B.B. King was NOT poisoned before his death reveals autopsy, as tests show blues legend died from natural causes stemming from Alzheimer's disease

B.B. King was POISONED, say his daughters: Children accuse blues legend's aides of killing him

• Autopsy findings made public on Monday showed King's cause of death was also attributed to other physical conditions
• The conditions include coronary disease, heart failure and the effects of Type 2 diabetes, coroner said
• He also said tests didn't detect any substances that might have hastened King's death
• Karen Williams and Patty King had previously said their father's business manager and personal assistant hastened his death
• B.B. King died in hospice care at home in Las Vegas at age 89 

Medical examiners found no evidence to prove the allegation that blues legend B.B. King was poisoned before he died of natural causes in May, according to autopsy findings.

Tests conducted - after two of the musical icon's 11 adult children said their father had been murdered - showed the cause of death was Alzheimer's disease plus physical conditions including coronary disease, heart failure and the effects of Type 2 diabetes, Clark County Coroner John Fudenberg told The Associated Press.  

Daughters Karen Williams and Patty King had said through their attorney, Larissa Drohobyczer, that King's business manager, LaVerne Toney, and his personal assistant, Myron Johnson, hastened their father's death.

The autopsy results were made public on Monday and Drohobyczer didn't immediately respond to messages.

Brent Bryson, a lawyer for King's estate, called the claims against Toney and Johnson defamatory and libelous.

'Ms. Toney and Mr. Johnson are very happy that these false and fictional allegations that were made against them by certain of Mr. King's children have been dispelled,' Bryson said. 

'Hopefully we can now focus on the body of musical work that B.B. King left the world, and he can finally rest in peace.'

Police were awaiting the coroner's findings which Fudenberg said close official investigations of King's death. Homicide Lt. Dan McGrath said there is no active police investigation.

The allegations drew intense interest while the daughters led a group of several of King's surviving adult children and grandchildren in an unsuccessful bid to wrest guardianship and oversight of the King estate from Toney.

Williams, Patty King and daughters Rita Washington and Barbara Winfree had Drohobyczer contest their father's will. 

They enlisted prominent national attorneys Benjamin Crump and Jose Baez to investigate whether B.B. King was properly cared for before he died. Crump and Baez didn't immediately respond on Monday to messages.

B.B. King died in hospice care at home in Las Vegas at age 89. No family members were present.

King's physician, Dr. Darin Brimhall, and the coroner attributed his death at that time to natural causes — a series of small strokes caused by atherosclerotic vascular disease as a consequence of a long battle with blood sugar fluctuations and type 2 diabetes. The medical term was multi-infarct dementia.

Fudenberg said on Monday that the autopsy found evidence of cerebrovascular disease and mini-strokes similar to those described earlier. 

'Considering the information available to any clinical physician at the time, multi-infarct dementia was a reasonable conclusion to reach,' he said.

Tests didn't detect any substances that might have hastened King's death, Fudenberg said.

The autopsy to collect tissue samples was conducted May 24 — 10 days after King died, two days after a public viewing in Las Vegas drew more than 1,000 fans and mourner and one day after a family-and-friends memorial drew 350 people to a downtown Las Vegas funeral chapel.

A Beale Street procession and memorial took place May 27 in Memphis, Tennessee followed by burial May 30 in King's hometown of Indianola, Mississippi.

Bryson told a probate judge in Las Vegas last month that Brimhall and two other doctors determined that King received appropriate medical and hospice care, and that Toney was fulfilling King's will and wishes.

Toney worked for King for 39 years and had power-of-attorney over his business affairs. She is named in King's will, filed in January 2007, as executor and beneficiary.

The value of the estate that hasn't been publicly disclosed.

Bryson has said it wasn't expected to amount to the tens of millions of dollars suggested during a guardianship fight before King's death.

Drohobyczer has said she thinks the estate is worth between $5 million and $10 million.

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Legendary Blues Guitarist B.B. King Dead At Age 89 {VIDEO+PICS}

• King died in his sleep May 14 in Las Vegas after a series of diabetic strokes
• Karen Williams and Patty King allege business manager LaVerne Toney and personal assistant Myron Johnson poisoned their father
• Homicide detectives are investigating
• Autopsy was performed Sunday on King's embalmed body
• The King family previously said they weren't allowed to see father's body 
• Over 1,000 gathered for a memorial in Vegas on Saturday 

Two B.B. King heirs who've been most outspoken about the blues legend's final days are accusing King's two closest aides of poisoning him.

