The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (67 page)

As far as anyone knows for certain, the only person on the scene with Marilyn at this point was Mrs Murray. Of the many stories she has told of the fatal night, this is essentially the original—the one repeated in the first police reports:

At around eight p.m., Marilyn says good night and, taking one of her two phones with its long cord in with her, closes her bedroom door.

Mrs Murray tidies up about the house and goes to her own room. At about three-thirty a.m., for some reason—perhaps alerted by a “sixth sense,” as Dr Greenson somewhat mystically referred to it—Mrs Murray arises and notices that Marilyn’s light is still on and that the phone cord is still under her door. The phone is normally disconnected at night. Mrs Murray is too timid to knock and risk awakening Marilyn, but alarmed enough to call Dr Greenson. He tells her to knock on the locked door, and she does. There is no response. He tells her he is on the way and instructs her to call Dr Hyman Engleberg, Marilyn’s personal physician. As she awaits the doctors’ arrival, Mrs Murray goes to the front of the house and uses a fireplace poker to pull back the curtains and peek in. She sees Marilyn lying nude on the bed. At about three thirty-five a.m., Greenson—who lives nearby—arrives, breaks the bedroom window, and enters the room. Marilyn is lying face down with the phone clutched “fiercely” in her right hand. Greenson realizes immediately that she is dead. Dr Engleberg arrives about five minutes later. The police are finally called at four twenty-five a.m.

On the face of it, the story almost makes sense, though it certainly has its queer touches. For one, it has Mrs Murray awakening a psychiatrist in the middle of the night before she makes any effort on her own to find out if anything is really wrong. Odder still, it shows us two doctors—who knew their obligations in what was clearly a coroner’s case—waiting, inexplicably, almost an hour to report the death of their most famous patient. There are other serious discrepancies that are not so immediately apparent. One is that Mrs Murray could not, as she claimed, have first been alarmed by the light under Marilyn’s bedroom door. The house had newly installed white wool carpeting that brushed firmly enough against the bottom of the door to make it difficult to close. No light showed through.

This early account of Marilyn’s death is not, as it may seem, stranger than fiction. It
is
fiction.

The first cop on the scene had immediate misgivings about the story he was told. The belated call to the police had been placed by Dr Engleberg. It had been taken by the Watch Commander on the West Los Angeles desk, a Sergeant named Jack Clemmons. Given that the death of Marilyn Monroe had been reported, Clemmons was curious enough to make the run to the scene himself. Clemmons was a tough-minded and experienced cop. Ironically, he was also a friend of Marilyn’s ex-husband Jim Dougherty, who became a policeman years after his divorce from his famous first wife.

The doctors showed Clemmons a Nembutal bottle among the fifteen bottles of medication cluttering Marilyn’s bedside table. The bottle was empty and had its top in place. Its label came from the San Vicente Pharmacy in Brentwood, and indicated a prescription from Dr Engleberg, filled on Friday, 3 August. Engleberg told Clemmons the bottle had contained fifty capsules when full. No suicide note was in evidence.

Perhaps more significantly, no water glass was in evidence either, and the water in the adjoining bathroom was turned off because of work on the plumbing system. People who knew Marilyn well have said she could not bear to swallow even one pill without water. Swallowing fifty pills without water was out of the question. It has been noted that photographs of the room show what appears to be a Mexican-style ceramic jug on the floor that could have held water. Apparently no one thought to see if it did, or ask if it was used for that purpose.

Clemmons had an “uneasy feeling” about the behavior of the doctors and of Mrs Murray. There was something about the death scene itself he couldn’t buy. It was too pretty, too arranged, to jibe with the death throes by overdose in his experience: “It looked like the whole thing had been staged.” Marilyn’s body was in rigor mortis. By Clemmons’s experienced guess, she had not died during the early hours of that morning, but may have been dead as long as eight hours. He did not like the fact that Mrs Murray was busying herself by doing laundry and packing boxes when he arrived, or that her son-in-law had already been called to repair the broken bedroom window. Most of all, he did not like the time sequences he was given.

