The Murder of Marilyn Monroe (15 page)

October 19, 2000: Letter from comedian Bob Hope to Schaefer Ambulance driver Edgardo Villalobos. (From the collection of Edgardo Villalobos)

THE MEN AT BEVERLY AND WESTERN

Schaefer’s main office is still located at 4627 Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles. This is where Schaefer Ambulance attendant Edgardo Villalobos and his driver Larry Telling received the first call to Marilyn Monroe’s home. Anthony Summers, author of
Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe
, interviewed seven Schaefer attendants who remembered the ambulance call from Marilyn’s house on the night of August 4, 1962: Joe Zielinski (not Zilinski), Carl Bellonzi (later a company vice president), Thomas “Tom” Jesse Fears, Hugh “Lucky” Patrick O’Bligh (not Sean, and company vice president before Bellonzi), Joe Tarnowski (later Tarno but his widow goes by Tarnowski), Edgardo Villalobos, and Murray Liebowitz (later Leib). Other attendants who remember the ambulance call to Marilyn’s home are Ruth Tarnowski (who worked as a Schaefer attendant especially when it was necessary to pick up female psych patients and as a Schaefer nurse all the rest of the time), the late Richard “Dick” Williams, Donald Altrock, Rick Staffer, James Hall’s regular partner Rick Charles Greider (a.k.a. Rick Summers), and Villalobos’ partner Larry Telling.

In August 1962, during the time that James Hall responded to the ambulance call to Marilyn Monroe’s home, Edgardo Villalobos relayed, “Hugh Patrick O’Bligh was the Vice President of Schaefer. They called him Lucky. He was much older than me. He was working for the studios in Burbank the last time I saw him. We loved the guy. Carl Bellonzi stepped in after Lucky but Carl didn’t have the knowledge that Lucky had. Lucky was there way before Carl and was a good man but unfortunately Lucky was a very heavy drinker . . . Mr. Schaefer called him Irish. He never called him Lucky . . . Because Carl was like a son to Mr. Schaefer, they made him the Vice President.”

Out of these thirteen attendants/drivers (not including James Hall) who remember the ambulance call to Marilyn Monroe’s home, only three are still alive: Carl Bellonzi, Ruth Tarnowski, and Edgardo Villalobos. The latter clearly remembers what happened at the Schaefer Ambulance main office on Beverly and Western on that fateful evening. He has never been quoted regarding Marilyn Monroe until now.

“The other guy was Larry Telling, my partner,” Villalobos told Jay Margolis. “We got the call first, but there was an ambulance closer in the area, so they canceled us and Hall got the call from Santa Monica. I didn’t get to go because I didn’t respond to the call. I was at Beverly Boulevard and Western, the main station. The dispatcher wrote three slips: one they threw in the trash, another they kept for so many years, and the other they gave to us. But they kept our slip there and that’s why reporters kept bothering me. The dispatcher never wrote a new slip. On the old slip, it had the driver, attendant, and call number. If I had transported Marilyn, I would have told it exactly how it was, but I didn’t transport her.

“One day, I pulled into the driveway coming in after a call and the media was there. They questioned me. They questioned Mr. Schaefer, too. They were always bugging me, asking, ‘Did you transport Marilyn Monroe?’ They kept insisting, and it was because of the slip. They never changed the slip after I got the first call. The dispatcher, when he canceled us, he forgot to write the other guy’s slip!

“If you call a private ambulance to any city in the LA area to pick up a patient, it should be a very, very short time, normally three minutes, four minutes, five minutes . . . Hall is the one who got the call. He was in that area. I didn’t respond to the call, but later on, when there was all this investigation, they kept coming to me because according to them I got the call . . . I do remember exactly everything that went on. Reporters came up to me and said I took her and I said, ‘I didn’t take her.’ They told me, ‘We know you did. We know you’re lying.’ But we did get the call. They canceled me and then they continued to give him the call. So Hall got the call. His partner’s name was Murray. A real nice guy. I knew the guy very well . . . Murray was a very nice person. I really liked him.”

Villalobos heard Hall’s account of Greenson administering the needle to Marilyn’s heart. “The psychiatrist is not supposed to inject,” he confirmed. “He has no business doing that . . . We are qualified to know the difference if they’re still alive or not breathing. If they’re alive we transport, but if they’re not alive we don’t pick up the patient. You’re not allowed to pronounce them dead. The city comes in . . . The only time you stick a long needle into people’s hearts is after you give them mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and, if that doesn’t work, the doctor has to be there with the long needle and he shoves it into the heart, but
not
a psychiatrist! There was a murder there because he was not the doctor. He might be her psychiatrist, but not her medical doctor, so he can’t go sticking no needle into her heart . . .

“Many times, we witness [an adrenaline shot] when the doctor comes in and we have a patient, and they get the needle and the doctor shoves it right here [in the heart]. That’s how they do it, but not brown liquid. A lot of people in Los Angeles, they all say Marilyn Monroe got murdered. Right after Marilyn died, there were all kinds of people asking me questions. I couldn’t convince them that I did not transport Marilyn Monroe.

“At Schaefer, they used to change me around. One time [about a year after Marilyn’s death], I was in an ambulance in one of the intensive care units and there was a strange nurse who I’ve never seen before. We know most of our nurses because we have a nurse riding in the critical care units. This nurse was a very nice and pretty girl. All of a sudden she started asking me questions so I suspected she was hired to try to find out information from me . . . Sometimes, a police officer would be in the back of the ambulance as a new attendant because private ambulances have a little problem sometimes because attendants would steal so they had somebody undercover. So that’s why I got suspicious of the nurse who I thought was undercover trying to get information about me on Marilyn Monroe. I could’ve been wrong but I don’t think I was wrong . . . That girl was sizing me up a lot. She said, ‘Tell me, how about Marilyn Monroe?’ I said, ‘What about Marilyn Monroe?’ ‘Tell me how it was.’ ‘I know already what you’re trying to find out. I did not transport Marilyn Monroe.’

