Original subtitles

Prince was one of the biggest artists of the 1980s.

He was huge.

He had this magnetism.

The Super Bowl performance,

that's going to go down in history.

It's clear that you were head and shoulders above

pretty much everybody else in the world of music.

People throw "genius" around,

but man, Prince was such a genius.

They found Prince lying on his side in the elevator.

He was pronounced dead.

Prince was, like, everything to me growing up.

He got me through my middle school.

He got me through my high school, my ups and downs.

When we got it was him, and that was crazy, man.

In the days after his death, there's chatter online

about what actually killed him.

He was a person that seemed to live a really healthy lifestyle.

A lot of the stuff just didn't add up.

When I got the news, it was kind of like, "What?"

It doesn't make any sense to me.

He's 57, so he's fairly young for the icon.

Over the years, there were all sorts of wild theories.

It was reported that Prince had AIDS.

They killed Prince.

Stevie Nicks says Prince might have killed himself.

Someone out there knows something about this

and is keeping their mouth shut.

You know, loose lips sink ships.

So some ships is getting ready to be sunk.

911 emergency.

The official narrative doesn't tell the whole story.

But you really have to look at everything.

You still have to go down that rabbit hole.

You still have to go down that path.

When a celebrity dies,

the search for answers moves online

and the truth may be one click away.

On the morning of April 21st, 2016, a 911 call

is made from 7801 Audubon Road in Chanhassen, Minnesota.

Everyone in town knows the home well,

and its nickname, Paisley Park.

At Paisley Park.

Person down, not breathing.

Emergency services rushed to the scene,

arriving 5 minutes later.

And upon entering the building,

they find the owner and music icon,

Prince, lying in an elevator.

They attempt CPR, but by 10:07 AM,

they are unable to revive him.

Prince is pronounced dead.

When they said that there was a death at Paisley Park,

my phone started ringing from all over.

People start calling me up.

But when we got it was him, that was crazy, man.

There's a ton of things that hit me all at once.

The one is that I felt for him being by himself.

You know, someone like him in a situation like that.

That was hard to take.

News of Prince's death

causes an outpouring of grief worldwide.

Prince was, like, everything to me growing up.

He got me through my middle school.

He got me through my high school, my ups and downs.

He was a hell of a musician.

He played 14 instruments.

He wrote all of his own music.

Gifted musician. He was a gifted person.

In public gatherings and online forums,

people pay tribute to Prince.

He's dead, and it is a very sad day for me right now.

Prince's musical journey starts from a very young age

growing up in Minneapolis.

Our family is incredibly close and nurturing.

So we go back and forth to each other's homes.

Prince is already at five playing commercials off TV.

"I Dream of Jeannie".

"Get Smart".

I'm dating myself, but I don't care

because the '60s were funky.

This is a kid.

People throw "genius" around.

I'm telling you, man, you know what it's like

when you really around something real special.

Prince explodes onto the music scene

and scores a recording contract at just 19 years old.

My first memory of Prince was watching him on TV in 1984.

Prince was in his early 20s. He put out "Purple Rain".

And that's what took him from being a star

to being a superstar.

Prince was one of the biggest artists of the 1980s.

He had number one after number one.

And on top of it all, his music was revolutionary.

But it isn't just his music that makes an impact.

It was this magnetism that people wanted to watch him.

He's a little bit androgynous.

Women thought he was sexy.

Guys didn't feel intimidated by him.

And then on top of it all, you can't discount the fact

that his music was really, really good.

Six weeks after Prince's death, the Midwest medical examiner

releases the results of his autopsy.

I'm going, "What is it?

Tell me what it is."

The official cause of Prince's death

is an accidental overdose of the opioid fentanyl,

a synthetic drug up to 50 times more powerful than heroin.

His family and friends just can't believe it.

Man, let me tell you something, man, you know the drug scene?

He was totally against it.

Cigarettes, anything.

From when I heard that,

immediately, it hit me different.

I was like, "You know, Prince?"

- Just doesn't sound like him. - Doesn't make any sense.

It was a surprise for pretty much everybody.

They were saying that he's an addict.

I never saw any signs of any addiction.

Like, a lot of this stuff just doesn't add up.

And naturally, given the subject matter,

within days of Prince's death, online theories start to form.

From the possible to the outlandish,

it seems that everyone in the world

has a different opinion on how he really died.

My name is Deanna Thompson.

