When the body of an elderly homeless man was discovered in a
discarded cardboard box behind the back of a fast food joint in downtown
Kingston, Jamaica, coroners had a problem: Who was this mysterious old
man? No identification had been found on the body; indeed, the only
possessions the old man had on him were a faded photograph of the Houses
of Parliament in London, a dented tin containing a small quantity of
marijuana and a battered old guitar.
With no leads to go on, the authorities turned to Jamaica’s national
DNA database. When the results came back from the lab, the coroners
couldn’t believe their eyes.
“I thought it must be a joke,” says Jacob Chambers, the chief
coroner. “My colleague came running into my office waving a piece of
paper in the air. ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ he shouted. I told
him to calm down and explain what all the excitement was about. When he
told me, I couldn’t believe it.”
The results of the DNA test reveled that the old man police had
discovered behind the fast food restaurant was none other than reggae
superstar … BOB MARLEY.
“I stared at the results wide-eyed,” Chambers admits. “My jaw dropped to the floor. This had to be a mistake.”
It had always been presumed Bob Marley had died from cancer in 1981
as he made his way back to Jamaica by plane from Germany. But if that
was the case, why was his elderly body lying on a slab in a downtown
Jamaican morgue? Chambers could come up with only one explanation:
“Naturally I concluded somebody was playing a joke on us, and told my
assistant to label the body as ‘persons unknown’. This would mean it
could be cremated by the authorities and the death filed as that of an
unknown male in his late sixties to early seventies. But it was then
that things got really weird.”
That afternoon, the coroners office was visited by men in sunglasses.
They were wearing dark suits and called themselves ‘government
officials’. They confirmed that the body was indeed that of the late
reggae legend, and that Marley’s death had been faked back in 1981 on
the request of the star who had grown tired of all the attention he was
getting and just wanted to live the quiet life of a street busker in
Jamaica, earning enough for food, reggae tapes for his Walkman and
cannabis. The Jamaican government agreed to go along with Marley’s plan,
on the understanding that they would receive the royalties from his
most successful album, Exodus.
Chambers claims the ‘government officials’ removed the body of
Marley, along with the DNA results and the coroner’s report into the
death. They then left, warning Chambers and his staff to keep quiet
about the matter or they would face – in Chambers’ words – ‘serious
consequences’.
“I decided I couldn’t stay silent about this, despite having no
evidence because the government took it all away to a secret location
somewhere,” says a defiant Chambers. “Bob Marley did not die in 1981,
and I’m damned if I’m going to keep that a secret just because some
shady officials told me to. The truth must be heard, even if that means
the government losing the royalty rights to Exodus, which is a fantastic
album by the way.”
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