The Murder of Marilyn Monroe Page 4
“Marilyn had done a turnabout,” noted one of private eye Fred Otash’s employees. “Lawford said Marilyn had called the White House, trying to reach the President, saying, ‘Get your brother away from me—he’s just using me.’ ”
John Miner, the Los Angeles County deputy district attorney who was an investigator into Marilyn’s death, claimed to have heard something similar on one of the free-association tapes she recorded for Dr. Greenson: “I want someone else to tell him it’s over. I tried to get the President to do it, but I couldn’t reach him.”
That afternoon, she felt very upset, used, and betrayed after Bobby had been the one to tell her, “It’s over.” Marilyn shot back, “But you promised to divorce Ethel and marry me.” According to Fred Otash’s recollection of what he heard on the covert recording set up by wiretapper Bernie Spindel, Marilyn said, “I feel passed around—like a piece of meat. You’ve lied to me. Get out of here. I’m tired. Leave me alone.”
Later, when Bobby tried to persuade Marilyn to visit Peter Lawford’s house, she told him over the phone, “Stop bothering me. Stay away from me.”
“She was convinced that not Jack but Bobby would leave Ethel and all their kids,” remarked Michael Selsman from the Arthur P. Jacobs public relations firm when asked by Jay Margolis whether one of the brothers had promised to marry Marilyn. “And they were heavily Catholic. She was under the impression that Bobby would marry her.”
Marilyn phoned hairstylist and trusted friend Sydney Guilaroff twice on that final Saturday. The first call was immediately after Bobby Kennedy’s departure. Guilaroff told Wolfe, “She was in tears, and I had difficulty understanding her.” In his own book, Guilaroff detailed their exchange as follows:
GUILAROFF:
What’s the matter, dear?
MARILYN:
Robert Kennedy was here, threatening me, yelling at me.
GUILAROFF:
Why was Bobby Kennedy at your house?
MARILYN:
I’m having an affair with him.
GUILAROFF:
Marilyn.
MARILYN:
I never told you. I never told anyone. But I had an affair with JFK as well.
GUILAROFF:
Both of them?
MARILYN:
Both … I warned him [Bobby] that I could go public.
Marilyn relayed to Guilaroff that Bobby had then responded, “If you threaten me, Marilyn, there’s more than one way to keep you quiet.”
Asking if Bobby was still there, Marilyn told Guilaroff, “He left—with Peter Lawford.” Guilaroff recommended that Marilyn get some rest and they would discuss this further in a few hours. As Peter Lawford’s friend, producer George “Bullets” Durgom, told Fred Otash in 1985, “Bobby was very worried about Monroe getting spaced out and shooting her mouth off.”
According to Anthony Summers (who didn’t know about that first phone conversation), Marilyn’s last call to Guilaroff was at 9:30 p.m. Guilaroff told Wolfe this final call was between “eight and eight-thirty” and that “she was feeling much better and had met with her psychiatrist, Dr. Greenson.” Guilaroff informed Wolfe that they ended the call with the following exchange:
MARILYN:
You know, Sydney, I know a lot of secrets about the Kennedys.
GUILAROFF:
What kind of secrets?
MARILYN:
Dangerous ones.
After that, Marilyn hung up. According to Morris Engelberg, Joe DiMaggio told his son Joe, Jr., “The Kennedys killed her.” In his book, DiMaggio: Setting the Record Straight, Engelberg recalled Joltin’ Joe telling him he’d given his son a manila envelope containing a statement regarding Marilyn’s death, to be opened after the Yankee Clipper’s own death. “Something the world should know about is in there,” the elder DiMaggio had announced. Engelberg subsequently wrote:
After his father’s funeral, I asked him about that envelope. He had given me an opening by volunteering that he had talked with Marilyn the night she died—he said “murdered.” He claimed he hadn’t opened the envelope because he already knew the message his father had left behind … 6
A SURPRISE EVENING VISIT FROM BOBBY KENNEDY AND GANGSTER SQUAD LAPD PARTNERS ARCHIE CASE AND JAMES AHERN
Norman Jefferies, who witnessed Bobby Kennedy and Peter Lawford earlier in the afternoon, said he watched television with his mother-in-law Eunice Murray later that night. Jefferies was surprised when, “between 9:30 and 10:00 p.m.,” the Attorney General and two men dressed in suits ordered him and Mrs. Murray out of the house. The most important point to note here is how at this time, just as Bobby arrived with the two men, there was absolutely nothing wrong with Marilyn Monroe. The men with Bobby Kennedy were identified as veteran LAPD partners Archie Case and James Ahern, members of Chief William Parker’s notorious Gangster Squad:
Archibald “Archie” Bellamy Case (July 19, 1929–August 26, 1990)
(Photographed by Sgt. Conwell Keeler in 1948)
James John Ahern (June 20, 1914–November 21, 2001)
(From the collection of Anna Mae Benz)
In the documentary Say Goodbye to the President, Mrs. Murray eerily recalled, “It became so sticky that the protectors of Robert Kennedy, you know, had to step in there and protect him. Doesn’t that sound logical?” Other Gangster Squad members included its leader Lieutenant William Burns, Sgt. Conwell Keeler, Sgt. John O’Mara, Officer Donald Ward, Officer Loren K. Waggoner, and Detective J. Jones.
