Last chance surgery, Steve McQueen dies in Juarez, Nov. 1980

Forty years ago, Nov. 7, 1980, actor Steve McQueen died of heart failure at a Juárez clinic while recovering from surgery to remove cancerous tumors of the neck and stomach.

El Paso Times reporter Ramon Renteria reported from Juarez:

Dr. Cesar Santos Vargas felt sympathetic toward the ailing man who called himself Sam Sheppard.

“He was a man sure of himself and very sincere,” Santos said.

Santos, a Juarez surgeon and kidney specialist, earned a medical reputation years ago in Juarez for treating injured bullfighters.

He gained national attention when the man called Sheppard suddenly died in his Juarez clinic at 2:50 a.m. Friday.

Painful cancer was killing him

Sheppard, alias actor Steve McQueen, went to Santos’ Clinica de Santa Rosa looking for reprieve from the painful cancer that was killing him.

McQueen spent time in El Paso in 1972 during the filming here of “The Getaway.”

Santos said McQueen checked into the clinic at about 5 p.m. Wednesday after he had signed an agreement for an operation.

Santos and an assistant, Dr. Guillermo Bermudez, operated on McQueen Thursday to remove the neck and stomach's advanced cancerous tumors.

The operation was performed from 8 to 11 a.m. Thursday.

Santos said McQueen’s condition seemed to stabilize after the operation. But late Thursday, he developed respiratory problems and died of heart failure a few hours later.

He was 50.

The hospital bed at a Juarez clinic where Steve McQueen died in 1980 after surgery to remove cancerous tumors.

5-pound tumor removed

Santos said the actor knew the surgery would be risky.

“If it hadn’t been for the heart failure, I believe something could have been done to make his remaining days more pleasant,” Santos said.

Santos said McQueen might have lived another two or three months if he had not undergone an operation. The Juarez doctors removed a 5-pound tumor from the ailing actor’s abdomen.

“The cancer caused him serious pains. Unfortunately, the disease was too advanced in this case,” the surgeon said.

Santos accommodated a horde of reporters in his tiny office Friday afternoon and discussed why McQueen might have come to Mexico for treatment.

“He and his wife asked for the surgery because he suffered intolerable pain,” Santos said. He was under constant sedatives.”

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Lived about 13 hours

Santos said McQueen lived about 13 hours after the operation. He was conscious and able to talk. For a while, the actor was able to eat small chunks of ice.

“He had a desire to live when he knew the race (against death) was at a short distance,” Santos said.

The actor was still in pain after the operation. But Santos said the actor told him the pain was not as severe as before the surgery.

Santos said the abdominal tumor was so large that it would have been only a matter of time before it would have choked him to death.

The surgeon said two friends of the family were at McQueen’s bedside when he died. Santos said McQueen’s wife, Barbara, and two children by a previous marriage, son Chad, 21, and daughter Terri, 20, had just left the clinic when he died.

Santos said he believes McQueen might have been referred to his clinic by other patients treated for cancer. The family did not want to subject the actor to publicity, he said.

“The press bothered him a lot when he was in Tijuana. He had a bad impression of journalists,” he said.

Actor Steve McQueen and his wife Barbara McQueen, the former Barbara Minty, arrive for a movie preview in Oxnard, California March.1980. A spokesman for the actor said McQueen died on Friday from a heart attack at a hospital in Juarez, Mexico, where McQueen was undergoing treatment for cancer. His wife and two children from a former marriage were with him when he died, Los Angeles publicist Warren Cowan added.

Died without saying anything

Santos said McQueen checked in using the pseudonym Samuel Sheppard, a Cleveland osteopath who was the defendant in two sensational trials in the 1950s and 1960s, allegedly killing his wife. He eventually was acquitted.

McQueen was asleep when his heart failed and the doctor said he died without saying anything.

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Attention on El Paso, Juarez

In the same edition of the Times, Renteria wrote about McQueen's trip from Juarez to El Paso International Airport:

A rattling old Ford carried Steve McQueen’s body from a Juarez funeral home to El Paso International Airport after losing his fight with cancer Friday morning.

The world’s eyes were on El Paso and Juarez as the actor’s friends and family prepared to fly his body back to California for funeral services.

Times photographer Carlos Rosales, dispatched to Juarez shortly after McQueen’s death was announced in Los Angeles, also rode in the car that brought the body to the Airport.

Rosales, assigned to provide The Times and The Associated Press with news photographs, followed the story from the clinic to Prado Funeral Home in Juarez and finally to El Paso International Airport where the casket containing McQueen’s body was flown to Los Angeles.

Autopsy took about 30 minutes

Since noon, Rosales had been in Juarez and was at the funeral home where Dr. Oscar Santos Vargas, who operated on McQueen Thursday, performed an autopsy on the actor’s body. The procedure took about 30 minutes.

Word circulated among Juarez news media that McQueen’s body was at the mortuary and reporters and television crews converged on the funeral home.

So many, in fact, that Alfonso Prado, director of the funeral home, called Juarez police and instructed them to keep the media out of the room where McQueen’s autopsy had just been completed.

Rosales accompanied McQueen’s body in the Prado funeral Home Station wagon taking the casket from Mexico to the El Paso airport.

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Transported in inexpensive casket

The body was transported in an inexpensive casket.

Prado’s old Fort LTD, used as a makeshift hearse, recently had been in the repair shop. Its front wheels shook as it cut through traffic lanes backed up at the Bridge of the Americas. The destination was Southwest Air Rangers terminal at the El Paso International Airport.

In the station wagon with Rosales was Prado and an assistant mortician.

“Would you let us cut through? We have a cadaver in the back,” Prado yelled out his window in Spanish at other motorists on the traffic-choked bridge.

At Mexican customs, the funeral director proudly proclaimed he had McQueen’s body in the back of his station wagon.

Once the hearse reached El Paso, heavy traffic caused it to miss the Airways Boulevard off-ramp on Interstate 10 and forced the vehicle to exit at Hawkins Boulevard and drive through the Cielo Vista area to the Airport.

Lear jet waiting

A charter Lear Jet, which arrived from California at about 4 p.m., set waiting.

The casket containing the body was placed aboard the private jet by three men identified only as McQueen's friends. They saw Rosales and his cameras nearby and crowded around him, then forcibly took the camera from his shoulder and removed a roll of film containing photographs of the casket being loaded into the plane.

“If Steve McQueen had been alive today, he would have punched you out,” one of the men told Rosales. “He punched out people like you.”

Trish Long may be reached at tong@elpasotimes.com or 915-546-6179.