The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

In the world she moved through, nobody who mattered used their real names. The names they used were made up for them, like magical incantations. But she was never sure of her real name, so even by the standards of this world of make-believe, she was an insubstantial creature. The actress the world knows as Marilyn Monroe created herself anew each day. What she created was a dream, a myth, the closest thing our times have summoned to a love goddess in the flesh. The death that came to her had all the scope of emotive possibilities she had brought to every day in life. From one perspective, it was squalid, pointless, and pitiable. From another, it was of itself a myth, an epic role in a drama involving the most potent names and players of her age.

Sometime in the night of 4 August 1962, Marilyn Monroe slipped away into the ultimate unreality, riding a massive dose of Nembutal and chloral hydrate. The Chief Medical Examiner of Los Angeles County made a hedging call on the cause of death-“probable suicide”. Other investigators, with considerable evidence but no hard proof, are still calling it murder.

Murder, accident, or suicide, Marilyn’s death is a mystery today not because of differing interpretations of the facts, but because this mistress of make-believe had been playing in a real and dangerous world, and the monarchs of that world were powerful enough to rewrite the script of her last hours.

In life and death, Marilyn embodied a supremely surreal and ambiguous version of the all-American success story. Raised in orphanages and foster homes, she became the Queen of Hollywood, using her talent and her body in equal measure to ascend from one imagined tier to the next. By the end she had achieved everything any starry-eyed bit player could dream of, and along the way she had bedded a president, married a sports legend and a literary giant, and captured the adulation of the world more completely than any actress of any time. She could be in turns a bitch and a baby, cunning and helpless, the goddess of sexual promise and the ghost of oblivion. She was a woman who could move, in the same afternoon, from a trembling mess of insecurity and self-doubt into an absolute master of her art. No one before or since has put more electricity and magic onto a piece of film.

The baby girl born at Los Angeles General Hospital at nine-thirty a.m. on 1 June 1926, was named Norma Jean Baker. The first name was inspired by the actress Norma Talmadge. The last was a convenience, borrowed from her mother’s departed second husband. Though the matter has been endlessly researched, the identity of Marilyn’s real father has never been firmly established. There are several candidates, the leading one a man named Gifford, who worked with her mother. The search for a father would become one of the themes of Norma Jean’s strange life. A number of surrogates-in fantasy, Clark Gable was a favorite-would fill and abandon the role.

The child who would be Marilyn had little more in the way of a mother. At the time of her daughter’s birth, Gladys Pearl Baker Mortenson was a delicately beautiful woman in her mid-twenties, working as a negative cutter at Consolidated Film Industries. She had two other children-a boy and a girl-who were living in the custody of her first husband’s family.

Norma Jean spent her first eight years with foster families while her mother worked, visiting the child on weekends. In 1934, mother and daughter lived in the same household for a few months-the longest period they would spend together during Norma Jean’s childhood-until Gladys suffered the first of many mental collapses and entered the same state hospital in which her own mother had died. The mother of Marilyn Monroe would spend most of the rest of her days in institutions, diagnosed-like her parents and brother before her-as a paranoid schizophrenic.

At nine, Norma Jean entered an orphanage and slept by a window overlooking the RKO studies. Beginning at eleven, she migrated from foster homes to guardians. Biographers have charted a total of twelve different households, not including the orphanage, inhabited by young Norma Jean before her marriage at sixteen. This upbringing did little to build a stable personality. After her transformation into movie stardom, Marilyn would milk the poor-orphan story for all it was worth with writers and studio publicists. Her accounts included an attempted smothering by her grandmother and no fewer than ten episodes of rape or molestation, beginning at age six. Even allowing for her exaggerations and self-contradictions, there is no doubt that Marilyn’s childhood was a perfect breeding ground for insecurity and loneliness.

Norma Jean’s first marriage, to a twenty-one-year-old former high school hero named Jim Dougherty, was more or less arranged by her guardian of the moment, who was moving out of state and preferred not to take the teenage girl along. In later years, Jim would remember the marriage more fondly than Marilyn. However happily it may have begun, the marriage was doomed when Jim shipped out with the merchant marine and the head of his luscious young bride was turned toward a career in modeling. With every stunning photograph, with every line of agent’s hype and every leer from ad executives and movie producers, Norma Jean moved closer to rebirth as Marilyn.

The official incarnation happened while Norma Jean was working as a contract player for 20th Century-Fox in 1946. Ben Lyon, the Fox casting director, borrowed the name Marilyn from an actress he admired named Marilyn Miller, Marilyn herself contributed Monroe-it was the maiden name of her grandmother.

Her first screen appearance came the following year, at the age of twenty-one. Marilyn briefly rowed a canoe in an insipid movie starring a team of mules and titled Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! The infamously jiggling-Monroe walk had its debut in a bit part in a Marx Brothers movie called Love Happy (1949), causing Groucho to evaluate the young starlet as “Mae West, Theda Bara, and Bo Peep all rolled into one.” The importance of these early cameos was that Marilyn’s uncanny ability to make love to a camera lens was being noticed by the men who owned the cameras. She was not, by Hollywood standards, an exceptionally beautiful woman. She was an exceptionally photogenic woman, and that was all that mattered. Remembering his first session with Marilyn in an early screen test, veteran cinematographer Leon Shamroy says, “I got a cold chill. This girl had something I hadn’t seen since silent pictures. She had a kind of fantastic beauty… she got sex on a piece of film.”

She also knew how to use sex on a casting couch, and her talents in this line contributed as much to her early successes as her undeniable screen presence. One advantageous relationship was with the seventy-year-old Joseph Schenck, the head of production at Fox and one of the founders of the company. Another was with a powerful agent named Johnny Hyde. Marilyn minced no words in describing her attitude at this stage of her career. “I spent a lot of time on my knees.” There were genuine love affairs to go with the affairs of business, and a good deal of near-pathological abandon. By the end of her life, Marilyn may have undergone as many as fourteen abortions.

Hampered by the studios’ unfortunate choices of vehicles to showcase her talents, the on-screen Marilyn remained more a sexpot than a major star until her twentieth picture, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). A succession of movie classics followed, among them The Seven Year Itch (1955), Bus Stop (1956), and Some Like It Hot (1959).

She was the movie star she had dreamed of being, lived to be. More than that, she had become a marvelous, if difficult, actress who worked long and seriously at her craft. She built these powers by a force of will, but the one thing she could never build was a complete and secure human being to occupy Marilyn’s-or Norma Jean’s-celebrated body. Take the time to sift through the recollections of those who knew her, and one word of description will occur more frequently than any other. The word is not “sex”-though the person described packaged and sold sex more powerfully than anyone. The word is “child”. Marilyn Monroe was a child, sometimes petulant and obnoxious, sometimes spontaneous and effervescent and living to charm and please, but more times than anything, afraid. Afraid of being unloved and alone.

Though lacking in formal education, this child-woman was not the dumb blonde she played in the movies. The saber wit and the insights into character were not created by the scriptwriters. One example. An attempt is made to blackmail the studio because Marilyn’s nude image has been discovered on a cheesecake calendar, which will make millions for its publishers but which was shot years before when Norma Jean needed the fifty bucks she was paid for the session. The time is the prudish early 1950s, but Marilyn skates through the thin ice to an enormous publicity advantage with a crowded press conference.

Reporter: Is it true you didn’t have anything on when these pictures were taken?

Marilyn: We had the radio on.