I am an IT specialist, and I specialize

in data analytics and database construction.

I am a web sleuth at night, and on my weekends, to try

and find people behind crimes that occur on the Internet.

The reports on the autopsy was that Prince died

from a fentanyl overdose.

And it was kind of like, "What?"

He lived very clean, right?

He was a vegetarian.

He didn't drink.

He didn't smoke.

He didn't even want people to curse around him.

Like, he was a very clean, healthy lifestyle.

It doesn't make any sense to me, at all.

When I heard that Prince died, it's like my heart sank.

It's like, another celebrity, another famous singer.

We lost Michael Jackson,

we lost Whitney Houston, and then we lose Prince.

It's like, what's going on in the music industry

where we're losing these talented artists

at such young ages?

That's the first thought that went through my mind

when I heard that Prince died.

My background is Army counterintelligence,

also forensics and law enforcement.

So I'm trying to get inside of his head, you know,

but there's just a lot of different scenarios

that may have gone through his mind.

Unfortunately, there's still a lot of gaps of time

that are unaccounted for.

You know, when you're doing, like, an investigation

into somebody's death, you want to get, like, a timeline

of, like, their last couple days.

Especially if there's, like, shenanigans going on.

As online detectives start to piece together the timeline,

they find that six days before his death,

Prince flies to Atlanta

to play a sold out show at the Fox Theater.

In an article in "The Guardian",

it's reported that Prince arrived an hour before

he was supposed to be on stage, got up on stage,

had a flawless performance, no after party,

which was highly unusual, and left right away.

According to TMZ, some pretty alarming things

happened on that flight home.

The plane had to make an emergency landing

in Moline, Illinois, because Prince became unresponsive.

Prince was taken to a local hospital,

but he didn't stay there long.

He was back on the flight a couple of hours later,

back home to Minneapolis.

It was reported that he had the flu.

That's what the press release said.

And he had a party, like, the next day.

So I've been working as an investigative journalist

for a little over a decade now, and I've been fascinated

by the details of the last days of Prince's life.

It seemed like overall, Prince was doing pretty well.

A couple of days after that party,

he went out to a local jazz club in Minneapolis.

People recall seeing Prince cycling around Paisley Park

and outside of a pharmacy.

The last images we have of Prince

are at a local doctor's office.

I found a video on YouTube and it said Prince visits

his doctor's office the day before his death.

Alright?

So I'm like, "Yeah, I'm watching that."

So, in the video, you see Kirk Johnson,

which was, like, Prince's, like, best friend and bodyguard.

You see the doctor open the door, let them into the hallway,

and all three of them disappear out of frame.

An hour later, all three of them come back into frame.

They're leaving,

and the doctor's, like, walking them out.

They leave, Prince waves goodbye,

and they get in the car and drive away.

And that was the day before Prince died.

According to police interviews, Prince's bodyguard, Kirk,

and his personal assistant, Meron,

were the last to see him alive that night.

Prince was alone in Paisley Park overnight,

and his body wasn't discovered until morning.

Prince was wildly popular.

Just to die alone in an elevator.

I mean, that was strange to me.

More than a dozen police cars pulled into Paisley Park,

some of them unmarked.

Over the next two years,

the police do a full investigation of Prince's death.

The investigation into Prince's death is pretty intense.

It involves various local, state,

and federal investigators.

In April 2018, they released their findings.

There is no evidence to suggest any sinister motive,

intent, or conspiracy to murder Prince.

When testing the pills,

the police lab makes a stunning discovery.

The fentanyl that killed Prince was disguised

as a regular painkiller.

There is no evidence that the pill or pills

that actually killed Prince were prescribed by a doctor.

In all likelihood, Prince had no idea

he was taking a counterfeit pill that could kill him.

The investigation concluded that Prince didn't even know

the drug he was taking actually contained fentanyl.

It's definitely not impossible

that somebody had switched out his medication

or given him different medication

than the one he asked for.

Investigators were never able to determine

the source of this fake Vicodin.

A lot of folks conclude it must be something nefarious.

First, you have Michael Jackson,

who walks away from Sony

and then he dies.

Well, now you have Prince who gets the rights to his music

and he also dies.

People are talking and there's chatter online

about what actually killed him, and it's worth a look.

With the official investigation closed,

the remaining mysteries of Prince's death

ignite an online wave of speculation.

