The Murder of Marilyn Monroe Page 7

  Every time he pushed, a black line of bile from the stomach rose up the clear tube. I thought, “I’m going to eat it.” When he would push, I would stick the end of my tongue over the opening of the tube to stop the stuff from going into my mouth. When he would let up, I would blow again.

  “Hey, doc,” I finally said, “you blow and I’ll push.” I know some doctors aren’t used to emergencies but this guy was all thumbs. That’s when he muttered, “I’ve got to make a show of this.” I never forgot that remark. “Christ, let’s move,” I said. “You can work on her in the back of the ambulance.” Time was running out and I wanted to save her.

  The doctor opened his bag and took out a hypodermic syringe with a heart needle already on it. That needle looked about a foot long. He drew up a liquid from a bottle with a rubber seal and filled the syringe. He mumbled under his breath like he was reading from a medical book, “Insert between the ‘blank’ and ‘blank’ rib.” I don’t remember the numbers. He felt his way down her ribs like an amateur. Then he thrust the needle into her chest. But it didn’t go in right. It hung up on the bone, on one of her ribs.

  Instead of trying again, he just leaned into it, his cheeks quivered with the effort. He pushed hard and he drove it all the way through the rib, making a loud snap as the bone broke. I know he scarred that rib bone. I had watched a lot of medical procedures and this guy was downright brutal.

  As for Peter Lawford and Sgt. Marvin Iannone, James Hall relayed to James Spada, “They walked in at the time he [Ralph Greenson] was injecting her.” In 1992, to Beverly Hills Detective Lynn Franklin, Hall identified the police officer with Lawford as Sgt. Marvin Iannone, and in 1993, Hall identified him to Donald Wolfe. Hall continued to Michelle Morgan:

  At that time, two men who I assumed were Los Angeles Police officers came in. One wore a Los Angeles Police blue suit and the other wore a jumpsuit. I have identified the man in the jumpsuit from a photo lineup as Peter Lawford who was married to Pat. Pat Lawford was Bobby Kennedy’s sister. I have also identified the blue suit. I will only say at this time he is presently the Chief of Police of a major affluent California city [Sgt. Marvin D. Iannone of Beverly Hills].

  Dr. Greenson finally removed the needle and put a stethoscope to her heart. “She’s dead,” he said. “I’m pronouncing her dead.” He stood up. It took me a minute to be sure I had heard him right. We could have saved her. I felt sick.

  “You can go now,” he said. It was obvious we were in the way. I have identified that doctor as Ralph Greenson, Marilyn’s psychiatrist. Mrs. Murray was not present in the guest house area. She must have been in the other part of the home.

  Outside the house, also pulled down Fifth Helena, was the first call car from the mortuary. “What the hell are they doing here already?” I asked Liebowitz. You don’t send for a first call car until you have a dead body. Marilyn had been pronounced dead only minutes before.

  In the 1982 Globe article, James Hall described Dr. Greenson injecting his patient with a “brownish fluid” out of a pharmaceutical bottle. Said fluid therefore wasn’t colorless adrenaline, which only becomes pale red and, eventually, brown on exposure to air and light. Instead, the brown liquid James Hall saw had to be Nembutal, which was the only other drug found in Marilyn’s body besides chloral hydrate. This does not mean, however, that the high level of Nembutal came from Greenson’s shot, but from the afternoon Nembutal injection, more evening Nembutal injections, and the drug-laced enema containing both chloral hydrate and Nembutal.

  There are, indeed, two types of Nembutal: a clear, thin liquid and a dark brown, syrupy elixir. Furthermore, Nembutal must be diluted with water before being administered, yet James Hall was certain that Dr. Greenson didn’t dilute the brown solution he injected into Marilyn’s heart. Accordingly, it traveled up the brain stem and paralyzed her respiratory center. The doctor would surely have been aware of this, and so, just as surely, he was guilty of murder.

  In his May 1986 interview with Hustler magazine, Hall remarked that Dr. Thomas Noguchi possibly didn’t notice the puncture caused by the needle because the hole was in the crease of one of Marilyn’s breasts.

  “He said he looked over the whole body with a magnifying glass and didn’t find any needle marks, including under the tongue,” Hall noted. “But that sounds like a junkie shooting up, not like a reason to look at her heart. You wouldn’t put a needle into your own heart, would you?”

