Elvis Put A $10,000 Hit On The Man Who Stole His Wife — Then This Happened At 3 AM HT

Elvis Presley sat in his Graceand bedroom on March 15th, 1972, holding a loaded gun and a piece of paper with an address written on it. The address belonged to Mike Stone, the karate instructor who was sleeping with Priscilla. Elvis had just offered Red West $10,000 to kill him. For 3 hours, Elvis debated whether to drive to Los Angeles and do it himself.

What stopped him? What Red West said that changed his mind and how close Elvis came to throwing away everything over revenge revealed a darkness that consumed him after Priscilla left. This is the story of the night Elvis almost became a murderer and the moment that saved him from himself. March 15th, 1972, 3 weeks after Priscilla told Elvis she was leaving him from Mike Stone.

Elvis hadn’t slept in days. He was taking handfuls of pills, drinking, raging, crying, going through every emotion except acceptance. Red West, Elvis’s best friend and bodyguard since high school, was at Graceand that night. He’d been watching Elvis spiral, watching him obsess over Mike Stone, watching him talk about revenge in increasingly specific and frightening ways.

Around midnight, Elvis called Red to his bedroom. When Red walked in, Elvis was sitting on his bed cleaning a .045 pistol. There were other guns laid out on the bed, at least five of them. Red, I need you to do something for me, Elvis said without looking up from the gun. What is it, E? I need you to go to Los Angeles and take care of Mike Stone. Red felt his stomach drop.

What do you mean take care of him? Elvis looked up and Red saw something in his eyes he’d never seen before. Pure cold hatred. I mean kill him. I want you to kill Mike Stone. E, you don’t mean that. I’m dead serious. Elvis pulled out an envelope and threw it on the bed. There’s $10,000 in there. Cash. Take it.

Go to California and make sure Mike Stone never touches my wife again. Red didn’t pick up the envelope. Elvis, I’m not going to kill anyone for you. And you need to stop talking like this before you say something to the wrong person. He destroyed my marriage. He took Priscilla away from me.

He took my daughter away from me. He deserves to die. He didn’t take anything, Red said carefully. Priscilla made a choice. You can be mad at her. You can be mad at him, but killing him isn’t going to bring her back. It’s just going to put you in prison for the rest of your life. Elvis stood up, gun still in his hand.

Then I’ll do it myself. I’ll drive to California right now and blow his brains out. At least I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing he paid for what he did. And then what? Red asked. You go to prison. Lisa Marie loses her father. Graceand gets sold to pay your legal fees. Everything you’ve built.

Everything you’ve worked for gone. Is that really what you want? I want Priscilla back, Elvis said. And suddenly, he wasn’t angry anymore. He was crying. I just want my wife back. I want my family back. Red took the gun from Elvis’s hand and set it on the dresser. I know, E, but killing Mike’s stone isn’t going to give you that.

Nothing is going to give you that. Priscilla’s gone, and you have to find a way to accept that. Elvis collapsed onto the bed, sobbing. Red sat next to him, not knowing what to say. They’d been friends for 20 years, but he’d never seen Elvis this broken, this consumed by rage and grief. For the next hour, Elvis talked about all the ways he wanted Mike Stone to suffer.

He talked about hiring hitmen. He talked about staging accidents. He talked about destroying Stone’s karate career, his reputation, his life. Red listened, letting Elvis vent, hoping that if Elvis got it all out, the homicidal thoughts would pass. But around 2:00 a.m., Elvis got quiet.

He stood up, grabbed the envelope with the cash, and grabbed car keys. “I’m going to California.” “No, you’re not,” Red said, blocking the bedroom door. “Get out of my way, Red. Make me. You want to get to that car, you’re going to have to go through me first. They stood there facing each other.

Elvis was bigger, but Red had been a boxer. Had been in plenty of fights. If it came down to it, Red wasn’t sure who would win. I’m not letting you destroy your life over this, Red said. I’ve been with you since we were kids. I’ve protected you from everything. And Red now, I’m protecting you from yourself. He deserves to die, Elvis said.

But there was less conviction in his voice. Now, maybe he does, but you don’t deserve to go to prison. Lisa Marie doesn’t deserve to lose her father. And Priscilla doesn’t deserve to watch you throw away everything over her. Elvis’s eyes filled with tears again. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to live with this.

One day at a time, that’s all you can do. One day at a time. Elvis dropped the envelope and the keys. He sat back down on the bed, his head in his hands. I loved her so much. Why wasn’t that enough? Love isn’t always enough. E. Sometimes people grow apart. Sometimes things just don’t work out.

But with Mike Stone, she left me for a karate instructor, the guy I paid to teach her self-defense. That was the part that hurt Elvis most. Not just that Priscilla had left, but who she’d left him for. Mike Stone wasn’t famous. He wasn’t rich. He was just a regular guy who taught martial arts.

