The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (68 page)

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”.