  Meanwhile, Dr. Thomas Noguchi told biographers Brown and Barham about bruises not documented in the official autopsy report: “I did find evidence which indicated violence. There were bruises on her lower back area—a very fresh bruise—and bruises on the arms.”

  In 1982, investigator Al Tomich from the District Attorney’s Office asked Dr. Hyman Engelberg, “Would you have noticed any fresh needle marks on her at that time if there were any in the chest area?”

  “I would have noticed any gross things,” came the reply. “I didn’t notice any such thing.”

  Donald Wolfe confirmed that Marilyn’s body displayed indicators of cyanosis, consistent with a needle injection. An actual witness to the cyanosis was Life magazine photojournalist Leigh Wiener, who said he saw strange blue markings all over her when he photographed Marilyn Monroe hours after her death. “They’ll look like a frozen cube of ice,” Leigh Wiener explained in a 1987 documentary. “You’ll see little streaks of blue running through the body … That’s how Monroe looked to me when I saw her.”

  Wiener may have unwittingly held the key to the more than fifty-year-old mystery. This was thanks to his bribing county morgue staff with a bottle of whiskey shortly before midnight on August 5 and capturing frontal images of Marilyn just hours after her death that might reveal a needle mark in the chest area.

  “I took a picture of her toe with a tag on it, covered by a sheet,” Wiener recalled in the same documentary. “Then they took the sheet off and I took more pictures but it was at eye-level. I couldn’t see the face. The pictures were obviously never used. I have them and I’ve been interrogated by the District Attorney in Los Angeles about them.”

  Wiener’s son Devik told Jay Margolis, “In 1982, a couple of deputy D.A.s knocked on the door during one of the numerous times they reopened the investigation into her death. They wanted to see any photographs and Dad basically said, ‘Look, they were black-and-white images, so you could tell nothing about flesh-tones from them. Good day. Good bye.’ They were interested in color images. Dad said she was so disfigured that it would have done a disservice to her and a service to no one. He basically died with the mystery of where those images were.

  “My dad claimed to have put those negatives in some safety-deposit box. I truly think he might have destroyed the negatives. From the bungalow to the mortuary, there were a total of a hundred and thirty-three images combined. And at the funeral he shot about a hundred and eighty images. Dad only pressed five hundred copies of the Marilyn: A Hollywood Farewell book. With all the celebrities he photographed, he left behind such an incredible body of work. It’s almost half-a-million images.”

  Devik Wiener told Margolis that his father never believed Marilyn Monroe committed suicide: “There was so much surrounding her death with the Kennedys, the odds of her overdosing on her own—and I think he would say the same thing—were very slim.”

  Marilyn’s friend, Hollywood reporter James Bacon, remembered, “I stayed there long enough to get a good view of the body before the real coroner’s staff arrived—then I made a quick exit … She was lying facedown on the bed, face slightly turned to the left on a pillow. Her legs were straight … I noticed that her fingernails were dingy and unkempt.” The fact is, her nails had changed color because of the cyanosis.

  In the documentary Marilyn Monroe: A Case for Murder, John Miner recalled Thomas Noguchi’s autopsy: “Her body was examined minutely by both of us under magnification to see if we could find any needle mark of any kind anywhere on her body. And her body was observed and there were no needle marks.”


  Following actor John Belushi’s drug-related death, Noguchi conceded in his book that he almost missed a needle mark on Belushi’s left arm. “The very fact that the fresh punctures had been so difficult to discover worried me,” the pathologist wrote. “Apparently a tiny medically clean needle had been used, and the injection had been made right into the vein, so that only drops of blood revealed them.”

  In Marilyn’s case, according to pathologist J. DeWitt Fox, “The blue postmortem lividity occurred over the front part of the body. This might have masked or covered up any injection which she might have had in her chest.” In Fox’s expert opinion, had Marilyn been moved, in this case facedown on the bed, then “the bruise-like discolorations of post-mortem lividity” would conceal an injection mark on her chest caused by the needle Hall saw Greenson putting into her heart.