In January of 1954, just as she ascended to the heights of stardom, Marilyn married another star who had been longer and even more widely adored. He was Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio, the Yankee Clipper, one of the greatest baseball players ever to swing a bat and the man who had held America in his grip during the entire summer of 1941, hitting in fifty-six straight games. The courtship had made good copy for a year and a half. The marriage lasted nine months. Joltin’ Joe, it seemed, wanted a wife more than a movie star. Still, Joe could “hit homes runs” in bed; but more than that, he was something Marilyn couldn’t find in Hollywood. He was “genuine” and he loved her as a woman. He would reemerge as a friend and protector in the last year of her life, and he would be the guardian of her violated body at the end.

In the summer of 1956, a second star from an entirely different constellation joined the goddess of love in marriage. Arthur Miller was-with Tennessee Williams-one of the two great living playwrights in America. For Marilyn, who desperately wanted to be taken seriously as an actress, the oh so serious playwright held all the fascination of the one who supplies the deathless words for the one who speaks them. In the media, it was the wedding of the Beauty and the Brain, the Egghead and the Hourglass. It proved to be a storybook romance that could not survive a prolonged reading by the eyes of the real world. After many difficulties, the divorce came at the beginning of 1961.

There was, or at least there may have been, another “marriage”. This marriage-if real-would have been the second, before DiMaggio and after Jim Dougherty. Though undocumented, this marriage is of great interest to those who believe Marilyn Monroe was murdered, for it was to the man who has maintained a single-minded crusade to expose the murder to the world, a man named Robert Slatzer. Slatzer is a writer and producer who met Marilyn in the summer of 1946, when he was a young fan-magazine reporter and she was the struggling model and would-be starlet Norma Jean Mortenson. Slatzer has subsequently claimed that he and Marilyn fell in love and were married in an alcoholic haze in Tijuana, on 4 October 1952. According to his account, the young couple lived together as man and wife “about three days”, until they were strong-armed by Darryl F. Zanuck-the head of 20th Century-Fox and Marilyn’s boss at the time-into annulling the marriage and having all records of it destroyed.

Monroe’s biographers are divided on the marriage story. It is well established that Robert Slatzer and Marilyn were certainly good friends, and that their friendship extended from the late 1940s until her death in 1962. In any case, Slatzer’s credibility is a crucial issue in the murder story, as much of the first-hand evidence in the case comes either directly from him or from his long and determined legwork.

To accompany the confirmed and could-be husbands there is a Homeric list of confirmed and could-be lovers. Marilyn could be ambivalent about how much she personally enjoyed the sex act, but there is no doubt she enjoyed attracting men. “If fifteen men were in the room with her,” said one Hollywood publicist, “each would be convinced he was the one she’d be waiting for after the others left.” Through personal magnetism, compulsion, or both, she raised the art of seduction to a new level. Not too surprisingly, a vast number of the men who had speaking acquaintances with her have claimed at one time or another to have shared her bed. But for our purposes the most interesting of the lovers are those who could not afford to brag. Of these there are two more interesting than all: the President of the United States and his brother, the Attorney General.

Some accounts trace the origin of Marilyn’s affair with John F. Kennedy to the early 1950s, when Kennedy was a rising star in the US Senate and Marilyn was an established sex symbol in Hollywood. Other sources say the romance began just before Kennedy received his party’s nomination for president in 1960. Whenever it may have started, the affair-judging by the independent testimony of several who witnessed it first-hand-seems to have reached its peak in the early, heady days of the Kennedy presidency, through the offices-and in the beachfront Santa Monica home-of the President’s brother-in-law, actor Peter Lawford. The timing of the coupling is significant. Marilyn was at the end of a marriage and in a downward spiral both professionally and personally, due to heavy drug abuse and the endless drain of her own insecurities. John Kennedy was very much married and the most powerful man in the world. As a security risk, the unstable Marilyn was as risky as they come.

Not that John Kennedy was above taking risks where sexual adventure was concerned. The list of his confirmed and could-be liaisons rivals Marilyn’s in its proportions. For Kennedy-and his brother Robert-the indiscretions may have seemed a sort of family tradition. “Dad”, JFK revealed to Clare Boothe Luce, “told all the boys to get laid as often as possible.” Joe Kennedy had taken his own advice. He himself had reportedly enjoyed Hollywood girlfriends in his heyday, the most famous being Gloria Swanson.

Robert Kennedy’s fling with Marilyn is less well documented than his brother’s, and its beginnings are no less difficult to trace. There are those who claim Robert was the first Kennedy to date Monroe. At least one first-hand account, however, suggests that Robert’s affair began as the President’s was ending-in the summer and fall of 1961. The inference has been drawn that the younger Kennedy was enlisted to soften the blow of the end of the President’s dalliance, and that he, like so many others, found Marilyn’s temptations impossible to resist. However and whenever it started, this affair appears to have continued until just prior to Marilyn’s death in August of 1962. At least from Marilyn’s viewpoint, there was an important difference between the ways the two brothers conducted their affairs. From what she reportedly told others, it seems the love goddess took Robert Kennedy’s attentions more seriously than John’s. Speaking of the President, she could be lighthearted: “I think I made his back feel better” and “I made it with the Prez.” Of the Attorney General: “Bobby Kennedy promised to marry me.”

Again, the timing relative to Marilyn’s state of mind is important. Her life, never securely anchored, was becoming increasingly unraveled as the decade of the 1950s wore into the 1960s. Her attempted “suicides”-some or all of which were accidental overdoses-had recurred perhaps a dozen times, with increasing frequency in later years. Her tendency to keep whole, and enormously expensive, film production ensembles awaiting her appearance for hours and even days had increased to the point that she had been fired from her last film, Something’s Got to Give, on 8 June 1962, after showing up on the set only twelve times during thirty-three scheduled shooting days. Marilyn’s last day before the cameras had been 1 June, her thirty-sixth birthday. Her psychiatrist had noted an alarming disintegration beginning in the summer of 1961, including “severe depressive” reactions, suicidal tendencies, increased drug use, and random promiscuity. She may have been a goddess, but she was not a goddess to be trusted with anybody’s secrets. And the Attorney General of the United States may have trusted her with the most important secrets that he knew.

The source for this intriguing possibility is Robert Slatzer. Slatzer was one of a number of friends in whom Marilyn confided about her affairs with the Kennedy brothers, but he appears to be the only one she told about Robert Kennedy’s weakness for dangerously indiscreet pillow talk. Slatzer says Marilyn told him Bobby had become annoyed when she forgot things he had told her during previous visits, and that she had resorted-unbeknownst to the Attorney General-to making notes of their conversations in a red diary. Ten days before she died, Marilyn showed Slatzer the diary, as they sat on a beach at Point Dume, north of Malibu on the Pacific Coast Highway. Most of the entries, Slatzer says, began with “Bobby told me.” He remembers entries about Kennedy’s war with Jimmy Hoffa and the Mafia, with Kennedy swearing to “put that SOB behind bars”. But most chillingly, he remembers an entry that read, “Bobby told me he was going to have… Castro murdered.”

The Kennedy administration’s bungling attempts to kill Fidel Castro-through the strangely combined efforts of the CIA, anti-Castro Cubans, and the American Mafia-first came to light during US Senate hearings in the mid 1970s, and have since become common knowledge. But in 1962, a revelation of this kind would have been the most dangerous political fiasco imaginable. It could certainly have done critical damage to the administration; it could feasibly have started a nuclear confrontation; it could even cause the assassination of the President of the United States-which, as matter of fact, it may well have.

