Conrad Murray

Conrad Robert Murray (born February 19, 1953) is a Grenadian-American former cardiologist who was the personal physician of Michael Jackson, providing medical treatment to help him sleep on the day Jackson died in 2009.

Conrad Robert 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.

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 an associate director of its cardiology fellowship training program.

In 1990, he opened a private practice in Las Vegas.

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.

After teaching, he worked as a customs clerk and insurance underwriter to save up for college tuition.

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.

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.

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 May 2009, Murray began working as Jackson's personal physician.

By that time, 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 was married to 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.

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).

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 a little less than two years out of his original four-year prison sentence.

In 2018, Murray released a memoir, This Is It!, which detailed his experience as Michael Jackson's physician and tells of having treated Mother Teresa.

Murray wrote,

However my most magnanimous and noble patient is also deceased.

She was the world-renowned quintessential nun who is now a saint: Mother Theresa.

I loved the way I dedicated my services to her, it was totally selfless because when I agreed to serve her, I literally had no idea then that she was widely known…

The A.V. Club called the book "literary poison with no antidote" and The Daily Telegraph said that any revelations it contains are "mired in several thousand words of self-aggrandising, poorly punctuated and repetitive text."

In May 2023, Murray opened his own institute entitled, "DCM Medical Institute" in El Socorro, a suburb of San Juan, Trinidad and Tobago.

Murray is a naturalized U.S. citizen.