The Locked Room
Blonde and beautiful Marilyn Monroe, a glamorous symbol of the gay, exciting life of Hollywood, died tragically Sunday. Her body was found nude in bed, a probable suicide. She was 36. The long-troubled star clutched a telephone in one hand. An empty bottle of sleeping pills was nearby.
—The Associated Press, August 5, 1962
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Confirming that Marilyn Monroe had committed suicide, she led Clemmons to a bedroom where a body lay sprawled across the bed. A sheet had been pulled up over her head, leaving visible only a shock of ash-blond hair. A distinguished-looking man sat near the bed, his head bowed, his chin in his hands. He identified himself as Dr. Engelberg, the person who had called the police.
Another man, standing near the nightstand, introduced himself as Dr. Ralph Greenson, Monroe’s psychiatrist.
“She committed suicide,” Dr. Greenson said. Then, gesturing toward an empty container of Nembutal on the nightstand, he added, “She took all of these.”
Clemmons could sense the two doctors watching him as he drew back the sheet that covered the naked body. It was indeed Marilyn Monroe, but the face known to millions of moviegoers all over the world was without makeup and splotched with the lividity of death. A telephone cord ran over one side of the bed and lay beneath her. Her body appeared to be bruised.
Clemmons recalled, “She was lying facedown 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.” He immediately thought she had been placed that way. He had seen a number of suicides, and contrary to the common conception, an overdose of sleeping tablets usually causes victims to suffer convulsions and vomiting before they die in a contorted position.
“Was the body moved?” Clemmons asked
“No,” the doctors replied.
Studying the two doctors, Clemmons noted that Engelberg, the taller and more distinguished-looking of the two, seemed despondent and uncommunicative, while Greenson, who did most of the talking, had a strange, defensive attitude. Clemmons recalled, “He was cocky, almost challenging me to accuse him of something. I kept thinking to myself, What the hell’s wrong with this fellow? because it just didn’t fit the situation.”
“Did you try to revive her?” Clemmons asked.
“No, it was too late—we got here too late,” Greenson replied.
“Do you know when she took the pills?”
“No.”
In Clemmons’s experience, doctors were readily informative and didn’t need to be probed—-but then, this was the death of a film star. When the sergeant turned to talk to the housekeeper, he found that Murray had left the room.
Searching through the sparsely furnished house, which seemed rather small and inelegant for the home of a film star, he found Murray in the service porch off the kitchen, where both the washer and the dryer were running. She appeared agitated as she folded a stack of laundry on the counter. Clemmons thought it odd that the housekeeper was doing laundry in the middle of the night while her employer lay dead in the bedroom.
While she continued folding, he asked, “When did you discover that something was wrong with Miss Monroe?”
“Just after midnight,” Murray replied. “Then I called Dr. Greenson, and he arrived at about twelve-thirty. I went to bed about ten o’clock. I had some things to do, and I noticed the light was on under Marilyn’s door. I assumed she was sleeping or talking on the telephone with a friend, so I went to bed. I woke up at midnight and had to go to the bathroom. The light was still on under Marilyn’s door, and I became quite concerned. I tried the door, but it was locked, you see, from the inside.”
“The door was locked?” Clemmons asked.
“Yes,” she replied, “I knocked on the door, but Marilyn didn’t answer, so I called her psychiatrist, Dr. Greenson, who lives not far away. When he arrived, he also failed to get a response upon knocking on the door, so he went outside and looked through the bedroom window. He saw Marilyn lying motionless on the bed, looking peculiar. He broke the window with a poker and climbed inside and came around and opened the door. He told me, ‘We’ve lost her,’ and then he called Dr. Engelberg.”
Clemmons felt that her story seemed prepared; she related the events in an even, precise voice and fidgeted with the laundry. The fact that Marilyn Monroe’s body had been discovered at 12:30 A.M., but the police had not been called until 4:25 a.M., Clemmons found disturbing. He asked Murray what she had done after the body was discovered
“I just had so many things to do…” she responded. “I realized that there were probably going to be hundreds of people involved, and I had to dress.
I had all sorts of things to do…. I first called Norman Jefferies, a handyman employed by Marilyn. He had helped with the interior decorating and was a guard at the gate when necessary. So I called him immediately to come over and repair the broken window…and then I was doing other things, you know,” she added.
“Other things?” Clemmons asked.