According to Slatzer, Marilyn not only knew these state secrets, she was prepared to tell the world about them. He says she talked of plans to call a press conference and “blow the lid off this whole damn thing,” revealing her affairs with the two Kennedys and the broken “promises that had been made to her”. The date allegedly mentioned for the press conference was Monday, 6 August 1962-the day after she was pronounced dead. Slatzer says he asked if Marilyn had told anyone else of her plans for the press conference and she replied that she had told “a few people”. He claims to have warned her that what she knew was “like having a walking time bomb,” but that she said she “didn’t care at this point… these people had used her… and she was going to… tell the real story.”

Some confirmation of Slatzer’s story comes from Peter Lawford’s ex-wife Deborah Gould. Gould has said that-years after the fact-Lawford broke down and offered a tearful account of the end of Marilyn’s life. Taken as a whole, Lawford’s “confession” raises as many questions as it answers. But in this case Lawford’s alleged account echoes Slatzer’s: Marilyn tells Lawford, “I’ve been used… thrown from one man to another… and I’m going public with everything.” If Marilyn wanted word of this threat to get back to the Kennedys, she could have chosen no better vehicle than Peter Lawford.

There is no record that Marilyn notified anyone in the media about plans for a press conference. The fact remains that the mere suggestion of such an ultimatum could have been an extremely dangerous gambit. It appears Marilyn was desperate enough to play this card in hopes that it would force Robert Kennedy to contact her. She had told several friends that Robert had abruptly ended the affair, and no longer called her or returned her phone calls. He had gone so far, she said, as to disconnect the private number he had given her, and the Justice Department operators refused to put her calls to the main switchboard through. Marilyn’s frequent calls to Justice during July of 1962 are documented on her phone records. The last call for which records are available was placed 30 July, the Monday before her death.

Marilyn’s reasons for calling Robert Kennedy may have gone beyond the sting of the spurned lover. In late June, she told an interviewer, “A woman must have to love a man with all her heart to have his child… especially when she’s not married to him. And when a man leaves a woman when she tells him she’s going to have his baby, when he doesn’t marry her, that must hurt a woman very much, deep down inside.” Between late June and early July, she told several friends that she had lost a baby, without specifying abortion or miscarriage. To some friends she confided that the father had been John Kennedy, to others, Robert. At least two sources have reported that there was an abortion, performed in Tijuana by an American doctor. Depending on which authority you trust, this may have been the fourteenth abortion of Marilyn’s life, an especially sad count for a child-woman who spent her final interviews talking about how much she wanted a child of her own. During the same period, Marilyn told several friends-to universal disbelief-that she and the Attorney General would someday be married.

In the available accounts of these last scenes of her life, there is another word that crops up frequently in descriptions of Marilyn. The word is scared. One long-time friend, Arthur James, recalls that Marilyn was “frightened stiff”. Slatzer says she told him that “because of circumstances that led all the way to Washington”, she was “scared for her life”. James and others say she became convinced that she was being watched, that her phones were bugged, and that she resorted to making personal calls from a phone booth in a park near her home, lugging pocketfuls of change for this purpose.

Marilyn may have had paranoid tendencies, but in this instance she was very much in tune with the real world. She was right about the phones. She was right about being watched. In fact her whole home was bugged, and so was Peter Lawford’s home, where she had rendezvoused with her two most powerful lovers. The bugging was not being done by the government.

Though she almost surely did not know it, the recording devices and the sinister people behind them may have been precisely the reason Robert Kennedy had become incommunicado. Kennedy was in the fifth year of a personal war against organized crime in general and Teamsters Union President Jimmy Hoffa in particular. The struggle had been joined when Kennedy was Chief Counsel to the McClellan Committee in the US Senate, and carried on, with unprecedented force, when he became Attorney General. Hoffa was convinced Robert Kennedy had used the attack on his union as a stepping stone to national power for himself and his brother, and in a sense he was right. The union boss and his mob friends hated both of the elder Kennedy brothers enough to want them dead-and were reportedly not above saying so, among themselves-but they especially hated Bobby.

In the course of the struggle, Robert Kennedy had created a special “Get Hoffa” strike force in the Justice Department, with the FBI, the IRS, and the government itself aligned on his side. But Jimmy Hoffa and his Mafia allies were not without their own resources and their own considerable army of foot soldiers. Hoffa knew the Kennedys were vulnerable because of their womanizing. When he learned of the amorous dance of John and Robert and Marilyn Monroe-by one account the information came to him as early as 1957-he must have rubbed his hands in glee.

The ideal weapon for this phase of the war on Kennedy happened to be a human being who happened to already be on Hoffa’s payroll-the man acknowledged by his peers to be the best wiretapper in the world, one Bernard Bates Spindel. Spindel had learned the basics of his trade in the US Army Signal Corps and in army intelligence during the Second World War. One of the ironies of his remarkable career is that he could easily have served on the Kennedy side in the bugging wars: as a young man he applied for a job with the CIA but was rejected. Though he is said to have worked both sides of the fence thereafter, Bernie Spindel spent the bulk of the rest of his days beating the government spooks at their own game. Spindel had been taping Robert Kennedy for his client Jimmy Hoffa since at least the late 1950s. According to Hollywood-based private eye Fred Otash, Spindel got the Marilyn Monroe assignment in the summer of 1961.

Otash has said Hoffa summoned him and Spindel to a meeting in Florida that summer. Hoffa wanted “to develop a derogatory profile of Jack and Bobby Kennedy and their relationships with Marilyn Monroe and with any other woman. The strategy… was to use electronic devices.” The first target was Peter Lawford’s home, where bugs were placed not only on the phone lines but “in the carpets… under chandeliers and in ceiling fixtures.” Otash says the tapes from the Lawford bugging contained conversations between both Kennedys and Marilyn, and phone conversation to arrange rendezvous between both Kennedys and Marilyn, and both Kennedys and other women.

Another private detective who worked on the assignment, John Danoff, has been more graphic in his description of the tapes from the Lawford house: it “was cuddly talk and taking off their clothes and the sex act in the bed-you could hear the springs squeaking and so on.”

If this was good stuff, maybe better stuff could be had at Marilyn’s home, the modest Spanish-style house in Brentwood in which she spent the last months of her life. Marilyn’s friend Arthur James says he was asked in the spring of 1962 to get Marilyn out of the house so that “people could come in there and bug… for the purpose of getting evidence on Bobby Kennedy.” James says he turned the request down, and never told Marilyn about it. The house was bugged anyway. Examination in later years turned up indications of eavesdropping devices both on the phones and on the premises.

Despite all these frightening developments, there are indications Marilyn had rebounded to some extent from her depressions during her last few days. The studio, with reluctance but with little choice in the matter, had rehired her on Something’s Got to Give, and shooting was set to resume before the end of 1962. She was negotiating on other film projects, giving interviews, enjoying setting up and landscaping the Brentwood house, the first home she had bought and lived in on her own. She had set several appointments for the week that would follow her death. Though never a model of stability, she did not appear to be a person who was contemplating suicide.

