THE FORBIDDEN AUTOPSY OF MARILYN MONROE

The Forensic Investigation That Exposes the Truth Behind Her Death

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. 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.

My Opening Salvo of Observations