The Murder of Marilyn Monroe (20 page)

Greenson, Engelberg, and Mrs. Murray subsequently told the police that Marilyn’s door had been locked. Hildi said the same thing to private investigator Cathy Griffin: “Her room was locked and with a bolt lock. It wasn’t a lock that you could go through with a credit card and open it or undo it. It was locked and my husband had to break the window to get in.” When asked by Griffin if Marilyn usually locked the door when she went to bed, Mrs. Greenson replied, “I don’t think so, but it was locked that night.”

As it happens, with the exception of those leading outside, none of the doors in the Monroe home had locks that operated. This was confirmed by secretary Cherie Redmond who wrote to Marilyn’s close friend Hedda Rosten, “There isn’t one door in the place that locks.” And David Marshall also noted, “Linda Nuñez . . . explained . . . that no one in her family ever had a key to any of the locks on any of the interior doors . . . The locks were old-fashioned skeleton key deadbolts . . . No one in her family ever locked any doors other than the front and back for that reason.”

If biographers Peter Harry Brown and Patte Barham were accurate in their assertion that Mrs. Murray had a skeleton key attached to her own keychain, then why would Dr. Greenson need to break the window to gain entrance to Marilyn’s bedroom? Besides, after her terrible experience at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, Marilyn wasn’t eager to go behind any more locked doors. Accordingly, when Marilyn’s genealogist Roy Turner asked his friend Eunice Murray if Marilyn’s door was locked on the night of August 4, 1962, she replied, “No.”

Turner told Jay Margolis, “I never felt Marilyn killed herself . . . When I met Mrs. Murray, it was either ’82 or ’83. I think that was about the only time we ever sat down face-to-face. We had talked on the phone and written letters. I told her about what I was doing and how I was coming out to California and that I would like to interview her. And she was okay with that, so I picked her up and we went to a café down in Venice.

“At that time, she was living with her twin daughters in Santa Monica. She showed me a few things of Marilyn’s that Joe DiMaggio had given her. At that point, she was very lucid. I had sent her a questionnaire with some questions on it. She got answers down for some of the questions and she didn’t answer some of the questions. Next to ‘Was Marilyn’s bedroom door locked?’ she answered, ‘No.’

“The BBC show aired in 1985. It was called
Say Goodbye to the President
and Mrs. Murray was being interviewed . . . As soon as it was over, I called her on the phone and taped the conversation. I told her I just watched her on the BBC and said, ‘You made this statement and it just blew my mind because you say Robert Kennedy was there that day. And out of all of our conversations, you never once mentioned that he was there the day of Marilyn’s death.’ She said, ‘Yes, he was definitely there the day she died.’ That was the most important statement on that tape.

“When I was in eighth grade, I wrote Dr. Greenson because I was doing a school project. We had to do a biography on a famous person and I chose Marilyn. I told him what I was doing and he basically answered that there wasn’t a whole lot he could tell me. But Dr. Greenson did say he did not believe Marilyn committed suicide and that was not her intent at that particular time in her life.”
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On her last night, Joe DiMaggio, Jr., phoned Marilyn at 7:00 p.m. and the call lasted until 7:15. Donald Spoto noted, “In his . . . police interview, he said . . . Marilyn picked up the phone while he was watching on television the seventh inning of a baseball game: the Baltimore Orioles against the Anaheim Angels . . . The game began . . . after seven-thirty Eastern Daylight Time, which would have put the seventh inning at about ten o’clock,” or 7:00 p.m. California time. Joe DiMaggio, Sr., said, “They spoke for about fifteen minutes and Marilyn seemed quite normal and in good spirits.”

“When I left at 7:15, she seemed somewhat depressed,” Dr. Greenson wrote to Dr. Marianne Kris in a highly defensive letter. “A half hour later she phoned me at home to tell me she had gotten some good news and she seemed quite pleasant and more cheerful . . . She sounded pleasant on the phone, although somewhat depressed, but by no means acutely so.”

Ralph Greenson and Eunice Murray claim Marilyn called him at home to inform the psychiatrist of Joe DiMaggio, Jr.’s phone call and how happy she was to hear her stepson break off his engagement to Pamela Reis. As for what happened next, Greenson relayed, “About an hour later, someone [Mickey Rudin] called the housekeeper and said that Marilyn had sounded funny on the phone, but the housekeeper said that Dr. Greenson had just been there and she did not want to disturb Marilyn.”

