The Mammoth Book of New Csi (48 page)

Clemmons found Engelberg and Greenson little more convincing. They claimed that Marilyn’s body had been discovered some four hours earlier, but that they could not contact the police until 20th Century Fox’s publicity department had given them the OK.

At 5.40 a.m., undertaker Guy Hockett arrived. He too noted that rigor mortis had already set in, indicating a time of death between 9.30 and 11.30. the previous evening. Later, he changed his estimated time of death to match the other witness statements.

Marilyn’s body was taken to the morgue where an autopsy was performed by pathologist Dr Thomas Noguchi, the deputy medical examiner and coroner for the county of Los Angeles. In his report he remarked that he performed the post-mortem examination on the unembalmed body of a well-developed, well-nourished thirty-six-year-old Caucasian female weighing 117 lbs (53 kg) and measuring 65½ in. (1.66 m) in length. She had bleached blonde hair and blue eyes. He noted a fixed lividity – a purplish discolouration that occurs when the blood is no longer being circulated by the heart – in the face, neck, chest, upper portions of arms and the right side of the abdomen. But he also noted a faint lividity in her back and the back of her arms and legs, which disappears with pressure. This would indicate that she had been laid on her back at some point after she was dead.

A slight ecchymotic area – that is, bruising – was noted in the left hip and left side of the lower back. There was no significant damage to the breasts. Dr Noguchi found a 3 in. (8 cm) horizontal surgical scar in the right upper quadrant of the abdomen and a 5 in. (13 cm) surgical scar above the pubic area. The mucus membrane around the eyes was congested, but there was no sign of bleeding or bruising.

Dr Noguchi then noted: “The nose shows no evidence of fracture. The external auditory canals are not remarkable. No evidence of trauma is noted in the scalp, forehead, cheeks, lips or chin. The neck shows no evidence of trauma. Examination of the hands and nails shows no defects. The lower extremities show no evidence of trauma.”

He then cut open the chest and abdomen, and found no excess of fluid or blood inside. All the organs appeared undamaged and in the right place. Her heart weighed 300 g. The pericardial cavity around it contained no excess of fluid and everything was as it should be.

The right lung weighed 465 g and the left 420 g. Both lungs were moderately congested with fluid, but otherwise appeared healthy. The liver weighed 1,890 g. It was damaged where the gall bladder had been removed. There was a slight accentuation of its lobe pattern, but no haemorrhage or tumour was found. The liver temperature taken at 10.30 a.m. was 89°F (32°C).

The spleen weighed 190 g and showed some sign of abnormality, though no enlargement of the lymph nodes. The bone marrow was dark red in colour. The adrenal and thyroid glands appeared normal. The kidneys together weighed 350 g. The tissue was “moderately congested”. The bladder contained approximately 150 ml of clear, straw-coloured fluid.

The brain weighed 1,440 g. There was no evidence of contusion or haemorrhage. The skull was not fractured. While the superficial vessels are slightly congested, there was no blood in the cavity and everything else appeared normal. The clavicle, ribs, vertebrae and pelvic bones showed fracture lines, but all the bones of the extremities were examined and showed no evidence of fracture.

“The external genitalia shows no gross abnormality,” the autopsy report continued. “Distribution of the pubic hair is of female pattern.”The uterus was of the usual size with no polyps or tumours. The cervix was clear with no cysts. The fallopian tubes were intact, though the ovaries showed some signs of disease.

The stomach was almost completely empty and contained no more than 20 ml of brownish mucus. Curiously, Dr Noguchi found no residue from the pills she was thought to have taken. She had no duodenal ulcers and her appendix was missing. However, her colon showed “marked congestion and purplish discolouration”.

Blood was taken to be examined for alcohol and barbiturates. Her liver, kidneys, stomach and its contents, urine and intestines were saved for further toxicological study and a vaginal smear was taken. The toxicologist found high levels of Nembutal and chloral hydrate in her blood. It was estimated that she had taken thirty-eight to sixty-six tablets of Nembutal and fourteen to twenty-three tablets of chloral hydrate – enough to kill ten people. However, Dr Noguchi found no trace of capsules, powder or the typical discolouration caused by Nembutal in Monroe’s stomach or intestines, indicating the drugs that killed her had not been swallowed. There was no sign of a puncture wound, so they had not been administered intravenously. The only other way they could have got into her body was via a suppository or enema. But those would have had to have been prepared, if not administered by someone else. However, Dr Noguchi eventually put aside his qualms and accepted that the drugs must have been swallowed.