It's definitely worthwhile for a group of citizen detectives

to look at a case after law enforcement

has conducted their investigation.

Sleuths dive deep into the emerging conspiracy theories

around Prince's untimely death.

Was it possible that somebody in his entourage did something?

Was there some other underlying health problems

Prince was suffering from that we didn't know about?

Is it possible that Prince was killed

because he was exposing a secret government program?

Not only do Prince and his family deserve justice,

but Prince's fans and the general public,

they deserve that, too.

People are talking. You know, loose lips sink ships,

so some ships is getting ready to be sunk.

Somebody could have swapped out his medication

in an attempt to kill him.

My first thought was, "What did Warner Bros. do to him?"

After Prince died, a lot of people felt

that something wasn't quite right about that official story.

As an investigative journalist,

step one is just compiling everything that's out there,

getting a handle of what's on the record.

As I was sifting through all of this information,

one theory kept popping up.

That Prince's death wasn't an accident, it was murder.

The way in which Prince died definitely lends itself

to some of these theories.

After all, the investigation concluded

that Prince didn't even know

the drug he was taking contained fentanyl.

It definitely means that somebody could have swapped out

his medication or lied to him about the medication

he was getting in an attempt to kill him.

The answers that I'm looking for are,

"Why would somebody want Prince dead?"

He was beloved, right?

Everyone loved Prince.

I've always been a really big Prince fan,

but Prince was always kind of weird.

I mean, he lived in his own world.

He had this weird mansion and his own studio,

and there were all these stories circulating

about the oddness of his life and his genius.

And so probably, inevitably, the fact that his death

was somewhat mysterious

and private led people to believe

that he had been a victim of powerful forces.

When I think about when he died,

my first thought was that he got into a car accident

and my second thought was, "What did Warner Bros. do to him?"

Suspicions around the culprit behind Prince's death emerge.

The idea that Prince was murdered by the music industry

had some pretty high profile backers.

In 2020, Kanye West reportedly tweeted,

"They made us call him crazy, and then they killed him."

So Prince's quarrels with the music industry

go back to the very beginning of his career.

Even as an 18, 19-year-old with his first record contract,

he was fighting for total control of his music,

which is pretty unheard of in the music industry.

And in protest, he would often do kind of elaborate stunts

meant to expose the industry for being as predatory as it is.

He changed his name to a symbol at one point,

going by "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince"

so he can have ownership of his persona

so that they couldn't own him.

And, like, he would write, like, "slave" on his face

and, like, walk the red carpet,

and it was all saying that he was basically a slave

to Warner Bros.

Prince's distrust of the record labels got so intense

that he just tried to cut them out entirely.

He was really one of the first big musicians to market

his music directly to fans without going through a label.

So Prince was a thorn in the side of the music industry.

Some of his most ardent fans are convinced

that played a role in his death.

When he went into that record company and talked to them folks

with that slave thing on him, that's what got him killed.

The idea reaches into some of the darkest corners of the web.

One YouTube account goes by "The Rabbit Hole".

Death is suspicious because 57 is fairly young for the icon.

There's not that many people who know how to navigate

some of the darker corners of the Internet

where a lot of these conspiracy theorist gather and remix

and build on their theories.

I probably, unfortunately, spend a lot of time in these spaces

and know them really well.

So in particular, on Infowars,

they built up this idea that there was these signs

that Prince knew the industry was out to get him.

They point to that Instagram post he made before he died,

captioned, "Just when you thought you were safe."

The idea goes that ever since Prince won

over the rights to his music,

the music industry has been out to get him.

Maybe to prove that artists shouldn't own their music

and to scare off others from doing the same,

or to win back control of that massively lucrative catalog.

And the further you go into the dark corners of the Internet,

the stranger the story becomes,

involving one of the world's most pervasive

conspiracy theories.

So whenever you start talking about the elites

who secretly run things,

whether it's the government or the music industry

or the global financial system,

eventually someone's gonna bring up the Illuminati,

and Prince is no different.

The Illuminati is this sort of shadowy, villainous group

that actually existed in the late 18th century

and disbanded soon thereafter,

but has remained in the background as being this,

you know, powerful, secretive force

that explains how the world actually works.

A lot of these conspiracy theorists see lots of hints

over Prince's career

that suggests that he was pointing the finger

at this secret society.

Whether it was the symbol that he changed his name to

in the '90s

or even the decorations at his home in Minneapolis,

a lot of these conspiracy theorists see these symbols

of the Illuminati everywhere in Prince's music.