Fred Otash: “I worked undercover in Hollywood. I worked Vice. I first met Peter Lawford when I was on the LAPD in 1949 when I worked the Gangster Squad.”
Former Police Chief Daryl Gates added, “I think Bobby always had an affection for LAPD because of the help we gave him.”
Jefferies corroborated Mrs. Murray’s recollection to Donald Wolfe: “They made it clear we were to be gone … I had no idea what was going on. I mean, this was the Attorney General of the United States. I didn’t know who the two men were with him … We waited at the neighbor’s house for them to leave.” This was at 12304 Fifth Helena Drive, the home of Mrs. Mary W. Goodykoontz Barnes.
What’s more, within days of Marilyn’s death, it was Mrs. Barnes who spoke to Sgt. Jack Clemmons about her first sighting of Bobby Kennedy with Case or Ahern in the afternoon. She also mentioned a second sighting of Kennedy in the evening but this time with both Archie Case and James Ahern. After interviewing Sgt. Clemmons in 1993 and 1997, Donald Wolfe wrote, “Three men [Kennedy with Case and Ahern] walked down Fifth Helena Drive. One [Case or Ahern] was carrying a small black satchel similar to a medical bag.”
Mary W. Goodykoontz Barnes relayed to Sgt. Jack Clemmons, “I’ve seen Bobby Kennedy go into that house a dozen times. That definitely was him. I don’t know who the other two men were.” This was the same house Mrs. Murray and her son-in-law Norman Jefferies stayed in while they waited for Kennedy, Case, and Ahern to leave.
A confidential source revealed to Jay Margolis, “Two of my brothers were FBI agents … I had heard that my brother John Anderson had seen Robert Kennedy and two men enter Marilyn Monroe’s home. Hours later it was reported that Marilyn Monroe had died.”
Anthony Summers asserted that, after 9:30 p.m., Marilyn happily chatted with her friend and sometimes lover José Bolaños on the private line in her main bedroom. She may well have been reading from her red diary when, according to Bolaños, Marilyn told him “something that will one day shock the whole world.”
MARILYN MONROE’S NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBORS TO THE EAST AT 12304 FIFTH HELENA DRIVE:
Mary W. Goodykoontz Barnes (October 25, 1904–March 12, 1964)
(University of Iowa yearbook dated 1927)
UCLA Professor Ralph Mosser Barnes (October 17, 1900–November 5, 1984)
(Photographed on June 13, 1949)
Then there was a crash. Informing Bolaños she would be right back, Marilyn went to investigate a noise she heard coming from the guest cottage. Summers: “Marilyn ended the conversation by simply la
ying down the phone—she did not hang up while he was on the line.” After arriving at the guest cottage, she found Bobby Kennedy with longtime personal LAPD bodyguards Archie Case and James Ahern rifling through one of her two filing cabinets in the guest cottage that they’d forcibly opened in search of the hallowed red diary. This was now in her main bedroom, but Marilyn’s privacy had been violated and she therefore screamed at the trio of would-be thieves to get out of her house.
Later, frightened for his life when in possession of the secret audiotapes capturing these events, Fred Otash provided biographer Ted Schwarz with a sanitized transcript that convinced Schwarz Marilyn committed suicide. Nevertheless, Jayne Mansfield’s press secretary, Raymond Strait, was certain that the eleven hours of tapes he actually listened to prove that Marilyn Monroe was murdered.
