At 6:15 in the morning on August 28, 1970, the telephone rang at a hotel in Las Vegas. The wife of one of Elvis Presley’s closest friends picked it up. The anonymous voice on the other end said that Elvis was going to “get it” the following night.
Forty-five minutes later, the same caller rang back with more detail: a killer, described as a madman, was going to shoot Elvis, and he had a gun fitted with a silencer. Then came the demand — $50,000 to reveal the name of the man who would do it.
This wasn’t the first call. Two days earlier, a hotel security guard had been told Elvis would be kidnapped that same evening. The next day, Colonel Tom Parker got a similar message. And a couple of hours after the shooting threat, something arrived in Elvis’s mail at the hotel that made everyone’s blood run cold. It was a hotel menu with Elvis’s photograph on it. His face had been scratched out, and someone had drawn a gun pointing at his heart. At the bottom were four words: “Guess who, and where?” Even the handwriting was disturbing — the message had been written backward.
The FBI got involved. Agents examined the menu and could not lift a single fingerprint from it. Nobody could tell whether they were dealing with a serious plot or an extortionist with a vivid imagination — which, if you’re the man whose heart the gun is pointed at, is not a comforting distinction.
The FBI Told Elvis A Man In The Audience Was Paid To Kill Him He Went On Stage Anyway
Elvis’s bodyguard Red West described the moment he saw his boss after that call, and it’s the most human detail in the whole story. “Elvis just stumbled into my arms and hugged me,” he said. “There was no doubt that he was taking this very seriously. So were we.”
And then he went on stage. Priscilla later described what that night actually looked like from the inside. They’d been tipped off that a woman in the audience was carrying a gun and had threatened to shoot him. “A true professional,” Priscilla wrote, “Elvis insisted on going on.” So they built a plan around him. He was told to stay downstage, further back, to make himself a smaller target. Bodyguard Sonny West was positioned ready to throw himself in front of Elvis at the first suspicious movement in the crowd. Red West sat out in the audience alongside FBI agents. The Memphis Mafia were spread through the room, armed. Elvis himself is widely said to have gone out carrying a gun.
Elvis Presley – The Complete 10 August 1970 Opening Show – Las Vegas
Picture that for a second. Two thousand people watching a man sing love songs in a spangled suit, and not one of them knowing that the men standing around the room were watching hands, not faces.
Nothing happened. Elvis got through the entire show unharmed, and no attacker was ever found. But afterward, he gave his bodyguards an instruction that revealed exactly how his mind worked. If anyone ever did kill him, he said, they were to get to the man before the police did — because he could not stand the thought of somebody sitting in a jail cell bragging to reporters that they had killed the King of Rock and Roll.