But Dr Karch believes that the mystery can still be solved. All it would take is for someone to open her crypt at the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery, take a few strands of her famously bleached-blonde hair and test it for poisons or paralysing drugs. Dr Karch was also interested in the drugs found at her bedside, saying that the peach-coloured pills in one bottle have never been identified.
Although Carroll’s investigation did not go as far as opening the crypt, he concluded that she was not murdered by the Kennedys or anyone else.
“We uncovered absolutely no evidence of an intentional criminal act with respect to her death,” he said. “No evidence of their involvement in her death ever came up with the exception that she was despondent. The cause of her despondency could have been one of the brothers. But in terms of involvement with a criminal activity, absolutely none.”
Newly released papers say that Marilyn had secretly obtained a large stock of Nembutal and chloral hydrate. So her death was either suicide or an accident.
“If there was no murder, there was nothing to cover up except embarrassing information or connections,” said Carroll. Although he admits that her death had political implications for the Kennedys, that lay beyond the scope of his investigation.
Theories of how Marilyn met her death abound. In 1985, the BBC produced the documentary,
The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe
, later shown in the United States under the title,
Say Goodbye to the President
. In it, Eunice Murray said: “When the doctor arrived, she was not dead.”
Off camera, the narrator Anthony Summers heard her say: “Why, at my age, do I still have to cover this thing?”
In his 1993 biography of Monroe, author Donald Spoto concluded that Dr Greenson arranged for Marilyn to have a chloral hydrate enema to help her sleep, unaware that Hyman Engelberg was still prescribing Nembutal. According to Milton Rudin, on the night of her death, Greenson said: “God damn it. Hy gave her a prescription I didn’t know about.” The two drugs working together killed her.
Dr Engelberg was having marital difficulties at the time and failed to inform Greenson that he was still prescribing Nembutal. Spoto believes that the enema was administered by Eunice Murray who, like Greenson, had no idea that it would be fatal. Consequently, Greenson, Engelberg and Murray – the three people on the scene when the police turned up – all had reasons to avoid telling the truth to the authorities.
Spoto said that this account of Marilyn’s death was supported by the autopsy report.
In Marilyn’s blood count, “there were eight milligrams of chloral hydrate and four and a half milligrams of Nembutal,” he said, “but in her liver there was a count of thirteen milligrams, a much higher concentration of Nembutal.”
Spoto maintained that the ratio of Nembutal found in the blood compared to that in the liver suggested that Marilyn lived for many hours after the ingestion of that drug. While Marilyn was alive and mobile during the day, her body was metabolizing the Nembutal. It had ended up in the liver, which was removing it from her blood stream and beginning the process of excretion. The barbiturates that killed her were absorbed over a period of not minutes but hours. This was consistent with what Greenson called her “somewhat drugged” condition. That the final overdose was administered by an enema was indicated by the “purplish discolouration” of the colon.
According to Donald Wolfe, author of
The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe
in 1998, published as
The Assassination of Marilyn Monroe
in the UK, Marilyn knew something that could possibly bring down President Kennedy. She knew of his involvement with Sam Giancana, the mafioso who had helped him get elected in 1960. They even shared a girlfriend, Judith Campbell Exner. Wolfe said that Eunice Murray’s son-in-law Norman Jefferies was also in Marilyn’s house on the evening of 4 August. According to Wolfe, Jefferies claimed that between 9.30 and 10 p.m., Robert Kennedy and two other men came to the door and ordered them to leave the house. Jefferies said they went to a neighbour’s home and waited until the men left at around 10.30 p.m. When they returned, Jefferies said that he saw Marilyn naked, lying face down on her bed. She looked like she was dead. Eunice called an ambulance and then called Dr Greenson. Jefferies said he then saw Lawford and Pat Newcomb arrive at the house. In a panic, they called Robert Kennedy. The ambulance company chief said that Marilyn was in fact in a coma when the ambulance arrived. She was taken to Santa Monica Hospital, where she died. Her body was returned to her house as part of a cover-up.
Jefferies’s account is partly corroborated by Marilyn’s neighbour Elizabeth Pollard. She told police that she saw Robert Kennedy with two unidentified men approach Marilyn’s house at about 6 or 7 p.m. One of them was carrying a black medical case.