Daughters Karen Williams and Patty King allege in documents provided by their lawyer to The Associated Press that King's business manager, LaVerne Toney, and his personal assistant, Myron Johnson, killed their father.

Clark County Coroner John Fudenberg said Monday that an autopsy was performed Sunday on King's embalmed body, and test results will take up to eight weeks.

Las Vegas police Lt. Ray Steiber confirmed that homicide detectives are investigating.

Toney and Johnson each declined to comment.

The coroner says King's body has been returned to a mortuary, and the investigation shouldn't delay planned memorials this week in Memphis, Tennessee, and Indianola, Mississippi.

Williams and Patty King - along with sisters Rita Washington and Barbara King Winfree, and brother Willie King — first raised suspicions last week during a viewing of King's body.

They said Thursday that they didn't think their father looked like himself.

Williams and Patty King accused King's longtime business agent Toney of keeping them from seeing their father for a week after he died May 14 at home at age 89 — and of preventing them from taking photos of him in his casket.

'A picture paints 1,000 words,' Patty King said as she showed cellphone images of the same family group with their father at his birthday in September. 

'He loved his children.'

The five family members refer to themselves as a family board. 

B.B. King is survived by eleven of his 15 children.

Toney, who worked for King for 39 years, has retained power-of-attorney over his affairs and estate despite several court challenges by Williams and Patty King.

Toney told AP she's doing what B.B. King said he wanted.

'They want to do what they want to do, which is take over, I guess,' Toney said of the family group. 'But that wasn't Mr. King's wishes. Mr. King would be appalled.'

B.B. King's will, dated Jan. 18, 2007, and filed Wednesday under his birth name, Riley B. King, appoints Toney as sole executor of his affairs. Another daughter, Riletta Williams, was second in line, but she died last September.

Toney is banning the media and photographs of any kind during the public viewing from 3 to 7 p.m. at the Palm Mortuary on South Jones Boulevard.

Funeral director Matt Phillips said viewers will be able to file past the open casket and security officials will prevent photos. The media won't be allowed inside.

King's eldest daughter, Shirley King, who isn't part of the group, has booked a Las Vegas Strip venue for what she said will be a free musical tribute event starting an hour after the public viewing ends.

'I don't want to be part of the argument over his life,' said Shirley King, who lives in Chicago and performs as Daughter of the Blues.

She booked a room at the Brooklyn Bowl Las Vegas at the Linq promenade to open at 8 p.m. Friday for what she said will be live music and remembrances.

'I don't want to fight with family. I don't want to fight with management,' she said. 'When everybody gets through being sad about him leaving, I want them to come out and let the good times roll and be happy about his life.'

Saturday's 11 a.m. memorial service at a Palm Mortuary chapel near downtown Las Vegas was announced as a gathering for family and friends only, but Toney said she doesn't know who will attend.

Plans then call for a Wednesday procession with his body down Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee, and a Handy Park tribute.

Officials say the autopsy and investigation will not disturb the memorials. 

After that, King's body will be driven to Mississippi for another ceremony and burial May 30 at the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center in Indianola.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ BB King was being abused by his manager before he was hospitalized with a minor heart attack, according to blues legend's daughter {VIDEO}

B.B. King believed anyone could play the blues, and that "as long as people have problems, the blues can never die."

But no one could play the blues like B.B. King, who died Thursday night at age 89 in Las Vegas, where he had been in hospice care.

Although he kept performing well into his 80s, the 15-time Grammy winner suffered from diabetes and other problems. He collapsed during a concert in Chicago last October, later blaming dehydration and exhaustion.

For generations of blues musicians and rock 'n rollers, King's plaintive vocals and soaring guitar playing style set the standard for an art form born in the American South and honored and performed worldwide. After the deaths of Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters decades ago, King was the greatest upholder of a tradition that inspired everyone from Jimi Hendrix and Robert Cray to the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton.

King played a Gibson guitar he affectionately called Lucille, with a style that included beautifully crafted single-string runs punctuated by loud chords, subtle vibratos and bent notes, building on the standard 12-bar blues and improvising like a jazz master.

