According with FOXnews.com Janis's lover Peggy Caserta said in an interview she's been blamed for Joplin’s death since revealing in her ghostwritten memoir she and Joplin would shoot heroin constantly and that she and Joplin’s fiancée stood up the singer for a planned threesome.
Caserta said, “I saw her foot sticking out at the end of the bed. She was lying with cigarettes in one hand and change in the other. For years it bothered me. How could she have overdosed and then walked out to the lobby and walked back? I’ve overdosed, and you crumble on the floor like how they found Philip Seymour Hoffman. I let it go for years, but I always thought, ‘Something is wrong here."
Joplin, who was wearing sandals with a “tiny hourglass heel,” had tripped on the room’s deep shag carpet, fallen and broken her nose, which led her to asphyxiate.
“Janis and James Gurley and Sam Andrew were shooting heroin from the beginning of Big Brother and the Holding Company, the three of them,” Caserta said of Joplin’s then bandmates, adding that Joplin was her “dope-shooting pal.”
Caserta believes being gay has something to do with people assigning blame to her over Joplin’s death.
“Sam certainly shot as much dope with her as I did,” she said. "It has to be the gay thing.”
Joplin had been clean in the days leading up to her overdose death, Caserta told Vulture. However, Joplin ran into a drug dealer delivering dope to Caserta in a hotel lobby where she later died, Caserta said.
“She just happened to walk out to get cigarettes and ran into George in the Landmark lobby,” Caserta said. “That started her thinking about it, and she came up to my room to get high.”
Caserta, though, believes Joplin didn’t die of an overdose, and instead tripped and fell and later died.
“She tripped and fell, honey. I'm positive of it.”
Peggy Caserta remembers the moment when Janis Joplin became Pearl. “I’d wanted to start calling myself Ruby,” says Caserta, whose second memoir, I Ran Into Some Trouble, was published yesterday by Wyatt-MacKenzie. “I never liked the name Peggy, and wanted to be more floozy, you know? Somewhere along the line, Janis started talking about changing her name to Pearl.
“One morning, we got up at the Chelsea after a night of debauching,” Caserta tells me. “Still stoned, she wanted a hot-fudge chocolate sundae, junkie food, so we went to Serendipity for breakfast. We’re sitting there, and Janis is reading the New York Times, and all of a sudden she just busted up and screamed, ‘You won’t believe this!’ There was an ad in the paper that went, ‘Ruby said to Pearl, Pearl, why don’t you be a stenographer?’ Not only did it have both of our new names, but Janis’s parents had wanted her to be a stenographer. We laughed and laughed that morning, two young, silly, southern girls …”
Joplin was 27 when she died at the Landmark in Hollywood.
