THE FORBIDDEN AUTOPSY OF MARILYN MONROE
The Forensic Investigation That Exposes the Truth Behind Her Death
My Opening Salvo of Observations
The house is wrapped in bougainvillea, as if the plants themselves knew how to cover what still hurts. The air in Brentwood carries that warm calm of neighborhoods where facades smile while the ground beneath hides secrets poorly buried.
Miryam Moya1
The preceding epigraph represents a typical theme and rhetorical device deployed by Miryam Moya in her recently published analysis of Marilyn Monroe’s death, a book copyrighted, released and made available for purchase on the one-hundredth anniversary of movie star’s birth. The author, a declared forensic expert, attempts to metaphorically include Fifth Helena Drive and its geography—Marilyn’s modest hacienda, Brentwood’s breeze rustled trees and the summer heat, the shimmering sidewalks, the shimmering asphalt pavement of the narrow cul-de-sac, its fenced houses, unaware of the decent lives living within them but evidently aware of the sixty-four-year-old murder enacted in their midst—the author metaphorically invests that geography with an undercurrent of evil and mute secrecy, as if the inanimate objects could reveal the poorly buried truth about Marilyn Monroe’s death. If only they would comply. If only those objects were not participants, alongside the middle Kennedy brothers and all the Large Letter Acronyms available to the powerful elite protected by the American Government. If only they were not participants in a gigantic plot and a jarring murder perpetrated to silence the world’s most famous blonde woman. The metaphors, the rhetorical devices are interesting, I must admit, but I expected a forensic analysis, a forensic investigation, to be scientific, not poetic, to be objective, not subjective.
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,2if 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 as a possible reason why Marilyn took her own life, a 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 and pedestrian footpath Miryam’s 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.
A Cast of Unsavory and Disreputable Characters
While researching and composing Murder Orthodoxies, I learned a significant amount about the complexities of Marilyn’s life; but I also learned a significant amount about the cast of unsavory and disreputable characters who essentially framed the story of Marilyn Monroe’s tragic and untimely death. Conspiracists authors, for decades, have relied on a core group of fantasists and tarradiddlists that are the very embodiment of the descriptive absurd.
It is impossible to discuss Marilyn Monroe’s death without also discussing Robert Slatzer, for example. Slatzer was an unattractive and portly man who asserted that he married America’s most beautiful and its fastest rising cinema star on October the 4th in 1952. Their wedding, according to Slatzer, known in the Marilyn Community as The Frog, occurred south of the border in Tijuana, Mexico; but the marriage endured for but a weekend.
Similarly, a discussion of Frank Capell also becomes necessary for any truthful discussion of Marilyn’s death. Capell began the mythology of the illicit romance and intimate affair starring Marilyn Monroe and Robert Kennedy, began the absurd mythology of Robert’s involvement in her probable murder. Capell’s pamphlet, The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe, published in 1964, was a political hand grenade lobbed at and intended to damage, possibly even to derail, Robert Kennedy’s senatorial campaign train before, in 1968, his train carried him all the way to Washington, DC. Capell’s overtly political pamphlet was thin, only sixty-nine pages of innuendo and cleverly worded but unsupported accusations; and likewise, the pamphlet was thin on actual evidence, as thin as a bowl of depression era soup. Nothing in Capell’s pamphlet proved Marilyn and Robert Kennedy were even lovers, much less that the former attorney general was involved in her death. Still, Capell’s absurd literary machinations made the right wing zealot an essential gear in the Marilyn-Was-Murdered machinery and its associated mythology.
Many additional characters and testifiers easily fall into the category of unsavory and disreputable; they contribute a certain complexity to the story of Marilyn’s death that simply cannot be neglected, although each and all of the conspiracists authors have engaged in a special type of neglect pertaining thereto. Those authors have presented the testimony of the unsavory and disreputable characters regarding Marilyn’s death as factual; and yet they neglected to reveal anything at all about the character of the characters. That neglect is a disregard for the historical facts; that neglect should be indicted; that neglect should then be prosecuted as a disdain and contempt for the truth. Additionally, due to some odd but nonetheless complex entanglements of the unsavory and disreputable characters, writing an uncomplicated critique of Miryam’s book will not be an easy to accomplish task; but I will endeavor to achieve at least a reasonable facsimile of simplicity and clarity.
