The Hayvenhurst Years

June 25, 2009, the rented Holmby Hills home at 100 North Carolwood Drive. Michael Joseph Jackson, fifty, the King of Pop, is found in cardiac arrest in his second-floor bedroom by his personal physician Conrad Murray. He has been preparing for the This Is It fifty-show comeback residency at the O2 Arena in London. He is pronounced dead at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center at 2:26 p.m. The cause of death is propofol intoxication. Murray is convicted of involuntary manslaughter in November 2011 and serves two years.

Keisha Morgan's biography opens earlier — in Gary, Indiana, where Michael was born in 1958, the eighth of ten children of a Gary Steel Works crane operator and a Jehovah's Witness homemaker — and follows the arc through the long Jackson 5 Motown years, the 1979 Off the Wall, the November 1982 Thriller that became the best-selling album of all time, the Bad and Dangerous and HIStory albums, the long Neverland Ranch years and the 1993 Jordan Chandler settlement, the 2003 Santa Barbara County criminal indictment and the 2005 trial that acquitted him on all counts, the long Bahrain and Las Vegas and Ireland exiles, the 2009 This Is It comeback announcement, and the June 25 death.

What emerges is a portrait of the King of Pop — the best-selling solo recording artist in history and the subject of the most thoroughly documented child-sexual-abuse allegations of any major American entertainer of the late twentieth century, a record the Leaving Neverland documentary of 2019 has continued to compel the country to read.