Priscilla Presley has claimed Elvis Presley wanted to take murderous actions against her karate instructor boyfriend Mike Stone. The star, 80, was married to The King from 1967 to 1973, and Priscilla detailed in her new memoir how she began an affair with Mike after her suspicions about Elvis’ infidelities were confirmed, according to Fox News.

But Elvis was unable to handle the prospect of her being with someone else and allegedly sought to hire a hitman to eliminate Mike, Priscilla writes in her book, Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis. The affair with Mike began after Priscilla discovered women had been sending her husband letters – enough to completely pack their mailbox.

‘When I turned the key in the mailbox, however, what poured out wasn’t bills or junk mail. The mailbox was stuffed full of letters from girls. … I finally held written proof of what I’d always feared. I was deeply hurt, but I was also furious. I called Elvis and demanded an explanation. … When that tactic failed, he resorted to saying the girls were all lying,’ she recalled in the book, according to Fox News.

‘This time, though, turning the tables didn’t work. If Elvis was having affairs that were none of my business, then it was none of his business what I was doing. The close friendship that Mike and I had developed turned into an affair,’ she said. But her new relationship pushed Elvis into a murderous mindset, with Priscilla claiming he asked his road manager Joe Esposito to find a hitman to take out Mike.

‘Elvis found the thought of me with another man unbearable. In the weeks after my departure, he told the guys that Mike had to die. He even asked Joe [Esposito] to find a hit man,’ she said. Eventually, Elvis was talked out of eliminating Mike.

‘Joe warned me to be careful. When I offered to bring Lisa [Marie Presley] to Vegas for one of Elvis’s shows, Joe advised against it. Seeing me might set Elvis off. Over time, and with a lot of persuasion from his father and the guys, Elvis gradually calmed down and gave up the idea of killing Mike, thank God,’ he said. The affair, Priscilla says, prompted Elvis to make love to her ‘forcefully’, devoid of his usual affection.

‘I didn’t leave because of Mike Stone. And I didn’t leave because Elvis had forced himself on me when he found out about Mike. He had not. Elvis had felt emasculated. He’d needed to prove to himself and to me that he could make love “like a real man,” the way he imagined a karate master doing it,’ she wrote. ‘Elvis made love to me forcefully, not forcibly. His usual tenderness and consideration for me were missing. It was emotionally hurtful, and it left me with an unhappy memory of my last experience of sexual intimacy with Elvis. But it was not the reason I left,’ she added.

Elvis was 24-years old and a global star when he met his future wife, then just 14-years of age, at a party in West Germany while seeing out his military service with the United States Army. The couple wed in Las Vegas in 1967 and welcomed their only child, daughter Lisa-Marie Presley, the following year.

The couple ultimately divorced in 1973 and Priscilla would eventually embark on a 22-year relationship with Brazilian screenwriter Marco Garibaldi, with whom she welcomed son Navarone, her second child, in 1987.

Elvis, of course, died ten years earlier in 1977 at the age of 42 after suffering a fatal cardiac arrest in the bathroom of his legendary Graceland home. His ex-wife would endure further tragedy in January 2023 when Lisa-Marie also died prematurely, aged just 54.