The Murder of Marilyn Monroe (5 page)

Jefferies corroborated Mrs. Murray’s recollection to Donald Wolfe: “They made it clear we were to be gone . . . I had no idea what was going on. I mean, this was the Attorney General of the United States. I didn’t know who the two men were with him . . . We waited at the neighbor’s house for them to leave.” This was at 12304 Fifth Helena Drive, the home of Mrs. Mary W. Goodykoontz Barnes.

What’s more, within days of Marilyn’s death, it was Mrs. Barnes who spoke to Sgt. Jack Clemmons about her first sighting of Bobby Kennedy with Case or Ahern in the afternoon. She also mentioned a second sighting of Kennedy in the evening but this time with
both
Archie Case and James Ahern. After interviewing Sgt. Clemmons in 1993 and 1997, Donald Wolfe wrote, “Three men [Kennedy with Case and Ahern] walked down Fifth Helena Drive. One [Case or Ahern] was carrying a small black satchel similar to a medical bag.”

Mary W. Goodykoontz Barnes relayed to Sgt. Jack Clemmons, “I’ve seen Bobby Kennedy go into that house a dozen times. That definitely was him. I don’t know who the other two men were.” This was the same house Mrs. Murray and her son-in-law Norman Jefferies stayed in while they waited for Kennedy, Case, and Ahern to leave.

A confidential source revealed to Jay Margolis, “Two of my brothers were FBI agents . . . I had heard that my brother John Anderson had seen Robert Kennedy and two men enter Marilyn Monroe’s home. Hours later it was reported that Marilyn Monroe had died.”

Anthony Summers asserted that, after 9:30 p.m., Marilyn happily chatted with her friend and sometimes lover José Bolaños, on the private line in her main bedroom. She may well have been reading from her red diary when, according to Bolaños, Marilyn told him “something that will one day shock the whole world.”

Then there was a crash. Informing Bolaños she would be right back, Marilyn went to investigate a noise she heard coming from the guest cottage. Summers: “Marilyn ended the conversation by simply laying down the phone—she did not hang up while he was on the line.” After arriving at the guest cottage, she found Bobby Kennedy with long-time personal LAPD bodyguards, Archie Case and James Ahern, rifling through one of her two filing cabinets in the guest cottage that they’d forcibly opened in search of the hallowed red diary. This was now in her main bedroom, but Marilyn’s privacy had been violated and she therefore screamed at the trio of would-be thieves to get out of her house.

Later, frightened for his life when in possession of the secret audiotapes capturing these events, Fred Otash provided biographer Ted Schwarz with a sanitized transcript that convinced Schwarz Marilyn committed suicide. Nevertheless, Jayne Mansfield’s press secretary, Raymond Strait, was certain that the eleven hours of tapes he actually listened to prove that Marilyn Monroe was murdered.

“[Pathologist Thomas] Noguchi never believed it was suicide, but they shut him up real quick,” Strait told Jay Margolis. “I knew Tom Noguchi. He said he never believed for a minute that she committed suicide. He wanted to blow the whole thing on Marilyn Monroe but [his superiors] weren’t having it . . . I had all those tapes in my garage in a sealed-up box for ten years . . . I never opened them. Fred called me one night in Palm Springs and he says, ‘You still have that box?’ ‘Well, of course!’ ‘You bring it down to the Springs. I want to show you something.’”

Interviewed by Peter Harry Brown and Patte Barham, Strait said, “Fred was afraid of the tapes. And he was so afraid that he planned to release a far less graphic version in his upcoming autobiography.” Strait also asserted that Marilyn had been murdered: “It was obvious that she was subdued—probably with a pillow—while the drugs were administered.”

In his personal notes, Fred Otash himself wrote, “I listened to Marilyn Monroe die,” while adding that he taped an angry confrontation between Marilyn and Bobby Kennedy in the hours before her death. “She said she was passed around like a piece of meat,” Otash recalled. “It was a violent argument about their relationship and the commitment and promises he made to her. She was really screaming and they were trying to quiet her down. She’s in the [guest] bedroom and Bobby gets the pillow and he muffles her on the bed to keep the neighbors from hearing. She finally quieted down and then he was looking to get out of there.”

Therefore, after Marilyn entered the guest cottage to see what was going on, Case and Ahern threw her on the bed. Then, per wiretapper Bernie Spindel and Fred Otash, Robert Kennedy covered her face with a pillow to keep her from screaming before ordering Archie Case and James Ahern to give Marilyn Monroe injections of Nembutal in an attempt to relax her hysterical state. Deputy Coroner’s Aide Lionel Grandison wrote in his memoirs what he learned from a wiretap conversation that night: Bobby Kennedy had instructed Archie Case and James Ahern to “Give her something to calm her down.”