Sgt Jack Clemmons
Since Sgt Jack Clemmons was the first unsavory and disreputable character to step into Marilyn’s hacienda on the morning of August the 5th, he is the logical starting point. According to Miryam, when the police officer arrived at Fifth Helena and entered Marilyn’s modest home, he did not walk into a virgin scene. He walked into a scene already interpreted. Already summarized. Already translated. Eunice Murray, the first great narrator of that night, so apprised Miryam, opened the hacienda’s front door and led the police officer through the house like someone who had already rehearsed the route in her mind. She did not guide him toward uncertainty. She guided him toward a conclusion. Miryam may be an expert forensic specialist, but, as I suggested earlier, I doubt that she has the ability to read minds or that she has the ability to remote view, in retrograde, sixty-four years into the past. And too, Eunice Murray must have walked the few steps from that entry door through Marilyn’s compact living room and into her even more compact bedroom more than just many times: that being the case, why would the housekeeper need to mentally rehearse walking that route, one requiring just a few steps? Miryam’s overly and overtly dramatic characterization insinuated that Mrs. Murray had already assumed a behavioral mode of deceit and dishonesty, an insinuation that Miryam expanded: Sgt Clemmons did not enter a bedroom: he entered a narrative: and one not of his creation (Moya 19-20). That short and brief walk from entry door to bedroom door was the housekeepers first great narration, her first great lie, albeit wordless.
While Miryam’s absolution of Sgt Clemmons—he did not create the scene he encountered in Marilyn’s bedroom that Sunday morning—an absolution that may contain a kernel of truth, Miryam cannot absolve him for creating more than just a few narratives that negatively and grossly impacted the future interpretations of what actually transpired on the evening of August the 4th and the morning of August the 5th in 1962. I will only discuss a few.
As Marilyn’s corpse reposed on her bed inside her bedroom, Sgt Clemmons searched her hacienda, although he was only on site for approximately fifteen minutes. The police office discovered the housekeeper folding laundry, with the washing machine and dryer running. For Robert Slatzer’s 1992 publication, The Marilyn Files, Sgt Clemmons reported that Mrs. Murray was in another section of the house doing laundry, washing sheets: he could hear that the laundry equipment was going (Slatzer Files 6). During interviews with the conspiracist author Donald Wolfe, in 1993 and again in 1995, the sergeant reported that he searched through the sparsely furnished house, which seemed rather small and inelegant for the home of a film star. While searching, he found Marilyn’s housekeeper in the service porch off the kitchen, where both the washer and the dryer were running (Wolfe Last Days 11). The image is brutal, assessed Miryam. Not because it is picturesque, but because it is procedural. Because while there is a body in a room whose death has not yet been legally established, any act of cleaning, organizing, or handling becomes something else entirely: potential interference (Moya 21). Here’s a question: was Eunice inside the house proper or outside in the service porch off the kitchen? (emphasis mine).
