The Murder of Marilyn Monroe (8 page)

We went into the house. Through the foyer was an open door with light spilling out into the hall. “In there! She’s dead! She’s dead!” she said. I don’t think she even knew she was screaming.

Countering Hall’s recollection, a remarkably defensive Pat Newcomb told biographer Donald Spoto, “Whoever the writer was who said I leaned over the body screaming, ‘She’s dead! She’s dead!’ I never saw the body. So what is he talking about, this ambulance driver? . . . How can he say he saw me? I never saw an ambulance.”

If so, then what about Norman Jefferies’ statements earlier in this book, asserting Mrs. Murray called for an ambulance shortly before Newcomb arrived at the scene? From the time she first opened up to biographer Fred Lawrence Guiles in 1969, Newcomb consistently claimed she didn’t learn of Marilyn’s death until 4:00 a.m. the next morning, courtesy of a phone call from the actress’s attorney Mickey Rudin. Later, we will learn about Newcomb’s rather weak alibi. For now, however, let’s return to James Hall’s 1997 recollection to Michelle Morgan and Hall’s first sighting of the person at the center of the unfolding drama . . .

“Oh my God, it’s Marilyn Monroe,” I said. She lay unconscious, her head hanging off the edge of the bed at an unnatural angle. Her color looked bad and I could see as I got closer that she was barely breathing. She was totally naked and her beautiful body made the scene surreal.

We had to get her off of the bed and onto a hard surface so we could work on her. “Let’s get her on the floor,” I said as I grabbed her by the arms and pulled her onto the floor. I know I bruised her, but seconds counted when you were saving a life; not bruises. I scanned the room for immediate signs of what happened. A small lamp burned on a bedside table. There was also a bunch of pill bottles grouped neatly around the base of the lamp. They were all capped. There was no sign of a water glass or any alcohol. “Someone is sure over-prescribing here,” I said. My father was the kind of physician who doled out drugs with exaggerated caution, so I really noticed all the pill bottles.

“Let’s take her out into the foyer so we can work on her,” I said. “There’s no room in here.” We dragged Marilyn into the hallway. As I bent over her, it hit me—there was no vomit, unusual with an overdose which is what the woman managed to tell us that she thought was wrong. When I bent over Marilyn, there was no odor of drugs from her mouth. Another classic symptom.

I began external heart massage. “I’ve got to get her breathing. Get me an airway!” I yelled at Liebowitz. An airway is a clear plastic tube, curved slightly and about six inches long. I worked the airway down her throat. This would clear anything that might be blocking her throat. Liebowitz ran to the ambulance for the resuscitator, a small apparatus which would pump oxygen into her lungs. I attached it to the airway and it started working. It was pumping the oxygen in and sucking it back out perfectly.

Liebowitz turned as he said, “I’ll get the stretcher,” then froze. A man had suddenly appeared in the doorway.

“I’m her doctor,” he said, moving quickly toward her. “Give her positive pressure.” I was astonished. “Where did you come from?” I thought, “How did you get here so fast?” I stared at him. He was wearing a suit. A somewhat big man with darkish hair and a rough complexion. He was clearly agitated and this time he shouted, “I said, ‘Give her positive pressure!’” “Jesus Christ,” I thought, “What’s wrong with you? I’ve got a machine here that’s doing a great job of that. Why take her off it?”

I removed the resuscitator and attached another short length of tube to the airway. The doctor knelt down and began to push on Marilyn’s abdomen. I started blowing into the airway. But the doctor was pushing in the wrong place. He was too low on her stomach. I was pinching her nose tight so the air would go into the lungs and not back out through her nostrils.

Every time he pushed, a black line of bile from the stomach rose up the clear tube. I thought, “I’m going to eat it.” When he would push, I would stick the end of my tongue over the opening of the tube to stop the stuff from going into my mouth. When he would let up, I would blow again.

“Hey, Doc,” I finally said, “you blow and I’ll push.” I know some doctors aren’t used to emergencies but this guy was all thumbs. That’s when he muttered, “I’ve got to make a show of this.” I never forgot that remark. “Christ, let’s move,” I said. “You can work on her in the back of the ambulance.” Time was running out and I wanted to save her.

