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.