The Brentwood household included a housekeeper-companion, a sixty-year-old woman named Eunice Murray, who had been installed by Marilyn’s psychiatrist, Dr Ralph Greenson. Mrs Murray, who seems to have had some experience dealing with psychiatric patients, came on the scene after Marilyn had alienated a succession of nurses. It was Mrs Murray who had found the Brentwood house for Marilyn to buy, and Mrs Murray who brought her own son-in-law into the household as a salaried handyman. The housekeeper and the handyman were two of many links between the film star and the psychiatrist. During her final summer, Marilyn saw Dr Greenson in his professional capacity as often as twice a day. She also relied on him increasingly for advice and moral support, spent a great deal of time in his home, and became close to his children. Marilyn came to depend on Greenson so heavily that some of her friends observed that the doctor was, in effect, running her life. It was a pattern she had lived through before with her acting coaches, and if it troubled her there is only one indication that she may have been trying to change it: a report that she made inquiries about replacing Mrs Murray with a housekeeper of her own choosing at the end of July, just before she died.

As it happens, Mrs Murray has become the enigma within the riddle of the Marilyn Monroe case. Her evidence is critical, because, according to the officially accepted version of events, she was the only other person in the house when Marilyn died. But beginning with her first statements to police that night, and stretching almost to the present day, her accounts have been so abstruse, ever-changing, and self-contradictory that they may be interpreted in any number of vastly different ways. In the impossible event that any party or parties were ever put on trial for the murder of Marilyn Monroe, one can imagine Mrs Murray in the role of witness for either the defense or the prosecution, depending on the story she chooses to tell on that particular day. It is hard to escape the conclusion that this kindly and soft-spoken old lady is either impossibly befuddled or is doggedly hiding a dangerous truth.

Mrs Murray is not alone in her capacity for confusion about the last hours of Marilyn’s life. In fact, virtually all of the small number of people who spent extended periods of time with Marilyn that weekend have shown an alarming tendency to forget or to offer contradictory stories, so much so that their testimony would seem highly suspicious even if there were no other reason to doubt the official suicide verdict. And there are plenty of other reasons.

Given all the fuzzy recollections, it is impossible to reconstruct with any certainty the last two days Marilyn Monroe spent on this earth. There are a few documented facts. One is that Robert Kennedy was in California that weekend. With his wife and four children in tow, he was to address the American Bar Association meeting in San Francisco, staying at the ranch of a lawyer named John Bates, about sixty miles south of the city. Marilyn knew Kennedy was coming, and was still desperately trying to contact him. Her phone records for the four days she lived in August were mysteriously confiscated, but an enterprising reporter established that she made several calls to the San Francisco hotel where the Bar Association had reserved rooms for Kennedy, and that the calls were not returned. Bit by bit, evidence has emerged that Kennedy left the San Francisco area to visit Marilyn that weekend. His host John Bates has steadfastly insisted that this could not have happened. A number of other witnesses, including Los Angeles police, claim otherwise.

For her part, Marilyn spent the early hours of Friday shopping for plants to landscape her yard. She visited her doctor and her psychiatrist. No one has clearly established what she did that night. One of the questionable sources for Marilyn’s activities that weekend, her press aide Pat Newcomb-who later worked for and was close to the Kennedys-has said she and Marilyn dined at one of their favorite Santa Monica restaurants that evening, but that she could not recall the name or location of the restaurant.

At dawn on Saturday, 4 August, Marilyn’s friend and self-described “sleeping-pill buddy” Jeanne Carmen received a phone call from Marilyn, speaking in “a frightened voice… and very tired-she said she had not slept the entire night” and complaining about “ ‘phone call after phone call after phone call’ with some woman… saying, ‘you tramp… leave Bobby alone or you’re going to be in deep trouble.’ ” During this call and twice later in the day, Marilyn asked Carmen to come over and “bring a bag of pills” but Carmen was busy and couldn’t comply.

Marilyn made a number of other phone calls during the morning-one to her friend and masseur Ralph Roberts, making a tentative plan for dinner at her home that evening. At one point Mrs Murray’s son-in-law Norman Jeffries, Jr encountered Marilyn while working on the kitchen floor. She was wrapped in a bath towel, looking “desperately sick” as though “she must have taken a lot of dope… or was scared out of her mind. I had never seen her look that way before.” Late in the morning, Marilyn’s hairdresser Agnes Flanagan visited and observed that Marilyn was “terribly, terribly depressed” at the delivery, via messenger, of a stuffed toy tiger. The significance of the tiger has never been explained.

The afternoon is a mystery about which very little clear information is available. The only reported event with several sources to support it is a visit by Robert Kennedy to Marilyn’s home. If Kennedy did visit, it would not have been the first time. Jeanne Carmen says she was once at Marilyn’s when Kennedy arrived, and Marilyn, fresh out of a bath and dressed in a bathrobe “jumped into his arms” and “kissed him openly, which was out of character for her”.

A private investigator working for Robert Slatzer reports that a neighbor of Marilyn’s was hosting a bridge game on the afternoon of 4 August, and that the ladies at the game-understandably interested in the comings and goings at the home of their famous neighbor-observed Robert Kennedy arrive in the company of another man “carrying what resembled a doctor’s bag”. A daughter of one of the women at the game (the woman is deceased) has repeated the story, adding that the hostess was harassed for weeks by men warning her “to keep her mouth shut”. Robert Kennedy himself allegedly testified in a deposition-no record of which is available-that he did visit Marilyn’s home that afternoon escorted by a doctor, who injected the distraught actress with a tranquilizer to calm her down. Mrs Murray, having denied over the course of twenty-three years that Kennedy had been in Marilyn’s home that Saturday, finally admitted on camera in a 1985 BBC documentary that the Attorney General had been there during the afternoon, though she offered no details. Peter Lawford’s ex-wife Deborah Gould says Lawford told her Kennedy went to Marilyn’s that Saturday to tell her once and for all that the affair was over, and the confrontation left her “very very distraught and depressed”. A neighbor of Lawford’s says he saw Robert Kennedy arrive by car at Lawford’s home during the afternoon.

Marilyn’s psychiatrist, Ralph Greenson, fills in the story as of about four-thirty or five p.m. Dr Greenson has said Marilyn called him in an anxious state, seeming “depressed and somewhat drugged”. He went to her house, spending “about two and half hours” there. According to his carefully worded account, she told him she had been having affairs with “extremely important men in government… at the highest level”, and that she had expected to be with one of these men that evening, but had been disappointed. At around six-thirty p.m., the masseur Ralph Roberts called to confirm the dinner plans. Roberts recognized Dr Greenson’s voice, as it told him Marilyn was not home. Joe DiMaggio’s son Joe Jr tried to call twice, reaching Mrs Murray, who said Marilyn was out. The press aide Pat Newcomb had spent the night in the house and had been on the scene all day. According to Greenson, Marilyn now became angry with Newcomb, and he asked Newcomb to leave.

There is an interesting sidelight to this seemingly minor incident. One source-a friend of Newcomb’s who also knew Marilyn-has said that Pat Newcomb, a bright and attractive young woman, was herself “deeply in love with Bobby Kennedy”. Marilyn considered the younger Newcomb a rival as well as a friend, and had been jealous of her in the past. Newcomb, who was sequestered in the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port immediately after Marilyn’s death and who subsequently became a Kennedy employee, has long refused comment on the Kennedys’ relationships with Marilyn.

Though Marilyn “seemed somewhat depressed”, Greenson had seen her “many, many times in a much worse condition”. He had a dinner engagement, and, according to his account, he judged that Marilyn was sufficiently recovered that he could return to his home around seven-fifteen, asking Mrs Murray to stay the night as a precaution. At about seven-forty p.m., Greenson says, Marilyn called him to report that she had talked to young DiMaggio. She sounded in better spirits.

