The Murder of Marilyn Monroe (22 page)

Abbott’s partner Ron Hast relayed, “Founded in 1957 by my business partner Allan Abbott, and myself, our company provided essential services commonly utilized by funeral homes on a regular or at-need basis, such as twenty-four-hour first-call services, hearses, limousines, floral transportation, long-distant statewide transportation, death certificate services, with experienced personnel. We had also developed the Casket Airtray (1960), and production of formal station wagon conversions for death care.

“On a monthly rotation of regional funeral homes, the Coroner’s Office assigned Ms. Monroe to the Westwood Village Mortuary and Cemetery; a very small, low-volume firm in West Los Angeles. It was owned by James and Clarence Pierce, and operated as a satellite from their primary location in Los Angeles. Apparently, by the time the coroner’s investigation was completed, Mr. Joe DiMaggio engaged the quaint cemetery mortuary to follow through with arrangements, private funeral, and entombment in its outdoor mausoleum crypt.

“We received a call from Clarence Pierce one Sunday morning, asking to pick up one of our new station wagon formal conversions to transport Marilyn Monroe from the Coroner’s Office to Westwood. They were aware that the press was anticipated in large numbers, and the event would be newsworthy. Clarence Pierce made the call—well documented in the news. We were later informed the transfer was the first death event telecast over Telstar, the first satellite to broadcast news worldwide.

“We were soon contacted again to arrange for one of our three new hearses: a 1962 Eureka Landau Cadillac Side Service. This led to a request for Allan and I to arrive at the mortuary for a planning conference. It was soon determined that there were many loose ends and unknowns to address. Allan inquired about security, explaining potential liability concerns with privacy assurance and other matters. He gave examples of photographs and other problems that surfaced in the past. He was then assigned to follow through, and ordered six armed and uniformed guards that soon arrived and were rotated through the entire event.

“In the course of constant issues, I was asked by a well-dressed woman for a moment of privacy. She then offered me $10,000 to be privately alone with Marilyn Monroe’s body for ten minutes. I explained the trust for privacy and security that was placed with us, the importance of that commitment, and respectfully declined her request. I admit to recognizing the value of her suggested gift, having then recently paid $12,250 each for three new hearses.

“As a deputy Los Angeles registrar, I signed and received Marilyn’s death certificate and burial permit. The certificate, at that time, only indicated ‘pending investigation and autopsy.’ The original certificate was later replaced with a ‘final certificate,’ indicating the cause of death, with new and permanent signatures.

“In the course of all details, we were involved in the preparation room, at the door of the chapel during services (less than fifty people were invited), and asked to be pallbearers during the transfer from chapel to hearse to outdoor crypt following chapel formalities. Ms. Monroe’s hairdresser and makeup artist [Sydney Guilaroff and Whitey Snyder] were the other two pallbearers.

“Over the past 50 years, we have received numerous inquiries regarding Marilyn Monroe and her final event. There is no question that her sudden, unexpected and mysterious death—as well as her image frozen in time—fuels curiosity about every detail of her life and death.”

On August 7, according to biographer Donald Spoto, Joe DiMaggio maintained a nighttime vigil over Marilyn’s body until her makeup man, Whitey Snyder, arrived the next morning to apply the final touches. However, Allan Abbott told Jay Margolis this wasn’t true: “Joe DiMaggio left at eleven o’clock at night. Out of all the celebrity funerals I worked on, the only one my wife ever had any interest in going to and seeing was Marilyn’s. So, we arrived at Westwood Cemetery Mortuary at eight-forty-five—because the visitation was going to conclude at nine o’clock—and figured we would talk to Pat Spinelli for about twenty minutes. Pat was the night girl who answered the phone.

“Come ten o’clock, Joe’s still going from the chapel to the cemetery. He would go out there and cry. Then he’d come back in and walk up to the casket, stay there for a while, then turn and walk out to the cemetery again. He did this five or six times. Pat said, ‘I’m not going to tell Joe DiMaggio he’s got to leave.’ We just sat there and kept talking and she told me how, the night before that night, she slept on a rollaway bed. And she rolled it in and slept next to Marilyn to make sure nobody got in secretly and got around her and got a picture of her. She slept there every night. Pat told me that absolutely nobody else stayed . . .

