Inside the investigation over the drugs that killed Matthew Perry

Matthew Perry‘s grieving stepfather Keith Morrison characterised the actor’s drug addiction as ‘a big terrible bear’.

‘He gave in to it frequently,’ he said. ‘He felt he was beating it. But you never beat it. And he knew that, too.’

He did, and despite having it all — fame, wealth, good looks, charisma, talent and success — the Friends star’s tragic death from an ‘acute’ overdose of ketamine last October, aged 54, stunned and saddened the world, not to mention his co-stars.

The pain and shock of losing such a close friend and colleague still runs deep.

Just this week, Jennifer Aniston broke down in tears as she was asked about Matthew’s tragic death during an interview with Variety. 

‘I was literally texting with him that morning, funny Matty. He was not in pain. He wasn’t struggling. He was happy,’ she said.

Perry’s battle with addiction was well chronicled: in his 2022 memoir Friends, Lovers And The Big Terrible Thing, he insisted that he had finally conquered it after spending $9 million trying to get sober, going to rehab 15 times, detoxing 65 times and attending 6,000 AA meetings.

Yet after he died some associates came forward to confirm that Perry, tormented by feelings of loneliness and fears of being abandoned, was never able to maintain his sobriety for very long.

They revealed he’d been on a multi-day ‘bender’ just before filming the Friends reunion show in May 2021, and had been high when recording the audiobook of his memoir, too, in late 2022. He’d even been under the influence, it was suggested, when writing it.

Now, some seven months after Perry was found dead in the hot tub of his home, in the upmarket Los Angeles district of Pacific Palisades, it seems the time has come for answers and justice.

A joint investigation has been launched by the Los Angeles Police Department, the federal Drug Enforcement Agency and the U.S. Postal Service to find the person — or people — responsible for supplying Perry with the drugs that killed him.

That person must have been aware of Perry’s addiction issues — the ‘terrible bear’ that stalked him — but didn’t care.

Now it’s hoped charges will be brought and the supplier jailed so that Perry’s true friends, fans and family can at last get some sense of closure.

The LA County Medical Examiner ruled in December that his cause of death was due to the accidental ‘acute effects of ketamine’ with contributing factors of drowning, coronary artery disease and the effects of buprenorphine, a drug commonly used to treat opioid use disorder.

Perry had been prescribed ketamine as therapy for depression a week and a half before his death, yet the post mortem concluded he could not have died from the prescription drugs, as the drug only lasts three to four hours, and that the ketamine he took was not part of his treatment.

If the task force does find someone responsible for supplying the ketamine that killed him, they could face a long jail term under federal law.

Two men who supplied hip hop artist Mac Miller, who fatally overdosed on fentanyl in 2018, were sentenced to 17 and 11 years respectively in prison.

But how will they go about it? Law enforcement sources indicate that the process will take between six and 12 months and will involve regular meetings between the three branches of the team, as they trace a complicated, digital ‘trail of crumbs’.

Much time will be spent getting information from social media providers, who are notoriously slow and obstructive when it comes to cooperating with law enforcement.

Investigators will also want to comb emails sent by Perry, track his activities over dating sites, and to study his financial records.

The Postal Service is part of the multi-agency investigation because many users obtain drugs from websites which are then sent through the post, internationally.

They have their own investigations unit which can track packages.

The hope is that they can find and follow a chain of evidence which will lead to whoever can be held responsible.

Is it a long shot? Derek Maltz, the former director of the DEA’s Special Operations Division who has experience of this type of investigation, thinks not.

‘There’s no doubt in my mind that the law enforcement agencies involved in the investigation into Matthew Perry’s death will be able to figure it out and bring closure to his family, friends and fans. To know one way or another what happened.

‘They’ll be working to a blueprint of investigative steps already developed because of America’s fentanyl crisis [the prescription painkiller epidemic which has seen up to 300 deaths a day through overdoses].

‘They’ll know what to look for and how to analyse the information they find.

‘They’re going to be looking at all forms of his social media communications — anything and anyone he’s been engaged with. They’ll be investigating from top to bottom and if there’s evidence there, they will find it.’

Mr Maltz added: ‘Technology will probably be very important to this investigation. There are judicial processes to be able to obtain the records of these communications through the providers and then they will have experts analyse the dates and the times and start putting together the bigger story.’

There has been talk that Friends co-stars Jennifer Aniston and Courtney Cox, who loved and supported him, will be spoken to by law enforcement.

B ut the fact remains that neither woman was a regular part of his day-to-day life. Instead, Perry had a professional team who were with him day and night and it’s likely that investigations will start with them.

There was a live-in nursing team plus executive assistant Kenny Iwamasa, who is thought to be the person who found him dead that afternoon in October 2023. There was also a security team.

Also on the staff was a ‘sober coach’, Morgan Moses, referred to as ‘Erin’ in Perry’s memoir. She’d quit in March 2022, however, claiming Perry had thrown her against a wall in an argument.

There was another assistant, too: Briana Brancato, who’d worked with Perry for seven years but quit six months before he died to work as a personal trainer.