“Getting my own things together,” she answered, “I’ve practically lived here most of the time, and I have many personal things besides my clothes, and I have a basket here that’s mine, so I filled it with my things.”
Returning to the bedroom, Clemmons asked the doctors why they’d waited four hours before calling the police. Greenson caustically replied,
“We had to get permission from the studio publicity department before we could call anyone.”
“The publicity department?” Clemmons wondered aloud.
“Yes, the 20th Century-Fox publicity department. Miss Monroe is making a film there.”
“What did you do during those hours?” he asked.
The doctors became more evasive, but Clemmons pressed the point.
“We were just talking,” Engelberg mumbled.
“About what?” Clemmons queried. “What were you talking about for four hours?”
The doctors shrugged their shoulders and stared at him blankly.
Protected by professional confidentiality, they were not compelled to answer, but Clemmons thought their attitude was strange under the circumstances. He noted that there was no drinking glass in the bedroom and wondered how she had swallowed the Nembutal tablets. He recruited the two doctors to help search for the drinking glass, but they found no glass or cup in the bedroom or the adjoining bathroom, where Clemmons discovered that the water had been shut off during remodeling. The sergeant then asked if Monroe was in the practice of using a hypodermic needle or syringe. Engelberg said she was not, and that the medications prescribed were all oral; however, the doctor stated he had been treating her for diarrhea and had recently administered some injections.
Returning to the bedroom, Clemmons again asked how the body had been discovered. Greenson related the story much as Murray had told it.
The housekeeper had called him sometime after midnight. Arriving at about 12:30 a.M., he broke the bedroom window with a poker to gain access to the room, where he found Marilyn on the bed. Greenson stated that her hand was firmly gripping the telephone, and he removed the phone from her hand shortly after discovering the body. He added that she must have been trying to call for help. Clemmons found it curious that Greenson would conclude Marilyn was calling for help when Murray was in the house, and her door was scarcely ten feet down the hall. But it wasn’t Clemmons’s job to investigate these matters. His duty was to take the initial report and write down what he saw and heard.
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Sunday morning Guy Hockett, owner of the Westwood Village Mortuary, received a predawn call to pick up Marilyn Monroe’s body. Hockett drove his dented, nondescript mortuary van to the Monroe residence with his son, Don, a UCLA music student working his way through college by helping his dad pick up bodies on weekends. Arriving at Fifth Helena Drive at approximately 5:45 a.M., they had difficulty getting through the growing crowd of reporters and curious neighbors gathering in front of the entry gates. Ironically, the large wooden gates had just been installed on Friday in compliance with Marilyn Monroe’s wish for privacy.
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Together, Hyams and Woodfield sped to the Monroe house, where they found that the veteran Hollywood columnist James Bacon had beaten them to the scene. Claiming he was with the coroner’s office, Bacon had gained entry and gone to the bedroom, where the film star’s nude body was being photographed by police photographers. Bacon recalled, “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.” Bacon described her body much as Clemmons had. “She was lying facedown on the bed, face slightly turned to the left on a pillow. Her legs were straight. She wasn’t holding a phone as some have said. I noticed that her fingernails were dingy and unkempt.” When Hockett entered Marilyn Monroe’s bedroom, he collected evidence of the possible cause of death, presumably the pill bottles on the bedside table. He collected eight of them. In one of the police photos there appears to be a water glass on the floor next to the bed. Clemmons stated that it hadn’t been there earlier, when the doctors helped him search the room for a drinking vessel.
When Byron asked Murray about the discovery of the body, she basically repeated the story she had told Clemmons, except that she altered the time frame by three and a half hours. Instead of saying that she had gotten up at midnight and seen the light under Marilyn’s door, Murray stated that it was closer to 3:30 A.M., and that she called Greenson at 3:35.
Apparently, Murray, Greenson, and Engelberg had decided to change the chronology. Engelberg also advanced the time by three and a half hours, telling Byron that he had pronounced the actress dead at 3:50 A.M. -not “shortly after twelve-thirty AM.,” as he had stated to Clemmons. In a follow-up report dated August 6, 1962, both Greenson and Engelberg reiterated thealtered chronology. The time discrepancy wasn’t an aberration or an error on the part of one of them – all three had changed their story.
