Drugs, Shame, and Betrayal: How Whitney Houston Ended Up Dead at 48
The long road to the singer's final days was a downward spiral that has been largely misunderstood. Allison Samuels on the chaos and addictions that, in the end, can be blamed on only one person: Whitney Houston.
On her final flight back home, singer Whitney Houston should have been surrounded by those who truly loved and cared for her. A few aboard the private plane that carried her body had been there for Houston through thick and thin. Her manager and sister-in-law, Pat Houston, was with her on this last journey, as was her beloved cousin, singer Dionne Warwick.
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Also along for the ride that Monday afternoon in February was Raffles van Exel, a self-described entertainment consultant who’d met Houston years before on her concert tour and somehow wriggled his way into her close-knit inner circle. Van Exel was a partner with Houston’s sister-in-law Pat in a new decorative-candle business, and the singer had been set to film a commercial for the new line Feb. 11—the day she died. Van Exel never got his commercial, but he did manage to snap a picture of the singer in her casket and sell it to the National Enquirer for millions of dollars.
"Her family couldn’t even protect her in death," says a close friend. "They had the person on the plane with her body that took her picture in the casket. That tells you a lot about the life she was living."
Such was the tragic and twisted reality of one of the greatest singers of all time.
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