Conrad Murray

Conrad Robert Murray is a former Grenadian cardiologist who was the personal physician of Michael Jackson and was bedside in 2009 when Jackson died. In 2011, Murray was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in Jackson's death for having inadvertently overdosed him with a powerful surgical anesthetic, propofol, which was being improperly used as a bedtime sleep agent. Murray served roughly two years out of his original four-year prison sentence.

Murray was born on February 19, 1953, and was raised by his maternal grandparents, who were farmers in Grenada until he joined his mother, Milta, in Trinidad and Tobago when he was seven years old. He grew up poor in Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago. He did not meet his father, Rawle Andrew, also a physician until he was 25. Andrew, who died in 2001, was devoted to providing medical services to the poor. Murray finished high school and worked as a volunteer elementary school teacher in Trinidad for a while.

 After teaching, he worked to save up for college tuition as a customs clerk and insurance underwriter. In 1973, Murray moved to Houston, Texas, where his father worked, to attend Texas Southern University, and graduated magna cum laude with a degree in pre-med and biological sciences. Murray continued his education at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, the same school his father attended and the first medical school in the Southern United States for African Americans. 

He began his internal medicine residency at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Murray completed it at the Loma Linda University Medical Center in California. He then completed a cardiology fellowship at the University of Arizona. Murray worked at the Sharp Memorial Hospital in San Diego as a cardiology fellowship training program associate director. In 1990, he opened a private practice in Las Vegas. In 2006, he founded the Acres Homes Heart and Vascular Institute in Houston. 

Murray met Michael Jackson in 2006 in Las Vegas and treated his daughter Paris when she fell ill. Jackson hired Murray to be his exclusive personal physician prior to his tour in July 2009. Jackson insisted that Murray be employed by his show promoter, AEG Live, for $150,000 monthly. However, AEG later claimed that there was never a contract with Murray. Murray and AEG agree that Murray was never paid. 

In 2018, Murray released a memoir; This Is It!, which detailed his experience as Michael Jackson's physician and told of having treated Mother Teresa. Murray wrote, However, my most magnanimous and noble patient is also deceased. She was the quintessential world-renowned nun who is now a saint: Mother Theresa. I loved how I dedicated my services to her; it was selfless because when I agreed to serve her, I had no idea then that she was widely known.

The book was poorly received by critics, with The A.V. Club calling it "literary poison with no antidote" and The Daily Telegraph describing its "thousand words of self-aggrandizing, poorly punctuated and repetitive text."In May 2009, Murray began working as Jackson's personal physician. By then, he had reportedly fathered seven children by six different women. He was in arrears on the mortgage for the Las Vegas home occupied by his first wife and children and owed child support to the mothers of children outside of his marriage, which he could not pay due to the amount of money he owed to Michael Jackson's family. 

He married Blanche, his second wife, whom he met at medical school, and helped pay rent for another woman, Nicole Alvarez. Murray met Alvarez at a gentlemen's club in Las Vegas when she worked as a stripper, and Alvarez gave birth to their son Che Giovanni Murray in March 2009.[9] Another relationship with a cocktail waitress from Houston was also reported.

Murray was at risk of losing his California medical license due to unpaid child support to one of his children and owed $13,000 to a California woman, Nenita Malibiran. Murray was a defendant in numerous civil lawsuits (though none for medical malpractice). By 2008, he had accumulated over $600,000 in court judgments against him for medical equipment and unpaid rent for his practices in Texas and Nevada. He also owed $71,000 for student loans at Meharry Medical College. Murray had filed for bankruptcy in 2002 in California.