The doctor opened his bag and took out a hypodermic syringe with a heart needle already on it. That needle looked about a foot long. He drew up a liquid from a bottle with a rubber seal and filled the syringe. He mumbled under his breath like he was reading from a medical book, “Insert between the ‘blank’ and ‘blank’ rib.” I don’t remember the numbers. He felt his way down her ribs like an amateur. Then he thrust the needle into her chest. But it didn’t go in right. It hung up on the bone, on one of her ribs.

Instead of trying again, he just leaned into it, his cheeks quivered with the effort. He pushed hard and he drove it all the way through the rib, making a loud snap as the bone broke. I know he scarred that rib bone. I had watched a lot of medical procedures and this guy was downright brutal.

As for Peter Lawford and Sgt. Marvin Iannone, James Hall relayed to James Spada, “They walked in at the time he [Ralph Greenson] was injecting her.” In 1992, to Beverly Hills Detective Lynn Franklin, Hall identified the police officer with Lawford as Sgt. Marvin Iannone, and in 1993, Hall identified him to Donald Wolfe. Hall continued to Michelle Morgan:

At that time, two men who I assumed were Los Angeles Police officers came in. One wore a Los Angeles Police blue suit and the other wore a jumpsuit. I have identified the man in the jumpsuit from a photo lineup as Peter Lawford who was married to Pat. Pat Lawford was Bobby Kennedy’s sister. I have also identified the blue suit. I will only say at this time he is presently the Chief of Police of a major affluent California city [Sgt. Marvin D. Iannone of Beverly Hills].

Dr. Greenson finally removed the needle and put a stethoscope to her heart. “She’s dead,” he said. “I’m pronouncing her dead.” He stood up. It took me a minute to be sure I had heard him right. We could have saved her. I felt sick.

“You can go now,” he said. It was obvious we were in the way. I have identified that doctor as Ralph Greenson, Marilyn’s psychiatrist. Mrs. Murray was not present in the guest house area. She must have been in the other part of the home.

Outside the house, also pulled down Fifth Helena, was the first call car from the mortuary. “What the hell are they doing here already?” I asked Liebowitz. You don’t send for a first call car until you have a dead body. Marilyn had been pronounced dead only minutes before.

In the 1982
Globe
article, James Hall described Dr. Greenson injecting his patient with a “brownish fluid” out of a pharmaceutical bottle. Said fluid therefore wasn’t colorless adrenaline, which only becomes pale red and, eventually, brown on exposure to air and light. Instead, the brown liquid James Hall saw had to be Nembutal, which was the only other drug found in Marilyn’s body besides chloral hydrate. This does not mean, however, that the high level of Nembutal came from Greenson’s shot, but from the afternoon Nembutal injection, more evening Nembutal injections, and the drug-laced enema containing both chloral hydrate and Nembutal.

There are, indeed, two types of Nembutal: a clear, thin liquid and a dark brown, syrupy elixir. Furthermore, Nembutal must be diluted with water before being administered, yet James Hall was certain that Dr. Greenson didn’t dilute the brown solution he injected into Marilyn’s heart. Accordingly, it traveled up the brain stem and paralyzed her respiratory center. The doctor would surely have been aware of this, and so, just as surely, he was guilty of murder.

In his May 1986 interview with
Hustler
magazine, Hall remarked that Dr. Thomas Noguchi possibly didn’t notice the puncture caused by the needle because the hole was in the crease of one of Marilyn’s breasts.

“He said he looked over the whole body with a magnifying glass and didn’t find any needle marks, including under the tongue,” Hall noted. “But that sounds like a junkie shooting up, not like a reason to look at her heart. You wouldn’t put a needle into your own heart, would you?”

Meanwhile, Dr. Thomas Noguchi told biographers Brown and Barham about bruises not documented in the official autopsy report: “I did find evidence which indicated violence. There were bruises on her lower back area—a very fresh bruise—and bruises on the arms.”

In 1982, investigator Al Tomich from the District Attorney’s Office asked Dr. Hyman Engelberg, “Would you have noticed any fresh needle marks on her at that time if there were any in the chest area?”

“I would have noticed any gross things,” came the reply. “I didn’t notice any such thing.”