In her initial statements to the police and the press, Murray recalled that she first became concerned about Marilyn when she got up to go to the bathroom and saw the light on under the door. She clearly stated, “It was the light under Marilyn’s door that aroused my suspicions that something was terribly wrong.” However, Murray’s bedroom was adjacent to Monroe’s and had its own bath with its own entry from the Murray bedroom. On the way from Murray’s bedroom to her bathroom there is no view of Marilyn’s bedroom door. Only if Murray had walked out into the hallway would she have had a view of a light under the door. In any case, the “light under the door” would prove to be an impossibility.
After Marilyn Monroe’s friend Robert Slatzer learned of her death, he went to the Monroe residence with the executrix, Inez Melson, on Thursday, August 9.” Slatzer noted that the recently installed carpeting was so thick that it was difficult to close Marilyn’s bedroom door. The door scraped along the surface of the carpet, and it was impossible to see light beneath it. Murray, who was present during Slatzer’s discovery, admitted that he was correct and that she must have been mistaken.
The question remained – what actually led Murray to believe that “something was terribly wrong” in the middle of the night?
In the book Marilyn: The Last Months, which Eunice Murray cowrote in 1975 with her sister-in-law, astrologist Rose Shade, she again altered her story. Instead of saying that she got up to go to the bathroom, she attributes the discovery that “something was terribly wrong” to her “Piscean qualities.” The book states:
A highly intuitive and gentle woman, born under a Piscean sign, she [Murray] seemed to sense that nightmare awaited not in sleep, but beyond her bedroom door. She recalls that night vividly:
“There was no reason I knew of for waking, for turning on the light and opening the door to the hall. There was no evidence of anything amiss until I saw the telephone cord at my feet. I knew then that something was terribly wrong. The cord ran from the spare bedroom [telephone room] across the hall and under Marilyn’s closed door. There was no sound from within her room, and thick carpeting made it impossible to tell if her light was on or not….
Cautious of awakening her unnecessarily, I did not tap on the door or call her name. Very much alarmed, however, I dialed her psychiatrist on the other line.”
In the altered version, Murray tells her readers it was the sight of the telephone cord running under the door that compelled her to call Marilyn’s psychiatrist at 3:30 A.M. However, the telephone cord running from the telephone room and under the door into Marilyn’s bedroom was not an uncommon sight after midnight; in fact, it was quite routine.
Two telephone lines ran to Marilyn’s residence. Her house number, GRanite 24830, was connected to a pink phone in the telephone room and an extension in the guest cottage. Her private number, GRanite 61890, led to the white phone in the telephone room. The pink and the white phone each had a thirty-foot extension cord, allowing Marilyn to take either one into her bedroom. Though Marilyn put the pink house phone under a pillow in the telephone room so its ring wouldn’t disturb her, her friends knew that Marilyn kept the private white phone in her bedroom at night. To the annoyance of many, she was a notorious night caller. On sleepless nights she often called people in the small hours of the morning to dispel her anxieties. Her friend Norman Rosten recalled being awakened on numerous occasions in the predawn hours and hearing the whispery voice on the phone saying, “Guess who this is.” When the phone rang at 2 a.M. and he fumbled in the dark for it, it didn’t take clairvoyance to know that Marilyn was calling. On the night before she died, her friend Arthur James stated that Marilyn left a message at 3 a.M. with his answering service. Obviously, the telephone cord of the private line leading under the door into Marilyn’s bedroom was the rule, not the exception.
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Although Newcomb claimed she spent early Sunday morning at Marilyn’s dealing with the press and making numerous phone calls, Norman Jefferies described Newcomb as distraught and hysterical.
Recalling that the police had difficulty dealing with her, Jefferies stated,
“She was looking through drawers and going into Marilyn’s bedroom. She had spent Friday night at the house and perhaps she was looking for something she left there. The police had to control her. When they told us to leave because they were going to seal the house, she became unglued. They had trouble getting her out of the door. She kept trying to get back inside. I don’t know if it was because she couldn’t find what she was looking for, or if she just couldn’t deal with everything that had happened.”
According to Murray, “Pat Newcomb didn’t want to leave. She was sitting in the third bedroom [the telephone room] where she had so recently spent the night. She had quieted down from her previous hysterical state, but gave no impression of planning to move…. The police practically had to forcibly evict her.”
