Possibly a willing partner too, I don't know.

But, you know, it probably isn't out of the realm of possibility.

And Tom Reese came down one day from the third floor,

which is where everybody went to get high ,

and announced that Jim Morrison would be down in a minute

to read some of his poetry.

And he wanted everybody to gather around to hear the poetry reading.

And a few minutes later, about five minutes later,

Jim kind of sleepily came down.

His pupils were very small and fixed.

And he proceeded to read some of his poetry

in a very cool, detached fashion,

which I thought was kind of interesting.

And that lasted about 15 minutes or so.

And then he went back up to the third floor.

Maybe to...

Probably to have a smoke or something else, but...

I understood that mostly he enjoyed heroin.

- Heroin? - Heroin, yes.

- Really? - Yes.

Wow. So heroin-- Was heroin prevalent

or easily available in Clearwater at that time?

Apparently it was.

I knew several other people who used it.

He asked me if he could borrow my car since Mary was there.

I was hesitant because I knew he didn't handle liquor well at all.

But he said, "Look, I'm not drinking. I don't ever drink around Mary."

And I said, "Oh, okay then." And so he did. He borrowed my car.

And the next morning he came to my apartment to return it to me.

Following his year at St. Petersburg Junior College,

Jim transferred to Florida State University in Tallahassee.

Met Jim Morrison when he was introduced to

several of my soon-to-be roommates at Florida State University.

We all assembled in one place to get ready to go over to the house that we had rented.

We had five guys that I was aware of, and we had needed a sixth.

And all I knew was Chris Kallivakos says,

"This is the guy I want to be our sixth man.

His name is Jim Morrison, and I knew him at junior college."

And from that moment on, I knew Jim.

I didn't see a whole lot wrong with him.

Outside of that, his antics and his desire to get attention was annoying.

We knew in no time at all that he was quite the provocateur.

He was a very intelligent guy.

And he was going to be very interesting, to say the least, as a roommate.

Well, I'll tell you one thing. I caught him doing one day.

I went into his room.

I wasn't looking for him.

I went into his room, and he was naked,

squatting down over a mirror on the floor.

And I said, "Jim, what are you doing?"

He said, "I'm contemplating my anus."

I said, "Your what?"

He said, "I am contemplating my anus."

And with that, you know, I said, "Okay."

"I'm leaving."

We soon discovered, however, that this talent for provocation

was continuous, nonstop, and intense.

That year, they were taking the census,

and they came to that house, wanted to know who lived in that house,

and they wanted to fill it all out.

Well, they were interviewing me at the time,

and I was telling them, because I answered the door, and I didn't know it,

but Jim was behind me in the living room

doing a handstand with no clothes on.

His provocation of people never appeared to be

with a mean streak involved.

He was simply curious about people and was interested in how they might react.

You could find Jim sometimes on a Tallahassee corner

spewing his own poetry whether there was anybody there to listen or not.

He would recite poetry and prose

and anything else he wanted to.

Sometimes he would recite it out loud

and, um, couldn't stop him.

He would just go on, and it didn't matter what you said or did, he wouldn't stop.

Did Jim physically have a notebook

in which he would record reactions to his extreme actions?

"Notebook" is an understatement.

He, at any given time, would have 10 to 12 notebooks going.

He had notebooks with respect to what he was reading,

notebooks with respect to poetry that he was trying to write,

notebooks with respect to the classes that he was taking,

and notebooks with respect to the goings-on each day

within the house and within the school area.

I have to tell you that he was extremely bright.

Probably had an IQ close to--

I don't know, they say genius, you have to be 160 to be a genius,

but my guess is if he wasn't there, he was getting close to it.

The thing I liked best about him

was how rapidly he revealed the depth of his intellectual capabilities.

It was clear that he was one of the most well-read individuals

I've ever encountered in my life.

Not only had he read the masters at that age,

but he was able to quote from them frequently,

understand them, explain them.

He was a true intellectual, a type of person I'd never encountered before,

and that's what I liked about him the most.

He was an A student, English major, had a phenomenal memory.

There was nothing he couldn't memorize first time out. If it went in, it stayed in.

While at Florida State, Jim became a theater arts major

and performed in his one and only stage play, The Dumb Waiter.

The local FSU student newspaper printed a review of the play

and even referred to Jim by his stage name, Stanislaus Boleslawski,

a hybrid of Konstantin Stanislawski,

the Russian creator of method acting,

and Richard Boleslawski, the Polish film director.

For Jim, hiding behind pseudonyms would become a recurring theme.

Jim would interact with girls that came in

as a result of other people's invitations and so forth,

but he never did much in the way of generating any kind of relationships.

And if you ask him about that, it was always, "I'm being true to Mary.

I don't date other girls," and so forth.

I don't think Jim was dating anybody, really, at Florida State.

Werbelow was it, was his girlfriend. She would come up.

But he didn't date. He didn't date anybody.

And his relationship with Mary Werbelow was very interesting

because it seemed like he did not find her in any way threatening,

that she was pure from his point of view.

Pure girl, so to speak,

that he had no reason to be intimidated by or feared or anything else.

So they developed a real loving relationship

that appeared

to depend on her willingness to keep him totally at ease

and feel non-threatened.

So given all that,

and it's obviously speculation, but I'm wondering,

as you were a friend of his,

not long after he told those two guys that he wanted to disappear,

do you feel that's something that he was capable of,

of faking his actual death?

Oh, yes, I think he could.

But the only reason that makes me...

hesitate to think that is because of Mary.

I really do believe that if he were still alive,

he'd have gotten back with Mary.

I was getting a bit dizzy from all the coincidences, so I pulled over for a break.

I called Cheryl, who'd been doing some more digging for me, to hear what she had found.

Hey Jeff, so I did the research you asked me to do

regarding Jim's Social Security number,

and I think you're gonna be surprised by what I found.

- What is it? - Well, Jim Morrison's

Social Security number, apparently is still active.

- How? - Isn't that crazy?

- Have you ever seen anything like this before? - No, never.

I know it could take a while for government agencies to update their systems,

but that was 50 years ago.

- And there's more. - Okay.

Jim's Social has been current as of 2014 in Rochester, New York,

which is less than an hour from where you are now.

Holy shit.

- But there's even more. - Yeah?

That guy, Frank, you were interviewing,

according to the database, he may have two Social Security numbers.

- Two? - I'll send it to you.

- Seriously? - I don't know how to explain it.

You could really be onto something.

After hanging up with Cheryl,

my mind was spinning about Jim Morrison's Social Security number

still being active,

and Frank having two Social Security numbers.

But that paled in comparison to my shock after Cheryl sent me the actual numbers.

Frank's second Social Security number began with the numeric sequence 127.

This dared me to call it yet another coincidence.

A 1989 issue of the Chicago Tribune

reported that labeled on Pam Corson's strong box

was the cipher "127 fascination."

That code had never been cracked.

My inner Sherlock was freaking out.

♪ Our electric friends Just pretend ♪

♪ Our electric friends Just pre-- ♪

♪ Tell me again why, where, when ♪

♪ Should I delete Or hit send? ♪

♪ Element bend See how you trend ♪

♪ Shall we deny or unfriend? ♪

♪ Tell me again why, where, when ♪

♪ Should I delete Or hit send? ♪

♪ Goodbye last band See how you trend ♪

♪ Shall we deny or unfriend? ♪