Exploring the conspiracy that Bruce Lee was murdered
By all accounts, Bruce Lee seemed like the perfect physical specimen in 1973. The martial artist turned actor was 32 and had fully crossed over to Hollywood, having established himself as a star in the television series The Green Hornet in the mid-1960s. His Hong Kong films like The Big Boss and Fist of Fury were beginning to find success in America as Lee prepared his next film, Game of Death. Lee halted production to film his first Hollywood production, Enter the Dragon, and returned to Game of Death.
That made it so unfathomable that Lee collapsed and died on July 20th, 1973. Lee had suffered from cerebral oedema while recording dialogue for Enter the Dragon two months earlier, and the condition returned on the day of his death. How could someone so committed to fitness be taken so suddenly and abruptly?
Almost immediately, rumours began to swirl about the actual events surrounding Lee’s death. Since he was with Taiwanese actress Betty Ting Pei on the day of his death, reports of his death were altered to initially discourage rumours of infidelity. After the truth came out, reports that Pei had potentially poisoned him began to circulate due to Pei giving Lee the painkiller Equagesic when he complained of a headache.
Pei later reported receiving death threats from Lee’s fans who believed that she had a hand in his untimely passing. Pei would later admit that she and Lee had shared an intimate relationship during their friendship but fully denied any wrongdoing in his death. In the years following his death, various other conspiracies surrounded Lee and his death.
In more recent years, other theories besides murder have been proposed. A potentially lethal case of heatstroke came to the fore, with Lee having removed the sweat glands under his arms to appear more photogenic on film. As heatstroke wasn’t fully understood in the early 1970s, there’s a possibility that Lee’s overheating could have led to his cerebral edema attacks that ultimately took his life.
When Lee died, the coroner ultimately came to the conclusion that he had experienced “death by misadventure”. The conclusion did not specify what misadventure Lee had suffered, prompting an increase in conspiracies. Producer Raymond Chow, who was also with Lee on the day he died, stated in 2005 that Lee died from an accidental allergic reaction to the pain medication he had taken that day.
Still, theories involving everything from assassinations to evil curses began to spread. The idea that the Lee family was cursed experienced a morbid revival when Lee’s song Brandon was accidentally killed on the set of the 1994 film The Crow. No conspiracies have survived scrutiny, but the mystery that still surrounds the death of Bruce Lee is enough to keep his legacy from fading in memory.