“[Pathologist Thomas] Noguchi never believed it was suicide, but they shut him up real quick,” Strait told Jay Margolis. “I knew Tom Noguchi. He said he never believed for a minute that she committed suicide. He wanted to blow the whole thing on Marilyn Monroe but [his superiors] weren’t having it … I had all those tapes in my garage in a sealed-up box for ten years … I never opened them. Fred called me one night in Palm Springs and he says, ‘You still have that box?’ ‘Well, of course!’ ‘You bring it down to the Springs. I want to show you something.’ ”
Interviewed by Peter Harry Brown and Patte Barham, Strait said, “Fred was afraid of the tapes. And he was so afraid that he planned to release a far less graphic version in his upcoming autobiography.” Strait also asserted that Marilyn had been murdered: “It was obvious that she was subdued—probably with a pillow—while the drugs were administered.”
In his personal notes, Fred Otash himself wrote, “I listened to Marilyn Monroe die,” while adding that he taped an angry confrontation between Marilyn and Bobby Kennedy in the hours before her death. “She said she was passed around like a piece of meat,” Otash recalled. “It was a violent argument about their relationship and the commitment and promises he made to her. She was really screaming and they were trying to quiet her down. She’s in the [guest] bedroom and Bobby gets the pillow and he muffles her on the bed to keep the neighbors from hearing. She finally quieted down and then he was looking to get out of there.”
Therefore, after Marilyn entered the guest cottage to see what was going on, Case and Ahern threw her on the bed. Then, per wiretapper Bernie Spindel and Fred Otash, Robert Kennedy covered her face with a pillow to keep her from screaming before ordering Archie Case and James Ahern to give Marilyn Monroe injections of Nembutal in an attempt to relax her hysterical state. Deputy Coroner’s Aide Lionel Grandison wrote in his memoirs what he learned from a wiretap conversation that night: Bobby Kennedy had instructed Archie Case and James Ahern to “give her something to calm her down.”
In 1986, Fred Otash had allowed Raymond Strait to hear eleven hours of tapes that were rolling before, during, and after Marilyn Monroe’s murder. On the January 7, 1993, episode of Joan Rivers’s Fox Network talk show, Raymond Strait informed the host and her viewers, “It was horrible. You could hear the two men [Case and Ahern] talking to each other, saying, ‘Give her another one. Don’t give it to her too quickly,’ and awful smothering sounds.” A confidential source states, regarding the Nembutal injections, “I don’t know if she was injected merely to subdue her or if it was meant to kill her.”
Lionel Grandison wrote in his memoirs, “Miner and Noguchi were looking at some bruises on her leg. I could clearly see a bruise just below the knee. Dr. Noguchi was explaining that this was common because many people fall or the body is bruised when being handled after death.”
Actually, dead bodies don’t bruise. Grandison continued, “My first thought was needle mark, but obviously Dr. Noguchi didn’t concur … When the final physical diagram and autopsy report were completed, no mention of these details, or the bruise marks on her body, were reported.”
Corroborating Grandison’s claims, a confidential source told Jay Margolis about a bizarre turn of events just days after Marilyn died: “My friend Marty George was a Los Angeles photographer. He had a job where, once a year, he would go down to the Coroner’s Office and take pictures of everybody. I guess they had some sort of shindig where they had to have all their pictures taken for this. And Marty was the kind of guy who was very innocuous. If he was the only person in the room, you could sometimes ignore him and miss him. He really blended in better than anyone I’ve ever known.
“He was in the file room taking pictures of somebody and that somebody got called out of the room. So, Marty George said, ‘Okay, fine.’ He was a big fan of Marilyn’s and he decided to see if he could find the coroner’s report. So, he went over to the files and he opened them up because they were papers in this day. And there it was but it was sealed. He decided that sealed coroner’s reports are not legal so he just broke the seal and opened it and read it. He did not take a picture of it because he was so stunned. So, he called me up when he got home and he said, ‘What does this mean? No contents in the stomach.’ I told him, ‘It means she could not have died by barbiturates from the mouth.’