According to Wolfe, Pollard’s story was discredited by police and left out of their account of the investigation. However, Pollard was not alone. Anthony Summers said that she was playing cards with several friends who all recognized Kennedy when he drove up to Marilyn’s house.
In 2005, former Los Angeles County District Attorney John Milner told the
Los Angeles Times
that Marilyn was not suicidal, citing tapes that she had recorded for Dr Greenson that Greenson had played him. The following year, CBS’s
48 Hours
confirmed that Marilyn did have an affair with John Kennedy – and possibly Robert Kennedy – and that she was considered a security risk by the FBI.
Later FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act confirmed Marilyn’s affair with Robert Kennedy and that he had promised to leave his wife and marry her. Among the documents, Australian film director Philippe Mora said that he found evidence that Marilyn was tricked into killing herself as part of a plot hatched by Robert Kennedy. It was in a report, dated 19 October 1964, written by a former FBI special agent and headed “Robert F. Kennedy”. The agent maintained that she was given the means to fake a suicide attempt to gain sympathy and went ahead on the understanding that she would be found in time and have her stomach pumped. Instead, those in on the conspiracy – Peter Lawford, Dr Greenson, Eunice Murray and Pat Newcomb – left her to die.
The motive was to silence Monroe, who had realized that Robert Kennedy was not going to leave his wife and threatened to go public about their affair. Monroe also believed that Kennedy had reneged on his pledge to “take care of everything” after her contract with 20th Century Fox was cancelled and they had “unpleasant words” on the phone.
The report says that that Lawford “knew from Marilyn’s friends that she often made suicide attempts and that she was inclined to fake a suicide attempt in order to arouse sympathy”. He had made “special arrangements” with Greenson, who wrote a prescription for sixty tablets of Seconal. This prescription was “unusual in quantity”, the report says. Eunice Murray left the pills on Monroe’s nightstand.
When Robert Kennedy returned to San Francisco, the report says, he “made a telephone call to Peter Lawford to find out if Marilyn was dead yet”. Lawford called once and spoke to Monroe, “then checked again later to make sure she did not answer”. According to the report, Eunice Murray then called Dr Greenson to tell him that Marilyn had taken the pills.
“Marilyn expected to have her stomach pumped and get sympathy for her suicide attempt,” it continued. “The psychiatrist left word for Marilyn to take a drive in the fresh air but did not come to see her until after she was known to be dead.”
Within forty-eight hours of Marilyn being found dead, the report says, Peter Lawford and Pat Newcomb flew to the Kennedy compound at Hyannisport, Massachusetts.
The former agent warned that he could not evaluate the authenticity of the information. However, the report was circulated to five top FBI officers, including J. Edgar Hoover and his deputy Clyde Tolson.
Mora said that he was not sure what to make of the report.
“Is all this the elaborate dirty tricks of Kennedy haters from decades ago, or are we getting closer to the historical truth?” he said.
Then in 2011 came the extraordinary claim that Marilyn had spent her last evening alive in Frank Sinatra’s lodge on Lake Tahoe, Nevada, with Mafia boss Sam Giancana, who made a last ditch attempt to stop her going public about her affairs with the Kennedys. She had been flown there on board Sinatra’s private jet.
The claim was made on tapes recorded by George Masters, Monroe’s hair and make-up stylist, in the month before his death in 1998. The cassettes were found by his nephew, sixty-year-old sales consultant Jeff Platts. In a frail voice, Masters can be heard on the recordings saying: “The night before she died, the last time I saw her, was in Lake Tahoe at the Cal-Neva Lodge. She was there with Sam Giancana, who was the head of the Mafia.”
Masters flew back to Los Angeles with Marilyn and dropped her off at her home at around 9 a.m. It has been documented that Marilyn had been at Sinatra’s lakeside lodge two weekends before her death. According to Masters, she was called back for a one-to-one chat with Giancana, a friend of Sinatra.
Platt said: “George specifically told me that Marilyn spent the evening with Sam Giancana. The only other person he mentioned that was there was [the singer] Buddy Greco. No Frank Sinatra, no Dean Martin. George also said that the person she was really in love with at that moment was Sam Giancana.”
On the tapes, Masters made clear why he thought she died.
“It was because of the Kennedys,” he said. “I really think the FBI did it.”
He also said that she had been moved both before and after she died.
“Did you know she was pronounced dead,” he said, “and then they brought her back to the house, and she was still alive, and they took her back to the hospital, and brought her back home, and then the coroners came over, and they found her dead in another bed – somebody moved her?”
However implausible that may seem, even more bizarre conspiracy theories circulate. In one, Marilyn was pregnant. Although she had been seeing other men, she was sure that the father was either John or Robert Kennedy. After she called the Justice Department to tell Robert, he changed the phone number so she could not call again. Peter Lawford was left to sort out the mess. He took Marilyn to Lake Tahoe to have an abortion. There is even some suggestion that she was kidnapped and underwent the termination forcibly, but she was too full of drugs and booze at the time to tell the difference. She attended some orgies there with Lawford and Sinatra and was filmed, possibly to blackmail her into keeping quiet about her affairs with the Kennedys. By then, she was drinking champagne all day, after breakfasting on Bloody Marys and amphetamines.
An ambulance was seen outside her bungalow before the alarm had been raised. A helicopter was heard overhead and friends who tried to investigate her death independently received death threats.
J
UST AFTER
9
A.M
. on 19 April 1995, a yellow Ryder Rental truck pulled into a parking area outside the Alfred P. Murrah Building, the US Federal Government complex at 200 NW Fifth Street in Oklahoma City. The driver stepped down from the truck’s cab and casually walked away. Two minutes later, at 9.02 a.m., the truck exploded, destroying one-third of the nine-storey building, killing 168 people, including nineteen children, and injuring 800 more with 490 hospitalized. One unborn child was also killed. It was the most deadly act of terrorism on American soil before 9/11.
The blast was so powerful it lifted pedestrians from the ground. One Japanese tourist said that it was “worse than the worst quake because there was no initial warning, no noise to say something terrible is going to happen. It just hit.”
The truck had been loaded with 5,000 lbs (2,268 kg) of home-made explosives. It created a fireball that briefly outshone the sun. Inside the building, a few lucky people had been away from their desks fetching coffee or delivering documents to another part of the building. But those in the offices above the blast stood no chance. The children’s day-care centre next to the bomb was devastated. Upper floors fell on those beneath them, causing a progressive collapse that crushed everything and everyone below. The north side of the building crumpled, sending deadly shards of glass flying that maimed passers-by blocks away. The windows were shattered in 258 buildings nearby. The broken glass alone was responsible for 5 per cent of the deaths and 69 per cent of the injuries outside the Murrah Building.
The explosion made a crater 8 ft (2.4 m) deep and 30 ft (9.1 m) wide. Traffic signs and parking meters were ripped from the sidewalk. The blast damaged or destroyed 324 buildings within a sixteen-block radius. Ten collapsed at the time and a further thirteen were later condemned as unsafe. The explosion destroyed or burnt eighty-six cars, causing further explosions from the vehicles’ gas tanks and tyres. It could be heard and felt up to 55 miles (89 km) away. Seismometers at Science Museum Oklahoma in Oklahoma City, 4.3 miles (6.9 km) away, and in Norman, Oklahoma, 16.1 miles (25.9 km) away, registered 3.0 on the Richter scale. Three square miles (7.8 km
2
) of downtown Oklahoma City were devastated, leaving hundreds of people homeless and closing down scores of businesses; 50,000 people had to be evacuated. In all, the Oklahoma City bombing was estimated to have caused at least $652 million worth of damage. The Murrah Building, which had to be demolished, was alone worth $30 million.
Sirens blared as rescue workers rushed to the scene. The first were there within two minutes. Firefighters, ambulance men and volunteers alike clawed through the rubble to dig out the wounded and remove the dead. A command post was set up in a parking lot at NW Sixth Street and Harvey.
Immediately following the blast, the Oklahoma City Police Department Headquarters, which itself had been damaged, was evacuated. A bomb search was conducted, but no device was found. Civilian personnel were permitted to return to their assignments or go to a blood institute and donate blood. A temporary morgue was set up in the playground of the Murrah Building’s day-care centre. Later it was moved to the first Methodist Church located at NW Fourth and Robinson.