The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (69 page)

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.

(William Gardiner, 1902)

Jack Smith-Hughes

A genuine mystery, and a real period piece, from Edwardian rural England, with religious rectitude challenged by the fleshly temptations of a lusty country girl. The victim, Rose Harsent, was by all accounts a nymphomaniac who had set her cap at an older, married man called William Gardiner. He was a stalwart of the local Primitive Methodists whose wife was expecting their eighth child, but whether he killed Rose Harsent when he discovered that she, too, was pregnant is a moot point. The question divided and defeated not one jury but two, with the result that Gardiner was freed to spend the rest of his days in obscurity. But the writer here, Jack Smith-Hughes (1918–94), is unequivocal and makes out a strong case against the accused man. Smith-Hughes played a key role in the resistance movement on the island of Crete during the Second World War. After the war, he qualified as a barrister and worked in the Army Legal Service for much of the 1950s. During this time he also wrote several true crime collections. In 1958 he joined the Northern Circuit, but after the death of his wife in 1972, Smith-Hughes emigrated to the British Virgin Islands and eventually established his own legal firm there. He also served as chief magistrate and acting attorney-general in the town of Tortola.

The year of grace 1902 was one of those vintage years of crime. It witnessed such memorable events as the arrest of the poisonous Polish publican, George Chapman (by some regarded as the original Jack the Ripper): the trial of Kitty Byron for the murder of her stockbroking lover: the liquidation of the Darby family by Edgar Edwards: the murders on the barque
Veronica
; and the mysterious death of Rose Harsent at Peasenhall. This last case has long been a favourite of criminologists but, at least until recently, the line taken by those who have written about it—Sir Max Pemberton, H. L. Adam, Guy Logan, and Elizabeth Villiers to name only four—has been that the suspect was a monstrously wronged man, and many have followed Sir Max’s lead in suggesting that the village belle died by misadventure and that there was never a murder at all. In 1934, however, William Henderson edited, in the
Notable British Trials
series, a comprehensive account of the mystery and refused to be bamboozled by the fact that the suspect was outwardly a deeply religious man of a puritanical disposition.

As a race, we English instinctively distrust Puritans: we doubt if Cromwell’s army was all that model, and we know that the Puritans suppressed bear-baiting not because it was cruel to the bear but because some people enjoyed it. The attitude of their Victorian descendants was admirably satirized for our fathers in the song, “Of course you can never be like us, but be as like us as you’re able to be.” We jealously guard our right to smoke, drink, dance, and be merry when we want and not when the godly want. And although we do not, if we are honest with ourselves, suspect them all of hypocrisy, we derive a modicum of pleasure from the spectacle of one of them being found out: nor are we surprised that they should be so found out from time to time.

Only very recently we have witnessed the downfall of an Australian teetotal politician who had earned the style of “Lemonade” Ley from his devotion, even at public banquets, to that worthy if unsatisfying beverage: we know now that he kept a mistress, that he promoted shady companies, that he was a brazen liar, and that he organized at least one murder. An earlier generation recalls Norman Thorne, that refulgent member of the Alliance of Honour (which eschewed the anticipation of connubial bliss by the affianced) who not only maintained two mistresses at the same time, but actually buried the dismembered remains of one of them under his chicken-run. Again, at least three of our medical poisoners were outwardly good churchmen: Palmer of Rugeley was a regular communicant: Pritchard of Glasgow and Cross of Shandy Hall both kept diaries in the most sanctimonious terms: yet all three expedited the demise of their wives. The type however reaches its apogee in Scotland and my readers who wish to study the Caledonian hypocrite are referred to the sparkling pages of William Roughead. For me, the most fascinating of his collection is “Holy Willie” Bennison, poisoner, bigamist, and a lay preacher on behalf of the Primitive Methodists in the city of Edinburgh.
²⁶

And now to meet another Primitive Methodist elder, Mr William Gardiner of Peasenhall, a charming Suffolk village. The place of his birth does not seem to be recorded, but the event took place in about 1867: he married a girl from Yoxford, Georgina Cady, in October 1888 and settled in Peasenhall (which is some three miles from his wife’s village) about a year or two later. The union was blessed with no less than eight children, of whom six were living at the time of their father’s tribulations. For many years he had worked for a local firm of agricultural implement makers, with whom he had risen to the position of foreman carpenter: he was held in high esteem by his employers but, even though he was sufficiently well thought of to represent them at the Paris exhibition, he was paid no more than twenty-seven shillings a week. There is no doubt that he was industrious but, in his little community, he is said to have been respected rather than liked. However, since he was, after all, a foreman, this is not exactly surprising. He is described as “a dark, swarthy-complexioned man of heavy build” by Mr Henderson, and by Sir Max Pemberton as of almost Spanish appearance. He also affected a jet-black beard. Nature had clearly equipped him suitably for a Calvinistic role and this he played superbly in the Primitive Methodist community at Sibton, an adjoining hamlet, where he fulfilled the functions of superintendent, treasurer, and trustee of the Sunday school, assistant society steward, and choirmaster. It was his association with the choir which proved his ultimate downfall, for amongst the choristers was a girl named Rose Anne Harsent whom he had seen grow from an attractive child to a desirable woman. Rose was on friendly terms with his wife and, had he desired an amorous dalliance, there were none of the usual difficulties in his path. Nor was the girl likely to demur.

In the year that Queen Victoria died, Rose was twenty-two, and Gardiner was twelve years her senior. She was the daughter of a carter employed at the Drill Works of which Gardiner was the foreman. She was herself employed as a domestic servant by the local Baptist elder, Deacon Crisp, in whose establishment she had replaced a girl who had been dismissed some three years previously in a condition alike embarrassing to herself and interesting to everyone else. The Crisp residence, known as Providence House, was unfortunately suited to the immoral desires of its handmaidens, whose room was immediately over the kitchen and access to it was by a separate stairway: the Crisps were old, and the Deacon somewhat deaf. Mr Henderson makes no attempt to court East Anglican susceptibilities and says of Rose, “living as she did in a part of England not notably celebrated for a particularly high standard of moral purity, she was probably a fair specimen of the girlhood of her district”. As he had, only a sentence or so earlier, put on record that the attentions of this girl’s admirers “had not been altogether free from certain gross accompaniments” and that “the cruder side of her amorous adventures was not entirely distasteful to her”, the Suffolk grandmother of today may well feel aggrieved. It would have been more courteous to have compared her with Alexandrine Vernet, that dangerous schoolmistress of Nohèdes who was, H. B. Irving tells us, “twenty-two years of age and comely after a bold and alluring fashion, perpetrated atrocious efforts at poetry, and had a pronounced taste for dirty literature”.