Though his concerns did not find their way into the final version of his written report, Clemmons has insisted that Mrs Murray told him she first became alarmed about Marilyn “immediately after midnight”. He says the two doctors were present when she made this statement, and
did not disagree
. Clemmons’s impression was that Drs Greenson and Engleberg had been on the scene themselves since around midnight, and he remembers questioning the doctors “very pointedly” about why they had waited not one hour but four to call the police. He got no satisfactory reply. When Sergeant Clemmons went off duty that Sunday morning and turned the case over to other officers, he was highly suspicious. By the time the official suicide verdict was returned, he was convinced that Marilyn Monroe had been murdered. He remains adamantly convinced today, though his refusal to accept the official line in the case cost him his job with the Los Angeles police.

Twenty-three years after the fact, Mrs Murray told the BBC interviewer that it had indeed been “around midnight” when she first became concerned about Marilyn. In this version of her story, she says she did wait until three-thirty a.m., to call Dr Greenson. Why did she wait so long? She can’t remember.

In fact there were hours of frantic activity—beginning well before midnight—in Marilyn’s house that night that Mrs Murray can’t remember. It was about eleven p.m.—perhaps even slightly earlier—when Marilyn’s press agent Arthur Jacobs’s enjoyment of a Henry Mancini concert was interrupted by an urgent message. Jacobs’s widow Natalie, who accompanied him to the Hollywood Bowl that night, remembers: “About three-quarters of the way through the concert someone came to our box and he said, ‘Arthur, come quickly . . . Marilyn is dead, or she’s on the point of death.’ ” Mrs Jacobs believes the message came from Pat Newcomb, an employee in her husband’s firm. She says Jacobs dropped her off at their home, and she saw nothing of him for two days thereafter. In her phrase, “he had to fudge the Press”.

Presumably one of the things Jacobs had to fudge was the possibility that Marilyn did not die at home after all. In the early hours of the morning she left the premises for an ambulance ride. The ambulance story first surfaced during a District Attorney’s review of the case in 1982, and has since been confirmed by writers and reporters. The ambulance driver has been identified as one Ken Hunter, and the attendant as Murray Liebowitz. The ambulance belonged to Schaefer Ambulance, the largest private company of its kind in LA at the time. Hunter and Liebowitz, who has since changed his name, have confirmed the call at Marilyn’s house, but have been mysteriously reluctant to talk about it. The owner of Schaefer Ambulance, Walter Schaefer, has not. Schaefer insisted Marilyn was alive, but in a coma—apparently suffering from a drug overdose—when she was picked up and taken to Santa Monica Hospital. The time has been reported as two a.m. Schaefer believes Marilyn died at the hospital. An obvious problem with this opinion is that, if the time report is correct, Marilyn was found in rigor mortis just two and one half hours later. Rigor mortis takes from four to six hours to set in.

Records of the ambulance company are only kept for five years, and have been destroyed. Hospital records for the period are likewise not available, and no one has been located who worked at the hospital in 1962 and who remembers treating Marilyn Monroe that night. It is of course possible that she was treated but, lacking makeup, not recognized, and possible that she died en route to the hospital. The autopsy records no evidence of medical attempts to resuscitate her from an overdose. Still, it seems incredible that Schaefer and his two employees could be mistaken about so memorable an emergency call. And the case for an attempt to save a dying Marilyn was reinforced by Mrs Murray, whose on-again, off-again memory recollected during a 1985 version of her story of a late night visit by an unidentified doctor while Marilyn was still alive.

What was happening at Marilyn’s house between the time someone—Pat Newcomb?—sent Arthur Jacobs the message that Marilyn was dead or dying around eleven p.m. and someone called for an ambulance, perhaps about two a.m.? And if she did ride to the hospital, who took her body home? It wasn’t Schaefer: Marilyn’s trip in the ambulance was one-way. It would have been no mean feat to make a corpse vanish from an emergency room. Standard procedure in such a case would be for the Medical Examiner to be called and to officially release the body only after an autopsy. A clever manipulation—or the wave of some powerful hands—would have been required to bypass the system.

With each new revelation in the case, the scene at Marilyn’s house grows more crowded. One of her lawyers, Milton “Mickey” Rudin, reportedly appears at around four a.m., calling Peter Lawford’s agent on the phone and telling him Marilyn is dead.