What's more, a lot of people who believe in the Illuminati

are also big into numerology,

and Prince loved to pepper his music

and his art with a whole bunch of numbers

that taken together, they say,

is evidence that he was pointing the finger at the Illuminati.

You know, already that Prince had knowledge in his mind

and information about what was going on.

However, the Cabal had another plan,

and that's why at the end, he ended up dying in the elevator.

There is a ton of people who see Prince as a crusader

against this Illuminati cabal,

and they think the Illuminati killed him.

While external forces can't necessarily

be ruled out in Prince's death,

another theory points to something much more personal.

Was he in chronic pain?

Stevie Nicks says Prince might have killed himself.

In 2016, Prince, one of the world's biggest

and most prolific superstars,

dies alone in his Paisley Park mansion.

And mourners, fans, and Internet detectives

debate the true cause of his death.

Many doubt the official explanation,

an accidental drug overdose.

For years, they've known the performer

as a healthy living guru.

I was looking at pictures of Paisley Park

that the police had taken.

His kitchen has, like, all those snacks on the counter.

And it's all health food,

you know, tofu and salads

and fresh fruit.

And he was very, very meticulous

about his diet and what he ate.

He had all of his meals at Paisley Park

prepared by a vegan chef.

He just led a very healthy lifestyle.

But in the wake of Prince's tragic overdose,

rumors circulate online about chronic health issues

that contributed to his death.

Stevie Nicks says, "I think he was probably fractured

from his neck down to his feet."

She thinks Prince might have killed himself.

A growing number of posts and comments claim

debilitating health conditions caused Prince

to deliberately overdose on fentanyl.

With any celebrity death, inevitably, people speculate,

tabloids grab a hold of it, rumors are circulating.

But maybe there's an element of truth to some of those rumors.

Was there some other underlying health problems

Prince was suffering from that we didn't know about?

Prince has had a complicated relationship with his health

since early childhood.

I've never spoken about this before,

but I was born epileptic.

In 2009, Prince shares that he suffered seizures as a child

and his mom and dad

did the best they could with what little they had.

The seizures pass, but as he grows older,

he sees personal health as an important part of his life.

I'm grateful that I grew up with the brother.

We would play tennis, everything, man.

Just stay in shape. Always.

Our sport was music.

We treated it like that.

It was like keeping in shape.

Cigarettes, anything, he was totally against it.

And barely raised his voice.

Just kept that instrument just beautiful.

Just like, "Dude, don't you ever crack?

Don't your voice ever go... "No.

He held the record for never canceling shows.

As sleuths piece together the few months prior to his death,

they uncover some major leads around Prince's health.

Looking at Prince's health history in the months

before his death,

we know that he was going through some changes.

He seemed off, and even his personal chef made comments.

He stated that, you know, Prince's appetite had changed.

It seemed like he was kind of eating less

in the months prior to his death.

It seemed like he was losing weight.

So those could all be symptoms

of some chronic underlying health issue.

And with so much secrecy in the weeks following Prince's death,

the rumors of AIDS gained momentum.

Media reports have quoted anonymous sources

as saying that Prince contracted HIV in mid-'90s,

but condition developed into AIDS six months ago.

"The National Enquirer" published their tabloid

a week after Prince's death,

with a huge headline that said "AIDS Killed Prince".

I can't even begin to imagine

where they came up with that craziness.

Prince had a stigma about him already

because, like, he was, like, oversexualized,

he was effeminate a little bit.

So the AIDS rumors seemed a little bit homophobic to me.

It kind of made me personally, like, gag a little bit,

like, "Ugh."

But there may be a more plausible answer

to Prince's health mysteries.

So this is my mind map for Prince,

and this is basically where I started,

was looking at his health.

So when I first started looking into,

like, what happened to Prince, I don't know what possessed me.

For some reason, I clicked on images

and I was just kind of scrolling through, and there was an image,

and the title, "76 photos of Prince

looking like a bad ass with a cane."

And so when I go to that Pinterest board,

I was like, "Whoa,

I didn't realize he used a can so much," right?

And some of them were of him, you know,

on the red carpet or on stage.

He was very flamboyant in his dress, right?

But when I saw Prince with a cane

walking from, like, his airplane

to, like the, car, that really, like, triggered something in me,

like, "Well, wait, why does he need a cane for that?"