“In the coroner’s report, he saw there were needle marks behind her knees, the jugular vein in her neck, and bruises on her arms and her back. He said as far as he was concerned, that doesn’t seem very much like suicide. I said, ‘It doesn’t to me either, and certainly not by barbiturate overdose by mouth with pills, because that leaves some residue in the stomach.’ There was nothing because she hadn’t eaten or consumed anything for hours before she died. Marty George also said there is an actual reel somewhere unlike coroner’s reports, and that there’s apparently been cover-up ones made since. I wish he would’ve taken a picture of it but he didn’t think to do that because he was in shock. He very carefully put it back together and put the seal back and put it in the file, but it exists. It’s somewhere.”
In October 1997, Schaefer Ambulance attendant James Hall relayed to biographer Michelle Morgan, “On the autopsy report, Noguchi wrote, ‘No needle mark.’ A question that has never come up is, did Dr. Noguchi always write, ‘No needle mark’ on all of the previous autopsy reports or was this a ‘special’ case?”
As it turned out, the Nembutal injections weren’t enough to subdue Marilyn. So, using one of the enema bags already in the guest cottage bathroom, the two LAPD Gangster Squad partners held her down, stripped her clothes off, and gave her an enema filled with broken-down pills containing anywhere from thirteen to nineteen Nembutals and seventeen chloral hydrates. Rendering her unconscious, this criminal act against Marilyn’s will accounted for the purplish discoloration of her colon as noted in the official autopsy report. In fact, Lawford’s third wife Deborah Gould told Anthony Summers how Lawford stated, “Marilyn took her last big enema.” By merely saying the word enema to his third wife regarding Marilyn Monroe’s death, Lawford is clearly saying he knew more than he had ever told. Donald Spoto consulted Arnold Abrams, M.D., and asked him about Marilyn Monroe’s death. Abrams stated: “The odds that she took pills and died from them are astronomically unlikely … I have never seen anything like this in an autopsy. There was something crazy going on in this woman’s colon.”
When Sgt. Jack Clemmons, the first policeman officially at the scene, arrived at 4:45 a.m. on August 5, 1962, he saw housekeeper Mrs. Eunice Murray washing bed linens in the garage. Clemmons saw this because, as at least one surviving photo demonstrates, Mrs. Murray had the garage open! Consequently the washer/dryer is not visible in that picture (see page 31).
Lynda Nuñez, the daughter of Dr. Gilbert and Betty Nuñez, who became the next owners of the house after MM’s death, confirms the existence of the washer/dryer. Jay Margolis asked Lynda Nuñez, “Where was the washer/dryer located in Marilyn Monroe’s house when your family first moved in?” Ms. Nuñez replied, “In the garage on the right wall.” Ms. Nuñez added, “My dad bid 10% above the highest bidder and bought the house for $100,000.00. He had seen a picture of the house in
a magazine before Marilyn died and told my mom that if he ever had a chance to buy the house, he would because it was an authentic, typical Mexican hacienda…. My dad built a bar in the guest house after we moved in.” Funeral director Allan Abbott said to Jay Margolis, “The pathologist never signs the death certificate. He comes out of the lab, and he goes up to the front desk where the deputies work and I knew all of them very well. He tells them the cause of death. And then they fill out the death certificate and put on the cause of death. There was a black guy working at the Coroner’s Office named Lionel Grandison. They went to him and said, ‘You’ve got to sign Marilyn Monroe’s death certificate’ and the Coroner had put on there ‘suicide.’ Grandison said, ‘I read Dr. Noguchi’s report about the inflammation of the colon. I don’t think we really know what she died of. I’m not going to sign it as “suicide.” ’ They threatened him with his job. He still wouldn’t sign it ‘suicide.’ So they said, ‘Okay, how about “probable suicide?” ’ and he said, ‘Okay, I’ll put that on it.’ ”
Negating oral ingestion of the pills, a drug-laced enema is the only way that such high levels of chloral hydrate could have been detected in her blood along with the high levels of Nembutal. Incidentally, chloral hydrate injections are not medically practiced. Per the 1982 District Attorney’s Report, “The results of the blood and liver toxicological examination show that there were 8 mg. percent chloral hydrate [seventeen 500-mg pills] and 4.5 mg. percent of barbiturates in the blood [forty–fifty 100-mg Nembutals] and 13.0 mg. percent pentobarbital in the liver.”