Seemingly protecting himself at every corner, the good doctor produced an answer to every possible question regarding the timeline of Marilyn’s last night. “At midnight, the housekeeper awakened and saw that there was a light on in Marilyn’s room, which was most unusual,” Greenson wrote. “The housekeeper was afraid to awaken Marilyn who would have become enraged, and so she fell asleep again.”

Contradicting the psychiatrist’s recollection about “the light on in Marilyn’s room,” Mrs. Murray conceded, “I knew that the new white wool carpet filled the space under the door. The surface wool had piled up as a result of contact with the swinging door. This I remembered later . . . Such are the pitfalls of demands under pressure when accurate reporting is desired.” Now that Mrs. Murray retracted her own account about seeing the light under the door, Greenson’s version is highly suspect.

This added twist about Mrs. Murray falling “asleep again” resolves the discrepancy of the “midnight” discovery of the body as told to Sgt. Jack Clemmons. Hildi Greenson countered, “People say that there were four hours before it was reported, and I think Eunice did that out of a kind of unconscious guilt. She wished she had awakened at midnight and called, but she didn’t.”

The psychiatrist’s wife claimed Mrs. Murray got up at midnight and was alarmed about Marilyn but inadvertently fell asleep. Consequently, Greenson’s wife says, Mrs. Murray waited until the early morning hours of August 5 to reach her husband for help. Hildi Greenson stated, “Eunice Murray awakened at midnight and saw . . . the light under the door, and wondered about it, but fell asleep while wondering. She didn’t get up. She saw the door . . . and said, ‘I wonder why she has the light on,’ because she usually didn’t go to sleep with the light on.”

The psychiatrist’s wife concluded her story by stating: “The ‘if’ then was,
if
[Mrs. Murray] hadn’t fallen asleep at midnight, [Marilyn] probably still could have been saved. By the time [Mrs. Murray] called, which was somewhere between two and three, it was too late . . . [Ralph] said, ‘Eunice called and Marilyn’s door is locked and she can’t get in.’”

Joan Greenson recalled what her father said happened after he took the call from Mrs. Murray and went over to Marilyn’s home: “Her bedroom door was locked, there was a light, and a telephone cord under the door. He knew Marilyn never liked to sleep that way . . . He took a poker from the fireplace, went to the side window of her bedroom, broke the glass, and reached in to let himself in.”

By lying to his family about Marilyn Monroe’s time of death, Greenson attempted to purge himself of his own involvement in her murder. “He could see that she had been dead for some time,” Joan Greenson relayed. “He said she felt cold, but she was clutching the telephone in her hand, and he had trouble getting it out of her hand to hang it up . . . Father never believed for a moment that she meant to kill herself. He felt sure it was an accident.”

For a man who admitted to not having a great memory that night, Dr. Hyman Engelberg told a remarkably similar story to the District Attorney’s Office: “That particular line about being called at midnight, I remember Mrs. Murray telling us clearly that she went to sleep around midnight and she saw the light on under Miss Monroe’s door. She woke up a few hours later and felt a little uneasy and the light was still on.”

In his letter to Dr. Marianne Kris, Greenson continued: “At 3:30 the housekeeper awakened and saw the light and phoned me. I was there in five minutes, broke the window in the bedroom, found Marilyn lying dead, clutching the phone in her hand so strongly that I could not remove it.” With these words, Ralph Greenson suggests that Marilyn was deceased many hours before he arrived on the scene, which was not true.

In fact, Greenson next accurately pinpoints the time of death. “It seems she had died around midnight,” the psychiatrist wrote. “I do not think she consciously wanted to die at this moment but expected to be rescued; this time, however, it failed.”

In an October 1992 interview, contradicting Dr. Greenson’s account to the police while unwittingly corroborating the recollection of Schaefer Ambulance attendant James Hall, Greenson’s brother-in-law and best friend Mickey Rudin conceded to Donald Spoto that the psychiatrist was at Marilyn’s home
before
midnight:

According to Mickey Rudin, he rushed to the Monroe home immediately after Greenson called him.
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Per the police report, Mickey Rudin’s phone call to Mrs. Murray was 9:00 p.m. allegedly to check on her employer. At this time, Marilyn was fine and not dying. Intriguingly, Anthony Summers noted: “Dr. Greenson confirmed privately, years later, that Robert Kennedy was present that night and that an ambulance was called.”

