Killed by the curse of Michael Jackson: What drove the father of Jordy Chandler to put a gun to his head?

Easing his pain-racked body on to the bed in his luxurious apartment overlooking the Manhattan skyline, a lonely old man placed a silver, snub-nose revolver to his head and pulled the trigger.

No one knew that Evan Chandler had brought his life to such a solitary end, and at first it seemed that no one much cared.

As he never had any visitors, his body might have lain undiscovered for days, had he not missed an important medical appointment, prompting his doctor to raise the alarm.

Warped: Michael Jackson pictured with the young boy he seduced, Jordan Chandler

And although he was the father of three children and hailed from a large and prominent Jewish family, only the crematorium staff were there to see the curtains close on his coffin when he was cremated a few days ago.



This week, however, after the public learned of 65-year-old Mr Chandler's suicide - which took place at his New Jersey home on November 5 - it was a very different story.

Suddenly, the reason for his death became the subject of worldwide speculation, and the internet chat-rooms where Michael Jackson's hero-worshipping fans exchange gossip were deluged by an outpouring of schadenfreude. 'Good riddance, you piece of ****. Hope you rot in hell! Things that go around come around - karma is a bitch,' one hate-filled message read.

'He was a very, very evil man. He should have been punished. This seems the easy way,' another responded.

Among the Jackson faithful, Evan Chandler is the devil incarnate. For in 1993, it was he who first exposed the King of Pop as a common paedophile by revealing how Jackson had sexually abused his son, Jordan, then aged 13.

His bombshell accusation set in motion the cataclysmic train of events which would ruin the star's reputation and effectively end his career. Some devotees would even have us believe it was this scandal which precipitated the drug addiction which, directly or not, killed him.

Evan Chandler, shown here in an undated photo, prompted a 13-month police probe after his allegations about Jackson

Even after 16 years, during which time many more children have told how Jackson inveigled them into his bed, many fans remain blinded to the truth.

They prefer to believe that Mr Chandler, then a respectable and affluent Los Angeles dentist, invented a lurid story of sexual abuse (and persuaded his son to corroborate it) as part of a lucrative blackmail plot.

When it emerged that Jackson had bought the Chandlers' silence by paying Jordy a reported $20 million and his parents $1m each, this travesty only gained more credence.

It is still widely accepted by many Jackson fans, even though Jordan's harrowing police statement has since been published in full.

'The saga was like a cancer in the family and affected us all'

In it, he described in shocking detail how Jackson seduced him on a jaunt to Monaco, after handing the boy's mother a wedge of cash to go on a shopping spree.

As a result, Jordan's father became one of the most widely reviled men in America. He received so many death threats that he turned into a paranoid recluse, frequently changing address and transforming his appearance with no fewer than 19 plastic surgery operations: as many, perhaps, as Jackson underwent.

Indeed, it was only because he feared being murdered by some revenge-seeking fan that he bought the .38 calibre handgun with which he shot himself - another irony.

But as his younger brother, California-based lawyer Raymond Chandler, 63, told me in an exclusive interview this week, Evan was not the only member of the Chandler family to have had his life ruined by the poisonous intervention of Michael Jackson.

For a decade and a half, they have all struggled in vain to escape the singer's dark and destructive shadow - and no one more than Jordan, who, at 29, is attempting to reinvent himself as a pop music lyricist after years in self-imposed obscurity.

'The Jackson saga was like a cancer in the family, and it has affected us all,' said Mr Chandler. 'We were never the same afterwards.

'I'm not blaming Michael Jackson directly, because everyone is responsible for their own lives. But until he came on the scene, this was one big extended family, and everybody liked everybody, and the kids all played with each other, even though there were divorces.

'The fact is our lives radically changed and for the worse. The whole thing was a curse. People can talk about the money [the $22million settlement], but there's no amount of money in the world that's worth any of that.'

Since Evan Chandler had suffered for years from an incurable genetic illness called Gaucher's disease, which caused him terrible pain in the bones, his brother stops short of directly attributing his suicide to the Jackson 'curse'.