Donald Wolfe confirmed that Marilyn’s body displayed indicators of cyanosis, consistent with a needle injection. An actual witness to the cyanosis was
Life
magazine photojournalist Leigh Wiener, who said he saw strange blue markings all over her when he photographed Marilyn Monroe hours after her death. “They’ll look like a frozen cube of ice,” Leigh Wiener explained in a 1987 documentary. “You’ll see little streaks of blue running through the body . . . That’s how Monroe looked to me when I saw her.”

Wiener may have unwittingly held the key to the more than fifty-year-old mystery. This was thanks to his bribing county morgue staff with a bottle of whiskey shortly before midnight on August 5 and capturing frontal images of Marilyn just hours after her death that might reveal a needle mark in the chest area.

“I took a picture of her toe with a tag on it, covered by a sheet,” Wiener recalled in the same documentary. “Then they took the sheet off and I took more pictures but it was at eye-level. I couldn’t see the face. The pictures were obviously never used. I have them and I’ve been interrogated by the District Attorney in Los Angeles about them.”

Wiener’s son Devik told Jay Margolis, “In 1982, a couple of deputy D.A.s knocked on the door during one of the numerous times they reopened the investigation into her death. They wanted to see any photographs and Dad basically said, ‘Look, they were black-and-white images, so you could tell nothing about flesh-tones from them. Good day. Good bye.’ They were interested in color images. Dad said she was so disfigured that it would have done a disservice to her and a service to no one. He basically died with the mystery of where those images were.

“My dad claimed to have put those negatives in some safety-deposit box. I truly think he might have destroyed the negatives. From the bungalow to the mortuary, there were a total of a hundred and thirty-three images combined. And at the funeral he shot about a hundred and eighty images. Dad only pressed five hundred copies of the
Marilyn: A Hollywood Farewell
book. With all the celebrities he photographed, he left behind such an incredible body of work. It’s almost half-a-million images.”

Devik Wiener told Margolis that his father never believed Marilyn Monroe committed suicide: “There was so much surrounding her death with the Kennedys, the odds of her overdosing on her own—and I think he would say the same thing—were very slim.”

Marilyn’s friend, Hollywood reporter James Bacon, remembered, “I stayed there long enough to get a good view of the body before the real coroner’s staff arrived—then I made a quick exit . . . She was lying facedown on the bed, face slightly turned to the left on a pillow. Her legs were straight . . . I noticed that her fingernails were dingy and unkempt.” The fact is, her nails had changed color because of the cyanosis.

In the documentary
Marilyn Monroe: A Case for Murder
, John Miner recalled Thomas Noguchi’s autopsy: “Her body was examined minutely by both of us under magnification to see if we could find any needle mark of any kind anywhere on her body. And her body was observed and there were no needle marks.”

Following actor John Belushi’s drug-related death, Noguchi conceded in his book that he almost missed a needle mark on Belushi’s left arm. “The very fact that the fresh punctures had been so difficult to discover worried me,” the pathologist wrote. “Apparently a tiny medically clean needle had been used, and the injection had been made right into the vein, so that only drops of blood revealed them.”

In Marilyn’s case, according to pathologist J. DeWitt Fox, “The blue postmortem lividity occurred over the front part of the body. This might have masked or covered up any injection which she might have had in her chest.” In Fox’s expert opinion, had Marilyn been moved, in this case facedown on the bed, then “the bruise-like discolorations of postmortem lividity” would conceal an injection mark on her chest caused by the needle Hall saw Greenson putting into her heart.

To quote the 1982 District Attorney’s Report on the re-investigation of Marilyn Monroe’s death, “Lividity, as described to our investigators, is a process by which blood drains to the lowest point in a deceased person after death due to the joint effect of the pull of gravity and the cessation of the blood pumping mechanism of the body . . . In addition to the rigor mortis observed in Miss Monroe’s body, Noguchi and others observed a pattern of lividity on her face and chest.”

Sgt. Jack Clemmons, the first policeman officially at the scene, agreed with Dr. Fox’s explanation of postmortem lividity and believed James Hall’s account. “It was obvious to me, apparent to me, I should say, that Marilyn had been placed in that position,” Clemmons remarked. “I felt at the time that the position of the body had to do with postmortem lividity. When a person dies, their heart stops beating; the gravity will pull the blood to the lowest part of the body. Marilyn being facedown, all the blood came forward. As a matter of fact, the coroner’s report particularly noted lividity, reddishness around the face and the chest area. I felt at the time that she was placed in that position to disguise needle marks.”