The Kennedys’ brother-in-law, Peter Lawford, gave a number of differing accounts of the night Marilyn died to a number of different people. In all of them, he claims to have had a phone conversation with Marilyn at about this time, in which she turned down his invitation to come to dinner at his home. The dinner party may have been the gathering Marilyn had hoped to attend with Robert Kennedy that night. By this time, she was in no shape to go.

As far as anyone knows for certain, the only person on the scene with Marilyn at this point was Mrs Murray. Of the many stories she has told of the fatal night, this is essentially the original-the one repeated in the first police reports:

At around eight p.m., Marilyn says good night and, taking one of her two phones with its long cord in with her, closes her bedroom door.

Mrs Murray tidies up about the house and goes to her own room. At about three-thirty a.m., for some reason-perhaps alerted by a “sixth sense,” as Dr Greenson somewhat mystically referred to it-Mrs Murray arises and notices that Marilyn’s light is still on and that the phone cord is still under her door. The phone is normally disconnected at night. Mrs Murray is too timid to knock and risk awakening Marilyn, but alarmed enough to call Dr Greenson. He tells her to knock on the locked door, and she does. There is no response. He tells her he is on the way and instructs her to call Dr Hyman Engleberg, Marilyn’s personal physician. As she awaits the doctors’ arrival, Mrs Murray goes to the front of the house and uses a fireplace poker to pull back the curtains and peek in. She sees Marilyn lying nude on the bed. At about three thirty-five a.m., Greenson-who lives nearby-arrives, breaks the bedroom window, and enters the room. Marilyn is lying face down with the phone clutched “fiercely” in her right hand. Greenson realizes immediately that she is dead. Dr Engleberg arrives about five minutes later. The police are finally called at four twenty-five a.m.

On the face of it, the story almost makes sense, though it certainly has its queer touches. For one, it has Mrs Murray awakening a psychiatrist in the middle of the night before she makes any effort on her own to find out if anything is really wrong. Odder still, it shows us two doctors-who knew their obligations in what was clearly a coroner’s case-waiting, inexplicably, almost an hour to report the death of their most famous patient. There are other serious discrepancies that are not so immediately apparent. One is that Mrs Murray could not, as she claimed, have first been alarmed by the light under Marilyn’s bedroom door. The house had newly installed white wool carpeting that brushed firmly enough against the bottom of the door to make it difficult to close. No light showed through.

This early account of Marilyn’s death is not, as it may seem, stranger than fiction. It is fiction.

The first cop on the scene had immediate misgivings about the story he was told. The belated call to the police had been placed by Dr Engleberg. It had been taken by the Watch Commander on the West Los Angeles desk, a Sergeant named Jack Clemmons. Given that the death of Marilyn Monroe had been reported, Clemmons was curious enough to make the run to the scene himself. Clemmons was a tough-minded and experienced cop. Ironically, he was also a friend of Marilyn’s ex-husband Jim Dougherty, who became a policeman years after his divorce from his famous first wife.

The doctors showed Clemmons a Nembutal bottle among the fifteen bottles of medication cluttering Marilyn’s bedside table. The bottle was empty and had its top in place. Its label came from the San Vicente Pharmacy in Brentwood, and indicated a prescription from Dr Engleberg, filled on Friday, 3 August. Engleberg told Clemmons the bottle had contained fifty capsules when full. No suicide note was in evidence.

Perhaps more significantly, no water glass was in evidence either, and the water in the adjoining bathroom was turned off because of work on the plumbing system. People who knew Marilyn well have said she could not bear to swallow even one pill without water. Swallowing fifty pills without water was out of the question. It has been noted that photographs of the room show what appears to be a Mexican-style ceramic jug on the floor that could have held water. Apparently no one thought to see if it did, or ask if it was used for that purpose.

Clemmons had an “uneasy feeling” about the behavior of the doctors and of Mrs Murray. There was something about the death scene itself he couldn’t buy. It was too pretty, too arranged, to jibe with the death throes by overdose in his experience: “It looked like the whole thing had been staged.” Marilyn’s body was in rigor mortis. By Clemmons’s experienced guess, she had not died during the early hours of that morning, but may have been dead as long as eight hours. He did not like the fact that Mrs Murray was busying herself by doing laundry and packing boxes when he arrived, or that her son-in-law had already been called to repair the broken bedroom window. Most of all, he did not like the time sequences he was given.

Though his concerns did not find their way into the final version of his written report, Clemmons has insisted that Mrs Murray told him she first became alarmed about Marilyn “immediately after midnight”. He says the two doctors were present when she made this statement, and did not disagree. Clemmons’s impression was that Drs Greenson and Engleberg had been on the scene themselves since around midnight, and he remembers questioning the doctors “very pointedly” about why they had waited not one hour but four to call the police. He got no satisfactory reply. When Sergeant Clemmons went off duty that Sunday morning and turned the case over to other officers, he was highly suspicious. By the time the official suicide verdict was returned, he was convinced that Marilyn Monroe had been murdered. He remains adamantly convinced today, though his refusal to accept the official line in the case cost him his job with the Los Angeles police.

Twenty-three years after the fact, Mrs Murray told the BBC interviewer that it had indeed been “around midnight” when she first became concerned about Marilyn. In this version of her story, she says she did wait until three-thirty a.m., to call Dr Greenson. Why did she wait so long? She can’t remember.

In fact there were hours of frantic activity-beginning well before midnight-in Marilyn’s house that night that Mrs Murray can’t remember. It was about eleven p.m.-perhaps even slightly earlier-when Marilyn’s press agent Arthur Jacobs’s enjoyment of a Henry Mancini concert was interrupted by an urgent message. Jacobs’s widow Natalie, who accompanied him to the Hollywood Bowl that night, remembers: “About three-quarters of the way through the concert someone came to our box and he said, ‘Arthur, come quickly… Marilyn is dead, or she’s on the point of death.’ ” Mrs Jacobs believes the message came from Pat Newcomb, an employee in her husband’s firm. She says Jacobs dropped her off at their home, and she saw nothing of him for two days thereafter. In her phrase, “he had to fudge the Press”.

Presumably one of the things Jacobs had to fudge was the possibility that Marilyn did not die at home after all. In the early hours of the morning she left the premises for an ambulance ride. The ambulance story first surfaced during a District Attorney’s review of the case in 1982, and has since been confirmed by writers and reporters. The ambulance driver has been identified as one Ken Hunter, and the attendant as Murray Liebowitz. The ambulance belonged to Schaefer Ambulance, the largest private company of its kind in LA at the time. Hunter and Liebowitz, who has since changed his name, have confirmed the call at Marilyn’s house, but have been mysteriously reluctant to talk about it. The owner of Schaefer Ambulance, Walter Schaefer, has not. Schaefer insisted Marilyn was alive, but in a coma-apparently suffering from a drug overdose-when she was picked up and taken to Santa Monica Hospital. The time has been reported as two a.m. Schaefer believes Marilyn died at the hospital. An obvious problem with this opinion is that, if the time report is correct, Marilyn was found in rigor mortis just two and one half hours later. Rigor mortis takes from four to six hours to set in.

Records of the ambulance company are only kept for five years, and have been destroyed. Hospital records for the period are likewise not available, and no one has been located who worked at the hospital in 1962 and who remembers treating Marilyn Monroe that night. It is of course possible that she was treated but, lacking makeup, not recognized, and possible that she died en route to the hospital. The autopsy records no evidence of medical attempts to resuscitate her from an overdose. Still, it seems incredible that Schaefer and his two employees could be mistaken about so memorable an emergency call. And the case for an attempt to save a dying Marilyn was reinforced by Mrs Murray, whose on-again, off-again memory recollected during a 1985 version of her story of a late night visit by an unidentified doctor while Marilyn was still alive.

