The Murder of Marilyn Monroe (21 page)

Thirty years after having arrived at Marilyn’s home around 6:30 in the morning of August 5, 1962, Detective Daniel K. Stewart told a reporter on TV news show
Hard Copy
, “I saw Marilyn’s body and I noted at the time that the Coroner was just getting ready to move her body out.”

In June 1968, Stewart was assigned to the investigation into Robert Kennedy’s assassination. “When I got down to the hospital, the officers in charge were intelligence division officers,” he recalled, “and they said, ‘This is really weird,’ because they had been watching Robert and Jack at Marilyn’s place.”

When the
Hard Copy
interviewer questioned him about Marilyn’s last night, Stewart confirmed that Robert Kennedy was under surveillance by the OCID: “They picked him up, I think, at Santa Monica Airport, followed him, took him up to Marilyn’s, took him
back
to the airport [actually LAX] later that night. He then went and left town. I’ve worked with these people long enough as an officer that their integrity is 100%.”

Mansfield’s press secretary Raymond Strait who listened to eleven hours of Otash’s tapes concurred, “Bobby skipped out of town and said he was never there but everybody knew he was there. You cover your tail as best you can. He took a quick hop up to San Francisco and acted like he was 400 or 500 miles away . . . I know that he went straight to Santa Monica and went up north to the Bay area to his friends.”

In 1970, biographer Patte Barham interviewed Peter Lawford’s mother Lady May Lawford, who relayed, “I already knew that a dark helicopter, like the one the Kennedy boys used, had been parked on the beach. And I knew that neighbors saw Bobby dashing in and out on Saturday.” Lawford’s next-door neighbor Ward Wood, who was married to Lynn Sherman, recalled, “It was Bobby all right. He was in khakis and a white shirt open at the neck.”

Reporter Joe Hyams unsuccessfully tried to obtain the helicopter logs from Conners Helicopter Service in Santa Monica. Then his friend William Woodfield went back and talked to the pilot claiming he was doing a story on celebrities who had recently used their service including Frank Sinatra. The pilot agreed on the basis of positive publicity for their company. Woodfield related to Anthony Summers that one log in particular displayed an entry for August 5.

“The time in the log was sometime after midnight,” Woodfield remembered. “I think between midnight and two in the morning. It showed clearly that a helicopter had picked up Robert Kennedy at the Santa Monica Beach.” James Zonlick worked for Hal Conners’s helicopter service as one of his main pilots.

Zonlick recalled, “Hal had picked Robert Kennedy up at the beach house and left him at Los Angeles International Airport . . . He was a little pleased that we’d handled that V.I.P. sort of person.” Connor’s daughter Patricia said her father Hal arrived later than usual on the night of Marilyn’s death. She relayed, “Next morning, I remember saying, ‘Did you hear Marilyn Monroe died?’ and he didn’t really answer at all.”

Four days after Marilyn’s death, Hyams and Woodfield called the Attorney General’s Office to “put the story to rest.” A Kennedy aide replied, “The Attorney General would appreciate it if you would not do the story.”

Jay Margolis spoke with Daniel Stewart, but on that occasion the former detective was more evasive than his recollections from
Hard Copy
.

Stewart’s perception echoed that of most police officers who, after entering Marilyn’s home on August 5, saw no evidence of foul play and simply assumed she took her own life, either intentionally or accidentally. Murder was neither discussed nor encouraged and, because nobody considered it a crime scene, standard procedures were never conducted.

Former intelligence captain Neil Spotts, who investigated the Monroe case when it was reopened in 1975, told Brown and Barham: “It was such an obvious case. Because she had most certainly killed herself . . . They found Mrs. Murray, learned of the discovery, found the empty pill bottles, and saw her hand grasping the telephone. There was absolutely nothing suspicious at the scene. Marilyn died by her own hand.”

“Nobody cared,” Sgt. Jack Clemmons complained to the same biographers.

“‘Should we call the lab boys?’ a young patrolman asked the ranking lieutenant standing next to him. ‘What for?’ the uniformed officer shot back. ‘It’s just another Hollywood broad who killed herself.’”