  To quote the 1982 District Attorney’s Report on the re-investigation of Marilyn Monroe’s death, “Lividity, as described to our investigators, is a process by which blood drains to the lowest point in a deceased person after death due to the joint effect of the pull of gravity and the cessation of the blood pumping mechanism of the body … In addition to the rigor mortis observed in Miss Monroe’s body, Noguchi and others observed a pattern of lividity on her face and chest.”

  Sgt. Jack Clemmons, the first policeman officially at the scene, agreed with Dr. Fox’s explanation of postmortem lividity and believed James Hall’s account. “It was obvious to me, apparent to me, I should say, that Marilyn had been placed in that position,” Clemmons remarked. “I felt at the time that the position of the body had to do with postmortem lividity. When a person dies, their heart stops beating; the gravity will pull the blood to the lowest part of the body. Marilyn being facedown, all the blood came forward. As a matter of fact, the coroner’s report particularly noted lividity, reddishness around the face and the chest area. I felt at the time that she was placed in that position to disguise needle marks.”

  For his part, John Miner conceded to biographers Brown and Barham, “A cursory examination of Monroe’s kidneys found them to be clear of drugs. This should have indicated that the stomach may have been bypassed. And the only way that could have happened was by injection.”

  The 1982 District Attorney’s Report attempted to discredit James Hall’s testimony by stating: “According to Hall, the doctor ultimately plunged a giant syringe filled with a brownish fluid into her heart, after which she quickly died while on her back on the floor … Minor streaks of lividity were … found on her back. These minor traces disappeared upon touch. This finding is consistent with the normal practice of transporting bodies from the death scene to the mortuary or Coroner’s Office … If the mysterious ‘doctor’ had given Miss Monroe a fatal shot of pentobarbital, leading to her rapid death as described by Hall, the level in her liver would not have been as high as it in fact was because her body would not have had time to metabolize the ‘hot shot.’ ”

  Marilyn Monroe died shortly before midnight and Thomas Noguchi began the autopsy after 9:00 a.m., leaving plenty of time for postmortem lividity to hide the needle mark. Still, this doesn’t mean Noguchi discovered no needle marks. Testimonies for this book by the likes of Raymond Strait, Allan Abbott, and a confidential source lead to the conclusion that Noguchi inexplicably disregarded his own findings when he wrote the statement: “No needle mark.” An admirer of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, as expressed in his 1983 book and in magazine articles, Noguchi did initially note needle marks on other areas of Marilyn Monroe’s body before omitting this one on the official autopsy report. Could it be because he knew a needle mark in the heart might implicate Kennedy? In fact, Anthony Summers reported that Noguchi “said he could not be positive the actress was not murdered by injection.”

  Marilyn died on her back. Regarding the drugs found in her body, the District Attorney’s Report did not consider the possibility that the high Nembutal concentration in the liver was due to several factors: some oral intake throughout the day, the pentobarbital shot in the afternoon, evening pentobarbital injections, and an enema containing thirteen to nineteen Nembutals (as well as seventeen chloral hydrates). This combination would in a matter of hours travel from the blood to the liver to detoxify the substance. Over this period of time, the liver was allowed to reach that very high Nembutal concentration. It could only reach higher levels while she was still alive. John Miner explained the 13 mg. percent of Nembutal in the liver is a “high concentration” and said, “It indicates that however the drugs were administered, hours and not minutes were involved before she died.”

  Suicide Team member Dr. Robert Litman agreed and explained, “High content in the liver just means she died slowly, the chance to be absorbed.” In contrast to the 13 mg. percent of Nembutal, the chloral hydrate in the liver was not tested since it would reveal a much smaller amount, incongruent with a suicide.

  John Miner told Donald Spoto, “Dr. Curphey in one of his more exuberant moments said, ‘Oh, she gobbled 40 pills all at one time.’ That’s not possible … Why in the hell under these circumstances would the housekeeper be doing laundry at midnight makes zero sense unless the bed clothing had become soiled as a result of the administration of these drugs? … Contact with a noxious substance such as the barbiturates, which is an organic acid would account for the discoloration in the large intestine we saw at the autopsy.”

  Indeed, it took several hours for the liver to absorb a lethal amount of pentobarbital whereas Dr. Greenson’s undiluted Nembutal shot to the heart would have killed Marilyn Monroe regardless of the amount injected. “That’s murder,” Elias Amador, M.D., told Jay Margolis regarding the undiluted heart injection. “That is point-blank murder. That’s never done for any reason except to kill.”