“We stayed there until almost eleven. Finally, I told my wife, ‘I’m really sorry but I’ve got to work this service tomorrow. We have to leave.’ We moved our car only twenty or thirty feet and I see Joe and his entourage leaving. So, I backed the car up and we went back inside. I said, ‘Boy, that was perfect timing.’ Just a minute or two later and I would’ve been gone. Pat took us into the visitation room and, as we stood there, immediately my wife started crying. We were very, very intensely looking at her. I had seen the horrible, horrible Coroner’s picture where Marilyn was just totally unrecognizable. My wife says to me, ‘Look at how big her eyes are!’ I’ve never heard anybody make that observation, but she was absolutely right . . .

“In Leigh Wiener’s book, it says we’re employees of Westwood. I guess we were there working that day for Westwood so I guess you could say loosely we were employees of Westwood. We had over a hundred funeral homes in Los Angeles that used our services and these two mortuaries, the mortuary cemetery in Westwood and Pierce-Hamrock in Downtown did not own a hearse, did not own a limousine and that really was not unusual. A lot of people find that very surprising. Every single service they had was by our staff and our cars. So I could just go into our dispatch office any afternoon, see what was on the sheet for the next day, and assign myself on whatever I wanted to go on.”

As for the man who performed the autopsy on Marilyn Monroe, Allan Abbott told Jay Margolis, “I never met [pathologist Thomas] Noguchi until after Marilyn’s funeral. They were talking about him all the time and they called him ‘The Knife . . .’ Noguchi was a working fool. He would do six or eight or ten embalmings in a day if he had to. Charles Maxwell embalmed Marilyn Monroe. Whitey Snyder was taking credit for dressing her and he kind of intimated that he moved her breasts around a little bit to make them more pointy. That was not true. Mrs. Mary Hamrock was the one who got credit for doing that. She and the two brothers Clarence and James Pierce opened a business on Venice Boulevard together . . . As Abbott & Hast, we provide funeral cars, hearses, and limousines to provide the service of a funeral home. The downtown location was called Pierce-Hamrock . . .

“Obviously, when people found out that Westwood had been called to take care of Marilyn, everybody wants to get in on the act and see whatever there is to see . . . I get to the cemetery and there’s about a hundred or so people there. I recognized most of them, like [gossip columnist] Hedda Hopper, a lot of photographers, and there were a lot of members of the public there, too.

“I heard that within ten minutes of my arrival, photographers were offering $30,000 for a picture of Marilyn dead. I could actually see guys going over and trying the doors. At that time, Westwood had their embalming room, which was a separate Spanish-style building that wasn’t really connected to the main building at all. Somehow they found out that that’s where the embalming room was and they were checking the doors and trying the windows and everything.

“I went inside and the manager’s wife was there and I said, ‘Where’s Guy Hockett?’ and she says, ‘He’s down at the Coroner’s Office picking up the paperwork on Marilyn.’ ‘Why? You got a really huge problem developing out there at the cemetery. You’ve got to get some security here!’ ‘Well, I’m not authorized to do that!’ So, she calls downtown, gets Clarence, and he says to her, ‘Whatever Allan needs, get it.’ I said, ‘You got a Yellow Pages?’ She handed it to me. Then I decided on Pinkerton Security Services with guards.

“I called them up and said, ‘I need six uniformed guards here at Westwood Village Cemetery as quickly as you can possibly get them here.’ ‘Do you want them wearing side-arms?’ ‘Absolutely.’ The embalmer and the Pinkerton guards arrived at almost the same time. We went into the embalming room and took the sheet off of Marilyn and I absolutely could not believe that was her. She was such a mess. She had purple blotches all over her face, which is from a condition called lividity. Whenever a person dies, the gravity pulls the blood to the area of your body that’s the lowest.

“The other thing that was readily apparent was that her neck was very swollen. So, the embalmer said, ‘I’ve got to get this swelling out of her neck.’ He had me roll her up on her side . . . Marilyn’s neck was bloated because I think Noguchi was in there, looking around and probing. In your neck, you have something called a hyaline bone and it’s not a very strong bone. Most people that are strangled, it breaks their hyaline bone and you can see what the actual cause of death is, such as manual strangulation or ligature, anything that’s used in place of hands such as a belt or hose or even a piece of nylon . . .

“Of course, she was already embalmed at the Coroner’s Office, so she was as stiff as a brick. He made this marquee diamond incision on the back of her neck, removed about three square inches of skin and then made this baseball stitch and just pulled all the skin as tight as he could, which really did the trick as far as getting all that swelling out. It made her neck the normal size. Before he made the incision, he cut some hair off the back of her head just to get it out of the way so he could do that.