Marilyn’s friend reporter George Carpozi, Jr., related to Joanne Green-Levine, “They never conducted a criminal investigation. What they did was they had a psychiatric study of a bunch of doctors who concluded that she killed herself either accidentally or deliberately.”

Odd things began to happen even after Marilyn’s body was removed from her home. Deputy Coroner’s Aide Lionel Grandison wrote in his memoirs that Deputy Cronkright relayed to him how Twentieth Century-Fox “signed a release” of her body but this was strange to Grandison who knew permission was needed first by the Coroner’s Office. Grandison learned how Greenson and Engelberg were “sure it was a common drug overdose” and requested a release of her body to Westwood Mortuary.

“As the Deputy in charge, it was my call,” Grandison wrote. “Although it was common practice to deputize a mortuary to act on behalf of the coroner, the circumstances must completely rule out the need for a complete autopsy with organ examination or the possibility of death at the hands of another . . .”

Grandison therefore decided to phone Marilyn’s residence. Sgt. R.E. Byron received his call and after some questioning, Byron surprisingly stated, “Ms. Monroe’s remains were authorized for release by Peter Lawford, her friend, and Twentieth Century-Fox, her employer . . .” Lionel Grandison subsequently relayed, “Fox Studios and LAPD were already issuing press releases and holding press conferences describing her death as a suicide . . .”

At the time of Marilyn’s death, Robert Dambacher was a deputy coroner. His partner’s name was Cletus Pace. “Cleet and I were dispatched at eight in the morning to go out to Westwood Village Mortuary to pick up her remains,” Dambacher told Jay Margolis. “Westwood had gone to the residence. We brought her body back to the Coroner’s Office in Downtown Los Angeles. In retrospect, she should have come in to the Coroner’s Office right in the beginning, right from the residence to the Coroner’s Office, but she didn’t . . . I think she took a deliberate overdose of drugs. She had enough drugs in her to kill about three of us. You can’t accidentally take that many pills.”

In a photo now licensed by Keystone/Getty Images, a young Bob Dambacher stands in front of the older, bespectacled Cleet Pace as they remove Marilyn Monroe from the Westwood Village Mortuary, a building with window blinds to the left and right. Many people have mistakenly assumed the men were taking the body away from Marilyn’s home, but as Dambacher confirmed, “I never did go to the residence.”

Meanwhile, those reporting on Marilyn’s death back in 1962 quickly grew suspicious of the secrecy surrounding it. The
New York Herald Tribune
’s Joe Hyams later recalled, “I had a source at the telephone company. My source came back and said the Secret Service has already been here and taken our records. Kind of weird . . . That’s the first time in my memory as a reporter that they ever, ever stepped in that fast to start a hush.”

Hyams told Anthony Summers he contacted the telephone company “the morning after her death.” On August 8, 1962, columnist Florabel Muir wrote in the
New York Daily News
how sources asserted, “Strange ‘pressures’ are being put on Los Angeles police investigating the death of Marilyn Monroe.” Muir wrote:

The police have impounded the phone company’s taped record of outgoing calls . . . The purported pressures are mysterious. They apparently are coming from persons who had been closely in touch with Marilyn the last few weeks.

Los Angeles Times
reporter Jack Tobin, in whom Chief Parker’s colleague Captain James Hamilton had often confided, informed Anthony Summers, “Hamilton told me he had the telephone history of the last day or two of Marilyn Monroe’s life. When I expressed interest, he said, ‘I will tell you nothing more.’”

In fact, the 1982 District Attorney’s Report surprisingly deduced, “Confidential LAPD records supplied to our office support the published media reports that toll records were seized by the Los Angeles Police Department. Toll records from General Telephone Company covering the period from June 1, 1962 to August 18, 1962 were secured by the Police Department.”

For their part, the Kennedys also had to exercise damage control over an absolutely hysterical Pat Newcomb. “I believe that the Kennedys were concerned that Pat, being a close friend of Marilyn’s, would become very emotional and might at some point mention something to somebody about the extent of the relationship between the Kennedys and Marilyn,” Newcomb’s fellow press agent Michael Selsman explained. And Joe Hyams noted that, while both Eunice Murray and Pat Newcomb conveniently disappeared for a time following Marilyn’s death, the latter “reappeared very hastily, working for the Kennedys in Washington. It just began to look like a vast cover-up.”