Just twelve days after her death, the coroner announced that her death was probably suicide. But suspicion lingered on. There were allegations that there had been a cover-up and in 1982, twenty years after she died, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office began to re-examine the evidence. The first question to answer was: was she murdered?

“We looked at the photographs of the death scene,” said former Assistant District Attorney Mike Carroll. “Looked at autopsy reports. And had to talk to people because there were some areas that we could not really determine without talking to people.”

Dr Engelberg was asked if he had prescribed the large number of pills found on Marilyn’s nightstand.

“No. Only one had been prescribed by me,” he said. “I was surprised to see at the side of her bed a large number of other sleeping pills.”

Dr Engelberg said that he had only prescribed the Nembutal.

“I knew nothing about any chloral hydrate,” he said. “I never used chloral hydrate.”

If Marilyn had all those pills by her bedside, why did she call Jeanne Carmen to ask for more? And if she had deliberately overdosed, why had she left no suicide note?

Top forensic pathologist Dr Steven Karch said that major omissions in the toxicology report make it almost impossible to determine what killed her – and he did not rule out murder.

“I’m bothered by some of the inconsistencies in the reports,” he said. “I’m particularly bothered by where the medicines came from. I don’t know that they were hers. I don’t know when they were taken, and I don’t know what was in her body when she died because the toxicology is incomplete.”

Karch thought that there had been a rush to judgement. Her death was thought to be a suicide almost from the moment she was found.

“The really strange thing is, it says barbiturate overdose death,” he said. “How did they know it was a barbiturate overdose death at 4.45 in the morning?”

But for Mike Carroll it was a natural assumption to make at the scene.

“The bottles were there,” he said. “She was unconscious. She had a history of overdose. In fact, she had a history of not only overdosing, but of being resuscitated.”

However, Dr Engelberg played down the idea that Marilyn had made earlier attempts to take her own life.

“I’m not aware of any deliberate suicide attempt,” he said. “I was only aware of the one time when she currently had too much to drink and had taken possibly slightly more than she should have. But that was not a serious attempt.”

During his re-examination of the case, Carroll found no rush to judgement – there had been nothing hurried about Dr Noguchi’s autopsy. Even so, he had the post-mortem report reviewed by an outside expert.

“He looked over the documents and he told us that this was a very competent and professional job considering the state of science at the time in 1962,” said Carroll.

However, Dr Noguchi himself was not happy with his findings. Soon after, he decided to re-examine the tissue samples he had taken, but they were missing and have never been found. So was this evidence of a cover-up or, at the very least, deliberate destruction of evidence?

“Yeah, I think that’s fertile grounds for people to say, ‘Oh boy, we got it now. We have a smoking gun,’” said Carroll. “And my experience of the loss of material like that, it’s unfortunately pretty common.”

Carroll also interviewed a man named Rick Stone, who claimed that he was a paramedic in an ambulance called to Marilyn’s house. He said he watched a doctor inject something into the dying movie star.

“He opened up a doctor’s bag and took out a hypodermic syringe that was already filled and injected it into her heart,” Stone said.

However, Noguchi had made a thorough search of Marilyn’s body for needle marks, but found none.

“He put a needle in her heart,” Stone later told CBS’s
48 Hours
. “I guarantee it. I was looking right at it.”

Set against Stone’s account is the testimony of Ken Hunter, an ambulanceman who was believed to have been there that night. Asked whether a doctor plunged a needle into the area of Marilyn’s heart, Hunter told Carroll: “That’s bullshit.”

No needle mark was found and the injection of a lethal dose of barbiturates would have left clear bruising.

Curiously, Hunter told Carroll that, when he saw her, Marilyn had been lying on her side, while Clemmons had found her lying face down and concluded that the body had been positioned, the scene manipulated and Marilyn had been murdered. Carroll dismissed Clemmons line of reasoning.

