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 were unable to immediately identify the man who had no identification on him. The only items found in the elderly man’s possession were a faded photograph of the Houses of Parliament in London, a dented tin can 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 could not believe their eyes. “I thought it must be a joke,” Jacob Chambers, the chief coroner told Now 8 News. “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 revealed 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,” Chamber 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 he could be cremated by authorities and the death filed as that of an unknown male in his late 60s to early 70s. 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 confirm that the body was indeed 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.
The Jamaican government admitted going along with Marley’s plan, on the understanding they would receive the royalties from his most successful album, Exodus.
Chambers claims the government officials remove the body of Marley, along with the DNA results and the coroners report of death. They then left, warning Chambers and his staff to keep quiet about the matters are they would face – in Chambers words – “serious consequences.”