  Sgt. Clemmons said that, when he arrived on the scene at 4:45 a.m. and saw Marilyn’s lifeless body in the master bedroom (to where it had been moved following the departure of ambulance attendants Hall and Liebowitz), Greenson was “cocky, almost challenging me to accuse him of something.” Clemmons’ suspicions were on target as Greenson’s guilt was immediately apparent.

  Peter Lawford explained how Robert Kennedy had instructed Greenson, “Marilyn has got to be silenced.” Lawford relayed, “Greenson had thus been set up by Bobby to ‘take care’ of Marilyn.” The psychiatrist achieved this by an undiluted Nembutal injection to the heart. After all, what better way for any witnesses to assume it couldn’t have been anything but an adrenaline shot? This was a common method used to save patients from an overdose.

  While one may question whether Peter Lawford’s account was second-hand and therefore hearsay, James Hall insists Lawford himself saw the heart injection by Greenson. Because Lawford was Kennedy’s brother-in-law, that makes Lawford a primary witness. Hall’s partner Murray Liebowitz also assured Donald Wolfe that Hall’s account of Greenson and the heart needle was accurate.

  Thus, there have been three eyewitness accounts detailing Marilyn Monroe’s death as a murder at the hands of her own psychiatrist. Not surprisingly, the other two eyewitnesses, Pat Newcomb and Sgt. Marvin Iannone, have refused to discuss their observations to protect the Kennedy family. In fact, in 1986, James Hall stated regarding Ralph Greenson’s shot to the heart: “I say, ‘Yes, I saw her get that injection.’ So did Pat Newcomb. She was there too. Will she come forward?”

  In the documentary Say Goodbye to the President, photographer William Woodfield shared his recorded 1964 telephone conversation with Ralph Greenson in which the doctor discussed only what he said he could about Marilyn’s last night. Oddly, two years after her death, he was still deferring all inquires to the Attorney General: “I can’t explain myself or defend myself without revealing things that I don’t want to reveal. I feel I—I can’t, you know—you can’t draw a line and say, ‘Well, I’ll tell you this but I won’t tell you that.’ It’s a terrible position to be in to have to say, ‘I can’t talk about it’ because I can’t tell the whole story … Listen, you know, talk to Bobby Ke
nnedy.” Ralph Greenson’s son Danny authenticated that the recording was indeed his father’s voice. In 2010, Danny remarked to Chris Turner regarding the “talk to Bobby Kennedy” recording: “I don’t know why he [Ralph Greenson] said that. I certainly don’t think he felt that Bobby Kennedy killed her.”

  According to James Hall, while watching Greenson administer the shot to the heart it was immediately obvious to him that the psychiatrist had never done this before. His line of work hardly necessitated him to carry a medical bag containing a large syringe with a heart needle already attached. Bobby Kennedy provided the syringe courtesy of one of his two longtime personal bodyguards James Ahern or Archie Case, who accompanied RFK to Marilyn’s on August 4, 1962, the last afternoon of her life. Case and Ahern would later go with Kennedy to MM’s house that night.

  Dr. Sidney Weinberg concluded, “Knowing the results of the toxicology examination and the negative findings in the stomach, one must seriously consider the possibility of an injection. If I had handled the case, I would have been remiss in my duties if I did not refer it to the district attorney for investigation.”

  Donald Wolfe wrote that, later in the evening, with Bobby Kennedy present, Marilyn “was injected with enough barbiturate to kill fifteen people.” Wolfe, however, is wrong. As John Miner stated, “The amount of drugs found in Marilyn’s body was so large that, had it been administered by one injection [containing high dosages of Nembutal and chloral hydrate], the star would have died almost immediately. The body would have only had minutes in which to begin absorbing all those drugs.”

  Rather, in front of Bobby Kennedy, LAPD partners Archie Case and James Ahern subdued Marilyn by throwing her onto the guest cottage bed. According to private detective Fred Otash and wiretapper Bernie Spindel, Kennedy then placed a pillow over her mouth to keep her from yelling while instructing Case and Ahern to give her Nembutal injections by stating, “Give her something to calm her down.”