The result could hypnotize an audience, no more so than when King used it to full effect on his signature song, "The Thrill is Gone." After seemingly make his guitar shout and cry in anguish as he told the tale of forsaken love, he ended the lyrics with a guttural shouting of the song's final two lines: "Now that it's all over, all I can do is wish you well."

His style was unusual. King didn't like to sing and play at the same time, so he developed a call-and-response, and let Lucille do some of the talking.

"Sometimes I just think that there are more things to be said, to make the audience understand what I'm trying to do more," King told The Associated Press in 2006. "When I'm singing, I don't want you to just hear the melody. I want you to relive the story, because most of the songs have pretty good storytelling."

The blues is a lifetime gig and King kept at it even as his health declined, playing more than 100 shows a year well into his 80s. He believed touring extended his lifespan. "I got a chance to ride today on a very nice bus and from my window I can see how beautiful this country is and how nice it is to be alive," he said once. "That to me is like extra vitamins."

From 1950 to 1970, he traveled about 300 days a year and spent the remaining days in the studio. In 1956, he and his band played 342 one-nighters. By 1967, he had made 30 albums and 225 singles. Even in 1989, he was away from his Las Vegas home about 300 days, but it was no longer mostly one-night stands.

Keith Richards would recall touring nonstop with the Rolling Stones during the mid-1960s, then adding "That's nothing. I mean, tell that to B.B. King and he'll say, 'I've been doing it for years.'"

King enjoyed acclaim and considerable commercial success, acting the gentleman onstage and off. The blues was born of despair, but King worked in many moods, and he encouraged black youngsters in particular to make positive choices.

"Most of the time when people say blues, it's pretty negative," King told a Houston audience in February 1992. "But I'm here to tell you, blues is a label that people put on a music that was started by black people, and you can choose between the negative and the positive."

King was named the third greatest guitarist of all time by Rolling Stone magazine (after Hendrix and Duane Allman, who died in their 20s, an age when King was just getting started). He won 15 Grammys and sold more than 40 million records worldwide, a remarkable number for blues. He was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. His album "Live at the Regal" was declared a historic sound and permanently preserved in the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry.

His playing style influenced performers from Otis Rush and Buddy Guy to Clapton, Hendrix, John Mayall and Mike Bloomfield.

Musicians even named a section of the guitar's neck after their blues idol, dubbing it the "B.B. box." Usually located from the 10th to 12th frets, depending on the key of the song, it's where King twisted and scorched many of his signature guitar licks.

"Mr. King's electric guitar can sing simply, embroider and drag out unresolved harmonic tensions to delicious extremes," The New York Times wrote in a review of a King appearance in June 1992. "It shrinks and swells with the precision of the human voice."

Among his Grammys: best traditional blues album: "A Christmas Celebration of Hope," and best pop instrumental performance for "Auld Lang Syne" in 2003; best male rhythm 'n' blues performance in 1971 for his "The Thrill Is Gone"; best ethnic or traditional recording in 1982 for the album "There Must Be a Better World Somewhere." A collaboration with Clapton, "Riding With the King," won a Grammy in 2001 for best traditional blues recording.

Riley B. King was born Sept. 16, 1925, on a tenant farm near Itta Bena in the Mississippi Delta. His parents separated when he was 4, and his mother took him to the even smaller town of Kilmichael. She died when he was 9, and when his grandmother died as well, he lived alone in her primitive cabin, raising cotton to work off debts.

"I was a regular hand when I was 7. I picked cotton. I drove tractors. Children grew up not thinking that this is what they must do. We thought this was the thing to do to help your family," King said.

His father eventually found him and took him back to Indianola. When the weather was bad and King couldn't work the fields, he walked 10 miles to a one-room school. He quit in the 10th grade.

A preacher uncle taught him the guitar, and King didn't play and sing blues in earnest until he was away from his religious household, in basic training with the Army during World War II. He listened to and was influenced by both blues and jazz players: T. Bone Walker, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lonnie Johnson, Django Reinhardt and Charlie Christian.

His first break came with gospel — singing lead and playing guitar with the Famous St. John's Gospel Singers on Sunday afternoons from the studio of WGRM radio in Greenwood, Mississippi.

But he soon split for Memphis, Tennessee, where his career took off after Sonny Boy Williamson let him play a song on WKEM.

By 1948, King earned a daily spot on WDIA, the first radio station in America to program entirely by African-Americans for African-Americans, as "the Pepticon Boy," pitching the alcoholic tonic between his live blues songs.