In 1986, Fred Otash had allowed Raymond Strait to hear eleven hours of tapes that were rolling before, during, and after Marilyn Monroe’s murder. On the January 7, 1993, episode of Joan Rivers’ Fox TV talk show, Raymond Strait informed the host and her viewers, “It was horrible. You could hear the two men [Case and Ahern] talking to each other, saying, ‘Give her another one. Don’t give it to her too quickly,’ and awful smothering sounds.” A confidential source states regarding the Nembutal injections, “I don’t know if she was injected merely to subdue her or if it was meant to kill her.”

Lionel Grandison wrote in his memoirs, “Miner and Noguchi were looking at some bruises on her leg. I could clearly see a bruise just below the knee. Dr. Noguchi was explaining that this was common because many people fall or the body is bruised when being handled after death.”

Actually, dead bodies don’t bruise. Grandison continued, “My first thought was needle mark, but obviously Dr. Noguchi didn’t concur . . . When the final physical diagram and autopsy report were completed, no mention of these details, or the bruise marks on her body, were reported.”

Corroborating Grandison’s claims, a confidential source told Jay Margolis about a bizarre turn of events just days after Marilyn died: “My friend Marty George was a Los Angeles photographer. He had a job where, once a year, he would go down to the Coroner’s Office and take pictures of everybody. I guess they had some sort of shindig where they had to have all their pictures taken for this. And Marty was the kind of guy who was very innocuous. If he was the only person in the room, you could sometimes ignore him and miss him. He really blended in better than anyone I’ve ever known.

“He was in the file room taking pictures of somebody and that somebody got called out of the room. So, Marty George said, ‘Okay, fine.’ He was a big fan of Marilyn’s and he decided to see if he could find the coroner’s report. So, he went over to the files and he opened them up because they were papers in this day. And there it was but it was sealed. He decided that sealed coroner’s reports are not legal so he just broke the seal and opened it and read it. He did not take a picture of it because he was so stunned. So, he called me up when he got home and he said, ‘What does this mean? No contents in the stomach.’ I told him, ‘It means she could not have died by barbiturates from the mouth.’

“In the coroner’s report, he saw there were needle marks behind her knees, the jugular vein in her neck, and bruises on her arms and her back. He said as far as he was concerned, that doesn’t seem very much like suicide. I said, ‘It doesn’t to me either, and certainly not by barbiturate overdose by mouth with pills, because that leaves some residue in the stomach.’ There was nothing because she hadn’t eaten or consumed anything for hours before she died. Marty George also said there is an actual reel somewhere unlike coroner’s reports, and that there’s apparently been cover-up ones made since. I wish he would’ve taken a picture of it but he didn’t think to do that because he was in shock. He very carefully put it back together and put the seal back and put it in the file, but it exists. It’s
somewhere
.”

In October 1997, Schaefer Ambulance attendant James Hall relayed to biographer Michelle Morgan, “On the autopsy report, Noguchi wrote, ‘No needle mark.’ A question that has never come up is, did Dr. Noguchi always write, ‘No needle mark’ on all of the previous autopsy reports or was this a ‘special’ case?”

As it turned out, the Nembutal injections weren’t enough to subdue Marilyn. So, using one of the enema bags already in the guest cottage bathroom, the two LAPD Gangster Squad partners held her down, stripped her clothes off, and gave her an enema filled with broken-down pills containing anywhere from thirteen to nineteen Nembutals and seventeen chloral hydrates. Rendering her unconscious, this criminal act against Marilyn’s will accounted for the purplish discoloration of her colon as noted in the official autopsy report. In fact, Lawford’s third wife Deborah Gould told Anthony Summers how Lawford stated, “Marilyn took her last big enema.”

Funeral director Allan Abbott said to Jay Margolis, “The pathologist never signs the death certificate. He comes out of the lab, and he goes up to the front desk where the deputies work and I knew all of them very well. He tells them the cause of death. And then they fill out the death certificate and put on the cause of death. There was a black guy working at the Coroner’s Office named Lionel Grandison. They went to him and said, ‘You’ve got to sign Marilyn Monroe’s death certificate’ and the Coroner had put on there ‘suicide.’ Grandison said, ‘I read Dr. Noguchi’s report about the inflammation of the colon. I don’t think we really know what she died of. I’m not going to sign it as “suicide.” They threatened him with his job. He still wouldn’t sign it ‘suicide.’ So they said, ‘Okay, how about “probable suicide?”’ and he said, ‘Okay, I’ll put that on it.’”

