Who murdered Marilyn Monroe and why? How was her murder accomplished, the exact and precise method her murderers deployed to silence her? The preceding questions regarding the who, the why and the how, and many others regarding Marilyn’s untimely departure from Planet Earth, have been asked for six decades plus four years, 64 years, practically as long as I have been breathing the oxygen of this planet. Despite the many investigations, the almost innumerable books written about the actress and her tragic death, many claiming to be the final word, and despite a veritable mountain of theories espoused by authors or novelists with a fictional take thereon, it is evident that those questions, at least in the informed percipience of Miryam Moya, have remained un­answered; and so, the newest book written by the declared forensic specialist, an expert crime scene reconstructionist, Miryam promised to fix all the dangling participles and answer all the dangling questions once and for all. The book’s under title contains a bold promise: Miryam’s forensic investigation will expose the truth behind Marilyn’s death.

My first thought was this: considering the lengthy amount of time that has elapsed since Mari­lyn’s death, and considering that many of the written reports and the documents pertaining thereto have been willfully destroyed, purportedly, or inadvertently lost, we have been told; and considering that virtually all of the principle characters in Marilyn’s story are deceased,1Patricia Newcomb, for example, who was Marilyn’s publicist until the movie star died, is 96 years old. Amy Greene, Milton Greene’s widow, is also 96. There are other contemporaries of Marilyn that remain alive, but they are all extremely old.if not deceased, then incredibly old, how could any person, expert or otherwise, actually perform a worthwhile forensic investigation at this point in time, today, now? I submit that performing such an investigation would be a tough job indeed; and so I be­gan to admire Miryam’s ev­i­dent grit and sand, her determination; but my admiration did not endure for very long.

On more than several occasions, I have written and also, in various forms, I have spoken these words, a caution for readers: when evaluating a purported to be non-fiction book about Marilyn Monroe’s death, the appearance of stage props purported to be evidence that the movie star was murdered, and additionally, the testimony from sources evoked by the author of the book, are of paramount im­portance. In fact, their paramount importance cannot be overstated. The appearance of stage props that I have alternately labeled MacGuffins and Weenies, along with the appearance of certain persons that populate a Rouges Gallery of Pre­varicators, will immediately snag my innate skepticism and incredulity and lead to an unshakable dismissal of the book and an unshakable disbelief in anything the author proffers. And that is exactly what transpired as I began to read Miryam’s publication.

My concern also focused on the absence of footnotes, endnotes or proper source notes; and Miryam did not provide an enumerative bibliography, either. However, she made it completely clear that she was a forensic expert, meaning, I pre­sume, that I, and all others who ingest her book, must accept what she asserted without reservations or internal debate—or any actual evidence. Miryam made it completely clear that she knew and understood Marilyn’s predicament; Miryam knew and understood what Marilyn had endured in Hollywood and America, especially peering backward through the kaleidoscope of MeToo; Miryam knew and un­derstood that Marilyn Monroe had become inconvenient to the political power structure of 1962 America. Why? Because both the president and the attorney general had squirmed and wriggled into and through her bed; and because Marilyn remembered what she had overheard being whispered or had been told; and she wrote about what she had overheard being whispered or had been told. Marilyn’s IQ exceeded Einstein’s, according to Miryam; and she possessed a photographic memory (Moya 26&318); but more importantly, perhaps, Marilyn simply re­fused to be mistreated and controlled by despicable but inordinately powerful men. She threatened to expose them for what they actually were—evil incarnate. However, she was warned that if she spoke openly, her words would destroy too much. But evidently, according to Miryam, Marilyn asked herself: What if I do? What if I destroy those who destroy? (Moya 35). A remarkable assertion to say the least, one intimating that Miryam could read Marilyn’s mind.

Only fifteen pages into her text, Miryam evoked the apparition of Marilyn’s numinous diary. According to Miryam, Marilyn’s death was an in­stitutional, chemical and narrative closure, a death that smelled of barbiturates and a missing diary (Moya 15, emphasis mine). The movie star’s death was not a suicide motivated by romance induced pain, or as the novelist Norman Mailer cleverly opined in his novel publication, Marilyn: A Biography, that Marilyn possibly committed suicide in despair at the turn of her love, rejection by the two-faced and heartless Robert F. Kennedy (Mailer KE:VIII). Immediately I knew the senescent, well-worn pedestrian footpath Miryam’s recent publication would tread, in all probability, that is; and I certainly understood very well what appeared to be an admission on the book’s first page: Certain scenes and dialogues have been narratively reconstructed for literary and contex­tual purposes. I feared, understandably, that once again I was walk­ing into a world of literarily reconstructed and contextualized creative non-fiction which would necessarily include some Maileresque factoids.

While Miryam’s publication is a curious blend of conjecture and innuendo, perhaps one partially hidden curiosity creates a subtle but imposing irony. By espousing that Marilyn was murdered, murdered either by or as a result of some heartless orders delivered by the then Attorney General of the United States, Robert Kennedy, with the consent of his older brother, of course, the then President of the United States, John Fitzgerald, Miryam has defended and advanced the now almost universally accepted version of events leading to Marilyn’s death, the version actually sanctioned and promoted by the current media and power elite.

I have written what I will here label historical corrections or clarifications about most, if not all, of the yarns unspooled by the unsavory characters that authors, especially those with a conspiracy axe to grind, have deployed as their essential sources. It’s a backwater slough, a foggy bog into which those authors have willfully dredged: Miryam did not just dredge; she fell headlong into that foggy boggy quagmire. That will become clear as we proceed.