Maltz says it’s likely to be an exhaustive process. ‘Friends and family will want to help, of course, but there will be other people that Matthew Perry interacted with that they’ll want to talk to.

‘Because he was such a celebrity, he wouldn’t have been able to hide his activities like an average citizen would.

‘People would have known what he was up to, who he was hanging out with, people would have been taking pictures of him coming and going. There will be a lot of source material to look at,’ he said.

Among these will be Athenna Crosby, the entertainment reporter with whom he had lunch the day before he died. She later posted about their meeting on social media, recalling that he’d been in extremely good spirits and had talked with enthusiasm about pro-jects he had lined up.

Yet the actor had another side. According to those in his inner circle, in his final years Perry would ‘burn’ through girlfriends he would pick up on the exclusive dating site Raya — perhaps one a month or more — using them for ‘affirmation’ and often also as a source of drugs.

I’m told that he would flirt with possible matches over FaceTime, often playing ’20 Questions’. Then, typically, he would ask the girls to come over to his home and at some point request they score some drugs for him.

A friend said: ‘He would meet girls on dating apps and have them come over. There was a slew of 21 to 25-year-olds. They would bring drugs with them. It was mostly OxyContin. He would also get illicit drugs from old girlfriends, there was a kind of network.’

His nursing team and assistants were powerless to do anything about it, as one source explains: ‘When nurses or companions are in someone’s home doing a detox or watching for sobriety they do not have the same permissions as in an institution. They cannot frisk visitors for drugs.’

Another source added: ‘Addicts are smart, and Matthew was brilliant. He would do the FaceTime thing and get to know them.

‘Then it would be like: ‘Let’s hang out.’ He wasn’t out in public any more. That’s how he snuck things past people.’ The source added: ‘He was living locked up and not reaching out to people. That was his pattern when he used drugs.

‘He would cut himself off from everyone.’

His former girlfriend Kayti Edwards, who dated him briefly in 2006 after they met at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, believes that he might even have scored drugs from his wider medical team.

She said: ‘I know when Matthew was taking 40 to 50 Vicodin in a day, he was getting it from a nurse who would bring it to his house.

‘He had a way of enabling people to do things for him, saying: ‘I’ll give you this amount of money if you keep your mouth shut and get me this.’

‘He made it so hard to say no. He was like: ‘Kayti, can you run down and pick up this envelope for me, I’ll give you $5,000.’ I want people to investigate medical staff to see if he had a deal with any of them to give him some ketamine on the side.’

Moses and Iwamasa have declined to comment on the latest investigation, as has his manager Doug Chapin.

P erry had started out with an addiction to alcohol in his 20s, which was tempered after co-star Jennifer Aniston intervened on the Friends set, telling him: ‘We can smell it.’

A jetski accident in 1997 sparked an addiction to painkillers and within 18 months he was skeletally thin and taking 55 pills a day.

There were numerous spells in rehab before, in 2018, he suffered an exploded colon, followed by two weeks in a coma and nine months with a colostomy bag. There was no evidence of alcohol, methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin, PCP or fentanyl in Perry’s system at the time of his death, according to the LA County Medical Examiner’s report.

After his passing, a picture emerged of a man who was desperately lonely.

‘He wanted a family and never found that person to settle down with,’ said a friend. ‘It was a tale of loneliness and how having all the money and fame can’t save anyone.’

But, as reports then revealed, Perry could be manipulative and even on occasion physically abusive to those close to him. Sober coach Morgan Moses was not the only one said to have been abused by him.

His former fiancée, Molly Hurwitz, with whom he was in a relationship between 2018 and 2021, was said to have been deeply hurt by him, too. One source told U.S. Weekly magazine that Perry was at times ‘verbally, emotionally and physically abusive’ and another described him as a ‘highly manipulative’ person, telling Moses after he’d assaulted her: ‘If I wanted to hurt you, I would have.’

‘He wasn’t a horrible human being, but he was so warped in his addiction that he wasn’t himself,’ the source said. ‘All he knew how to do was cause pain and play the victim . . . He put people on a ride from hell.’

That account is borne out by the reaction to his death by Molly Hurwitz.

She expressed love and sorrow, but also wrote: ‘While I loved him deeper than I could comprehend, he was complicated, and he caused pain like I’d never known. No one in my adult life has had a more profound impact on me than Matthew Langford Perry. I have tremendous gratitude for that, for everything I learned from our relationship.’

There are reports that one ex girlfriend, a woman in her early 20s whom he’d met in rehab, threatened to sue him in 2020 for emotional and psychological abuse.

A source said that he got her addicted to drugs, including oxycodone and painkillers, but that the matter ended up being settled out of court with the young woman in question signing a non-disclosure agreement.

There are even claims that one of his nurses quit the profession after a spell in his employ.

‘He was cruel . . . he had to pay for a lot of women to go to therapy. He left a lot of destruction,’ a source told U.S. Weekly.Ultimately, though, the one who was destroyed was him.