Similar to Miryam, Sgt Clemmons interpreted Eunice’s domestic activity as an act of evidence eradication, an act of interference and control. However, I must clarify that the sergeant did not report Eunice’s manipulative control of Marilyn’s murder scene contemporaneously. When the LAPD officer, Sgt Robert Byron, arrived at Fifth Helena at 5:45 AM and assumed control of the scene and the death investigation, Sgt Clemmons did not report or even mention Eunice’s domestic activities. When Robert Slatzer, for his 1974 Marilyn apocrypha, interviewed the then disgraced LAPD officer, to be clarified later, the former sergeant did not recount the automatic washer and dryer episode for Marilyn’s counterfeit weekend husband. More than twenty years would arrive and depart before Sgt Clemmons began to recount what he had observed Eunice doing that Sunday morning. His belated recounting began in 1985; he would mention what he considered to be Eunice’s odd activity many, many times thereafter; and yet, with each recitation, Sgt Clemmons added a detail here and a detail there: Eunice was operating a vacuum cleaner; she was cleaning this or that; she was dutifully wiping and arranging, fashioning Marilyn’s modest hacienda into a residence of cleanliness and order. Eventually, Sgt Clemmons simply began to declare that Marilyn’s hacienda was unusually neat; it appeared as if many of the objects that the house contained had been picked-up, cleaned and then arranged; that there was nothing out of place; that cleanliness and order were everywhere; that even Marilyn’s bed clothes had been properly, if not perfectly arranged; that the many prescription vials on her bedside table had been precisely organized; that a chaotic scene implied suicide but an orderly scene implied murder, most certainly an illogical and false correlation.
As the photographs taken by the police photographers, and professional photographers who, incredibly, were allowed to enter Marilyn’s hacienda and bedroom that tragic morning, Marilyn’s residence was not neat and orderly—her remodeling efforts had created some debris, as is commonplace when a residence is being remodeled—and most certainly, as one police photograph clearly confirmed, Marilyn’s tiny bedside table was disorganized, cluttered with several unusual objects and several prescription vials. Her bed clothes were in complete disarray. Law enforcement’s bedside table photograph would be used to confirm that another assertion by the first policeman to view Marilyn’s body was also false.
Miryam repeated the assertion by Sgt Clemmons that he could not find a drinking glass in Marilyn’s bedroom or nearby bathroom. It struck him [Sgt Clemmons] as strange that in a supposed oral overdose there was no drinking glass in the room. Strange that the water supply in the house was shut off due to maintenance (Moya 22-23). Each and every conspiracist author who has presented a murder orthodoxy has also presented a cropped version of that bedside table photograph; and that cropped version conveniently excludes what is clearly a drinking glass sitting on the floor between the table and Marilyn’s bed, pictured in the panel below. Additionally, sitting on the floor to the left of the bedside table is a jorum that Marilyn purchased during her recent furniture shopping excursion to Mexico. Upturned and placed over the neck of the Mexican water pitcher is a matching drinking vessel. I do not know if that colorfully decorated jorum held any water; but a reasonable contention is this: it could have.
Suffer me to put a period to the washing machine and no water mythology, the mythology that appears to support the theory that Marilyn could not have swallowed the drug-filled capsules that killed her.
Whether the domestic water supply to 12305 Fifth Helena had been deactivated or not is of no importance whatsoever regarding her ingestion of pills. Marilyn could have ingested the pills with a glass of milk or Coca Cola or fruit juice; and even though we know she did not consume any alcohol that day, she could have swallowed the pills with a sparkly Dom Pérignon chaser. Both Donald Spoto and Gary Vitacco-Robles reported that she stood in her kitchen Saturday morning, within the open doorway of her cool refrigerator, and drank a glass of grapefruit juice for breakfast. Besides, if the water supply to Marilyn’s hacienda had been deactivated, how could Mrs. Murray have been operating a washing machine? Well, in fact, and importantly, she could not have been; but the real proof that Mrs. Murray was not doing the laundry as asserted by Sgt Jack Clemmons follows hereafter—Marilyn did not even own an automatic washer and dryer. In fact, Marilyn’s house was not even equipped with built-in washing machine connections or a thru-the-wall dryer vent, which is understandable, since her hacienda had been constructed in 1929, about 25 years before automatic washers and dryers became fixtures in American homes. Other acknowledged Marilyn Monroe experts, April VeVea3for instance, have written about and permanently discredited Sgt Clemmons’ story; but the final proof that Sgt Clemmons’ washing machine testimony was a fabrication, the final fact is this: Marilyn used a professional laundry service, proven by extant receipts, pictured below.
