going to leave Jackie for her. Monroe may even have become pregnant by him. When JFK dumped her she threatened to go public and “blow the lid off Washington”. Any such eruption would have ended JFK’s career. Needless to say, JFK needed Monroe silent. Permanently.
As did Bobby Kennedy. Sloughed off by JFK, Monroe fell into a passionate relationship with his brother, who likewise found Monroe emotionally demanding and indiscreet. Her constant calls to his office and home jeopardized both his professional and his personal life. Moreover, RFK, in some braggardly pillow talk, had illuminated Monroe about the CIA’s attempts to kill Castro, leaving her in possession of state secrets which might end up being exposed in her proposed planned lid-lifting.
No one has seriously suggested that JFK took a literal hand in Monroe’s demise, yet numerous witnesses place RFK at Monroe’s bungalow on the eve of her death. According to James Hall, an ambulance driver, he [Hall] arrived at Monroe’s house to find the star reviving from a drug coma; at this point bystanding RFK persuaded Monroe’s psychiatrist, Dr Ralph Greenson, to inject the star with a lethal dose of Nembutal. This would explain one of the puzzles in Monroe’s autopsy report: her stomach was devoid of tablet residue, despite the empty pill bottles around her corpse. In another version of Bobbydunnit, the Attorney General ordered the FBI to kill Monroe in order to save the Kennedys’ careers; of course J. Edgar Hoover was only too pleased to do so because it gave him a stranglehold on the White House.
Joe DiMaggio, the baseball superstar who was Monroe’s first husband, went to his deathbed convinced the Kennedys offed the sex goddess with the help of the Mob, with whom they had been in cahoots since old man Kennedy bootlegged alcohol during Prohibition. Curiously, one of the Mob’s most effective and subtle methods of murder was a lethal enema of chloral hydrate. Such an enema would explain the lack of pill residue in Monroe’s body; it would also explain the bruising on her body, which was consistent with a violent struggle.
In
The known facts of Monroe’s last evening are these. At around 6.00 p.m. on 4 August 1962 Monroe’s press agent Pat Newcomb left the bungalow at 12,305 Fifth Helena Drive in LA followed by Monroe’s psychiatrist Greenson, who had spent the afternoon with the movie star. At around 7.15 Monroe took a call from DiMaggio’s son Joe Jr, and half an hour later rat-pack star Peter Lawford (who was JFK’s and RFK’s brother-in-law) phoned to invite her to a party.
Thereafter, the many sources differ wildly over how and when Monroe died. Not until 4.25 the next morning do undisputed facts re-enter the Monroe death story, when Sergeant Jack Clemmons of the LAPD got a call he would never forget. Dr Hyman Engelberg, Monroe’s personal physician, informed him she had committed suicide. When Clemmons arrived at Helena Drive there were three people there: Greenson, Engelberg and the housekeeper, Murray. They led Clemmons into the bedroom where Monroe’s nude body was lying covered with a sheet, and took care to point out bottles of sedatives. According to Clemmons, “She was lying face down in what I call the soldier’s position. Her face was in a pillow, her arms were by her side, her right arm was slightly bent. Her legs were stretched out perfectly straight.”
Clemmons immediately thought Monroe had been
The witness statements clanged with implausibility. Murray claimed that at about 3 a.m. she awoke and saw a light under Monroe’s door. Finding the door locked, she contacted Greenson to alert him. In fact, the deep-pile carpeting in Monroe’s bungalow would not have allowed light to seep under the bedroom door, on which there was no lock. Greenson allegedly forced entry into Monroe’s bedroom at around 3.50 and pronounced her dead. The trio claimed they had waited until 4.00 before contacting police because they needed permission to do so. (This clearly contradicts Murray’s statement that she had discovered Monroe’s body at around 3.30.) Clemmons further noted there was no glass in the bedroom from which Monroe could have drunk to help down the pills she was supposed to have swallowed.
Despite Clemmons’ observations, Coroner Curphey determined that Monroe had committed suicide—her corpse, after all, was surrounded by bottles of prescription sedatives and she did have a history of suicide attempts. Doubtless Curphey was influenced too by the opinion of Greenson. A number of major forensic experts have argued, however, that there were no traces of Nembutal in Monroe’s intestinal tract or stomach and therefore she cannot have swallowed the barbiturates as tablets. Neither could she have injected herself with the overdose of barbiturates, since the injection of such a high dosage would have caused immediate death with evident bruising around the injection site—yet there were no needle marks or relevant bruises on her body. This leaves one possible explanation: that the OD was administered by an enema. Since a self-administered enema is a near-impossibility, Monroe did not commit suicide. She either died accidentally or was murdered.
So what did happen during the “missing hours” of Monroe’s last day? According to the author Donald H. Wolfe, Murray’s son-in-law Norman Jeffries was at Monroe’s bungalow on the fatal night. At around 9.30 p.m., Robert Kennedy and two unknown men came to Monroe’s door and ordered Murray and Jeffries to leave. (This timing dovetails with the recollection of Jose Bolanas that his phone call to Monroe at around 9.30 was broken off because of people arriving at the door. A neighbour of Monroe’s, Elizabeth Pollard, confirmed that Bobby Kennedy arrived at the bungalow at around this time.) When Murray and Jeffries returned to the bungalow at 10.30, Jeffries says that he saw Monroe face down, naked, and holding a phone. Murray then called an ambulance and Dr Greenson. Jeffries’s story is corroborated by the chief of the local ambulance company, who is on record as saying that Monroe’s body was collected and taken to Santa Monica hospital, but then returned to Helena Drive. Sometime before midnight, Pat Newcomb and Peter Lawford turned up at the bungalow in high panic. They phoned Bobby Kennedy. Soon afterwards Monroe’s personal journals and telephone records were apparently taken.
Did the Kennedy brothers have evidence of their affairs with Monroe removed? It would be astounding if they didn’t. Did Bobby Kennedy murder Marilyn Monroe? It would be astounding if he did. Given Bobby Kennedy’s personal moral compass, his position as Attorney General, his crusading against organized crime, he makes an unlikely hands-on killer.
In his re-creation of the evening of 4 August 1962, Monroe’s biographer Donald Spoto makes a convincing case that the movie star’s death was neither suicide nor murder but an accident. To aid Monroe sleep that night, Greenson arranged with Murray that the latter would give Monroe an enema of chloral hydrate; Greenson was, however, unaware that Monroe’s physician Hyman Engelberg had supplied her with Nembutal. Monroe and Murray had no idea that Nembutal and chloral hydrate reacted adversely with each other. At around 9.30 Monroe began slipping into a coma. Bobby Kennedy arrived to find Monroe in a drugged stupor and called an ambulance, but when Monroe died en route to hospital he realized the public relations fallout of arriving at the hospital with an overdosed sex goddess could be lethal. He thus ordered the ambulance to return to Helena Drive, where Monroe’s body was laid out and incriminating documents removed. Greenson, Engelberg and Murray all had a reason to acquiesce in the cover-up because they had killed—albeit unwittingly—Marilyn Monroe, movie star. Their careers, like those of the Kennedys, would have been ruined had the truth become known.
Robert Slatzer,
Donald Spoto,
Anthony Summers,
Donald H. Wolfe,
Montauk Point
The conspiracy theories that surround Montauk Point, New York, call into doubt the whole existence of