Chandler, right, pictured with his brother Raymond, was found dead on November 5

In particular, he debunks the theory expressed repeatedly on Jackson fan websites this week that Evan killed himself because he knew he had lied and could no longer live with his guilt.

'There have been all these reports saying that Evan and Jordy had retracted [the abuse allegations].

Well, I can tell you there has been no retraction. My brother always maintained that his son was molested.'

In recent years, however, Raymond Chandler says he watched his once-ambitious, creative and zestful brother become an increasingly 'sad, lonely guy'. And he traces his brother's demise - and that of the entire Chandler clan - to the spring of 1992, when Jackson first met Jordan.

It all happened by chance. As the singer was being chauffeured through Santa Monica, near Los Angeles, his limousine broke down and his driver sought help at the nearby depot of car-hire company Rent-A-Wreck.

The boss was Jordan's stepfather, David Schwarz. He had married the boy's mother, June, a striking former model, after her 11-year marriage to Evan Chandler ended in 1985.

A starry-eyed Jordan, then aged 12, was ushered in to meet Jackson - undisputedly the world's biggest pop star - and the singer was immediately smitten. Within days, he began phoning Jordan, spending up to three hours making small-talk with him and inviting him to Neverland, his fantasy ranch, a two-hour drive up the coast.

Unbeknown to the Chandler family, who were understandably flattered by all this attention, and clearly saw the advantages of having a son who was the playmate of the hottest ticket in town, the grooming of Jordan had started.

Jordan was then living with his mother and stepfather who, apparently, saw nothing unusual in the bond that had developed between a callow (and good-looking) adolescent and a megastar, then in his early 30s.

So they drove Jordan to the ranch, where Jackson refreshed him with iced tumblers of Coke, sat beside him on the fairground rides and introduced him to Bubbles the chimp. Soon afterwards, the singer began sleeping over at the Schwarz's house in Malibu.

Even when June caught Jackson and Jordan snuggled up in bed together, she believed a tearful Jackson when he swore that nothing untoward had taken place. The gold Cartier bracelet and all those other gifts he bought her must have made his explanation so much easier to accept.

At first, Evan Chandler was similarly thrilled by the liaison, not least because he yearned to escape his humdrum life as a dental surgeon and forge a new career as a Hollywood screenplay writer.

Chandler stared into the star's eyes and knew he was lying

He had already had some success by co-writing the Mel Brooks comedy film Robin Hood: Men In Tights, and Jackson offered to boost his fortunes by co-operating with him on more lavish movie projects.

According to Raymond Chandler, his brother Evan (who had now remarried) and Jackson were in many ways remarkably similar and at first a genuinely 'close kinship' appeared to have developed between them.

Evan did not realise why the star was at such pains to befriend him - until he went into his son's bedroom one night to find Jordan being cradled from behind by Jackson, whose hand was cupping his groin.

Again the singer hotly denied any impropriety, but gazing into his 'remorseless' eyes, Mr Chandler instantly knew he was lying.

His worst fears were later confirmed when his son admitted the truth that the singer had seduced him and performed sex acts with him.

Mr Chandler demanded that the friendship must end, but Jordan's mother - who was planning to take her son on Jackson's world concert tour - refused to comply, and a noholdsbarred custody battle ensued. As she was Jordan's legal guardian, it seemed her wishes would prevail.

But Mr Chandler took their son to a child psychiatrist - knowing that the expert was bound by oath to report any allegation of sexual abuse to the Los Angeles child protection authorities - and Jordan was removed from his mother and ordered to live with his father.

'Everyone took sides, and that's what caused the first rift in the family,' said Raymond Chandler.

As the months went by, it grew uglier, and Jordan's father and stepfather even came to blows.

Meanwhile, the story of Jackson's child abuse was leaked to a British newspaper. The subsequent lurid allegations about Jackson's perversion forced him to abandon his tour, losing millions in sponsorship deals, and the star then vanished for almost two weeks before being discovered in a London clinic.

Though he insisted it was not an admission of guilt, he escaped prosecution by paying $22million to the Chandlers.