In the bedroom, when Guy Hockett and his son placed Marilyn’s body on the gurney, he noted, “Rigor mortis was advanced, and she was not lying quite straight, and it took about five minutes to straighten her out…. We had to do quite a bit of bending to get the arms into position so that we could, you know, put the straps around her.” He added, “She didn’t look good, not like Marilyn Monroe. She looked just like a poor little girl that had died….” When the time of death is unknown, it is often determined by the extent of rigor mortis. Over the first four to fourteen hours after death the muscles of the body contract to rock-hardness. Hockett recalled that they placed the body on the gurney sometime between 5:30 and 6 A.M. He estimated that she had died approximately six to eight hours earlier, or sometime between nine-thirty and eleven-thirty Saturday night.
In an an exclusive interview with New York Journal-American correspondent Alfred Robbins, Pat Newcomb said, “I had arrived at Marilyn’s house on Friday. I was fighting a bad case of bronchitis and had decided to enter a hospital for a complete rest, but Marilyn had called me and said, ‘Why don’t you come out here?.. You can sun in the back and have all the rest you want, and you won’t have to go to the hospital.’ It was typical of Marilyn,” she went on, “this concern for friends. So I accepted her invitation. I found her in wonderful spirits. Some furnishings had just arrived from Mexico. She was in a very good mood – a very happy mood.
Friday night we had dinner at a quiet restaurant near her home. Saturday she was getting things done inside the house. She loved it. This was the first home she ever owned herself. She was as excited about it as a little girl with a new toy.”
Newcomb said that when she left on Saturday, nothing indicated the impending tragedy: “When I last saw her, nothing about her mood or manner had changed.” She recalled that Marilyn had waved at her with a smile from the doorway and said, “I’ll see you tomorrow. Toodle-oo!” Pat Newcomb left Marilyn’s at approximately 5:45 P.M.
Five hours later Marilyn Monroe was dead.
The narrative of events was picked up by Murray, who stated that she Newcomb left Marilyn’s at approximately 5:45 P.M.
Five hours later Marilyn Monroe was dead.
The narrative of events was picked up by Murray, who stated that she stayed at her own apartment in Santa Monica on Friday night and returned to Marilyn’s Saturday morning. When she arrived, Norman Jefferies was already at work retiling the kitchen floor.
“I arrived there about eight-thirty Saturday morning,” said Murray.
“Marilyn was up and dressed in a terry-cloth robe. Pat was asleep in the guest bedroom [the telephone room]. Marilyn and I had some juice; we were sitting in the breakfast nook. We talked for about an hour or so, discussing household things, then Marilyn went back to her bedroom.”
Newcomb had slept late, and according to Murray, Newcomb and Marilyn had a disagreement after Newcomb emerged from the telephone room. When asked about the disagreement, Newcomb stated that “the small argument that day was because I had been able to sleep all night and Marilyn hadn’t. While I had my door closed and was sleeping, Marilyn had been up wandering around the house. And she just couldn’t bear not being able to sleep. Then for her to see someone come out all refreshed, who had been sleeping the night before, you know, that made her furious.”
According to Murray, Marilyn didn’t eat lunch or dinner that day and spent the afternoon in her bedroom. When Newcomb began walking out to her car at about 1 P.M., Murray stated, “I called to her asking if she wanted something to eat. She said she did, and I fixed her one of my omelets.” After lunch Newcomb decided to stay on. Sometime in the afternoon Murray went shopping for about an hour, but she returned before Greenson arrived at about 5 or 5:30 p.M. It was unusual for Greenson to come to Marilyn’s. Marilyn almost always met with her psychiatrist at his home, which was only minutes away. When asked if Marilyn had requested that Greenson visit her, Murray replied, “No, I called him late that morning when Marilyn had said something about oxygen. She asked, ‘Mrs. Murray, do we have any oxygen around?’ I really didn’t understand, but it was something that I thought was questionable. It wasn’t my habit to call Dr. Greenson about every little thing, but I did call him and asked, ‘What’s this about oxygen?’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m not quite sure, but I’ll be over later this afternoon.””
Murray stated that she and Newcomb were talking in the living room when Greenson arrived. After briefly visiting Marilyn in her bedroom, Greenson walked to the living room and told Pat Newcomb she should leave. “When the doctor came, he spoke to Marilyn,” Murray said, “and then he asked Pat if she was leaving. She said, ‘Yes, I am.’ It was part of his plan, evidently, that Pat not stay because Marilyn and she had some kind of disagreement.”
According to Murray, Newcomb left between 5:30 and 6 p.M., and the doctor then went back into Marilyn’s bedroom. Approximately an hour later he emerged from the bedroom and asked Murray if she would spend the night.
“I said yes,” Murray recalled, “There wasn’t any feeling of urgency in his request. There wasn’t anything that gave me any idea that it was important that I stay.” Greenson then left at approximately 7 P.M.
Four hours later Marilyn Monroe was dead.
Not long after Greenson left, one of the phones rang in the telephone room. “I answered the phone and summoned Marilyn, who sat on the floor and talked to Joe DiMaggio, Jr.” Murray recalled, “She was in a very gay mood while she spoke with him. He had given her some good news – he had broken off with a girlfriend of whom Marilyn did not approve. She was very pleased about that. I didn’t hear what she was saying, but I heard her laughing. After the call, she phoned Dr. Greenson to tell him about it. Then she walked toward her room. I was in the living room facing her bedroom.
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Murray recalled that Marilyn then took one of the phones into her bedroom and closed the door at approximately 8 p.M. According to Murray, it was the last time she was to see Marilyn alive.
Three hours later Marilyn Monroe was dead.
Though Peter Lawford’s story varied in minor details over the years, he held steadfast to the essential elements until his own death in 1984.
Lawford said he was having a dinner party at his beach house Saturday night with television producer Joe Naar; Naar’s wife, Dolores; and Hollywood agent George “Bullets” Durgom. Lawford said he first telephoned Marilyn at approximately 5 p.M. Saturday, urging her to join them. He recalled that she “sounded despondent over her dismissal from the film Something’s Got to Give and some other personal matters.” She told him she wasn’t sure she’d be there and would think about it.
When Marilyn hadn’t shown up by seven-thirty, and Lawford called again, he said she sounded depressed and “her manner of speech was slurred.” She said she was tired and would not be coming. Her voice became less and less audible, and Lawford began to yell in order to revive her, describing his shouts as “verbal slaps in the face.” Then Marilyn stated,
“Say good-bye to the president and say good-bye to yourself, because you’re a nice guy.”
According to Lawford, the telephone then became silent, as if Marilyn had put the receiver down or perhaps dropped it. He called back, but got a busy signal.
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According to Murray, after Marilyn and Newcomb had their disagreement, Marilyn spent most of the afternoon in her bedroom. Murray was specific in stating that Marilyn was in her room when Newcomb left and never said good-bye. That Newcomb stayed on until Greenson arrived and told her to leave seems as inexplicable as Newcomb’s recollection of her last view of Marilyn alive smiling as she waved her last good-bye and saying, “I’ll see you tomorrow. Toodle-oo!”
Responding to Lawford’s concerns, attorney “Mickey” Rudin claimed that he called Murray to see if everything was all right. The “highly intuitive” Mrs. Murray assured him that Marilyn was fine. It wasn’t until seven hours later that Murray recovered her Piscean qualities and “seemed to sense that nightmare awaited, not in sleep, but beyond her bedroom door where the telephone cord running under Marilyn’s doorway indicated ‘something was terribly wrong.””
It was then that she called Dr. Greenson for the second time that day.
However, before changing the motivation for calling Dr. Greenson from the “light under the door” to the “phone cord under the door,” Murray had already told the press that the last time she’d seen Marilyn alive, “she had turned in the doorway and said, ‘We won’t be going for that drive after all, Mrs. Murray’ and went into her bedroom, taking the telephone with her.” There were many implausibilities in the narrative of events by the key witnesses as to what occured in the last twenty-four hours of Marilyn Monroe’s life. Evidence would emerge indicating the depth of the deceptions. Investigative journalists would discover that the alarm concerning Marilyn’s death went out as early as 10:45 P.M. Saturday, and that an ambulance arrived at the house while Marilyn was still alive. Years later Murray would once again change her story and refute the “locked bedroom” scenario.
Clearly, in 1962 the key witnesses conspired to conceal information.
The haunting question is why six diverse people an actor, a housekeeper, a psychiatrist, a press agent, an attorney, and a physician-collaborated to conceal the truth regarding the circumstances of Marilyn Monroe’s death What extenuating circumstances could have been so overwhelming that this disparate group conspired in a deception that has endured for over three decades?
Were they the extenuating circumstances of a suicide or a murder?
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Case #81128
While many businesses remained closed on Sundays, it was usually the busiest day of the week at the Los Angeles County morgue, because so many people seemed to die under questionable circumstances on Saturday night. In 1962, the county coroner’s office and morgue were in the basement of the Hall of Justice in downtown Los Angeles.
The dank, rat-infested facility suffered from limited funding and had a history of and corruption. Investigations have revealed thievery, necrophilia, and the acceptance of bribes in the determination of the cause of death.
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When he didn’t find Monroe’s name in the necrology of bodies that had arrived at the morgue Saturday night and Sunday morning, he questioned coroner’s aide Lionel Grandison, who was responsible for ensuring that who died under questionable circumstances, without physician’s direct attendance, be directed to the L.A. County Coroner’s office. Grandison soon discovered the first of many irregularities that led him to conclude that there had been an attempt to cover up the circumstances of Monroe’s death.
“When people die of natural causes in hospitals, the body is generally held there while arrangements are made for transportation to a mortuary,” Grandison recalled, “but when the death involved a suspected suicide or murder, or accident, or the causes were simply unknown, the law said the body had to be shipped to the downtown county morgue in the Los Angeles coroner’s office for evaluation.”
Grandison initiated a search and found the body at the Westwood Village Mortuary. “For that to happen,” Grandison related, “someone had to have called the mortuary and specifically asked them to come and pick up the body.” He was further surprised to find that the mortuary was preparing the body for embalming and was reluctant to release the corpse to the coroner. “They began to squawk. They didn’t want to let us have the body. But ultimately there was nothing they could do because they were under my orders and the jurisdiction of the county.” This was an unprecedented situation, and in his subsequent investigation Grandison questioned the Westwood Village Mortuary staff, but he never discovered who had received the call releasing the body from the death scene and directing it to their mortuary.
Shortly after 9 …, Grandison had the body removed from the mortuary and driven downtown, where it was placed in crypt #33 of the county morgue in the Los Angeles Hall of Justice. Marilyn Monroe became Coroner’s Case #81128. At 10:15 A.M., Eddy Day, a coroner’s assistant, wheeled the corpse to stainless steel table #1 to prepare it for autopsy. The table was equipped with a water hose and drainage system, and a scale for weighing human organs.
Marilyn Monroe would be the first of a number of stars to be included in Dr. Thomas Noguchi’s cadaverous cast of players. Others would include Sharon Tate, Janis Joplin, William Holden, Natalie Wood, and John Belushi. In 1968 he performed the autopsy on Robert Kennedy. Noguchi went on to publish a book concerning his affinity for the famous and gained the unfortunate title “Coroner to the Stars.” After the publication of his book in 1984, he was demoted by the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors and put on probation for allegedly mismanaging his office and sensationalizing his position as medical examiner.
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At 10:30 A.M the autopsy began. Miner recalls being profoundly moved when they first viewed the body. “I had looked at thousands of bodies, but Tom and I were both very touched. We had a sense of real sadness, and the feeling that this young, young woman could stand up and get off the table at any moment.”
Noguchi and Miner had studied the police reports indicating that Monroe had died in a locked room, and that her doctors believed she died of an ingestion of an overdose. They also had studied the pill bottles gathered by Guy Hockett. Dr. Engelberg had told the police he had given Monroe a refill prescription for fifty capsules of Nembutal on Friday, August 3.
Records at the San Vicente Pharmacy indicate that the prescription was filled the day before she died.”
Though no hypodermic needles had been found in the locked room, Noguchi stated that the autopsy began with an external examination for puncture marks indicating that drugs were administered by injection. Miner stated, “We both examined the body very carefully with a magnifying glass for needle marks. There was no indication that the drugs had been administered by way of a hypodermic needle. If there had been marks, they would have been apparent on such a very careful examination of the body.” The autopsy diagram clearly has the notation “No needle marks.” However, there are serious questions concerning the findings. It is a matter of record, according to the bill submitted to the Monroe estate, that Engelberg gave her an injection on August 3. The injection was at approximately 4 PM. on Friday, and according to Guy Hockett she died at approximately 10 pM. the following day—an elapsed time of thirty hours.
Miner, who was not a physician or a medical examiner, has been the primary defender of the “very careful search for needle marks.” However, in his book Coroner, Noguchi poses the question,
“Were the drugs that killed her injected into her body by someone else?” He states how difficult recent needle marks are to detect, citing the John Belushi case. On examining Belushi’s body, the police first ruled out drugs as the cause of death because the coroner’s staff at the death scene had been unable to discover needle marks.
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Without explanation, Noguchi’s External Examination Report points out two fresh bruises on Marilyn’s body: “a slight ecchymotic area is noted in the left hip and left side of the lower back.” However, according to Grandison, more bruises were found on Monroe’s body than the official documents reveal. Grandison explained,
“When a body is brought into the morgue, it is immediately inspected by a medical assistant. At this time all scars, bruises, cuts, or other trauma are indicated on a special initial examination form. This form becomes part of the official file and is completed before the beginning of the autopsy.” Grandison saw this form on the morning of August 5, and he said it included the hip bruises indicated in the autopsy report but also revealed additional bruises on Monroe’s arms and the back of her legs. According to Grandison, “This initial examination form was part of a file that disappeared as the case began to expand.”
Miner later commented that all of the bruises were small, except for the large bruised area on the left hip. “We saw bruised areas on the body,” he recalls, “but nothing that could have contributed to death in any way.” However, bruised areas are an indication of violence, and the fact that obvious bruises weren’t questioned, and that minor ones weren’t even noted, is a disturbing omission.
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Noguchi then opened the stomach, and he and Miner examined the contents for signs of the Nembutal tablets. But to their surprise the stomach was completely empty. “There was a small quantity of liquid in the stomach,” Miner recalled, “but we did not detect any sign that would indicate it contained any heavy drugs or sedatives.”
The examiner’s report states,
“A smear made from the gastric contents and examined under the polarized microscope shows no refractile crystals.” According to Dr. Sidney S. Weinberg, former Chief Medical Examiner of Suffolk County, New York,
“It is inconsistent with the mode of death by ingestion of a large amount of barbiturates not to have found refractile crystals in the digestive tract. Under a polarized microscope the smear should have disclosed the exact character of the death-producing drug, as each medication has its own individual crystalline shape.” Furthermore, Weinberg and several other prominent medical examiners have pointed out that Nembutal’s street name “yellow jackets” derives from the distinctive yellow in the gelatin capsules. If Monroe had swallowed as many as forty or more capsules of Nembutal, as has been estimated, evidence of yellow dye should have been found in the digestive tract especially in an empty stomach. Noguchi found no trace of yellow dye.
Next, Noguchi and Miner looked at the duodenum, the first digestive tract after the stomach. When pills have been in the stomach for a period of time, sometimes the remains and residue will move on into the duodenum; however, they found nothing. Noguchi said, “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.”
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During Christmas 1950, when she was staying at the apartment of her drama coach, Natasha Lytess, Marilyn became despondent over the death of her mentor, Johnny Hyde. Lytess returned home and discovered a note on her pillow that read, “I leave my car and fur stole to Natasha.” She recalled,
“I ran to Marilyn’s door, which was unlocked, and burst in to find that the room looked like hell on earth. Marilyn was on the bed, her cheeks were swollen, and she was unconscious. There was an ooze of purplish paste in the lip corners… I jammed her mouth open and reached in and took out a handful of wet, purplish stuff she hadn’t yet swallowed. On the night table was an empty bottle that contained sleeping pills.” Even though she’d used a glass of water, Marilyn had gagged on the pills she tried to consume. Her stomach was pumped, and she revived at the hospital.
In the 1960s, when Marilyn was filming The Misfits and was troubled by marital problems with Arthur Miller, she swallowed a number of barbiturate tablets, but she again gagged and regurgitated many of them.
When her coach, Paula Strasberg, discovered Marilyn unconscious on a bed, she told of seeing the vomitus on Marilyn’s face and described using her fingers to scoop the dissolved capsules out of her mouth. Again, Marilyn’s stomach was pumped at the hospital, where she regained consciousness.
These experiences make the absence of vomitus or residue in Noguchi’s autopsy even more striking.
Also of significance was the absence of the “odor of pear.” Victims who ingest chloral hydrate emit a strong pearlike odor. However, this is not the case when chloral hydrate is injected directly into the bloodstream rather than ingested through the digestive tract.
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Monroe’s body were returned to crypt #33.
Sometime after ten o’clock Sunday night, Life photographer Leigh Wiener snuck into the county morgue. Offering a bottle of whiskey as a bribe, Wiener persuaded a morgue attendant to open up crypt #33 and roll out Marilyn Monroe for a few snapshots. He took a number of photos of the corpse, both covered and uncovered. It was Marilyn Monroe’s last photo session.
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