What was happening at Marilyn’s house between the time someone-Pat Newcomb?-sent Arthur Jacobs the message that Marilyn was dead or dying around eleven p.m. and someone called for an ambulance, perhaps about two a.m.? And if she did ride to the hospital, who took her body home? It wasn’t Schaefer: Marilyn’s trip in the ambulance was one-way. It would have been no mean feat to make a corpse vanish from an emergency room. Standard procedure in such a case would be for the Medical Examiner to be called and to officially release the body only after an autopsy. A clever manipulation-or the wave of some powerful hands-would have been required to bypass the system.

With each new revelation in the case, the scene at Marilyn’s house grows more crowded. One of her lawyers, Milton “Mickey” Rudin, reportedly appears at around four a.m., calling Peter Lawford’s agent on the phone and telling him Marilyn is dead.

Peter Lawford himself appears. According to his ex-wife Deborah Gould, he shows up to purge the house of any evidence of contact with the Kennedys. He even finds and destroys, in the story as Gould reports it, a suicide note. Several of Lawford’s later accounts of the evening feature a distress call from a slurry-voiced Marilyn telling him to “say goodbye to Jack, and say goodbye to yourself, because you’re a nice guy”. Two of his dinner guests have confirmed that there was some discussion about whether Lawford should go to Marilyn’s and check on her. Judging by the statements of the guests, his trip to the house happened sometime after eleven p.m.

Private detectives and their operatives troop in and out. Fred Otash recalls that Lawford-unaware that he is hiring one of the men who have been bugging his home-bursts into his office around three a.m., “completely disoriented and in a state of shock… saying that Marilyn Monroe was dead, that Bobby Kennedy was there, and that he was spirited out of town by some airplane, that they [Marilyn and Robert Kennedy] had got in a big fight that evening, that he’d like to have… someone go out to the house and pick up any and all information… regarding any involvement between Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys.”

And all of the actors on this crowded stage play out their parts for at least five hours-and probably more-before anyone feels safe enough to call the police and tell them Marilyn Monroe is dead. No wonder Marilyn’s body was already in rigor mortis-indicating she had died at least four to six hours earlier-when Sergeant Clemmons arrived and found only the two doctors and Mrs Murray on the scene.

Where is the leading man? There is no proof that Robert Kennedy was back at Marilyn’s house the night she died, but there are several reports that place him at Peter Lawford’s house, only minutes away. Police sources have said Kennedy was seen at the Beverly Hilton during the afternoon, was at Lawford’s house that night, and broke a dinner date with Marilyn. An enterprising photographer named Billy Woodfield ran down a lead to the owner of an air charter company often used by Lawford and his guests. Woodfield says the charter man showed him logs indicating that Kennedy had been picked up by helicopter at Lawford’s house around two a.m. Sunday morning, and flown to Los Angeles International. Neighbors were awakened by the sound of the helicopter. Another report, from Deborah Gould, confirms Woodfield’s story. She says Lawford told her Kennedy left by helicopter during the night, going back to his accommodations near San Francisco. According to Gould, the stall in calling the police served two purposes: allowing time for incriminating evidence of the affair to be removed, and for Kennedy to make his escape from the area.

If such an elaborate-and swiftly arranged-cover-up seems unlikely, consider that what we have seen thus far are only the more visible suggestions of a remarkably thorough scheme of damage control that seems to have reached federal law enforcement agencies, the phone company, the coroner’s office, and the Los Angeles Police Department.

Not long after daybreak on Sunday, two men “with Eastern accents”, identified by two knowledgeable sources as FBI agents, appeared at the offices of General Telephone and purged Marilyn’s phone records for the four days she lived in August. The agents obviously acted with the quickly secured cooperation of high-ranking phone company officials. Like many of the actions in the Monroe cover-up, the seizure of the records was illegal. They have never been recovered, and the FBI has denied any involvement. A Santa Monica newspaper publisher who was a close friend of a telephone company division manager has said he was told the missing records showed “a call to Washington on the night Monroe died.” A police leak during the highly secret Monroe investigation indicated that a wadded piece of paper with a White House telephone number had been found among the sheets on Marilyn’s bed.

At nine-thirty a.m. on Sunday morning, Marilyn’s body went under the knife of the world’s most famous coroner, Dr Thomas Noguchi. The results of the autopsy are as controversial as anything in the controversial case. Noguchi, then working as a medical examiner under Chief Medical Examiner of Los Angeles Dr Theodore Curphey, noted the somewhat unusual presence of the DA’s liaison to the coroner’s office, Deputy District Attorney John Miner, at the autopsy. Though Dr Englebert had reportedly given Marilyn an injection as recently as Friday, and despite the alleged injection by Robert Kennedy’s “doctor” companion on Saturday afternoon, Noguchi-after “searching painstakingly”-“found no needle marks”. Miner has confirmed the thoroughness of the search. A fresh bruise was found on the lower left back and hip, which Noguchi notes “might have indicated violence”.

Despite the fact that Marilyn supposedly swallowed as many as fifty Nembutal capsules and chased them with a handful of chloral hydrate, Noguchi found “absolutely no evidence of pills in the stomach or the small intestine”. There was some diffuse, pinpoint hemorrhaging evident in the stomach lining, but there were no partially digested capsules, with the yellow color that gives Nembutal its street name “yellow jackets”. No residue. No retractile crystals in a smear of gastric contents. Nothing.

Marilyn was a pill popper. She did not do drugs with needles. Much has been made of her surprisingly empty stomach, and some have insisted that this fact alone proves she was murdered.

If the fatal dose was not taken orally, murder by injection is one obvious possibility, and despite the absence of needle marks the door to this theory remains at least partially open. Noguchi himself has said that it is possible that “punctures made by fine surgical needles” could “heal within hours and become invisible”. Other coroners concur: depending on the type of injection and the needle used, a needle mark can be extremely difficult to find.

There is another possibility, supported by more evidence: Marilyn was given the fatal dose in an enema.

Noguchi’s autopsy report notes the presence of “purplish discoloration” of the colon, or large intestine. This discoloration, as John Miner-who has seen 5,000 autopsies in the course of his career-puts it, “is not characteristic of a barbiturate OD death”. To Miner, the discolored colon is “the most puzzling” aspect of the autopsy, as it “does indicate the possibility that the drugs, or some portion of the drugs, were introduced into the large intestine rather than being swallowed”.

If the task at hand was the murder of a known pill addict, enema would certainly be a clever choice of method. Empty a few pill bottles, and a high concentration of drugs in the body would be expected. There would be no incriminating needle marks. And there would be no obvious residue remaining in the colon because the drug would have been administered in liquid form.

Aside from the forensic evidence, the death-by-enema theory is supported by a thoroughly odd remark attributed to Peter Lawford. Asked by ex-wife Deborah Gould exactly how Marilyn had died, he allegedly replied, “Marilyn took her last big enema.”

Noguchi has written that the absence of pill residue in the stomach did not surprise him in the least. In the belly of a pill addict like Marilyn, he says, pills would be familiar visitors and would be rapidly “dumped” into the intestinal tract, just as familiar food is easily digested, while exotic food causes indigestion. Other reputable coroners-including those interviewed for this book-have disagreed, saying that such a massive dose of pills should leave some telltale residue behind.

