Page 74 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

At the County Morgue, Coroner Theodore J. Curphey gives his “presumptive opinion,” pending an autopsy, that “death was due to an overdose of some drug.”

The case is assigned to a “suicide team.”

Now her prediction has become eerily, horribly true.

Was it an accidental overdose? Or was it deliberate? And if so, was it suicide … or murder?

Says LAPD homicide detective Sergeant Jack Clemmons, “It was the most obviously staged death scene I had ever seen. The pill bottles on her bedside table had been arranged in neat order and the body was deliberately positioned.”

Peter Lawford quickly instructs investigator Fred Otash to “do anything to remove anything incriminating” at Marilyn’s house that could connect her to Jack and Bobby Kennedy.

But “incriminating” covers a lot of potential ground.

During an interview with the BBC, Mrs. Murray says words to the effect of “Oh, why do I have to keep covering this up?”

“Covering what up, Mrs. Murray?”

“Well of course Bobby Kennedy was there [on August 4], and of course there was an affair with Bobby Kennedy.”

On the other hand, Mrs. Murray was on the verge of losing her job. Marilyn had been trying to get rid of her.

“I can’t flat out fire her,” Monroe had told Dr. Greenson. “Next thing would be a book— Secrets of Marilyn Monroe by Her Housekeeper . She’d make a fortune spilling what she knows and she knows too damn much.”

The Associated Press reports, 2 CLOSE TO MARILYN LEAVE HOLLYWOOD .

Eunice Murray leaves town with no forwarding address.

The Arthur Jacobs Agency acknowledges that Pat Newcomb, formerly employed as Marilyn’s personal publicist, “is no longer with us.” According to the Hollywood Reporter, she’s accompanied Peter and Pat Kennedy Lawford to the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port.

At the autopsy, John Miner, who heads the medical-legal section in the Los Angeles DA’s office, wants to know more.

It is established protocol for the chief medical examiner to conduct celebrity autopsies, but inexplicably, junior medical examiner Dr. Thomas Noguchi performs the procedure on the five-four, 118-pound actress.

Dr. Noguchi’s examination is meticulous, and his subject clearly makes an impression, stirring the pathologist to quote the Italian poet Petrarch: “It’s folly to shrink in fear if this is dying. For death looked lovely in her lovely face.”

Bearing in mind that “when you are a coroner, you start from the assumption that every body you examine might be a murder victim,” Dr. Noguchi examines Marilyn and detects neither needle marks indicating a drug injection nor signs of physical violence beyond a fresh bruise just above her left hip.

The autopsy confirms blood toxic with barbiturates, and also a stomach empty of food particles, even the yellow dye that coats Nembutal capsules.

But Dr. Noguchi never performs the full range of organ tests, stopping short after analyzing the blood and the liver.

“I am sure that this could have cleared up a lot of the subsequent controversy, but I didn’t follow through as I should have. ”

The forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht interprets the autopsy as “acute combined drug toxicity, chloral hydrate and Nembutal.”

Miner is convinced that someone administered an enema to Marilyn containing the lethal combination of Nembutal and the sedative chloral hydrate.

Ralph Greenson is also an unofficial “suspect.” Miner claims that the psychiatrist allows him to listen to sessions Greenson has taped with Marilyn, sessions filled with conflicting references to a hopeful future and unresolved feelings for both of the Kennedy brothers.

“I tell you, doctor,” Marilyn says in one session.

“I’m glad he [Jack] has Bobby. It’s like the Navy—the president is the captain and Bobby is the executive officer.

Bobby would do absolutely anything for his brother and so would I, I will never embarrass him.

As long as I have memory, I have John Fitzgerald Kennedy. ”

Marilyn asserts, “As you see, there is no room in my life for him [Bobby]. I guess I don’t have the courage to face up to it and hurt him. I want someone else to tell him it’s over,” she says. “I tried to get the president to do it, but I couldn’t reach him.”

But Greenson then destroys the tapes, so there is only Miner’s recollection to go on.

“When they found Marilyn Monroe,” the Los Angeles Times reports, “one of her hands grasped a telephone. Perhaps she had called for help. She’d been calling for help all her life.”

It may have provided some vestige of comfort.

Not long before she died, she’d confided in the journalist W. J. Weatherby. “Do you know who I’ve always depended on? Not strangers, not friends. The telephone! That’s my best friend.”