“I got a call from the front office. Mrs. Hockett says, ‘The executor just dropped off the clothing and everything,’ and by that time we were just about ready to start dressing her. I said, ‘Alright, I’ll be right up to get it.’ I go to the office, which was in a separate building, and I start looking through the stuff. I said, ‘There’s no panties.’ ‘She never wore them and they couldn’t find any, so they just didn’t bring any.’ But they brought a bra, some tiny falsies, and a green Pucci gown that had a Florence, Italy label in it . . .

“We had just finished dressing Marilyn. Charles Maxwell, the embalmer, I only knew as Frenchie because he spoke with a very heavy French accent. Frenchie said, ‘Look, they brought in falsies, but they’re way too small to do any good, so I guess we’ll stick them in the bra.’ Then we were cleaning up to get ready for her hairdresser and makeup man when Mrs. Hamrock came walking into the embalming room and just stood there for a long, silent time, looking at her. She said, ‘That doesn’t look like Marilyn. She’s flatter than a pancake!’

“Not only do they make a Y-incision at the autopsy, they cut each of the ribs so they can get to all the internal organs. The whole chest caves in. When Mrs. Hamrock heard about this thing about the falsies, she just walked over to the embalming table and grabbed the neck of this Pucci dress, pulled on it, reached in there and grabbed the falsies, took them out of there, and threw them in a waste basket. Then she went over and stuffed the bra completely with cotton. She kind of moved things around a little bit, then took a step back, looked at it, and said, ‘Now
that
looks like Marilyn Monroe.’ Then she walked out the door . . .

“I kept thinking about those falsies in the trash can. Gosh, I knew how much my wife would love those. I was in my early twenties and kind of embarrassed, wanting to retrieve these falsies. So, the embalmer walked over to wash his hands. I didn’t take my eyes off of him. I just kept watching him to make sure he didn’t see me. I was standing next to the trash can and I reached in, felt the falsies, squeezed them into my fist, and put them into my pocket without even looking . . .

“If Mrs. Hamrock hadn’t come in, I would have never ended up with the falsies. It wasn’t until Whitey and Sydney showed up that I was able to find out the purpose of the falsies. I don’t think Sydney had any particular idea about it, but Whitey said, ‘Oh, yeah, she’d been using those for a few years now. She puts on a bra and a sweater, then she stuffs these up inside there so that, when you look at her in the sweater, you see the outline of her nipples.’ She wanted people to think she was not wearing a bra. She liked to be provocative. I would have never known why they were used because to me, they should have been about four inches in diameter, which is all the ones I’ve ever seen. But the whole purpose of these was not to make her breasts seem larger, because she was well-endowed. It was to just make more definition in her sweater . . .

“Then, when I got outside, I pulled them out of my pocket and some of the hair that was cut off of her was between the two falsies. They could get DNA from hair. Her hair was actually fairly short and it hadn’t been bleached for probably a month because it was growing out almost half an inch. It was dishwater blonde . . .”

On April 20, 2006,
48 Hours Mystery
correspondent Peter Van Sant interviewed Dr. Steven Karch on the possibility of using DNA to determine more information regarding the drugs found in Marilyn’s body. Such DNA tests could prove with scientific evidence that Marilyn Monroe did not take her own life. Van Sant reported what he learned and relayed, “Dr. Steven Karch is one of the nation’s top forensic pathologists . . . All it would take are a few strands of that famously blonde hair . . . Dr. Karch says tests could be run to look for poisons or paralyzing drugs, not done back then.” Dr. Steven Karch himself stated, “Somebody would have to open the crypt and take some hair and fingernails and analyze it.”
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DR. GREENSON CALLS THE POLICE TO SAY MARILYN MONROE COMMITTED SUICIDE

Contrary to what is stated on the official police report of Marilyn Monroe’s death, it was Ralph Greenson who phoned in the “suicide” of the most famous woman in the world. Over the years, LAPD Sgt. Jack Clemmons consistently confirmed this to documentarians and biographers. As for the August 5 phone call at 4:25 a.m. from 12305 Fifth Helena Drive, biographers Brown and Barham noted, “At first the man on the phone was so agitated that Clemmons couldn’t understand him. He was talking very fast and seemed to have a European accent.” Greenson had a soft Brooklyn/Viennese accent.