The high level of barbiturates found in Marilyn’s liver does suggest that drugs were taken over a period of hours, rather than in one dose, and could offer some explanation for the lack of residue in her stomach. At the same time, the liver concentration does not negate the fatal-dose-by-enema theory. No doubt Marilyn had been taking pills over a period of hours, as was her habit. A fatal dose administered into the colon on top of her self-administered oral dosages would reach the liver through “portal circulation”-entering the blood vessels directly from the large intestine-rather than through the usual digestive process.

The enema explanation and other forensic theories in the case remain theories not because of anything Dr Noguchi said or did, but because of an incredible slip-up in another part of the coroner’s office.

Noguchi made the following notation at the bottom of his autopsy report:

“Unembalmed blood is taken for alcohol and barbiturate examination. Liver, kidney, stomach and contents, urine and intestine are saved for further toxicological study.” [My emphasis].

Standard procedure, then and now. But in Marilyn Monroe’s case, standard procedure went out the window. The blood and the liver were tested, revealing a blood level of 8.0 mg% chloral hydrate and a liver containing 13.0 mg% pentobarbital (Nembutal), “both well above fatal dosages”. But the stomach and its contents, the intestine, the other organs, and tissue samples taken for microscopic analysis somehow disappeared and were never tested. Noguchi, who has nothing to do with this aspect of the examination, has speculated that the toxicology department may have assumed suicide because of the blood analysis and the empty pill bottles. If so, the assumption has fed the flames of conspiracy theories, and with good reason. A thorough analysis of the stomach, its contents, and the intestine could have shed more light on the crucial question of whether the fatal drugs entered Marilyn’s body through her mouth or through some other avenue.

Elsewhere in the coroner’s office toiled a deputy coroner named Lionel Grandison, who happened to be the man who signed Marilyn’s death certificate, and who surfaced years later to provide one of the more bizarre sideshows in the case. Robert Slatzer stumbled across Grandison-by this time a radio engineer-while appearing on a program at a Los Angeles radio station in 1978. Slatzer was eager to talk with Grandison, and in the course of the recorded interview, Grandison made a number of startling allegations. He claimed to have seen, among Marilyn’s personal possessions, the red diary Marilyn had told Slatzer about. Grandison said he skimmed the diary and saw references to the President, the Attorney General, and Fidel Castro. The diary subsequently disappeared, as did other things of Marilyn’s, particularly a scribbled note Grandison assumed was a suicide note. He claimed there were numerous bruises on Marilyn’s body that were not mentioned in the autopsy report. He said he had to be forced to sign the death certificate, for he did not agree with the suicide ruling. And he topped his story off with the revelation that there were necrophiliacs in and about the coroner’s office who had taken liberties with Marilyn’s corpse.

The necrophilia tale, together with the discovery that he had done six months on a forgery rap, damaged Grandison’s credibility on more salient points. His allegations remain unproved.

If Grandison’s story was manufactured, what did happen to the red diary? One of the private detectives hired by Peter Lawford to destroy evidence at Marilyn’s house may have just missed it. He reported entering the house, with the help of a police contact, at around nine a.m. Sunday morning, just four and a half hours after the police were first called to the scene. His brief search revealed a filing cabinet in the garden room that had been jimmied. Marilyn apparently used the filing cabinet to hold valuable papers. She had recently had the lock on it changed. A friend of Joe DiMaggio’s has said that when Joe went to the house later Sunday, he was looking for “what he referred to as a book”. He didn’t find it. The book and other personal papers were long gone. The implication is intriguing: Lawford’s clean-up team was not the only one at work. Whoever rifled the filing cabinet must have done it either before the police were called, or while there were still police officers in the house.

At the coroner’s office, the fine line between bad judgment and deliberate cover-up is difficult to distinguish. At the police department, the line appears to have been blatantly crossed. The Police Chief at the time was William Parker. The head of the Intelligence Division was Captain James Hamilton. Both men were friends and admirers of Robert Kennedy. Parker reportedly made the amazing statement during the investigation that he expected to be named FBI Director when Robert Kennedy became President. Robert Kennedy had alluded to Hamilton as “my friend” in the foreward to his book The Enemy Within, and later recommended him for the job of Chief of Security with the National Football League.

Very early on in the investigation, Chief Parker took the unprecedented step of yanking the Monroe case from Homicide and making it the exclusive domain of the Intelligence Division. Thereafter, in the words of Parker’s successor Tom Riddin, nobody outside Intelligence “knew a bloody thing about what was going on”. A file that ran to hundreds of pages was reportedly developed on the case, but only a few innocuous fragments from the file exist-so far as is known-today. When former Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty asked to see the Monroe file, he was told it could not be found. Reddin has said that the only justification possible for making the Monroe case a secret Intelligence Division operation would be “a national security problem”.

No doubt the police file contained much information that could make the Marilyn Monroe case less a mystery than it is today. Like so much of the material on the John F. Kennedy assassination, it has been withheld from public view by a few individuals who have decided for the rest of us that ignorance is preferable to unpalatable truths. Again like the Kennedy assassination, the difficult business of learning the truth has been left to private citizens-to writers, researchers, and investigators-whose collective efforts have pieced together much of what is known about the case today.

One of the most visible of these citizens is a private detective with the colorful name of Milo Speriglio. Speriglio is Director and Chief of Nick Harris Detectives in Los Angeles and a public figure in his own right who has, among other things, run unsuccessfully for mayor of the city. In 1972, Speriglio accepted Robert Slatzer as a client. In so doing, he joined Slatzer’s crusade to prove to the world that Marilyn was murdered, a crusade that continues to the present day.

Speriglio has written two books on the case himself, is at work on a film and a third book, and is periodically featured in splashy tabloid articles with headlines like “Marilyn Was Murdered by the Kennedys”. Despite all their efforts, Speriglio and his client Slatzer have produced no conclusive proof that Marilyn was killed. They have, however, filled in a great deal of the story that would otherwise be unknown, and have provided some chilling suggestions in the process.

Perhaps the most chilling is the possibility that Marilyn’s murder may have been recorded on audio tape. It is well established that clandestine recording devices were in place at her home at the time. Speriglio claims to have been contacted, in August of 1982, by an informant who, twenty years previous, had been in the employ of ace wiretapper Bernie Spindel, the man who bugged Marilyn and the Kennedys for Jimmy Hoffa. The informant provided Speriglio with technical tidbits about the bugging of Marilyn’s home, including the band frequency used and the pioneering hardware Spindel brought to his assignment-bugs smaller than matchbooks with VOX, or voice-activated, capabilities that turned on the recorders only when audible sounds were present.

The informant had not actually heard the tapes himself, but heard them described by an associate Speriglio calls Mr M, who supposedly still had, as of 1982, a copy of the tapes in his possession. According to the informant, Mr M had described what he took to be the tape of the murder, with Marilyn being “slapped around”. Speriglio, who at first accepted this account and repeated it in his first book, now believes that the slapping was not the murder but an earlier event. He remains convinced that the murder tape once existed-and may still exist.

In checking out the story, Speriglio says he made contact with a newspaper reporter who in turn located Mr M. M-identified as a “well-respected” Washington attorney with offices in the Watergate complex and a former associate of Bernie Spindel’s-denied having the tapes and would not admit having heard them.

Speriglio also claims to know of a phone call-likewise recorded by a bug-to Marilyn’s house the night she died. The call came from San Francisco (the operator’s voice is heard) and the caller asks an unknown party, “Is she dead yet?” Since the Kennedy party was in San Francisco at the time, Speriglio speculates that the caller may have been a Kennedy aide, and the call may have occurred sometime after Marilyn was put in the ambulance en route to the hospital.

