“It was easy to be with her that day; she was a lot of fun,” he recalled in Amy, My Daughter.
Janis and second husband Richard Collins (Mitch and Janis divorced when Amy was 9) saw Amy on July 22, as did Reg, and she seemed fine to them. That night she was “tipsy,” her security guard Andrew Morris recalled, but she was singing and playing drums in her room.
When Andrew checked on her at 10 a.m. on July 23, she appeared to be sleeping. But five hours later, she hadn’t moved.
The automatic assumption was that she had died of some sort of overdose.
Officially, she died of accidental alcohol poisoning, or “misadventure,” as the coroner ruled at the inquest. Her blood-alcohol level was .416 (416 mg of alcohol per 100 ml of blood), with .35 considered a fatal level (.08 is considered too intoxicated to drive). One small and two large empty vodka bottles were found in her house.
“She chose her own path, we have suffered from the trolls and the damaging speculation—accusations that Mitch just wants to make money off of his daughter, that we killed her, that we could have done more—it’s completely wrong,” Janis reflected in OK! in 2021. “But addiction is a mental illness and that is the true villain in this story, I’ve studied addiction and I understand that now.”
Reg took Amy’s cat Katie home to live with him. “I can’t describe what I am going through,” he told The Sun at the time, “and I want to thank so much all of the people who have paid their respects and who are mourning the loss of Amy, such a beautiful, brilliant person and my dear love. I have lost my darling who I loved very much.”