Marilyn used CLEANERS A A LAUNDRY service, as the above receipts clearly indicate. Please note that the customer’s name inscribed on the receipts was E. Murray: Eunice. Most certainly, like most if not all women, Marilyn hand washed some of her delicate under garments; but she did not need an automatic washing machine for that task. Receipts published here with the gracious permission of Scott Fortner, The Marilyn Monroe Collection.
The LAPD snapped the now famous photograph, pictured below, on the morning of August the 5th. Clearly, Marilyn’s small bedside table and all the objects that rested thereon were not perfectly arranged. not even neatly arranged; and just as clearly, a drinking glass rested on the floor between the trash can and bed. The Mexican jorum rested on the floor near the wall and to the left of the table. Upturned and placed over the neck of the jorum is a drinking vessel. I have seen a color photograph of that jorum: it is colorfully decorated with shades of red and brown.
I must denote at this point, Fifth Helena Drive did not have a service porch off the kitchen as asserted by Sgt Clemmons according to Donald Wolfe. Drawings that Marilyn commissioned for her kitchen remodeling did not indicate a service porch and the listing of new appliances that the actress planned to purchase, for her remodeling, did not include a washer or a dryer. Additionally, when the hacienda was sold to the Nunez family after Marilyn’s death, the written declaration of appliances included in the sale did not include a washer or a dryer.
One final comment regarding the washing machine construct. Later in her text, Miryam wrote: […] if Marilyn committed suicide, why […] didn’t she vomit […]? (Moya 36). Miryam’s argument appeared to be thus: Marilyn’s death was not a suicide: Marilyn’s death was a homicide, so all the machinations enacted by Eunice Murray, Dr. Ralph Greenson and Dr. Hy Engelberg that morning were designed to suggest and support death by suicide. Sgt Clemmons even alleged, several years later, that the drinking glass in the police photograph was surreptitiously placed there by the three conspirators after he left the scene; or as the zealot Frank Capell would allege in 1964, Marilyn’s death was a murder dressed up to look like an accident or suicide, dressed up by Communist Agents dispatched by the dangerous Commie Robert Kennedy (Capell 68). So, if vomit or gastric foam or stomach reflux would have clearly pointed to the mode of death the conspirators needed or desired to confirm, why would they wash Marilyn’s sheets, and in so doing, remove that confirming evidence? That tactic seems to be patently illogical.
Be that as it may but most certainly, Mrs. Murray was not doing Marilyn’s laundry on the morning of August the 5th in 1962. Sgt Jack Clemmons fabricated the entire scenario. Sgt Clemmons will reappear herein later.
Eunice Murray, Robert Slatzer, Inez Melson and The Strip of Light
Ohio born newspaper reporter, writer and small time movie dilettante Robert Franklin Slatzer, appeared in the Realm of Marilyn in 1952 while she was filming Niagara. Using his press credentials, he finagled passes that allowed him to access a few filming locations, which he used to an odd and perverse advantage. After coercing Marilyn to pose with him for a few photographs, making a slight nuisance of himself,4Robert F virtually disappeared until 1973 when publicity in the form of magazine and newspaper articles along with a synopsis of a soon to be controversial book, The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe, its authorship credited to Slatzer, began to appear here and there across the nation.Twelve years after Marilyn’s death, in 1974, Slatzer’s book appeared on the shelves of brick and mortar book shops in America. In 1975, Slatzer released another edition of the same book but under a different title, The Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe, a title that evoked the title of another book that had been published in 1964, written by Frank Capell, The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe. Eventually the lives of Slatzer and Capell became entwined and both men will forever be connected to the death of the famous movie star; and their connection will forever be one of adulteration because each man added the pollutant of untruth. Remember, Slatzer claimed that he was married to Marilyn for three days in 1952. The possibility that Marilyn Monroe would have married Robert Slatzer, even for just a few days, during the time of her intimate relationship with Mr. Baseball, Joe DiMaggio, was and is patently absurd. More about that absurdity will appear later.
Miryam evoked the name of Robert Slatzer early in her narratively reconstructed account of Marilyn’s death. The expert crime scene reconstructionist mentioned the light under the door conundrum, the hotly debated narrow strip of light visible beneath Marilyn’s bedroom door. Originally, Mrs. Murray testified that this visible strip of light triggered her moderate alarm, which occurred at approximately 12:30 AM on August the 5th; but, as was often the case with Eunice Murray, she altered her story many years after the fact: she changed the trigger of her moderate alarm from the visible strip of light to a visible telephone cord passing under the bedroom door. The story of the light under the door collapses, Miryam asserted,
when you examine the layout of the house and the thickness of the carpeting. Robert Slatzer, a friend of Marilyn’s and one of the men who later returned to the residence to review details of the scene, observed this days later alongside Inez Melson, administrator of Marilyn’s estate and a key figure in the management of her immediate affairs. The newly installed carpet made it so difficult for the door to close properly that it would have been virtually impossible to see light beneath it (Moya 21: emphasis mine).
The first mistake Miryam made was declaring that Robert Slatzer was a friend of Marilyn’s. Marilyn and Slatzer were not friends. In fact, Marilyn and Slatzer were not even what might be termed distant acquaintances, as I will clarify as we proceed. Now, I do not want to quibble over the choice of words in the preceding quotation because I often break Mark Twain’s Golden Rule of Writing: I often employ the second cousin of the correct word. Still, according to Merriam-Webster’s on-line dictionary, virtually means practically, as in almost; very close to but not completely. Was a visible passage of light beneath the bedroom door possible or not?
Occasionally, during my tenure as a practicing architect, I found myself involved in projects that required dark rooms or other special function rooms from which the infiltration of light had to be completely occluded. Preventing the passage of light is difficult and requires the use of precise, specially designed and installed seals. A deep pile, wool carpet, which the new carpet in Marilyn’s bedroom was, and a thirty-three-year-old wooden door with a snug fit against the carpeting would not have sufficed. Besides, as the photograph below clearly demonstrates, a strip of light was visible beneath Marilyn’s bedroom door.
Taken in the early 1960s, the above photograph clearly revealed that light could be seen beneath Marilyn’s bedroom door. Miryam implied that the configuration of Marilyn’s hacienda would have precluded Mrs. Murray from seeing Marilyn’s bedroom door unless she left her bedroom. The plan of the bedroom wing of Marilyn’s hacienda clearly disproves that implication. Photograph used with the gracious permission of Gary Vitacco-Robles, who published the photograph in ICON: What Killed Marilyn Monroe, Volume One.
Please note: Although I labeled the room occupied by Eunice on August the 4th as her bedroom, Marilyn actually used that space as a Guest Room, and it contained a cot. It is the room in which Pat Newcomb had slept the night before. Marilyn had plans to convert the detached space between the house and the garage into an actual Guest Area. She planned to have it ready when her friend, the poet Carl Sandburg, arrived for an extended visit.
Considering that the preceding photograph irrefutably answers the question about a visible strip of light beneath Marilyn’s bedroom door, there is no need to linger over the light strip, no light strip debate. To me, the important consideration is why Mrs. Murray changed her story. Also, when did she and where was she when she changed it? I could present a mountain of details, falsities and contradictions as a means of getting to the navel of those issues; but there is little need to linger over all that as well, since all the details, falsities and contradictions are available on this website. If you have not already done so, please visit Murder Orthodoxies, Section 4, An Alleged Second Husband for a mountain of additional information about the fantasist, Robert Slatzer.
Robert Slatzer has been credited with writing two books starring Marilyn Monroe, his 1974 publication about Marilyn’s curious life and death, and The Marilyn Files, published eighteen years later in 1992. Within the text of his 1974 literary effort, he referenced an interview with Mrs. Murray that had occurred in August of 1973, when he was purportedly writing his first book; he did not identify the actual date or day of the week on which the interview transpired (Slatzer 30). Later in that literary effort, Slatzer asserted: I recently had the opportunity to speak with Mrs. Eunice Murray, and she reconstructed from memory the events of that last Saturday (Slatzer 266: emphasis mine). Obviously Slatzer was referring to his purported 1973 interview with Mrs. Murray, an interview, he asserted, that he had tape recorded.
While Slatzer did not specify the actual calendar date of his purported taped interview with Mrs. Murray, the conspiracist author Donald Wolfe did; but Wolfe’s attributed date suffers from a serious chronological problem: Wolfe translated the date back in time eleven years to 1962 just one day after Marilyn’s funeral. After Marilyn Monroe’s friend Robert Slatzer learned of her death, Wolfe wrote,
he went to the Monroe residence with 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 (Wolfe 17).
In Robert Slatzer’s 1974 book, Inez Melson appeared only twice; and Slatzer did not mention that Inez was involved in his 1973 Eunice Murray interview. He certainly did not mention an interview with either woman that transpired on August the 9th in 1962. In fact, Donald Wolfe’s translation of the alleged Melson–Murray interview to the day following Marilyn’s funeral contains a chronological hiccup, to say the least. Here’s the hiccup.
On August the 11th, just three days after Marilyn’s funeral, the Columbus Star featured a gossip section article written by Paul Pry, Jr. The article indicated that Slatzer was in Ohio when Marilyn died: Bob Slatzer read in Monday’s paper, the article noted, that Marilyn Monroe’s body lay unclaimed in a Los Angeles morgue.5Obviously, Monday’s paper referred to August the 6th’s edition of the Columbus Star. Over the years following Marilyn’s death, Slatzer asserted several times that he attempted to claim Marilyn’s body and arrange for her burial, which appears to be disproven by the Columbus Star article: Bob Slatzer was in Columbus, Ohio, on August the 6th in 1962.
Other contradictory and dubious declarations about his geographic location at the time of Marilyn’s death and her funeral, along with other reliable sources who described Marilyn’s funeral, appear to prove conclusively that Robert Slatzer was nowhere near the Westwood Village Memorial Park in 1962 on August the 8th; but the habitual fantasist apparently could not resist the following fantasy: Slatzer declared in the introduction to his 1992 publication: At Marilyn’s house with Inez Melson before the burial services, I again saw the places she loved so much and realized that now all those high hopes had died, too. Thirty years after the Columbus Star article placed him in Ohio, Slatzer remarkably recalled that he attended Marilyn’s funeral with Inez Melson; and yet, the memoir written by Marilyn’s sister, Berniece Miracle, recalled Marilyn’s funeral in precise detail along with some intimate but disconsolate interactions with Inez Melson. Berniece did not mention the presence of Robert Slatzer; and not one of the many photographs snapped on August the 8th in 1962 and not one of the many newsreels or home movies that captured Marilyn’s interment revealed the presence of Robert Slatzer, who, in his 1974 publication declared the following: I was at my home in Columbus, Ohio. It was early Sunday morning, August 5, 1962, when the persistent ringing of the phone roused me from an exhausted short-lived sleep. Slatzer’s close friend and neighbor unceremoniously, succinctly relayed the bad news: Marilyn’s dead (Slatzer 49). But wait! There’s more! Later in the same publication, Slatzer remarkably declared the following:
On the afternoon on the funeral I was at home in Columbus with four close friends […]. Late Wednesday afternoon, after the others had gone, Emerson Burkhart and I were left alone to empty the last bottle of brandy. The only one of the group who had ever met Marilyn, Burkhart was deeply moved by her death. […] After Emerson left, I felt lost. I didn’t feel much like staying at home alone, so I slipped into some old clothes, grabbed my hip boots, pulled out my favorite St. Croix fly rod, and drove into the autumn countryside. In the fading afternoon, which Marilyn had loved so much, I fished for bass in a secluded spot at Greenwood Lake, in Delaware County, Ohio (Slatzer 299: emphasis mine).
I, for one, must express a considerable amount of dazed confusion and incredulity, the shameless dishonestly of Robert Slatzer notwithstanding. Was he in Los Angeles with Inez Melson on August the 8th in 1962? Or was he with friends that afternoon and then later that day, alone with his memories and morose thoughts as he fished for bass in a secluded spot at Greenwood Lake, in Delaware County, Ohio? Now, I suppose, in 1962, Slatzer could have boarded a red-eye flight in Columbus late on that Wednesday, the 8th, and arrived in Los Angeles in time for an interview with Inez Melson and Eunice Murray sometime on the afternoon of the 9th; but that evidently did not occur, as the following clearly proves.
On the day following Marilyn’s funeral, the 9th of August in 1962, the day Donald Wolfe asserted that Slatzer actually interviewed Inez Melson and Eunice Murray together, the memoir written by Marilyn’s sister,6which included her recitation of that day’s events, reported that August the 9th began in Milton Rudin’s office, an early morning meeting with Aaron Frosch to discuss Marilyn’s “Last Will and Testament.” After that meeting, Marilyn’s sister, Berniece. and Marilyn’s niece, Mona Rae, returned to 12305 Fifth Helena, along with Inez Melson, where they searched through Marilyn’s belongings and documents. According to Mona Rae, on August the 8th, when Slatzer, remember, was in Ohio drinking brandy and fishing:
After the funeral, Inez, who was appointed by Frosch and the court to act as administrator, and I, and Cherie [Redmond], a secretary who had done some work for Marilyn, spent three days—meaning August the 8th, 9th and 10th—at Marilyn’s home checking through all her belongings. I was there just to help in an unofficial capacity (Miracle 224-225).
Mona Rae recalled that her mother, Marilyn’s sister, sat tearfully at her task, hour after hour, as the three women [picked] through stacks of paper like amateur archaeologists (Miracle 225). Within the pages of Berniece’s memoir, Robert Slatzer is completely absent; he is nowhere to be found. In addition to Slatzer’s absence from Berniece’s memoir and her chronicle of those August the 9th events, Berniece, along with Cherie Redmond, are also absent from the events of August the 9th and the Melson–Murray interview as reported by the conspiracist Donald Wolfe; but then Wolfe, like many others, blindly believed Robert Slatzer. Donald Wolfe, like Anthony Summers, evidently never read Robert Slatzer’s fraudulent publications. Did Miryam Moya read them? I must express doubt that she did. We are left to wonder why?
If we accept Robert Slatzer’s anecdote—always a dangerous position to assume with Robert Slatzer—unquestionably, Eunice Murray altered her story regarding the visible strip of light and telephone cord running beneath Marilyn’s bedroom door; but unquestionably, also, she did not alter her story in 1962. Eunice must have altered her story in 1973 due to the coercive and manipulative Robert Slatzer; and she was not standing within the walls of 12305 Fifth Helena either. The only explanation I can offer regarding why Donald Wolfe time warped and shifted Slatzer’s alleged interview with Mrs. Murray, making it contemporaneous to Marilyn’s death, is this: to give Sgt Jack Clemmons’ allegation that the housekeeper altered her testimony for nefarious and sinister reasons, to give that specific allegation some validity. I must denote here: Donald Wolfe and Sgt Jack Clemmons became very good friends while Wolfe wrote his ridiculous and goofy book.
But, Eunice’s testimonial alteration, a contradiction of sorts, still remains to be explained.
If I learned anything at all about Eunice Murray as I researched her life, I learned that she was a meek, soft spoken and mild mannered woman. Mrs. Murray was the type of person who said what she believed the other persons in her company at any particular moment wanted to hear; and some Marilyn experts have noted that Eunice generally supported the murder orthodoxy that happened to be the most popular at the time of her interviews; or she supported the murder orthodoxy also supported by the conspiracist performing her interview at that moment. Additionally, she once admitted that she merely said what she thought sounded the best at the time: she frequently contradicted herself, particularly when talking about Marilyn’s relationship with Robert Kennedy. Furthermore, as evidenced by her relationship with Dr. Greenson, Eunice was easily manipulated. She was undoubtedly motivated by an ingrained compulsion to please men through a religiously implanted acquiescent complaisance, no doubt implanted during her childhood and by her Swedenborgian religion. How can anything Eunice Murray ever said be considered reliable? The only honest and prudent answer to that question is this: nothing she ever said can or should be accepted at face value simply because Eunice Murray was an unreliable witness.
Still, all the yarns and stories that precede lead to the following facetious assertion: Slatzer, who was also an unreliable witness, must have been cloned, so there must have been multiple identical Slatzers; that must have been the case, which bestowed upon him, tantamount to getting a gift from God, the amazing ability to be in two places at once and in different decades; but not one of those multiple, time traveling Slatzers had the ability to tell the truth. The truth is: light was visible beneath Marilyn’s bedroom door, a proven fact, proven by a sixty-year-old photograph.
Allow me to end My Opening Salvo of Observations with what follows hereafter.
Marilyn owned two vertical filing cabinets, one she kept in her dressing room at 20th-Century Fox and the other in her detached guest cottage at Fifth Helena.7 It has been frequently reported by sundry authors that, on the night of her death, various individuals broke into the filing cabinets and removed pile after pile of documents, removed evidence of Marilyn’s affairs with the middle Kennedy brothers. One author even reported that the ransackers burned many of those purloined documents in Marilyn’s large fire place. Odd, though, not one photographer snapped a photograph of those wrecked filing cabinets. It is worth noting here, that in 1964, Frank Capell did not reference any plundered filing cabinets. In 1963, Edwin Hoyt did not reference any plundered filing cabinets in his Marilyn biography, the one Mark Shaw praised for its accuracy. Ten years later, Norman Mailer did not mention Marilyn’s ransacked and burned documents, either. In fact, the mythology of the plundered filing cabinets began with Robert Slatzer in 1974. He asserted that Marilyn told him that important documents had started to disappear from her filing cabinet. Which one specifically, Slatzer never identified. Still, the filing cabinets, pictured below, display no evidence of damage. Of course, the cabinets could have been repaired; but there exists no evidence that they were ever broken into, damaged, contents rifled and emptied.
The author Donald Wolfe was the most effusive about Marilyn’s filing cabinets; but Wolfe received his information from Robert Slatzer. Wolfe wrote:
“Inez was going through what remained of Marilyn’s papers in the file cabinet kept in the guest cottage,” Slatzer recalled, “She told me that when she arrived at the house early Sunday morning she discovered the cabinet had been broken into and many of Marilyn’s things were missing. It was obvious that the lock had been forcibly broken” (Wolfe 79).
It is more than clear, based on Slatzer’s written declarations, that he was not in Brentwood the day Marilyn was entombed; and Berniece and Mona Miracle’s memoir did not include Robert Slatzer in the activities of August the 9th, despite what Donald Wolfe alleged. If the women mentioned by Berniece and Mona Rae spent three days sorting Marilyn’s documents, then there must have been plenty of them to sort. Also, the Miracle’s recollections of that day did not feature any damaged filing cabinets.
Donald Spoto offered this:
Back at Fifth Helena, the police remained in charge. Later, there were ridiculous reports that Fox executives had ordered the “burning [of] a pile of documents in the huge Mexican fireplace.” There were also rumors that “the locks on Monroe’s metal filing cabinet had been smashed with a crowbar and the drawers rifled” in order to remove documents compromising the security of the United States government. This is all utter nonsense, according to Officer Don Marshall, who was present all day: “Nobody was destroying anything” (Spoto 580).
Finally, from a Spoto footnote: As for a small cache of Marilyn’s personal letters and papers, they were duly removed next day by Inez Melson, after whose death in 1986 they passed first to a collector, thence to D[onald] S[poto] (683).
My Second Salvo Soon to Follow