Was he in chronic pain?

Carver County, Minnesota,

the sheriff's office had a link on their website called

"The Prince Investigation",

and they had a treasure trove of information there.

I knew he was in some sort of pain from all the touring,

but that was never really documented

or out in the press as far as I'm aware of.

From what I've learned, in December 1984,

when Prince was rehearsing,

one of the scenes was to be in a bathtub

that was suspended in the air over the stage.

And whatever contraption was used to hold this bathtub

in the air broke

and he fell 10 to 12 feet inside the bathtub to the floor.

His tour manager said that he was never the same again.

His hip and his leg were constantly in pain.

These serious medical issues could have been complicated

by Prince's religious beliefs.

On Websleuths, Reddit,

there's a lot of talk about Prince having hip surgery.

For you and me, that's not gonna be a problem.

But Prince was a very devout Jehovah's Witness.

He went door to door sometimes, even as a famous person.

As a Jehovah's Witness, we can't get a blood transfusion, right?

Because he couldn't get a blood transfusion,

it was somehow complicated and he had a lot of pain from that.

There are those who speculate that this extreme pain

may have caused Prince

to deliberately overdose on fentanyl to end his own life.

Stevie Nicks says, "Fentanyl is the worst of the worst;

way stronger than heroin, morphine, anything...

And he was having to take it

because I think he was probably fractured

from his neck down to his feet.

I don't know in my heart of hearts

whether he just took too much

or did he purposefully take too much?"

Followers of this theory point to an eerie comment

Prince made at his last public appearance,

just a few days before his death.

So April 16th, the day after the emergency landing

and the rush to hospital, Prince puts on a party

as planned at his Paisley Park residence

for a bunch of his friends and fans,

where he showed off a new piano and new guitar he had gotten,

and by all accounts, seemed to be doing all right.

At that party, he said something

that was really interesting.

He said, "Wait a few days before you waste your prayers on me."

And it turned out to be pretty accurate.

And Tyka herself, Prince's sister, has come out

and said that Prince had had a conversation with her,

that he had come here to do everything he had come to do.

But being a family member and kind of watching all that,

I'm going, "None of this is making sense."

While this remains a possibility,

another demon may have been haunting Prince.

On TV, they're saying they don't think he was a drug user.

That's a mistake. He was into some devil business.

In 2018, authorities conclude Prince's death

is from an accidental overdose of fentanyl.

His friends and family are confused

and shocked by this news.

They only knew Prince as a crusader against drugs.

We grew up with alcoholics and people that were on drugs

in our families.

They had a real heavy impact on the family.

We knew that's not what we're gonna be doing.

He was totally against it.

He would come and look at your eyes

and everything when you walk in rehearsal,

because we would experiment stuff like marijuana.

Other artists, they needed to be high to play.

Man, Prince was such a genius.

You should have did the opposite if you seen him

and just say, "Man, maybe I shouldn't get high.

Because look at that."

But despite the public record that Prince avoided drugs,

one online rumor speculates

Prince's death wasn't an accident as reported,

but was maybe the result of a long term drug addiction.

The rumor gains momentum among online theorists

as the police investigation closes

and thousands of documents

and photos of Prince's property are released to the public.

The sheriff's office released thousands

and thousands of photos,

and they did so many search warrants

and you have to go through so much paperwork

and it's in handwriting.

It's not, like, typed up.

And you have to examine each photo,

you have to look at the underlying data.

My eyes were, like, tearing up and, like, almost falling out.

But you have to do it in order to get the truth.

What I found interesting from reading the search warrants...

They found so many pills

scattered throughout Prince's home.

They were in suitcases, they were in sock drawers,

they were in his bathroom,

they were in old bags.

They were hidden all over his house.

There was a Bayer aspirin bottle with 16 white pills.

So I want to know what those are.

You Google C600 stamp... Vicodin.

So I know that the cops took Vicodin from his home

and it was hidden in this Bayer bottle.

Those were the drugs they believe killed him.

The web sleuthing community kicks into overdrive

looking for answers.

It's possible that Prince's drug use explains

the strange emergency landing of his plane

in the lead up to his death.

By all accounts, the shows that he performed in Atlanta

were normal.

Nobody noticed anything out of the ordinary.

But some pretty alarming things happened on that flight home,

as Prince became unresponsive.