And somehow that regular guy had given Priscilla something Elvis couldn’t. “What does he have that I don’t?” Elvis asked. Red thought carefully about how to answer. “Well, he has time. He’s present. He’s not Elvis Presley with all the pressure and expectations and fame. He’s just Mike. And maybe that’s what Priscilla needed. Elvis absorbed that.

The idea that being Elvis Presley, the thing that had brought him everything else, had cost him his marriage. Around 3:00 a.m., Elvis made a decision that changed everything. He picked up the phone and called Priscilla in California. She answered on the third ring, her voice groggy with sleep. “Hello, it’s me,” Elvis said. There was a pause.

Elvis, it’s 3:00 in the morning. I know. I’m sorry. I just I need to tell you something. What? I wanted to kill him tonight. Mike Stone. I wanted to kill him and I almost did it. Red stopped me, but I came this close. Elvis’s voice was shaking. I came this close to throwing everything away because I couldn’t handle losing you.

Priscilla was fully awake now. Elvis, you can’t talk like that. You can’t. I know. I know I can’t. And I’m not going to. I’m calling to tell you that I’m not going to hurt him. I’m not going to hurt anyone because Lisa Marie needs a father. And she needs her father to not be in prison. Thank you, Priscilla said quietly.

Thank you for making that choice. But I need you to understand something. I will never forgive him. I will never accept him. If you’re going to be with Mike Stone, that’s your choice. But don’t ever expect me to be okay with it. I don’t expect that. I’m not asking for your blessing.

I’m just asking that you don’t do something that will destroy your life. I won’t, Elvis promised. Not for him, but for Lisa Marie and for me. I won’t. They talked for another 20 minutes. It wasn’t a reconciliation. It was more like a ceasefire, an agreement that they would both move forward, that they would co-parent Lisa Marie, that they wouldn’t let their personal feelings turn into something destructive.

When Elvis hung up, he looked at Red. “I’m not going to kill him.” “I know,” Red said. “But I still hate him.” “That’s fair.” Elvis picked up all the guns on the bed and put them in his safe. He took the envelope with the $10,000 and threw it in a drawer. And then he took enough sleeping pills to knock himself out for the next 12 hours.

When he woke up the next day, the homicidal rage had passed. It was replaced by depression, by grief, by the slow process of accepting that his marriage was really over. But the obsession with Mike Stone never fully went away. For years after, Elvis would talk about Stone with hatred, would fantasize about revenge, would make veiled threats.

The Memphis Mafia members learned to just let Elvis vent knowing that he’d talked himself out of actually doing anything violent. In 1973, a year after that 3:00 a.m. phone call, Elvis was performing in Las Vegas when he spotted Mike Stone in the audience with Priscilla. Elvis stopped mid song and stared at them.

The entire showroom went silent. Red West, standing at the side of the stage, tensed. Was Elvis going to call Stone out? Was he going to do something crazy? But Elvis just said into the microphone, “I’d like to dedicate this next song to my ex-wife and her friend.” Then he sang, “You’ve lost that loving feeling with so much emotion and pain that people in the audience cried.

” After the show, Priscilla came backstage. “That was cruel,” she said. “So was bringing him to my show,” Elvis replied. They didn’t speak to each other for months after that. The Mike Stone situation revealed something dark in Elvis. A capacity for violence and revenge that scared everyone who witnessed it.

The fact that Elvis seriously considered murder, that he offered money to have someone killed showed how far his mental state had deteriorated after the divorce. Years later, after Elvis died, Red West talked about that night in March 1972. Elvis was serious. He really was going to do it.

Either hire someone or do it himself. I’ve never been more scared for him than I was that night. Not scared of him, but scared for him. If I hadn’t been there, if I hadn’t stopped him, Elvis might have done something that would have destroyed everything. Mike Stone, for his part, never publicly spoke about Elvis’s death threats.

But people close to him said he took them seriously, that he had security for a while, that he was genuinely concerned Elvis might follow through. Priscilla in her autobiography addressed the situation briefly. Elvis was consumed by hatred for Mike for years. He made threats that I had to take seriously, but in the end, he didn’t act on them.

Some part of him, the part that loved Lisa Marie and wanted to be a good father, was stronger than the part that wanted revenge. The night of March 15th, 1972 was the closest Elvis came to becoming a murderer. The loaded gun, the cash for a hitman, the address written on paper, it was all there.

The only thing that stopped him was Red West’s loyalty and Elvis’s love for his daughter. But the darkness that consumed Elvis that night never fully went away. It stayed with him, feeding his paranoia, his drug use, his isolation. And in a way, that darkness contributed to his death 5 years later because Elvis never learned how to process pain in healthy ways.

He just buried it or raged about it or numbed it with pills. The man who destroyed Elvis’s marriage lived. But the man whose marriage was destroyed died. Unable to cope with the loss, unable to move forward, unable to let go of the hatred that poisoned everything. If this story of rage and redemption moved you, subscribe and hit that like button.

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