Harrison increasingly tolerated invasions of his privacy from the outside world. After the lawsuits on Maui and the problems on Hamilton Island, there were other intrusions. In 1998 thieves entered Friar Park and stole two bronze busts of monks worth £50,000 from the gardens. In 1999, while in Henley, he learned that a stalker had broken into his home in Hana. Cristin Kelleher, a 27-year-old woman with mental problems, had entered the house, taken a pizza from the freezer, cooked it and ate it. The police had arrived on site while she was cleaning up. She explained that she had a “psychic connection with George.”
But these were nothing compared to the brutal and terrifying attack that took place in Friar Park on the night of December 31, 1999. After watching a movie on television, Harrison and his wife went to bed around two in the morning. Dhani and a friend of hers were in one of the detached houses, while Olivia's mother slept somewhere else in the main building. Most of the staff had returned home for the holidays.
Around three in the morning, Michael Abram managed to enter the property from one of the points where the fence was broken, without being caught by the surveillance cameras. Abram was a thirty-four year old with schizophrenic problems, originally from Liverpool and with a history of drug addiction behind him: he was convinced that the Beatles were “witches”. He had recently been to Henley-On-Thames several times to investigate Harrison's house and on Thursday 30 December he came down from Liverpool for the last time.
Once he entered Friar Park he headed towards the house and used a statue of St George and the Dragon to smash the patio door, which led into the kitchen. The burglar alarm system didn't go off, but Olivia Harrison heard the noise and woke up her husband, who got up to go check. From the top of the first-floor stairs, Harrison saw Abram enter the hall, armed with the statue's spear and a knife in his other hand. He tried to go back to the bedroom but the key was jammed, so Harrison decided to confront the man. He began chanting Hare Krishna in an attempt to calm Abram, but it only served to irritate him further: the attacker began to scream and lunged up the stairs. He jumped over Harrison and hit him, both were on the floor.
A twenty-minute struggle ensued in the first-floor gallery. Abram kept hitting, Harrison tried to defend himself. After calling for help on the phone, Olivia emerged from the bedroom, grabbed a heavy brass poker and began hitting her attacker on the head, whereupon Abram attacked her. Harrison, who had several knife wounds, was bleeding profusely and struggled to stand up to defend his wife. Once again, he was overpowered, and stabbed on the left side of the chest, this time deeply. Later, while hospitalized, he confessed to Olivia Harrison that his recurring thought at those times was, “I can't believe that after everything that's happened to me, I'm about to be murdered in my own home.” As he fought to save himself and his wife, he tried to mentally prepare for the moment he had been thinking about for the past thirty years: when the soul leaves the body.
Olivia Harrison hit Abram with a lamp but it wasn't particularly helpful. The assailant took it from him and lunged at Harrison again, before turning to Olivia again. When it seemed like there was no escape, two policemen appeared and managed to stop Abram. Dhani arrived at the house shortly after and became convinced that his father, covered in blood, on the verge of losing consciousness and struggling to breathe, was about to die. Paramedics arrived at four in the morning and spent twenty minutes dressing his wounds, stopping the bleeding and putting him on a saline drip. Harrison and his wife were taken in wheelchairs to the nearest hospital, Royal Berkshire in Reading.
In the end he was lucky. The most serious injuries were a punctured lung and a deep stab wound just below the collarbone, for which he received twelve stitches. If he had hit him an inch further, he would have ruptured the blood vessel connecting his heart to his brain and Harrison would have died within minutes. But it went well: Mark Gritten, head physician at Royal Berkshire, reassured the public that Harrison's life was not in danger. They also treated Olivia Harrison's cuts and wounds. Harrison was later transferred to Harefield Hospital in Uxbridge, and on the evening of the first day of the Millennium he was home again.
While newspapers around the world published worrying headlines, friends rushed to his bedside. Eric Idle immediately took a flight from the United States to join him at Friar Park. Starr and McCartney sent him messages of support. Tom Petty faxed him: “Aren't you happy you married a Mexican girl?” Harrison joked to Mark Gritten: whoever the intruder was, “he wasn't a burglar, and he certainly didn't want to audition for the Traveling Wilburys.” But who was Abram really, and what had driven him to that gesture? In an interview given to Liverpool Echo Shortly after the attack, his mother explained that her son had been addicted to heroin and suffered from numerous mental disorders. Abram had been treated in psychiatric therapy but was then left to fend for himself. He had recently become obsessed with the music of the Beatles. His mother told him about him: “he went into pubs shouting phrases about the Beatles. He started walking around with a walkman to listen to music and silence the voices in his head. He talked more about Paul McCartney than George Harrison.”
Abram was charged with the double attempted murder. When the case came to trial at Oxford Crown Court on 14 November 2000, Harrison was excused from attending. Instead he sent a written account of the attack. Olivia Harrison, who appeared in court with Dhani, gave raw and powerful testimony about the events of that night and the effect they had had on her family. On the second day of the trial, the jury found Abram not guilty because he was incompetent. The judge ordered him to be committed indefinitely to a psychiatric care home and he ended up at the Scott Clinic in Rainhill, near Liverpool. Geoffrey Robertson, the Harrisons' lawyer, asked that the family be notified if Abram was to be released, but the judge informed him that he had no power to do so. After the trial, Dhani Harrison, twenty-two years old and speaking in public for the first time, stood outside the courthouse and passionately and eloquently expressed her family's anger at the verdict. “The prospect of that man being released is abhorrent,” she said. Within thirty months their fears came true and Abram, apparently recovered, left the nursing home.
Deep down Harrison had always suspected that the high waves of karma created by the Beatles' fame would one day backfire on him. All those moments of panic on tour, the screaming fans, the death threats, the intrusions and the paranoia, according to his wife, had already “traumatized” him for life. And now, at 56, he had seen his worst fear materialize within the walls of his home. “They used us as an excuse to go crazy, the whole world did,” he declared in Anthology. Some people kept doing it. He began to leave Friar Park less and less and tried not to let the trauma of the horrific attack overwhelm him, but many friends believe the event shortened his life – especially given that it happened at a time when his health was failing. particularly fragile. Geoff Wonfor comments: “The trauma suffered by George, the attack at home… no one knows how much it had an impact. It was a truly terrible moment. He never fully recovered.”
Adapted from George Harrison: Behind the Locked Door – The Biography by Graeme Thomson (The Castle/Chinaski).