When the plane lands, they're met by paramedics on the tarmac

and Prince is still unresponsive.

And so paramedics help get him off the plane.

I did a bunch of research to try to figure out anything

that could provide a clue.

I found because he's unresponsive,

they give him a shot of Narcan.

But he was still unconscious and unresponsive,

so they had to give him a second one, and he woke up.

As an emergency room doctor,

when do we give Narcan?

We give Narcan any time anybody has taken an overdose

of any kind of opioid,

whether that's, you know, morphine

or oxycodone or fentanyl,

any number of them, Narcan will reverse all of them.

But why do emergency responders

immediately give Prince a Narcan shot?

My interpretation of the whole situation as an investigator

is that somebody on the plane

believed that Prince had a possible opioid addiction

and that he took something on the plane

that caused him to become unresponsive.

They probably relayed that information to paramedics,

which is what led paramedics to give Prince

the two shots of Narcan.

The Narcan saves Prince's life,

but raises questions about the length of his drug use

and fuels speculation that Prince might have known

the effects of the drugs he ingested.

From what I've learned,

it appears Prince started taking opioids

when he suffered a fall in 1984.

And then through the years and the decades,

pharmaceutical companies are developing

even stronger narcotics.

During an interview with Carver County Police,

pop star and former collaborator Sinead O'Connor says drugs

were everywhere during Prince's professional life.

In the case of Prince, everyone is mistaken

who believes that he did not have a drug habit.

He used hard drugs commonly.

I know this because I spent time with the man.

His eyeballs literally disappeared out of his head.

This idea that he's only lately

been taking these painkillers is nonsense.

The man has been on very scary, hardcore drugs.

It's suspected that Prince was in rehab in 1994.

If that's true, it shows a very, very long term fight

that he had with opioid addiction.

The very sad thing about opioids is how quickly

and how very strongly they can become addictive.

It only takes four or five days

of regular consumption of opioids

for somebody to develop a tolerance or a dependance.

Dependance means that we start to need opioids

just to feel like ourselves.

It's why these are so addictive.

At the end of the day, only a few people know

if Prince was really aware of the power

of those Fentanyl pills or not.

- What's the mindset? - Like, did he try to start

detoxing from the addiction that night,

and it just... it got to be too much?

It's obviously something that we're never going

to know for sure.

In the wake of this tragedy, two final questions remain...

Who sourced Prince's fentanyl pills,

and do they bear some responsibility for his death?

He touched so many people's lives with his music.

We want to make sure that justice

has been served for Prince.

Who gave it to him?

Like, you know, just gave him something so strong

that he's dead now.

So it's just... it's bizarre.

It's a fact that a powerful opioid caused Prince's death.

But the origins of the fatal pills remain a mystery.

We know that the Vicodin that Prince took was counterfeit,

meaning it was not legally prescribed.

It was illegally manufactured by somebody.

We don't know who. We don't know where.

We don't know how he got it.

Who gave it to him?

Like, you know, gave him something so strong

that he's dead now.

So it's just... it's bizarre.

From the beginning, the police investigation focuses

on Prince's tight knit inner circle,

but they find it difficult to get clear information.

So Prince did a really good job of surrounding himself

with people who were not gonna talk,

and that extended past his death.

He made sure of that.

With the people who he hired, what they knew

and when they knew it,

they haven't gone public with that.

And so you're left kind of relying on police reports,

toxicology reports,

and a lot of speculation about what had happened.

After he died, the inner circle was distancing themselves,

getting lawyers, not talking, being evasive.

So, yeah, I was heavily concerned.

The hunt for the truth about the involvement

of Prince's inner circle has moved online.

There's a website called

princeinvestigationfile5.com,

and it's full of really passionate

Prince Internet sleuths,

and they go through every bit of information available

with a fine tooth comb.

These are really my kind of people.

It has so much information about the sealed lips kind of theory.

And they're very focused on this Kirk Johnson fella.

Kirk Johnson was Prince's former drummer,

and then he became Prince's bodyguard at some point,

and they were obviously very close.

It was Kirk who went to the doctor's office

with Prince during his final days.

In the video, you see Kirk leaving.

He walks out of the door. He gets into the car.

About 10 minutes later, he comes back with a bag,

and I immediately stopped it,

downloaded the video, and opened it up in VLC

and dumped it out frame by frame.

These surveillance cameras aren't that great.

This one's pretty good.

Sometimes, you can find a really clear image of something.