The accounts of Detective Franklin, Eunice Murray, Norman Jefferies, and Mickey Rudin fly in the face of Greenson’s official version to the police. His story about a fireplace poker is clearly a fabrication. In fact, Mrs. Murray’s claimed that, before calling Greenson, she went around to the side of the house and used a poker to “part the draperies,” but Pat Newcomb told Donald Spoto, “Those were heavy curtains that had no middle-divider.”
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DID CHIEF PARKER COVER UP BOBBY KENNEDY’S TRACKS IN LOS ANGELES?

Anthony Summers learned that, about forty-five minutes after Detective Sgt. Robert Byron was awakened at 5:00 a.m. on August 5, he arrived at Marilyn’s home where he and Lieutenant Grover Armstrong, Chief of Detectives in West LA, interviewed Milton Rudin, Dr. Hyman Engelberg, and Eunice Murray. Dr. Greenson was no longer around, yet the two veteran cops subsequently noted inconsistencies in the recollections provided by the lawyer, the internist, and the housekeeper who, they reported, was “possibly evasive.”

More than two decades later, Byron told Summers he had the distinct impression that Mrs. Murray had been coached on what to say, and that Engelberg and Rudin were withholding material information. “I got some wild answers,” Byron recalled. “There was a lot more they could have told us . . . I didn’t feel they were telling the correct time or situation, but we did not do what we’d normally do and drag them into the station.” This, apparently, was due to the “fact” that there had been no signs of violence at the scene and that, as later confirmed by the autopsy report, Marilyn had died of self-inflicted barbiturate poisoning. Still, Byron also noted that police sources back then did inform him of her having been visited by Attorney General Robert Kennedy the day of her death.

Byron was correct that Greenson couldn’t have been at the house by the time newspaper and TV reporters showed up. After all, it would have been nearly impossible for the psychiatrist to escape their prying camera lenses. Consequently, there are no known photographs of Ralph Greenson on the scene.

Chief William Parker liked Bobby Kennedy, especially his stance on organized crime. However, as Parker’s wife Helen told Anthony Summers, her husband “wanted special attention paid to this particular case by the investigators, and he tried to send the best men out there, including detectives from the downtown office, because there was so much talk that she was close to John or Robert Kennedy.”

According to Mrs. Parker, the police chief’s Catholic faith and concern about the Kennedys being fried by their political opponents convinced him the whole matter had to be “straightened out” immediately.

However, as biographers Brown and Barham explained, “With the stroke of a pen, Chief Parker began the cover-up by refusing to assign a full-time detective team to the Monroe case.”

Sgt. Byron’s conviction that Mrs. Murray had been speedily coached to provide the police with false information was just one of several investigation-worthy factors that were now summarily ignored. Furthermore, when celebrity columnist May Mann reported on what she considered to be an inept probe into Marilyn Monroe’s untimely death, she instantly received a call from Chief Parker. Mann relayed, “He said it would be bad for my health if I kept writing stories like that.” What basically took place was a cover-up, not an investigation, and the case was allowed to turn cold.

In the late summer of 1992, former OCID (Organized Crime Intelligence Division) detective Mike Rothmiller released his book
LA Secret Police: Inside the LAPD Elite Spy Network
, exposing the corruption he witnessed firsthand within the police department. Brown and Barham wrote, “It was this unit [the OCID] which had undertaken the clandestine probe of Monroe’s death. Organized by the dictatorial Chief Parker in 1959, the fifty-seven man unit apparently rampaged beyond the bounds of legality.”

Rothmiller said the unit would “accumulate dirt on the movers and shakers of LA’s political and entertainment establishment. The intelligence chiefs were ruthless and corrupt . . . And they had the power to ruin lives and reputations—or to safeguard. This is precisely what they did with the Monroe investigation . . . they protected the name of the Kennedy dynasty.” Brown and Barham concluded, “It was this circle of handpicked detectives who investigated Monroe’s death three times (in 1962, 1975, and 1982). Every scrap of paper about the death wound up in the hands of these investigative power brokers.”