The Murder of Marilyn Monroe (6 page)

Norman Jefferies took Mrs. Murray away from the guest cottage, into the living room. Detective Sgt. Robert Byron, who wrote the official police report, informed Anthony Summers: “Engelberg told me he’d had a call from the housekeeper who said Marilyn was either dead or unconscious. He came over and found Marilyn dead.”

Matthew Smith interviewed Tom Reddin, who was William Parker’s deputy chief. Smith concluded that Chief Parker most likely protected Robert Kennedy from being implicated in any controversy surrounding Marilyn’s death simply by association. In other words, being present at the scene. Parker’s wife Helen told Anthony Summers that her husband relayed to her days later, “This thing has to be straightened out in more ways than one.”

Parker saw to it that Kennedy was shielded from anything that would damage his career. After all, the LAPD chief had his own agenda. For
The Marilyn Files
documentary, Sgt. Jack Clemmons relayed that Parker “was a very ambitious man and he wanted to be head of the FBI . . . He went to the point of trying to plant false stories about J. Edgar Hoover.” In the same documentary, former Mayor Sam Yorty concurred: “I know that he would have liked to take the head of the FBI and he certainly would’ve been good at that. And of course to get that job you have to have Bobby Kennedy.”

This seemed within reach considering Kennedy and Parker were close friends since first fighting organized crime together in 1956, alongside Captain James Hamilton. Although Parker could have overheard events via his own bug in Marilyn’s home during the time she died, he evidently didn’t know all the details. Summers wrote, “Weeks later, when his wife asked how the Monroe case was going, Parker was uncharacteristically vague. ‘It seemed to be a big question mark,’ Helen Parker recalls. ‘I remember him just doing this’—and she draws a big question mark in the air.”

Marilyn’s first husband Jim Dougherty, himself an LAPD detective, wrote in his second book about her: “Did someone know she was in trouble? Robert Kennedy? Peter Lawford? . . . And were they so terrified about losing their careers, their reputations that they did nothing? If this is true, then they are accountable.”

Biographer Ted Schwarz believed Marilyn committed suicide. However, he told fellow biographers Brown and Barham what he heard from Fred Otash: “Otash thought Bobby and Lawford knew what was happening and let her die . . . Otash viewed the death as a ‘case of negligent homicide’ and confided that ‘the Kennedy brothers had already murdered her emotionally.’”

During the autopsy, Dr. Thomas Noguchi became distracted by the findings of the Suicide Prevention Team. He stated in a February 1976 article for
Oui
magazine: “Our physical examination was coupled with what we call a psychological autopsy. In the case of Miss Monroe, there had been previous suicide attempts. In fact, her whole lifestyle, as we reconstructed it, pointed toward suicide rather than an accident.”

Funeral director Allan Abbott told Jay Margolis, “They had this first-time autopsy called the ‘psychological autopsy’ and they called in all these people that knew her, what kind of mood she was in, and so forth. That became a first but they knew it was such a big case that they had to do something over and above procedure to try and convince people of what happened.

“I’m sure Noguchi was under a lot of pressure to consider ‘suicide’ over ‘murder,’ which would take the lid off the case. They knew who wanted her out of the way. Therefore, what makes the case so important is who wants the case to go away. If she had taken all the drugs orally, she would’ve died well before the time she did . . .

“Noguchi seemed to be very cooperative with everyone involved and seemed to come to different decisions at different times, changing his mind about what he claimed were the circumstances. The best way for them to ever convince him to not talk would be to offer him the job as permanent coroner. He was certainly qualified to do the job, but I think he thought he would be the best coroner they ever had. He tried to stay as neutral as possible when he made statements on Marilyn Monroe, but I think he knew an awful lot more than he talked about.”

As it turned out, Noguchi curiously replaced Theodore Curphey as LA’s chief medical examiner in 1967, an impressive promotion for a man who had been a deputy coroner just five years earlier.

The Suicide Prevention Team investigating Marilyn’s “suicide” was comprised of Robert Elkon Litman, M.D., Norman Donald Tabachnick, M.D., and Norman Louis Farberow, Ph.D. Since Marilyn’s psychoanalyst Dr. Ralph Greenson was at the death scene when the police were called, they each consulted with Greenson over what happened to Marilyn. Spoto interviewed Dr. Litman, who had been a former student of Greenson’s. Litman told Spoto that the Team “didn’t consider the murder hypothesis” yet “Greenson wasn’t at all sure if she committed suicide. Greenson felt very much undecided in his own mind . . . All I heard from Greenson was that she was involved with men at the very highest level of government. The name Kennedy was not mentioned specifically . . .” Oddly, Litman next said to Spoto that, in 1962, at the time of the Marilyn Monroe investigation, “I didn’t see any record of no drugs in the stomach.”