And I did that, and I found an image.

It's definitely a prescription bag.

That bag and its contents match the bag

found by police at Paisley Park.

Kirk had been giving Prince medicine

through his own doctor,

Dr. Michael Schulenberg.

Dr. Schulenberg stated to police

that he prescribed the drugs in Kirk's name

in order to provide privacy and anonymity to Prince.

I can sort of understand that point of view

and that reasoning,

but at the same time, it's just totally illegal.

In Prince's case, because he found a doctor

who was willing to prescribe medication in a different name,

he could have then gone to another doctor

and got a second prescription of the same pills.

I'm not saying he did that because we don't know,

but it would have made it easier for him to doctor shop

if that's something he wanted to do.

According to some online sources,

this activity raises questions about how much Prince's

inner circle really knew about his drug use.

In a 2017 CBS interview, Kirk Johnson

refuses to answer questions on the subject.

Is there anything that you wish you had done

personally to stop his drug use?

I don't like being this. Next.

Would Kirk Johnson know about him being addicted

to pain pills?

- Oh, of course. - He couldn't not know.

One of them knows something

and they're just not telling the truth about it.

The person you work for is dead now and one of you

had to have set up something or gave him something

because he can't do it on his own.

It's very possible that they don't want to be implicated

themselves for providing him with these medications

and basically be criminally implicated in Prince's death.

When the police conclude their investigation,

they reveal no charges will be laid.

The only consequence is a fine to Kirk's doctor

for giving Prince medication in Kirk's name.

The police and others have debunked this theory,

but it's not possible for me to debunk it.

Just because they haven't been captured and charged yet

doesn't make them innocent of the crime.

Prince's death may forever be associated with opioid use,

but there is also evidence that in his final days,

he was taking action to fight his addiction.

Prince called me the day before he died

and said, "I don't know what to do."

He said that he wants to go get help.

I said, "I will help you find some place for him to go."

He has the incident on the airplane and has the overdose.

And I'm kind of wondering if that was a scare to the point

where he was, like, willing to talk about

what was going on with his opioid addiction.

Clearly, he needs some professional help.

I read in "People Magazine" that they reach out

to Recovery Without Walls in California

to talk about the recovery process.

On the day before Prince dies,

Andrew Kornfeld, a member of Recovery Without Walls,

flies overnight from California to Minneapolis.

On April 21st, Andrew Kornfeld flew to Minneapolis

to meet Prince

and to talk about a treatment plan.

But he never got the chance to have that meeting.

He shows up to Prince's residence,

and as he's led inside by Prince's assistant,

he hears a scream.

The two of them run down the hall

and see Prince lying on his side in the elevator.

It's Kornfeld who dials 911.

In Kornfeld's bag is medication

designed to manage extreme drug withdrawal cases,

but he arrives a few hours too late.

After looking into it,

I'm really not convinced that this was murder.

This is a tragedy and it is another example

of an incredibly talented person falling victim to opioids.

When I reflect on Prince's death,

I still feel like it's unresolved.

We can be almost certain that somebody out there knows

they manufactured this counterfeit Vicodin

and that it made its way to Prince and caused his death.

This has been a really hard case to sleuth.

All the information that we need to solve this case

was going on in Prince's head,

and we just don't have access to that.

Despite the lack of answers, friends and family,

like Charles Smith,

have continued to fight for the truth.

Charles started the organization Justice4Cuz.

People go like, 'Why do you do what you're doing

getting justice for him?" I said, "It's the least I can do."

Justice4Cuz is a place that you...

If you find out anything or have any information,

you can contact us, and people have contacted us.

We started getting real stuff.

Whoever gave him that last dose of fentanyl

deceived him.

Prince's death is a tragedy,

but what he leaves behind is legendary.

In hindsight, it seems that iconic performances

that were unforgettable for his fans

were likely very painful for Prince.

Prince wasn't the type of person

who was gonna give an interview with Oprah

and talk about the pain that he was in.

To us, we didn't know anything

about his personal life.

We just knew that he could get up on stage

and knock our socks off.

So it's really sad to think what cost that was to him.

If you've ever seen him in concert, you know,

he really commits when he's performing.

He gives it his all.

If I knew my man had... I knew what kind of heart

he had, and he suffered horribly for it.

But he's gonna be Prince.

He's gonna do the best of the best

of the best of the best.

There's only one Prince, period.

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