In return, they dropped a civil case against him, and, as they were not prepared to testify, the police did not press charges. But the money did little to restore harmony to the family.

Michael Jackson died suddenly while preparing for a series of concerts at London's O2 arena

Although Jordan was said to have escaped relatively unscathed from his ordeal thanks to psychotherapy sessions, throughout his teens he was tormented by irrational feelings of guilt for having proved so attractive to Jackson, and kept asking: 'What did I do wrong?'

He was also deeply confused by his ambivalent feelings towards Jackson, summed up by his description of him as 'the devil in sheep's clothing'.

Desperate to escape the malicious whispers in Hollywood, where his name was bandied whenever some new allegation against Jackson surfaced, Jordan enrolled at a college in New York.

He bought an apartment in Manhattan, in a building with a rooftop swimming pool and running track, and a beachfront mansion in The Hamptons, the summer retreat for millionaire New Yorkers.

With his $20 million pay-off fast mushrooming, thanks to some lucrative investments - he bought shares in Mobil, Chevron and Texaco - life ought to have been sweet for a young bachelor with film-star looks.

Yet he was constantly on the alert for some revenge-seeking Jackson fanatic and lived the life of a recluse.

His demons returned four years ago, when Jackson finally faced trial, accused of having sex with another young boy, cancer victim Gavin Arvizo.

Appearing chastened, Jordan's weeping mother gave evidence for the prosecution, and he was expected to do the same. He never took the stand, however, and attempted to evade the spotlight by staying in a Nevada ski chalet, accompanied by a group of friends, including singer Sonnet Simmons (a Greek-American he had met at school).

Tracked down there, he was photographed on the slopes, wearing an apparently carefree smile and chic designer skiwear, and cruelly branded a coward in some quarters for refusing to testify.

In later years, though, it was Jordan's increasingly turbulent relationship with his father that troubled him most.

Utterly consumed by his struggle with Jackson, soon after the scandal broke Mr Chandler closed his dental practice and split up with his second wife. He later joined his son in New York, and for several years they spent much time together.

But, according to Diane Dimond, author of Be Careful Who You Love, an acclaimed book about the Jackson child abuse saga, the relationship was dogged by rows over money.

Despite his million-dollar settlement from Jackson, Mr Chandler was not in his son's financial league, and for several years Jordan subsidised his father with a generous allowance, Dimond says.

Mr Chandler was forced to go cap in hand for more handouts, and for a proud man, this was unedifying.

He would fly into uncontrollable tempers, blaming his son for all the trauma that had befallen the family, and the burden of his painful genetic illness only made him more irascible.

Their final row occurred in the summer of 2005, when Jordan and he were sharing the apartment where Mr Chandler shot himself.

Filing for a court restraining order against his father, on the grounds of 'domestic abuse', Jordan claimed he had been battered over the head with a 12lb dumb-bell and sprayed with mace.

In his testimony, he also accused his father of trying to choke him.

The frenzied attack took place just two months after Jackson had been acquitted of assaulting Gavin Arvizo.

Father and son never settled their differences.

Jordan moved to a new apartment, across the Hudson River in Manhattan, but now spends much of his time back in California, where, to some acclaim, Sonnet has just released the love song they penned together.

Until the events of recent days, Jordan had every reason to feel his life was at last heading in the right direction.

But his father spiralled into a mental and physical decline. Still deceptively youthful-looking by dint of his many facelifts, he was in constant agony from his genetic illness and barely able to walk in his final days.

He also seems to have been friendless, and so totally estranged from his family that, when I spoke to Raymond Chandler on Wednesday, he was waiting to hear about the funeral arrangements - unaware that his brother had already been cremated.

'Actually, there was no one there,' said a member of staff at the Jersey City funeral home which organised the service.

'We were instructed that no one would want to go. It was very sad. They still haven't decided what to do with the ashes.'

Precisely why Jordan and the rest of the family did not pay their last respects will doubtless be the subject of more speculation in the internet chat-rooms.

Whatever the reason for their absence, the crematorium was a hauntingly empty place when the curse of Michael Jackson claimed its latest victim.