Negating oral ingestion of the pills, a drug-laced enema is the only way that such high levels of chloral hydrate could have been detected in her blood along with the high levels of Nembutal. Incidentally, chloral hydrate injections are not medically practiced. Per the 1982 District Attorney’s Report, “The results of the blood and liver toxicological examination show that there were 8 mg. percent chloral hydrate [seventeen 500-mg pills] and 4.5 mg. percent of barbiturates in the blood [forty-fifty 100-mg Nembutals] and 13.0 mg. percent pentobarbital in the liver.”

Donald Spoto’s Marilyn Monroe biography noted that Marilyn had many receipts for enema paraphernalia (most likely located in more than one of her bathrooms). When the police officially discovered her body, only ten of fifty 500-mg chloral hydrate pills were still in the prescription bottle. According to Gary Vitacco-Robles, “The guest bedroom near the pool shares a bath (at left) with the third bedroom. The middle door accesses a closet. The door to the far right leads to a hallway and a linen closet.” Therefore, the water for the enema had been easily accessible and so were the linens later used to dry Marilyn’s body once the enema had been expelled. During the struggle, Marilyn received an injury on her upper back—a bruise not documented in Thomas Noguchi’s official autopsy report, but one that is clearly visible in a police photo that captures Marilyn facedown on the bed.

Because the drug-laced enema only rendered her unconscious, Marilyn was still alive when Schaefer Ambulance attendant James Hall arrived with his driver, Murray Liebowitz. Had Marilyn been injected instead with massive amounts of Nembutal and chloral hydrate in one injection, she would have died before Hall and Liebowitz came on the scene.

Less than a minute after they gave Marilyn a drug-laced enema, Kennedy, Case, and Ahern were once again preoccupied with a frantic search for the red diary. At the same time, Marilyn grabbed the only phone, the public line from the guest cottage, to call her masseur friend Ralph Roberts, yet she only reached his answering service. It was 10:00 p.m. The woman at the other end noted that Marilyn asked for Ralph in a “slurred voice,” only to be told he was out for the evening. Then she hung up, en route to losing consciousness as a result of the sleep-inducing chloral hydrate coursing through her body; a body that would be leaning on the phone when discovered a short while later by Norman Jefferies and Eunice Murray.

Why would Bobby Kennedy risk destroying his skyrocketing career by becoming directly involved in such a dark turn of events? The fact that he was in Los Angeles from at least 11:00 that morning—when he was spotted on Stage 18 of the Fox lot by studio publicist Frank Neill—until after midnight proves he was willing to take that risk.

Jefferies noted that Kennedy, Case, and Ahern departed Marilyn’s home at 10:30 p.m. Thereafter, it was due to the incessant barking of her dog Maf—so named because the white maltese terrier (not French poodle) was a gift from mob-connected Frank Sinatra—that Marilyn was discovered in the guest cottage by Jefferies and Mrs. Murray who stated, “I saw that the telephone was under her. She was lying on it.” Jefferies told Donald Wolfe, “I thought she was dead. She was facedown, her hand kind of holding the phone. It didn’t look to me like she was breathing, and her color was awful—like she was dead.”

Nobody expected what the housekeeper would do next. Jefferies continued to Wolfe, “Eunice took the phone and called an ambulance. Then she put through an emergency call to Dr. Greenson, who was someplace nearby and said he would be right over. He told Eunice to call Dr. Engelberg.”

Schaefer Ambulance attendant James Hall, Mrs. Murray, and Norman Jefferies all stated that Marilyn Monroe was still alive when Dr. Ralph Greenson arrived at the scene.

Mrs. Murray told Anthony Summers, “Why, at my age, do I still have to cover this thing up? . . . When he [Dr. Greenson] arrived, she was not dead because I was there then in the living room.” Summers asked, “Marilyn was not dead when the first doctor arrived, is that what you’re saying?” Mrs. Murray replied, “That’s what I’m saying.”

Jefferies relayed to Wolfe, “I went to the gates to wait for the ambulance, but before the ambulance got there Peter Lawford and Pat Newcomb arrived. Pat became hysterical and started screaming at Eunice. I had to take Eunice into the house. She [Pat] was a basket case. I think the ambulance arrived before Dr. Greenson.”