“His opinion was not based on any kind of personal, professional training or experience,” said Carroll. “He was not a detective. He was not an experienced detective and certainly not a homicide detective.”

Carroll concluded that the mystery surrounding what happened that night stems from the conflicting accounts given by Eunice Murray and the timeline of events.

“The investigator at the scene did have some concerns about Mrs Murray,” said Carroll. “He thought that her answers were evasive, and that she might have either been distressed or hiding something.”

The police were called at 4.25 a.m. on the morning of 5 August 1962, but allegations persist that Murray raised the alarm much earlier.

“There was some form of cover-up surrounding the circumstances of her death,” said author Anthony Summers, who has written of the death of Marilyn Monroe in two books,
Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe
and
Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover
. At the centre of the cover-up were the Kennedy brothers.

Actress Jeanne Carmen had first-hand knowledge of Marilyn’s affair with John F. Kennedy as it unfolded in Peter Lawford’s Santa Monica beach house.

“President Kennedy and Marilyn were in bed when I went in to take my shower, just cuddle, cuddle, cuddle,” she recalled. And she was not the only one who knew. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had the place bugged.

Marilyn believed that, after he was re-elected, Kennedy would divorce his wife Jacqueline and marry her. This was not going to happen. As one Washington insider put it: “Marilyn Monroe was just another cup of coffee to Jack.”

After the very public display of singing “Happy Birthday” in Madison Square Garden, Kennedy knew that he must distance himself from her and Robert Kennedy moved in.

“I think Marilyn Monroe was in love with John Kennedy for a while,” said Jeanne Carmen. “Then I think she fell in love with Bobby.”

In February 1962, Marilyn and Eunice Murray went to Mexico on vacation where they met Eunice’s brother-in-law, Churchill Murray, who was living there with a group of openly communist Americans. She spent time with them, talking politics late into the night.

“Marilyn Monroe wasn’t a dumb blonde,” said Summers. “She devoured books on politics. She liked to talk to people about politics.”

The conversations were monitored and the FBI opened a file on Monroe. It was the height of the Cold War and a woman who had access to the president and the attorney general, and was openly consorting with communists, was considered a security risk. Just months before the Cuban missile crisis, the FBI recorded Kennedy and Marilyn discussing the morality of atom-bomb testing over lunch at the beach house. What’s more, Hoover did not get on with his boss, Robert Kennedy, who could not understand why his brother did not fire him.

“Discussing nuclear matters at a time of horrendous international crisis, if anything like that would have got out, it would have been enormously damaging to the Kennedys,” said Summers.

On Saturday, 4 August 1962, President Kennedy was on the East Coast, while Robert Kennedy was in northern California. His host insisted that he was there the entire weekend, but the former chief of the LAPD Daryl Gates said that Robert Kennedy travelled to Los Angeles.

“Our records show that he was in Los Angeles and probably that information came to our intelligence function through the FBI,” said Gates. But he did not think that Kennedy visited Marilyn. “Had he gone to see Marilyn that day, I think we would have known it.”

However, Deborah Gould, Peter Lawford’s third wife, said she was told that Robert Kennedy had gone to see Marilyn that day to end the relationship.

“Marilyn, from what Peter told me, knew then that it was over,” said Gould. “That was it, over. Final. And she was very, very distraught and depressed.”

According to Summers: “There was what you might call a benign cover-up, not a cover-up of a murder, but a cover-up to protect prominent people.”

Jeanne Carmen said that Marilyn kept a diary, detailing her relationship with John and Robert Kennedy. No diary was found. Deborah Gould said Lawford told her that he had made an early morning sweep through Marilyn’s house.

“He said he went there, he tidied up the place and did what he could before the reporters found out about the death,” she said.

According to Summers, the FBI seized the telephone company’s records, so he has never been able to discover who she was calling when she died. However, in the weeks leading up to her death, she called the Justice Department, where Robert Kennedy worked, eight times.

Most of the police records have also disappeared. They were “destroyed in compliance with departmental procedures,” an official said.