Marilyn’s last professional photographer, George Barris, relayed to Jay Margolis: “I’ll tell you about Pat Newcomb. When Marilyn died, they couldn’t reach Pat. All the press, the newspapers, the radio, television, they couldn’t find her. When my story came out in the
Daily News
, I get a phone call. I was at the
Daily News
office. She called me there. I said, ‘Where are you? Everybody’s looking for you.’”

“I don’t want to talk to anyone,” Newcomb informed Barris, “but I’d like to see you.”

“Where are you?” Barris asked.

“I’m at the Sherry-Netherland,” Newcomb replied, referencing the large hotel situated close to Central Park in New York. “Can you come over?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll give you a name to call me.”

Newcomb had adopted an alias to avoid other press reporters. So, after arriving at the Sherry-Netherland, George Barris asked to see the person who had checked in there under a false name and, on being directed to her room, he immediately enquired what had been going on.

“George, I was invited to stay with Bobby Kennedy,” Newcomb explained before announcing, “I’m going to Paris.”

“I think the Kennedys paid for that trip,” Barris told Margolis. “Where was she going to get the money? She wanted to get away from everything, same as I didn’t want the press bothering me. ‘Do you know anybody in Paris?’ ‘No.’ So, I gave her the name of a friend and I said, ‘Look, if you’re lonely and you want to see Paris, call this person I can trust and he won’t tell the press you’re there or anything. And he’ll take you to dinner and show you Paris.’ Then I gave her the name and phone number of a friend so she could have somebody to meet.

“She thanked me and I left. But she called me one day and said, ‘George, I’m working in Washington. I know you took a lot of these wonderful pictures of Marilyn.’ I knew she wanted some. It was as a memento, something to remember Marilyn. At my own expense, I flew down. I met her at the office near Bobby Kennedy. She had a job working for motion pictures. We chatted a while. She had tears in her eyes. I then flew back to New York. So, she had a collection of photos of Marilyn for her own personal use. She doesn’t want to talk about Marilyn because she was so close to her.”
³¹

BEHIND THE SCENES AT MARILYN MONROE’S FUNERAL

On August 8, 1962, at the Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery, funeral director Allan Abbott helped with Marilyn’s service and acted as one of the pallbearers. “We had provided limousine service for JFK in Los Angeles for the Democratic Convention before he was elected President,” Abbott told Jay Margolis. “The Secret Service came in and searched all of our cars and looked for microphones and bugs. They wanted backgrounds on all the drivers that were being used so they were very careful about it . . .

“I drove the limo on Clark Gable’s service and the service for Ernie Kovacs where I was a hearse driver on that. There’s no question what killed Ernie Kovacs. That’s why they stopped building that rear-engine car because it would go out of control. The interesting part about working that service is that Kim Novak showed up and she was just gorgeous then. Frank Sinatra and Jack Lemmon were two of the six pallbearers carrying the casket. Kim and Ernie made a movie together called
Bell, Book, and Candle
(1958) . . .

“Clarence Pierce, who was the younger of the two brothers, originally put out the call to tell me to get out to the cemetery to help get things all situated for Marilyn’s funeral. He told me Marilyn would come in to the cemetery when she was like twenty years old. She would have a book and a sack lunch. She would sit there and read and eat her lunch. It’s nice that she ended up in a place where she felt so much solace and felt so at ease there because she was always under a lot of pressure to perform and she took everything so seriously . . .

“I actually stood at the door of the chapel and checked everybody’s invitation. Nobody got in there without an invitation, including Frank Sinatra. Joe DiMaggio didn’t like Hollywood people at all. There were four active pallbearers. If you look at the picture in Leigh Wiener’s book, you’ll see four people walking from the chapel behind the hearse. The guy in the front-left is Sydney Guilaroff and he has a handkerchief up to his eyes. He was crying. The guy directly opposite him was Marilyn’s makeup man Whitey Snyder. Behind the two of them are me and my partner Ron Hast. Our company was called Abbott & Hast.”