These reports are hearsay, and, pending the discovery of the tapes themselves, they should be weighed accordingly. Still, there were bugs in Marilyn’s house-and on her phones-the night she died. If the bugs were active, they presumably produced tapes. Where are those tapes? And if we could play them back today, what would we hear?

In addition to the copy supposedly possessed by Mr M, Speriglio believes other copies of the tapes were once held by Bernie Spindel’s widow, by Jimmy Hoffa, and by the New York County District Attorney, who carried off a collection of bugging tapes during a raid of Bernie Spindel’s home in 1966. Hoffa’s “foster son” and associate Chuck O’Brien has confirmed that Hoffa had tapes of the Kennedys and Marilyn.

There may have been still another copy. Researchers for a 1985 BBC documentary discovered that the tapes were a potential time bomb placed dead center in Robert Kennedy’s career path. In 1968, when Kennedy was the most promising Democratic candidate for President, a right-wing Republican group hired a journalist named Ralph De Toledano to find the rumored Marilyn-Kennedy tapes. According to De Toledano, an investigator was hired, who reported back that the tapes could be had-through an unnamed ex-policeman-for $50,000. The Republican group agreed to the deal on 4 June 1968, but requested “a couple of days” to raise the money. That night, as he celebrated his California primary victory at the Hotel Ambassador in Los Angeles, Robert Kennedy was fatally shot. (As a final irony, the autopsy on Robert Kennedy-which would also become a matter of controversy-was performed by Dr Thomas Noguchi.) The plan to buy the tapes was dropped. De Toledano says he is certain the tapes would have been used against Kennedy if he had lived to be nominated for the presidency.

Interviewed for this book, Speriglio says he is still “positive” Marilyn was murdered, but less sure anything will ever be done about it. The authorities are “not planning to do a damn thing… One of the best things they could have gotten was the tapes, if they wanted to prove what really happened, and they never made an effort.” The detective claims to have given an LA District Attorney specific information on where a copy of the tapes could be found, and “he never went after it”.

Speriglio’s latest theory is that two men-he says he knows who they were-murdered Marilyn on orders from Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana. Giancana’s private army was involved in the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Fidel Castro-the same plots we are told Marilyn had documented in her red diary and threatened to reveal in a press conference. The gangster shared with John Kennedy a sexual involvement with starlet Judith Campbell. And his organization had reportedly done Kennedy a favor-either by request or gratuitously-by suppressing information on the President’s alleged involvement with another starlet, Judy Meredith, as recently as the spring of 1961. He had even bragged that his machine delivered Illinois to Kennedy in the 1960 election. Marilyn spent the last full weekend of her life, stoned and disorderly, at the Cal-Neva Lodge, a mob hangout on the Nevada border in which Giancana once had an interest. Could she have said or done something that made her a target? Could Giancana have wanted her dead because of her threat to talk about the top-secret Cuban plots?

Giancana and his henchmen were active players in the Hollywood power game. For that matter, their successors still are. If they killed Marilyn, it would not have been the first time real blood has been spilled in the land of make-believe to serve the purposes of their secret society.

The mob was a partner with the Kennedy administration in Cuba, but a bitter enemy at home, due to Robert Kennedy’s unrelenting attacks on organized crime. Because of this two-edged relationship, Speriglio finds it difficult to choose between two motives in his mob-killed-Marilyn theory: “to embarrass the Kennedys… or as a favor to them, we’ve never been able to put that together”.

Speriglio’s theory echoes that of one of the case’s original investigators. The late Frank Hronek was a Los Angeles DA’s investigator in 1962. According to his family, he suspected that Sam Giancana and his associate Johnny Roselli-another link in the CIA-Cuba connection-were involved in Marilyn’s death. Hronek also mentioned his suspicions of the CIA’s involvement in either the death or the cover-up. Hronek’s report file, like the police file, has mysteriously disappeared.

In 1982, due largely to the efforts of Slatzer, Speriglio, and others who had joined the cause, the Monroe case was reopened by the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office. A great deal of new information came to light-the ambulance ride, details of the cover-up, etc.-but despite these intriguing developments the case was dropped with the conclusion that “no further criminal investigation appears required”.

Many disagree. John Miner, the Deputy District Attorney who stood beside Dr Noguchi during the autopsy, has never been comfortable with the suicide ruling. This may be particularly significant, because Miner appears to have information on Marilyn that is possessed by no one else. During the original investigation, Miner conducted a four-hour interview with Dr Greenson, Marilyn’s psychiatrist. Speaking with a guarantee of confidentiality, Greenson opened up to Miner, told him the reasons he did not believe Marilyn was a suicide, and played a forty-minute tape of Marilyn talking, presumably to prove his point. The tape was not a recording of a psychiatric session, but a statement Marilyn had specially recorded on her own for her psychiatrist to hear and to keep. According to Miner, Greenson (who died in 1979) later destroyed the recording.

Miner has steadfastly refused to tell anyone what the psychiatrist told him, and continued to honor his twenty-seven-year-old promise when interviewed for this book. A crucial question, of course, is whether Greenson offered any reason to believe Marilyn was murdered. Refusing direct comment, Miner points out that any information he had from Greenson was “a product of either single or… double hearsay… it’s not admissible in court, it’s not valid for any purpose legally”. He did, he says, write a memo about the Greenson interview to the coroner and the Chief Deputy District Attorney that included a phrase he remembers as, “I believe I can say definitely that it was not suicide.” After writing the memo, Miner worried that he would be called before a grand jury, and might be cited for contempt for refusing to answer questions on ethical grounds. There was no grand jury. Not surprisingly, the memo has disappeared.

Caught off guard by a phone call from a reporter, Greenson himself may have suggested some of what he revealed to Miner. The reporter had his recorder running. The resulting tape exposes an exasperated Dr Greenson saying, “I can’t explain myself or defend myself without revealing things that I don’t want to reveal… It’s a terrible position to be in… because I can’t tell the whole story.” Greenson ends the conversation with a few cryptic words of advice: “Listen… talk to Bobby Kennedy.”

No one can talk to Bobby Kennedy now. Or to Dr Greenson, Peter Lawford, Sam Giancana, Police Chief Parker, and others of the major players in the drama. All are dead. It is still a safe bet that there are people who live today with secrets that could reveal the truth in the case. And there still remains the macabre possibility that the last few moments of Marilyn’s life may be recorded on a tape that may someday be played for the world to hear. The red diary-if it still exists-would be a fascinating find, but would likely prove nothing as far as the cause of death is concerned. The key to the question of whether Marilyn was murdered is in the bungled autopsy: if she swallowed a fatal dose of pills, she was probably a suicide or the victim of an accidental overdose; if she didn’t swallow the fatal dose-and the evidence suggests that she did not-her death was caused by someone else. The key to the questions of how and why she was killed is on the hidden tapes and in the hidden thoughts of her killers and their silent accomplices.

In her last interview with Life magazine, published days before her death, Marilyn Monroe unknowingly delivered an epitaph for herself as fitting as any other: “I now live in my work.” She was a brilliant performer, and she is best remembered in the images of that vast and all-forgiving screen of unreality that were her gift to the world. The story of the real Marilyn, the abandoned and vulnerable child who played with a powerful fire and was burned, is perhaps too painful and too full of disillusion to live in our memories for long.