In addition, Litman said Curphey told the Team it was suicide and that their function was to determine Marilyn’s state of mind: did she or did she not intend to kill herself? Curphey instructed them not to determine
how
she died but only to determine whether she accidentally or intentionally killed herself according to her past history of suicide attempts. Anthony Summers noted, “The head of the Team, Dr. Norman Farberow, said neither Kennedy brother was questioned. He added, ‘I’m sure discretion entered into it.’” Farberow attempted to interview Marilyn’s last publicist and long-time Kennedy confidant Pat Newcomb, but “she stone-walled me, was uncommunicative.”

Dr. Farberow told Jay Margolis that Marilyn’s housekeeper Mrs. Murray was also interviewed and that she believed Marilyn accidentally took her life. Farberow relayed, “She said she didn’t realize how many pills she had taken.” Regarding Marilyn, he explained, “The general pattern that we had found common among women of her age was that she was unhappy and it [suicide] was not a very difficult possibility,” yet he conceded, “I have no idea now, at this time, what her intention was in taking so many.”

In his own book,
Coroner to the Stars
, Noguchi wrote that, back in 1962, he had asked Dr. Robert Litman, a member of the Suicide Prevention Team who’d participated in the psychological autopsy, “Any chance of murder?” Litman’s reply: “The door to the bedroom was locked from the inside. They had to break a window to enter the room. And Mrs. Murray was in her room all evening only a little way down the hall from Monroe’s.” Noguchi remained skeptical. Yet, with no further evidence at his disposal, he eventually agreed with Dr. Curphey’s official conclusion: “probable suicide.”

In the early 1980s, Noguchi had more details, including John Miner’s memorandum that emphatically discredited the suicide theory. Noguchi would write that, regarding Marilyn’s alleged ingestion of 64 pills, “An accidental overdose of that magnitude was extremely unlikely. From my forensic experience with suicide victims, I believe that the sheer number of pills Monroe ingested was too many to swallow ‘accidentally.’ Thus, if Miner’s evaluation in 1962 was correct, the only conceivable cause of Monroe’s death was murder.” Thomas Noguchi further noted, “I found absolutely no visual evidence of pills in the stomach or the small intestine. No residue. No refractile crystals. And yet the evidence of the pill bottles showed that Monroe had swallowed forty to fifty Nembutals and a large number of chloral hydrate pills.”
⁷

SCHAEFER AMBULANCE ATTENDANT JAMES EDWIN HALL TOLD THE TRUTH

In his 1983 book, Dr. Thomas Noguchi wrote, “The most prevalent of [the theories] called Monroe’s death murder, done to silence her and prevent her from destroying Robert Kennedy’s political career. I called her death suicide—both twenty years ago and today—but I admit there are many disturbing questions that have remained unanswered . . .”

As Noguchi himself noted, the assorted murder theories had one thing in common: they all asserted that Marilyn had died from a lethal injection, not by oral overdose of sleeping pills. When, in 1982, he was driving near her home and heard a news announcer on the car radio state that ambulance attendant James Hall was claiming to have witnessed her murder at the hands of a doctor who’d injected a mysterious fluid directly into her heart, the pathologist almost expected to hear that he had been the culprit. He subsequently relaxed when learning that, in a
Globe
newspaper report, Hall had described the killer doctor as having had “a mustache, longish sideburns, and a pockmarked face. Not me.”

Based on rigor mortis, Westwood Village Mortuary employee Guy Hockett estimated Marilyn’s death to have occurred somewhere between 9:30 and 11:30 p.m. on August 4, 1962. Sgt. Jack Clemmons and Dr. J. DeWitt Fox agreed the two drugs that killed Marilyn hadn’t been taken orally. As Deputy Medical Examiner Dr. Thomas Noguchi noted in his official autopsy report on Marilyn Monroe, “The stomach is almost completely empty. The contents is [sic] brownish mucoid fluid. The volume is estimated to be no more than 20 cc. No residue of the pills is noted. A smear made from gastric contents and examined under the polarized microscope shows no refractile crystals . . . The contents of the duodenum is [sic] also examined under polarized microscope and shows no refractile crystals . . . The colon shows marked congestion and purplish discoloration.”

In the documentary
Marilyn Monroe: A Case for Murder
, former New York coroner Dr. Sidney Weinberg discussed discrepancies in the autopsy report that bothered him:

Another would be via enema. In October 1985, on ABC’s
Eyewitness News
, Noguchi said the possibility of foul play shouldn’t be ruled out:

Lawford’s close friend Milt Ebbins may have known more about Marilyn’s last night than he ever told when he relayed to Donald Spoto, “When there’s an overdose of drugs, the first thing the doctor would give her was a shot of adrenaline.”

This brings us to the story of Schaefer Ambulance attendant James Edwin Hall who, concerned that his testimony might make him a target, first phoned the LA District Attorney’s office on August 11, 1982, under the name “Rick Stone.” Refusing to divulge his own phone number, Hall/Stone said
he
would be the one to always call the District Attorney’s office. There, he first talked to Deputy District Attorney Ronald “Mike” Carroll: