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- [00:01]
Vanessa Richardson
Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Before today's episode, I want to take a brief moment to tell you about a show from Crime House's sister studio, Rewind, that I know you'll love. It's called Government that Doesn't Suck, hosted by professors Lindsay Cormack and Greg Jackson from History that Doesn't Suck. Ever wonder how the weather forecast on your phone is so accurate? Or how your mail still gets across the country for less than a dollar? Or who actually built the highway you drove on this morning? Each episode tells the surpr of an American institution that you'll never look at the same way again. Listen to and follow Government that Doesn't Suck every other Monday on Apple podcasts and Spotify or watch video episodes on YouTube. This is crime house. It was just past 3am on Sunday, August 5, 1962 when 60 year old Eunice Murray padded down the hallway of a small Spanish style bungalow in Brentwood, California. Murray was the live in housekeeper for the home's only resident, 36 year old Marilyn Monroe. When Murray reached Marilyn's bedroom door, she saw a thin strip of light glowing underneath the telephone cord that usually snaked out from under the do. Marilyn had a habit of taking calls in. Bed was pulled tight inside. Murray knocked. No answer. She tried the knob but it was locked. Murray picked up the phone and called Marilyn's psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, who lived just a few minutes away. Greenson sped over. When he couldn't get the door open either, he ran around to the side of the house and smashed a window with a fireplace poker. He climbed through and found Marilyn lying face down on the bed naked, a telephone receiver still clutched in her hand. She was dead. But here's the thing. By the time the LAPD got the call, it was 4:25 in the morning, well over an hour after Greenson found her. Maybe a lot longer. And in that gap, a lot of strange things happened inside 12305 Fifth Helena Drive. The bed sheets were changed, the room was cleaned and and one of the most famous women on the planet would be on a coroner's table before most of America even heard she was gone. The official story is that Marilyn Monroe died by suicide. But more than 60 years later, that story still doesn't quite add up. And it's become one of the most contested questions in American history. From ufo, UFO cults and mass suicides to secret CIA experiments, presidential assassinations and murderous doctors, these aren't just theories. They're real stories that blur the line between fact and fiction. I'm Vanessa Richardson and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes, a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I'll explore the real people at the center of the world's most shocking events and nefarious organizations. These cases are wild and I want to hear what what you think at the end of each episode. Please leave a comment wherever you listen. Be sure to rate, review and follow so we can continue building this community together. And if you want even more, subscribe to Crime House plus and get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts tap try free at the top of the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes show page age Please note this episode contains discussions of death by suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of suicide or self harm, you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis lifeline. Please do so if you need to, please listen with care Today I'm looking at the death of Marilyn Monroe. This is one of my personal favorite cases. I'm fascinated by Marilyn and her story. She was Hollywood's biggest star and one of the most famous women in the world. Decades after she died, her face still shows up everywhere. On t shirts, on posters, on social media. Here's something that puts it into perspective for me. Generations of people who weren't even alive when she passed away can recognize her in a single frame. So when she was found dead at 36, surrounded by empty pill bottles in her own bed, the world wanted answers. The Los Angeles county coroner gave them one probable suicide. But the timeline was off. The autopsy was botched and almost everyone in her orbit her psychiatrist, her housekeeper, her publicist would change their stories over the years. So what really happened? Was it suicide? An accidental overdose? Or was Marilyn Monroe murdered to keep a secret? She she should have never been told. All that and more coming up. What's the business idea you've been putting off because it feels too complicated? 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- [06:40]
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- [07:38]
Vanessa Richardson
Marilyn Monroe was born Norma Jean Mortensen on June 1, 1926, in Los Angeles, California. Her mother, Gladys, was 24, unmarried and already coming apart at the seams. Mental illness ran deep in Gladys's family. Her mother and grandfather had been committed to psychiatric institutions. Gladys herself had been struggling with paranoia and depression for years. She also had two older children from a previous marriage, but her ex husband had custody. By the time Gladys got pregnant with Norma Jean, she was born barely holding it together. The baby's father, a coworker named Charles Stanley Gifford, wanted nothing to do with either of them. He was gone before Norma Jean was born. When Norma Jean was just two weeks old, Gladys placed her with a foster family named the Boers. It wasn't because she didn't love her Glattus visited every weekend and paid the bonders out of her own paycheck. She just couldn't manage a baby on her own. The arrangement worked for seven years. Then in 1933, Gladys decided to try again. She'd saved enough to buy a small house in Hollywood and moved her 7 year old daughter in for a few months. It looked like they'd finally be a family. But it was short lived. In January 1934, Gladys had a complete mental breakdown. She was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and committed to a state hospital. She would spend months, most of the rest of her life, in and out of psychiatric care. And Norma Jean became a ward of the state. Over the next eight years, Norma Jean bounced through 11 foster homes and one orphanage. She never had the chance to settle in anywhere. Just when she got used to one family, she was sent to another. It was also a deeply traumatic time. In her memoir and in later interviews, Marilyn said she was sexually abused in at least three of those foster homes. In one of the most cited stories, she described a male border who lured her into his room when she was 8 years old and molested her. When she told her foster mother what had happened, the woman slapped her and called her a liar. Biographers over the years have largely backed up these accounts, and Marilyn never got over it. After the abuse, she developed a stutter, one that would come back at stressful moments for the rest of her life. She also had a hard time at school. She usually wore hand me downs that didn't fit right. The other kids called her Norma Jean, the human being. And they laughed even harder when she told everyone she was going to be an actress one day. Her one comfort was the view from the orphanage window. From her dorm, she could see see the water tower of RKO Pictures, one of the biggest movie studios in Hollywood at the time. Her own mother had worked there as a film cutter before she got sick. Norma Jean would stare at that tower and imagine herself inside on a sound stage, making a different life. When Norma Jean was 12, things finally got better. She moved in with her mother's aunt, a 58 year old woman named Anna Lower. For the first time in her life, she had something close to a real home. Lower took her to the movies, bought her clothes that actually fit, and told her she was loved. But by 1942, lower was elderly and her health was failing. Norma Jean, now 15, was sent back to her former legal guardian, Grace Goddard. And almost immediately, Grace's husband got a job job offer in West Virginia. The Goddards were moving across the country and California law wouldn't let them take Norma Jean with them. So Grace gave her foster daughter a choice. She could go back to the orphanage or she could marry a 21 year old neighbor named Jim Daugherty. Norma Jean picked Jim. Jim Daugherty wasn't a stranger. He was a nice guy and had been giving Norma Jean rides home from school for the past year. They'd been on a handful of dates. He just wasn't anyone she'd planned to marry. But the alternative was the orphanage. So on June 19, 1942, just a few weeks after her 16th birthday, Norma Jean Mortensen married Jim Daugherty in a small ceremony in Los Angeles. She dropped out of high school the same year. By all accounts, Jim was good to her. Norma Jean settled into life as a teenage housewife. But then in 1944, Jim enlisted in the Merchant Marines and shipped out to the Pacific. While he was gone, Norma Jean took a job at the radio plane munitions factory in Van Nuys, assembling aircraft parts for the war effort. That's where her entire life changed. In June 1945, an army photographer named David Conover came to the factory to take photos of women supporting the troops. He spotted 19 year old Norma Jean on the assembly line and couldn't stop staring. He asked her if he could photograph her separately. She said yes. Norma Jean wasn't conventionally beautiful in the way starlets of the era were expected to be. She had a slightly crooked nose. Her hair was frizzy light brown. But on camera, something happened. The shyness vanished. The lens loved her in a way it didn't seem to love anyone else. Other women looked pretty in photos, but Norma Jean came alive in them. Conover showed his photos to a modeling agency. The agency signed her on the spot. Within months, Norman Norma Jean was modeling full time. The agency convinced her to bleach her hair. Platinum blonde, they said. Brunettes didn't look as well. She also started taking acting classes on the side. And around this time, she discovered her own little trick. Norma Jean had a small mole on her left cheek, but it was flesh colored, so faint you could barely see it in photos. So she started darkening it in with an eyebrow pencil before shoots. Over the years, that little darkened dot became one of the most copied beauty marks in the world. But it was always her own invention. Years before anyone ever called her Marilyn. And it wouldn't be the last time she made her own call. In 1946, Jim came home from the war and gave her an ultimatum. Quit modeling or end the marriage. She she chose modeling. That same year, she signed her first studio contract with 20th Century Fox. The studio executives took one look at Norma Jean Daugherty and decided the name had to go. It wasn't glamorous it wouldn't fit on a marquee, so they gave her a new one. Marilyn Monroe. The first name was borrowed from a 1920s Broadway actress, and the last was her mother's maiden name.
- [14:42]
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- [14:43]
Vanessa Richardson
She would later say it was the first time she felt like she got to choose who she was. For the next several years, Marilyn paid her dues. She took small roles in forgettable films. She studied acting seriously and eventually traveled to New York to train at the legendary Actor Studio. She worked obsessively on her image, practicing her walk, her smile, her breathless way of speaking. Speaking until she had it down cold. By 1952, the industry was starting to notice her. Maryland. Was getting bigger roles and tons of fan mail. Then in 1953, everything broke open. That year, Fox cast her as the lead in three different films. A noir thriller called Niagara, a musical comedy called Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and a romantic comedy called called how to Marry a Millionaire. All three were hits. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes alone made her a global phenomenon. The scene where she sings Diamonds are a girl's best friend in a hot pink dress would become one of the most imitated performances in movie history. By the end of 1953, Marilyn Monroe was the biggest female movie star in America. And she was just getting started.
- [16:07]
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- [16:39]
Tristan Hughes
Odysseus is still lost war hero, liar, survivor and the man at the heart of one of history's greatest stories. I'm Tristan Hughes and all of this month on the Ancients, I'm going to be sailing through Homer's treacherous world of monsters, witchcraft and tempestuous gods, exploring the real archaeology and history beneath the myths. From Troy to Ithaca, this is Odysseus like you've never heard him before. Join us on the Ancients from history hit. Listen now and subscribe on your favorite podcast player.
- [17:24]
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- [17:56]
Vanessa Richardson
By the end of 1953, Marilyn Monroe had everything she'd ever wanted. Three hit films, her face on every magazine, and a studio that finally treated her like a star. But her personal life was about to take a turn nobody saw coming. She had met Joe DiMaggio in 1952. He was a baseball legend, recently retired from the New York Yankees. A mutual friend set up a blind date. Marilyn barely cared about baseball, but she liked Joe immediately. He was quiet, traditional, almost old fashioned. After years of Hollywood men who only wanted her for her image, Joe felt like someone solid. They married at San Francisco Francisco city hall on January 14, 1954. Overnight, they became the most famous couple in America. But the marriage didn't last long. The problem was simple. Joe wanted a wife who'd stay home and raise children. But Marilyn was on her way to becoming the most photographed woman alive. The tension between them got worse and worse until it finally cracked open in September 1954. Marilyn was in New York shooting the Seven Year Itch when the director set up a now famous scene. Marilyn was standing over a subway grate, her white halter dress billowing up around her legs as a train rushed past underneath. Hundreds of male spectators showed up to watch, hooting and cheering. Joe was there too, watching from the sidelines. And according to people who are were there, he was humiliated. Some reports say the two of them got into a violent argument back at the hotel that night. Two weeks later, Marilyn filed for divorce. Two years after that, Marilyn married again, this time to a man who couldn't have been more different from Joe DiMaggio. Arthur Miller was one of the most respected playwrights in America, the author of Death of a Salesman and the Crucible. He was Jewish, intellectual and politically progressive. Marilyn, who'd spent her whole life being told she was beautiful but not smart, had been drawn to him. For years. She'd studied his plays and told friends he was the kind of man she wanted to marry. They tied the knot in June 1956, and for a while, this unlikely pairing actually won worked. Miller wrote her a film, the Misfits, as a kind of love letter. He encouraged her to take her craft seriously, but the cracks ran deep. Marilyn desperately wanted children, but during their marriage she had at least two miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy. And then one day, she found one of Miller's notebooks. In it, he allegedly wrote about his disappointment in her including. Including a passage where he called her his. For Marilyn, that was the end. Even with all the fame, the money, the awards, the magazine covers, the one person she thought truly saw her had been writing things like that behind her back. They officially divorced in January 1961. By that point, Marilyn was something more than a movie star. She was the amazing American icon. She'd appeared on the COVID of the first issue of Playboy in 1953. She'd starred in Some Like It Hot, which was later named the greatest American comedy of all time and won a Golden Globe for her performance. She was also doing something nobody else in Hollywood had thought to do. In 1955, she founded her own production company, Marilyn Monroe Productions. It was a direct jab at the studio system that had been underpaying her for years. She wanted better roles, more creative control and more money. And she got it. She was doing something else too. While other stars kept reporters at arm's length, Marilyn invited them in. She talked candidly about her childhood, her ambitions and her insecurities. She joked about her own image that had never happened with a Hollywood star before. She was, in a real sense, the first modern celebrity, the blueprint that every public figure who came after her would borrow from. But all of that success came with a private cost. Marilyn battled severe insomnia, anxiety and depression for most of her adult life. She'd been prescribed her food, first sleeping pills back in the 1940s. And by the early 60s she was deeply dependent on barbiturates, particularly a sleeping pill called Nembutol. She'd started seeing psychiatrists almost daily. She was showing up late to work, she was forgetting her lines. On top of all that, she was incredibly lonely. After three failed marriages, miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy, she was starting to wonder if she'd ever find a real partner. That's when the Kennedys came into her life. Marilyn had been around the Kennedy family for years through a guy named Peter Lawford. Lawford was a British born actor and a member of Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack. But more importantly, he was married to Patricia Kennedy, the sister of John, Robert and Ted. He was the social link between Hollywood, Wood and the Kennedies. By the late 1950s, Lawford was hosting parties at his Malibu beach house where movie stars rubbed shoulders with the country's most powerful politicians. Frank Sinatra was a regular. So was JFK. Marilyn started showing up around 1959 and it was at one of those parties in the early 60s that her relationship with John F. Kennedy reportedly turned into something more. How serious that affair was depends on who you ask. Biographers and Kennedy aides alike have documented it over the years, but it was almost certainly more of an on and off arrangement than a love story. Marilyn was one of many women JFK saw outside his marriage to Jackie. They met at Lawford's parties, at the Kennedy compound in Palm Springs, and according to some sources, even at the White House. But by early 1962, JFK seems to have ended whatever was happening between them. He stopped taking her calls, and by some accounts, when Marilyn kept trying to reach him at the White House, he had her routed to his younger brother instead, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy was a very different man from his brother. He was married with seven children, famously devoted to his family and the face of the administration crackdown on organized crime. But like jfk, Bobby reportedly became involved with Marilyn at some point in 1961 or 1962. Just how involved is something biographers still argue about. Some think the two of them had a full blown affair. Others say they were close, but it never crossed that line. What's not in dispute is that they knew each other and that by the summer of 1962, they were talking on the phone all the time. Marilyn told at least one friend she was in love with Bobby and that she thought he was going to leave his wife for her. But around the same time, JFK was pulling back. Bobby started pulling back, too. He wasn't picking up her calls at the Justice Department, and the more she tried to reach him, the colder the silence got. But none of that had broken into the open yet.
- [25:31]
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- [25:32]
Vanessa Richardson
And on the night of May 19, 1962, it was Bobby's older brother who was watching from a box seat at Madison Square Garden. Marilyn took the stage in front of 15,000 people. She was wearing a flesh colored gown by designer Jean Louis that was so tight she'd been sewn into it. She breathed into the microphone, Happy birthday, Mary. Mr. President Kennedy joked afterward that he could now retire from politics after having had Happy Birthday sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way. It became one of the most iconic moments of his presidency and one of the most analyzed performances of Marilyn's career. It was also one of the last times she would ever be seen on a public stage. On May 19, 1962, Marilyn Monroe sang Happy Birthday to the President of the United States in front of 15,000 people at Madison Square Garden. It was the single most famous performance of her career. It was also the beginning of the end, because while Marilyn was on Stage in New York. She was supposed to be in Hollywood making a movie production on her next film, a comedy called Something's Got to Give had started at 20th Century Fox in April 1962. Marilyn had been calling in sick constantly. She showed up late, she forgot her lines. She'd flown to New York for the Kennedy birthday gala against the studio's orders. When she finally returned to set, you could cut the tension with a knife. The director, George Ku Queen, was furious. The studio was hemorrhaging money and Marilyn herself was exhausted. On June 1, her 36th birthday, she filmed her last scenes. She left work early that night feeling cold. Called in sick the next day and never came back. A week later, on June 8, 1962, 20th Century Fox fired Marilyn Monroe row and sued her for $750,000. For Marilyn, that was the breaking point. She'd bought a small Spanish style bungalow in Brentwood earlier that year. It was the first home she'd ever owned. After the firing, she stopped going out. She stopped seeing most of her old friends. She spent her days inside that house, filling it with Mexican folk art and planning renovations she'd never get to finish. To the people who actually saw her every day, her psychiatrist, her housekeeper, her publicist, she was barely functioning. She'd lost weight. She was relying more heavily on sedatives than ever. She was canceling appointments. Now and then there were flickers of hope. There was talk of a comeback film with Frank Sinatra. And her people were negotiating to get her back on Something's Got to Give. But nobody was sure whether she was about to bounce back or fall apart. And those people in her orbit would come back into the story in a very important and controversial way. Her psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, was one of the most respected psychoanalysts in Los Angeles. He'd treated Tony Curtis, Frank Sinatra and Vivian Lee. But the way he treated Marilyn was, by any standard, strange. He saw her almost every single day. He brought her into his own home for dinners with his wife and kids. He convinced her to buy a house just down the street from his. And in 1961, he placed a woman named Eunice Murray inside Marilyn's home as her live in housekeeper. But Murray wasn't just a maid. She'd previously worked as a psychiatric nurse for Greenson. And she was reporting back to him about Marilyn's moods, her habits, her visitors, everything. Today, this would be considered a massive violation. Greenson's own colleagues later called it a textbook case of countertransference. When a therapist gets too emotionally tangled up with A patient and loses professional distance. Then there was Dr. Hyman Damon Engelberg, MD's regular physician. He was the one writing most of her prescriptions. Between June 7 and August 3, 1962, he and Greenson gave her more than 700 capsules of various sedatives and barbiturates. That's nearly 13 pills a day. On August 3, Engelberg refilled her Nebutol prescription, 25 capsules. Two days later, the bottle would be empty. Saturday, August 4, 1962 started off like any other day. In the morning, Marilyn met with photographer Lawrence Schiller at her home. They were talking about her doing a nude shoot for Playboy. She seemed bright and engaged, like she was looking forward to it. After Schiller left, her publicist Pat Newcomb stopped by. Newcomb had actually stayed over the night before. And then two them of of them were bickering. Eunice Murray would later say there was tension between them all day. Around 4:30pm, Dr. Greenson came over for Marilyn's daily therapy session. He stayed for about two and a half hours. Before he left, he pulled Eunice Murray aside and asked her to sleep at the house that night, which was unusual. Murray normally went home in the evening, but Greenson was worried about leaving Marilyn alone. Alone? Greenson left around 7pm Newcomb left around the same time, maybe a little before. Then. Marilyn went into her bedroom alone. Sometime between 7:30 and 7:45pm the phone rang. It was Peter Lawford, the actor we met earlier, the one married to JFK's sister. He was inviting Marilyn over for dinner at his beach house in Malibu. The call was short and it was strange. According to Lawford, Marilyn's voice was slurred. He could barely understand her. She told him she wasn't coming. And then before she hung up, she said something Lawford never forgot. She said, quote, say goodbye to Pat, Say goodbye to Jack, and say goodbye to yourself, because you're a nice guy. Jack was John F. Kennedy. Pat was Lawford's wife. Wife, JFK's sister. The line went silent. Lawford tried to call back, but he got a busy signal. He panicked and called his agent, a man named Milton Rudin, who also happened to be Maryland's lawyer. Rudin told Lawford to stay put. They didn't want to embarrass Marilyn if she was just drunk or high. So Lawford did nothing. He'd later say he never forgave himself for it. What happened inside Marilyn's house between 8pm on August 4 and 3am on August 5 is one of the most disputed timelines in modern American history. Almost nobody who was there ever told the same version of events twice. The official story, the one Greenson and Murray gave to the police, is one you already know. Around 3am Murray noticed a light under Marilyn's bedroom door. The door was locked. She called Greenson, who smashed a window, climbed in and found Marilyn dead. Then he called Engelberg, and finally the police. Simple enough. The problem is, almost none of it holds up. For starters, Eunice Murray's story kept changing. In her first interview with police, she said she'd noticed the light around midnight, not 3am Then she changed it. Then she changed it back. Decades later, in a 1985 interview with BBC, Murray suddenly admitted on camera that Robert Kennedy had been at the house earlier that day and that he and Marilyn had argued. The interviewer was stunned. Murray had spent 23 years denying that exact thing. She also said something else in that 1985 interview. Asked why nobody called the police for so long, she muttered, why at my age do I still have to cover this thing? She never elaborated. Then there's the timeline itself. According to Sergeant Jack Clemens, the first LAPD officer on the scene, the doctors told him Marilyn had in fact died around 12:30am that meant Greenson and Engelberg had waited nearly four hours to call the police. Their excuse was that they had to get Permission from the 20th Century Fox Publicity department before calling the authorities. Yeah, that's right. They wanted to coordinate with the movie studio before reporting one of their employees dead. And when Sergeant Clemens walked into Marilyn's bedroom, what he saw didn't look like a suicide scene at all. The room was spotless. The bed had freshly washed sheets on it. Eunice Murray was running the washing machine when he arrived at 4 4:30 in the morning. There was another strange detail about the bedroom. There was no glass of water on the nightstand. The water in the house had reportedly been shut off because of a plumbing issue. So how exactly had Marilyn swallowed all those pills? And then there was Marilyn's body. When Clemens saw her, she was lying face down on the bed, arms straight at her sides, legs together. To Clemens, it looked like she'd been posed. Especially if Murray's original account was true, that Greenson had found Marilyn with the phone in her hand. Clemens wasn't naive. He'd worked overdose scenes before. People who overdose on barbiturates don't die in neat, graceful positions. They contort, they reach, they convulse. Clemens later said on the record that he believed Marilyn had been murdered. And he wasn't the only skeptic. Within days, other people started talking. Walt Schaefer, who owned the local ambulance company, claimed one of his crews picked up a still living Marilyn from her house late on August 4th and took her to Santa Monica Hospital. He said she died there and then his crew quietly returned the body to her bedroom to be discovered naturally hours later. There was never any paper trail to come confirm this, but Schaefer stood by his claims. And the autopsy that came next would only raise more questions. That Same afternoon, Sunday, August 5th, Marilyn's body was taken to the Los Angeles County Coroner's office. The autopsy was assigned to a 35 year old deputy medical examiner named Dr. Thomas Noguchi. Noguchi was meticulous. He spent hours examining Marilyn's body. And what he found, or rather what he didn't find, would haunt him for the next six decades. The toxicology report eventually showed that Marilyn had lethal levels of two drugs in her body. She had 4.5 milligrams per deciliter of penobarbital, the generic name for Nembutol, in her blood. She had another 13mg milligrams per deciliter in her liver. She also had 8mg per deciliter of a powerful sedative called chloral hydrate in her blood. To put those numbers in perspective, she had enough Nembutol in her system to have swallowed somewhere between 30 and 40 capsules, plus a massive dose of chloral hydrate on top of it. Based on those details alone, the suicide story made sense. Except Noguchi noticed something he couldn't explain when he opened Marilyn's stomach and small intestine. There were no pills, no residue, no yellow staining from the Nembutol capsules, which were known to leave a dye behind. Nothing. If Marilyn had swallowed dozens of pills within an hour of her death, there should have been something in her digestive tract. Noguchi wanted to run more tests. He wanted to examine the contents of her stomach. He wanted to look at her organs more closely. But he never got the chance. The head toxicologist on the case, a man named Raymond Abernathy, took one look at the fatal blood levels and said the cause of death was obvious. Then he literally threw out Marilyn's stomach contents and other organs before anyone could test them further. For a death this high profile, that's almost unthinkable. The most important physical evidence in the most famous death in Hollywood history, destroyed within days. Decades later, 98 year old Noguchi told biographer An Soon Choi that he was never fully convinced Marilyn had killed herself. He said the moment he saw that empty, empty stomach, alarm bells went off. But by the time he wanted answers, the evidence was already gone, and so was any chance of finding out what really happened to Marilyn.
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- [40:08]
Vanessa Richardson
August 17, 1962, less than two weeks after Marilyn Monroe's body was found, the Los Angeles County Court coroner held a press conference. He announced the official ruling. Marilyn Monroe's death had been, quote, caused by a self administered overdose of sedative drugs and the mode of death was probable suicide. Note that word probable, not certain. Probable. Even the official ruling wasn't definitive. Still, it was enough, I guess. The case was closed. But it wouldn't stay that way. Over the next 20 years, journalists, private investigators and biographers picked apart the official story. Books were written, documentaries were made. By 1982 there was so much public pressure that the Los Angeles County District attorney, John Van de Camp, ordered a formal reinvestigation of the case, it took four months. The assistant district attorney interviewed dozens of people and reviewed thousands of pages of documents. In December of 1982, the DA's office released a 29 page report. Its conclusion? There was no credible evidence to support the idea that Marilyn was murdered. The original ruling of probable suicide or possibly accidental overdose was the most likely explanation. Vander Camp closed the press conference by saying, quote, on the basis of the known facts, permit me to express the faint hope that Marilyn Monroe be permitted to rest in peace. She is entitled to that end quote. But the rest in peace part, that didn't happen either. Because in the more than 60 years since Marilyn's death, several theories about what happened that night have refused to die. So let's walk through them. The simplest explanation is also the official one. She killed herself. Marilyn had a documented history of mental illness. She'd had at least one previous overdose that her psychiatrist was aware of. She was deeply depressed about being fired from her movie about her romantic Life, about turning 36 in an industry that worshiped youth. She was prescribed pills. The bottle was empty. To the people who believe this, everything else is just noise. The second theory is gentler but ends the same way with an accidental overdose. The theory goes like this. Dr. Greenson was trying to wean Marilyn off Nembutol. Dr. Engelberg was still writing her prescriptions. But the two doctors weren't communicating well. And Marilyn, who'd been on barbiturates for almost 20 years, may have just. Just lost track of how much she'd already taken that night, mixed it with chloral hydrate by mistake and never woken up. There's a real case to be made here. Marilyn was making plans. She had a comeback movie in negotiations. She just bought her first house. She wasn't acting like someone who was about to end her life. But then there's the other type of theory. The one that's gotten the most airtime, sold the most books and, and refused to fade for 60 years. The theory that Marilyn Monroe was murdered. In the weeks before she died, Marilyn had been telling friends she was furious with the Kennedys. JFK had cut her off and Bobby had stopped returning her calls. She felt humiliated. According to Bob Slatzer, she told him that if Bobby kept ignoring her quote, I might just hold a press conference. I've certainly got a lot to say. To be clear, Bob is something of a wild card. He claimed he was friends with Marilyn and even alleged that they were briefly married. No biographers back up his claims, but if he's telling the truth, we have to wonder, what did she actually have to say? The tame version is that Marilyn knew about the affairs. She could have humiliated JFK personally and personally politically by making them public. That alone would have been a serious threat to a sitting President. The more controversial version is that Maryland knew classified information. According to several biographers, JFK had a habit of telling her things he wasn't supposed to when they were in bed. Allegedly that included a CIA plot to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro and the administration's secret moves against organized crime. In the wilder corners of the conspiracy world, the list stretches all the way to Roswell, alien technology and the atomic bomb. It's hard to say how much of that is real, but here's what we do know for sure. J. Edgar Hoover's FBI had opened a file on Marilyn Monroe. They were tracking her. They considered her, in their words, a security matter. Whatever was going on between Maryland and the Kennedys, the federal government was paying close attention. And here's the unsettling part. Just over a year after Marilyn died, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Five years after that, in 1968, Robert Kennedy was assassinated too. Three people, all of them in the middle of this story, all dead within six years of each other. But if Marilyn was murdered, who did it? For most people, the prime suspect is Robert F. Kennedy himself. The evidence isn't a smoking gun, but it adds up to something. Bobby was almost certainly in Los Angeles on August 4, 1962. Officially, he was 350 miles away in Northern California at a ranch with his family. But multiple witnesses placed him in LA that weekend. A 20th Century Fox publicist said he saw Kennedy arrive by helicopter. A Beverly Hills police officer said he pulled over a car with Kennedy in the back seat and Peter Lawford at the wheel. And remember, Eunice Murray, Maryland's housekeeper, admitted on camera that Robert Kennedy had come to Marilyn's house that very, very afternoon. Not only that, but she said he and Marilyn had been arguing. And according to one man, that argument was caught on tape. Years later, a private investigator named Fred Otash claimed he'd planted a tiny microphone in Marilyn's phone. According to him, those tapes caught Kennedy and Lawford at the house that night in a heated fight with Marilyn over why Bobby wouldn't want leave his wife for her. But no one's ever confirmed any of it, and the tapes have never surfaced. Then there's the mafia angle. In 1992, a book called Double Cross came out. It was published by Sam Giancana and Chuck Giancana. The brother and godson of Chicago mob boss Sam Mooney Giancana. In it, they made a wild claim. According to the Giancana, Mooney had ordered Marilyn's murder to get back at the Kennedy brothers for their crackdown on organized crime. In their account, four hitmen entered Marilyn's house, subdued her, and administered a lethal dose of barbiturates by enema. If that's true, it would explain why Marilyn's stomach was empty during the autopsy. Not only that, but chloral hydrate is sometimes nicknamed a Mickey Finn. A knockout drink combined with barbiturates absorbed through the colon. It could produce exactly the toxicology results Noguchi found with none of the digestive evidence missing. And then there's the possible CIA connection. This one came from a 1973 biography by Norman Mailer. He claimed that rogue CIA agents murdered Marilyn because they were angry about her affairs affair with RFK. Mailer later went on 60 Minutes and admitted that he'd made the whole thing up to sell books. But the theory didn't fade. Other authors picked it up and added their own details. Some said the CIA killed her as a revenge for the Bay of pigs, the botched 1961 attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro. Others said they wanted to silence her because she was about to leak top secret information. Then there's the even more fringe idea that Marilyn was actually recruited by the CIA to seduce world leaders. There's almost no hard evidence for any of it. But during the Cold War, the CIA really did run programs involving Hollywood, domestic surveillance and political assassination. So the capability was there. It's the motive that's the harder sell. So those are the death by suicide, accidental overdose, murder by Bobby Kennedy, murder by the Mafia, murder by the CIA. I really want to know which one you think is most likely was Marilyn Monroe a deeply troubled woman who finally broke under the weight of everything? Was she failed by her doctors, who'd been writing her prescriptions like candy for years? Or did somebody walk into that Brentwood bungalow on the night of August 4, 1962, and make sure she never made it to morning? Leave a comment wherever you're listening. While the world argued about how Marilyn died, somebody had to take care of her funeral. And in the end, it fell to the most surprising person of all. Joe DiMaggio. Her second husband, the one she'd divorced nearly eight years earlier, got the call. By 1962, he and Marilyn had reconnected. He'd been at her side during her hardest stretches, and he told friends the two of them were planning to get remarried. When the LAPD couldn't figure out who to contact about her body, they reached him. Joe took control of the funeral, and he made a decision that shocked Hollywood. He barred almost every major star, producer, and studio executive from attending. Frank Sinatra, the Lawfords, the Kennedys, the heads of every studio, all blocked at the door. When the studios complained that very important people were being excluded, Joe gave the only response he had. He said, quote, tell them if it was wasn't for them, she'd still be here. End quote. Many think he was talking about Hollywood, the studios that worked her to the bone. Others believe he was referencing the Kennedys, who had toyed with her and tossed her aside. Joe never said outright what he thought happened to Marilyn, but he made it clear who he blamed. For the next 20 years, Joe had fresh flowers delivered to Marilyn. Marilyn's crypt at Westwood Village Memorial park three times a week, every week. He never remarried. When he died in 1999, his last words were reportedly, I'll finally get to see Marilyn. There's a tension at the heart of Marilyn's story that I don't think we've ever really resolved. At the start of this episode, I talked about how she invented the template for the modern celebrity. The openness with the press, the production company, the candid interviews about her insecurities. But there's a darker side to that template, and it's the part nobody really wanted to look at. While she was alive, Marilyn was the first major star to publicly struggle, the first to be photographed at her worst as well as her best. The first to have her addictions, her affairs, and her mental health turned into national tabloid stories. The first to have the public believe they owned a piece of her, and the first to show us what that kind of ownership does to a person. Every conversation we have now about parasocial relationships, about paparazzi culture, about the cost of fame for women in particular. Every one of those conversations traces back one way or another to Maryland. And yet, more than 60 years after her death, we don't argue about what she changed, what she built, the films she made, the production company she created, or the way she fought her studio for better pay. We argue about how she died, but it's worth remembering who she actually was. She was a girl born to a mother with serious mental health issues, raised in 11 foster homes and married off at 16 to escape an orphanage. That same girl somehow grew into the most photographed, most imitated, most fantasized about woman of the 20th century. In 1982, the DA's office asked the public to let her rest in peace. And maybe we should. Maybe Marilyn deserves to be remembered as more than a body in a Brentwood movie bedroom and a stack of timelines that don't add up. But as long as the pills, the phone call, the locked door, and the freshly washed sheets refuse to line up, Norma Jean won't really get the peace she should. And maybe that's the real tragedy. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Vanessa Richardson and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes. Come back next time. We'll hear another story about the real people at the center of the world's most notorious cults, conspiracies and criminal acts. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is a Crime House original. Powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support.
- [54:05]
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Vanessa Richardson
If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media, Rimehouse on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review and follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes listening experience, subscribe to Crime House. Plus. You'll get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts tap, try free at the top of the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes show page. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson, and is a Crime House original. Powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the contest Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes team Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benedon, Natalie Pertsovsky, Lori Marinelli, Alyssa Fox, Elena Johnson, Kaylee Pine and Michael Langsner. Thank you for listening.