Until then, he had been known as Riley King. He needed a better nickname. The station manager dubbed him the Beale Street Blues Boy, because he had played for tips in a Beale Street park. Soon, it was B.B., and it stuck.

Initial success came with his third recording, of "Three O'Clock Blues" in 1950. He hit the road, and rarely paused thereafter.

King made his first European tour in 1968, played in 14 cities with the Rolling Stones in 1969, and made TV appearances, from "Sesame Street" to "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air." In 1989, he appeared in "Rattle and Hum," a film about U2, and toured with that band.

Music brought him from Mississippi's dirt roads to black-tie meetings with world leaders. He gave a guitar to Pope John Paul II, and had President Barack Obama singing to his "Sweet Home Chicago."

In 2005, the Mississippi House and Senate declared Feb. 15 to be B.B. King Day. The blues great said he had never set foot in the Mississippi Capitol until then. He wiped away tears, and described it as his most proud moment.

"I tell you I was in Heaven. I was so happy that I cried. I don't do that often in public, but the water just came. I couldn't help it," King said later.

King lived in Las Vegas, but Mississippi was his home.

In the early 1980s, King donated about 8,000 recordings — mostly 33, 45 and 78 rpm records, but also some Edison wax cylinders — to the University of Mississippi, launching a blues archive that researchers still use today. He also supported the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center in Indianola, a $10 million, 18,000-square-foot structure, built around the cotton gin where King once worked.

"I want to be able to share with the world the blues as I know it — that kind of music — and talk about the Delta and Mississippi as a whole," he said at the center's groundbreaking in 2005.

The museum not only holds his personal papers, but hosts music camps and community events focused on health challenges including diabetes, which King suffered from for years. At his urging, Mississippi teenagers work as docents, not only at the center but also at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

"He's the only man I know, of his talent level, whose talent is exceeded by his humility," said Allen Hammons, a museum board member.

In a June 2006 interview, King said there are plenty of great musicians now performing who will keep the blues alive.

"I could name so many that I think that you won't miss me at all when I'm not around. You'll maybe miss seeing my face, but the music will go on," he said.

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Blues Legend B.B. King Hospitalized With Diabetes Related Dehydration (Video)

BB King's daughter has accused his manager of abusing him.

Patty King said the blues legend's long time handler Laverne Toney refused to let her take him to hospital after he'd suffered a heart attack.

According to TMZ, there is an ongoing battle between Patty and Toney, who lives with the 89-year-old in Las Vegas.

Scroll down for video  

Patty reportedly became worried when her father wouldn't eat and his urine turned orange, and decided to take him to hospital

But when Toney - who has the power of attorney over the guitarist - refused, his daughter called the police.

Responding officers concurred that he needed medical attention and summoned paramedics, who then brought him to hospital.

It was there doctors diagnosed he had had a mild heart attack.

Patty and her boyfriend have already accused Toney of elder abuse, as well as burglary. In November they filed a police report accusing her of fleecing up to $30million and several items of jewelry from the 16-time Grammy winner, as well as withholding his medication.

While police investigated the accusations, no charges were filed against her.

BB, whose real name is Riley B. King, was also hospitalized in early April suffering from dehydration, caused by the type II diabetes he has lived with for 20 years.

He was released hours later and reassured fans by posting a message on his official website: 'I want to thank everyone for their concern and good wishes. I'm feeling much better and am leaving the hospital today.'

The musician was known as one of the most robust in the industry, playing as many as 300 shows per year throughout his long career.

He toured as recently as last year, but was forced to drop out suffering from dehydration and exhaustion after a show in Chicago.

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Legendary blues guitarist B.B. King was hospitalized in Las Vegas over the weekend with dehydration related to diabetes.

However, King's daughter, Claudette, told the Los Angeles Times, that her father was doing "much better."

Born Riley B. King, the 89-year-old Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee was diagnosed with the disease more than two decades ago.

His hits include 1950's R&B piece "Three O'Clock Blues," 1970's "The Thrill Is Gone" and 1989's "When Love Comes to Town," a collaboration with U2.

King, born in Mississippi, began his recording career in the 1940s and has released more than 50 albums, according to his official website.

Also known as the "King of the Blues," King was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. Rolling Stone and Gibson have ranked him among the greatest guitar players of all time.