Kinkade 'Drinking All Night' Before Death: 911 Call

Earlier this week, Thomas Kinkade's girlfriend told the San Jose Mercury News that the artist "died in his sleep, very happy, in the house he built, with the paintings he loved, and the woman he loved." But another depressing article in The Daily paints a very different picture: When that same girlfriend, Amy Pinto, called 911 on the morning Kinkade died, she apparently told the dispatchers Kinkade had been drinking. "Apparently he has been drinking all night and not moving," the dispatcher says on the recording.

And Kinkade's relationship with Pinto was also seemingly troubled: Los Gatos police confirmed they had responded "a couple" of times to Kinkade's home, and a neighbor says those calls involved domestic disputes. "They'd get into some nasty fights," he says. The Mercury News notes Kinkade and Pinto started dating six months after Kinkade's wife Nanette filed for legal separation and had been together about a year and a half. Click for more on Kinkade's troubled final years. (More Thomas Kinkade stories.)