Peter Lawford himself appears. According to his ex-wife Deborah Gould, he shows up to purge the house of any evidence of contact with the Kennedys. He even finds and destroys, in the story as Gould reports it, a suicide note. Several of Lawford’s later accounts of the evening feature a distress call from a slurry-voiced Marilyn telling him to “say goodbye to Jack, and say goodbye to yourself, because you’re a nice guy”. Two of his dinner guests have confirmed that there was some discussion about whether Lawford should go to Marilyn’s and check on her. Judging by the statements of the guests, his trip to the house happened sometime after eleven p.m.

Private detectives and their operatives troop in and out. Fred Otash recalls that Lawford—unaware that he is hiring one of the men who have been bugging his home—bursts into his office around three a.m., “completely disoriented and in a state of shock . . . saying that Marilyn Monroe was dead, that Bobby Kennedy was there, and that he was spirited out of town by some airplane, that they [Marilyn and Robert Kennedy] had got in a big fight that evening, that he’d like to have . . . someone go out to the house and pick up any and all information . . . regarding any involvement between Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys.”

And all of the actors on this crowded stage play out their parts for at least five hours—and probably more—before anyone feels safe enough to call the police and tell them Marilyn Monroe is dead. No wonder Marilyn’s body was already in rigor mortis—indicating she had died at least four to six hours earlier—when Sergeant Clemmons arrived and found only the two doctors and Mrs Murray on the scene.

Where is the leading man? There is no proof that Robert Kennedy was back at Marilyn’s house the night she died, but there are several reports that place him at Peter Lawford’s house, only minutes away. Police sources have said Kennedy was seen at the Beverly Hilton during the afternoon, was at Lawford’s house that night, and broke a dinner date with Marilyn. An enterprising photographer named Billy Woodfield ran down a lead to the owner of an air charter company often used by Lawford and his guests. Woodfield says the charter man showed him logs indicating that Kennedy had been picked up by helicopter at Lawford’s house around two a.m. Sunday morning, and flown to Los Angeles International. Neighbors were awakened by the sound of the helicopter. Another report, from Deborah Gould, confirms Woodfield’s story. She says Lawford told her Kennedy left by helicopter during the night, going back to his accommodations near San Francisco. According to Gould, the stall in calling the police served two purposes: allowing time for incriminating evidence of the affair to be removed, and for Kennedy to make his escape from the area.

If such an elaborate—and swiftly arranged—cover-up seems unlikely, consider that what we have seen thus far are only the more visible suggestions of a remarkably thorough scheme of damage control that seems to have reached federal law enforcement agencies, the phone company, the coroner’s office, and the Los Angeles Police Department.

Not long after daybreak on Sunday, two men “with Eastern accents”, identified by two knowledgeable sources as FBI agents, appeared at the offices of General Telephone and purged Marilyn’s phone records for the four days she lived in August. The agents obviously acted with the quickly secured cooperation of high-ranking phone company officials. Like many of the actions in the Monroe cover-up, the seizure of the records was illegal. They have never been recovered, and the FBI has denied any involvement. A Santa Monica newspaper publisher who was a close friend of a telephone company division manager has said he was told the missing records showed “a call to Washington on the night Monroe died.” A police leak during the highly secret Monroe investigation indicated that a wadded piece of paper with a White House telephone number had been found among the sheets on Marilyn’s bed.

At nine-thirty a.m. on Sunday morning, Marilyn’s body went under the knife of the world’s most famous coroner, Dr Thomas Noguchi. The results of the autopsy are as controversial as anything in the controversial case. Noguchi, then working as a medical examiner under Chief Medical Examiner of Los Angeles Dr Theodore Curphey, noted the somewhat unusual presence of the DA’s liaison to the coroner’s office, Deputy District Attorney John Miner, at the autopsy. Though Dr Englebert had reportedly given Marilyn an injection as recently as Friday, and despite the alleged injection by Robert Kennedy’s “doctor” companion on Saturday afternoon, Noguchi—after “searching painstakingly”—“found no needle marks”. Miner has confirmed the thoroughness of the search. A fresh bruise was found on the lower left back and hip, which Noguchi notes “might have indicated violence”.