“She
was
a nurse, but somebody—probably a writer or reporter—sent her to see if she could get information from me. There were so many people who tried to get information because they all knew it was murder. I’m not one of those guys who believes things that don’t exist. My belief was if I was the one who transported Marilyn Monroe in those days, in the beginning of all that investigation, I wouldn’t be here because they could not afford to have me running around when I know everything. I bet you they would have bumped me off.”

Oddly enough, Edgardo Villalobos said Murray Liebowitz’s regular partner disappeared shortly after Marilyn’s death. Villalobos told Margolis, “Look what happened to Murray’s partner Ryan. He was Murray’s permanent attendant. And they were always together. After Marilyn died, nobody heard from him. He completely disappeared out of the sky. Very weird. Very mysterious. We all knew Ryan was an attendant, but nobody found Ryan. We never saw him anymore. His last name I don’t know. They would’ve made
me
disappear somehow because they wouldn’t want me to give out the information. The big people cannot afford to be exposed, so they would try to take care of that guy somehow. I said to the people asking me questions, ‘You guys are going to get me killed.’”

After learning that Hall had yielded to the man in the business suit identifying himself as Monroe’s doctor, Villalobos explained, “You have to listen to a doctor. The doctor calls the shots. We cannot intervene . . . I knew there was something going on because reporters were really hard after me. I kept telling them I knew nothing because, as I told you, they just canceled us, but my name and my partner’s name remained there on the slip. It was a Code Three. During all the excitement, the dispatcher didn’t write a new slip for them. That’s why they were bothering me a lot, because they put on it our name and location and everything else.”

Edgardo Villalobos was interviewed before Former Schaefer Vice President Carl Bellonzi. Villalobos told Jay Margolis which Schaefer employee dispatched the ambulance call on the night of August 4, 1962, “Joe Tarnowski was a driver but then he became a dispatcher. By the way, he was the dispatcher! . . . Joe Tarnowski was the dispatcher.”

Without being prompted, Bellonzi said to Margolis that Joe Tarnowski was indeed the dispatcher for the call coming from Marilyn Monroe’s home: “I know who the dispatcher was at that time, and that was Tarnowski. Joe Tarnowski. He was the dispatcher at that time. I remember that call and I remember him being the dispatcher on that call.”

Villalobos told Margolis, “Ruth Tarnowski was a nurse for Schaefer in the Santa Monica area and used to ride with the ambulances because they needed female attendants. She also worked at Culver City Memorial and then worked in a lot of convalescents.”

Schaefer nurse and sometimes-attendant Ruth Tarnowski, confirmed that her late husband Joe was the dispatcher on August 4, 1962, “At the time Marilyn died, Joe and I were married and living in West LA. I worked 11 to 7 as a nurse at Schaefer’s and when I got home at 7, he had already left for work. Later, I called him and he told me he dispatched the call to Marilyn Monroe’s house. When he came home, he said it was really weird because everybody [at Schaefer Ambulance] was talking about it and that Robert Kennedy was one of the last ones to see her alive. It was funny the way they found her. It wasn’t like she OD’d. Joe thought Marilyn was mixed up with the Kennedys. It was murder and that was covered up by the FBI.”

Mrs. Tarnowski added, “Marilyn went to University High when I was going there. She was a nice girl. Later on, they made her up from head to toe. I almost didn’t recognize her. When she was at Uni, she was Norma Jeane.”

Villalobos relayed to Margolis, “I used to fight. Amateur boxing. There were five of us and the car dealer in Oxnard used to sponsor us. And they took us to the Hollywood Legion Stadium to fight there where all the movie stars used to go. Marilyn Monroe was at the fight. She came into the ring to give us all a kiss. We lined up and three guys were ahead of me. Something happened while we were standing there but I almost got a kiss from her. Three more guys and I would’ve gotten a kiss.”
¹⁴

THE SANTA MONICA HOSPITAL “STORY”

“We took Marilyn Monroe in on an overdose and of course she succumbed at the hospital,” Walt Schaefer stated in a 1985 interview. “She was alive when she was picked up, yes.”

Schaefer told a similar story to another reporter: “I came in the next morning and found on the log sheet we had transported Marilyn Monroe. I understood that she had overdosed. She was under the influence of barbiturates. They took her on a Code Three, an emergency, into Santa Monica Hospital, where she terminated.”

Asked how Marilyn could possibly have been brought back to her home in Brentwood, Schaefer replied, “Anything can happen in Hollywood.”

Years later, Hall’s partner Murray Liebowitz would change his last name to Leib. When Jay Margolis interviewed Murray Leib’s now ninety-six-year-old widow, Sylvia, she stated that, throughout the years, her husband told her Marilyn Monroe was taken to the hospital and then returned home after she was dead.

Since Murray Leib finally admitted to biographer Donald Wolfe that James Hall’s account was accurate, and because Mrs. Leib stated in a previous chapter of this book that Murray only told her about Marilyn Monroe during the last few years of their forty-year marriage, it is our conclusion that Murray was simply protecting his wife Sylvia by continuing to echo Walt Schaefer’s original testimony: