A family member of neurotoxins found in contaminated shellfish, Rotson identified the poison deployed by Robert Kennedy to murder Marilyn Monroe as a saxitoxin, one of the most deadly and fast-acting poisons on Mother Earth. A quantity equal to a poppy seed, or 3/10s of a milligram, can kill a normal sized human being with an almost immediate onset of symptoms resulting in a very quick, almost immediate death. The symptoms include, in the following or­der: 1) numbness and tingling in the lips and tongue; 2) numbness in the neck; 3) numbness in the arms and legs; 4) numbness in the fingertips and toes; 5) general loss of muscular coordi­nation; 6) flaccid muscular paralysis; 7) respiratory paralysis and failure; and 8) death. The syn­drome that causes the preceding symptoms is known as Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning. Neither a vaccine to prevent saxitoxin poisoning nor a cure exists.

Clearly Rotson wanted their readers to conclude that Robert Kennedy used that specific type of poison, a boutique poison developed and provided to the attorney general by the CIA, of course, via Robert Kennedy’s CIA emissary, Charles Ford. Still, Rotson admitted that a conclusive identification of the poison that killed the world’s most famous blonde was not possible; but in 1962, according to Bombshell, the CIA possessed a store house of many poisons, including an unspecified but large amount of the naturally occurring saxitoxin. Oddly, though, a passage in Bombshell, contradicted the assertion regarding Charles Ford’s provision of the deadly poison: Whether Bobby Kennedy was supplied with the substance through his CIA contacts is not known (Rotson 166). Alright, if the poison was not provided by the CIA, from where did Robert Kennedy get it? He certainly could not have purchased it at the corner Walgreens or Rite Aid. According to a Stephen Kinzer penned article published by Politico on September the 15th in 2019, Sidney Gottlieb, who headed MK-ULTRA, the CIA’s program to facilitate hu­man mind control though chemical agency, developed the toxin at Fort Detrick, Maryland, during the early 1950s. Even though the CIA1Evidently, The CIA gave U2 pilot, Gary Powers, a very small amount of Saxitoxin in a small grooved needle, concealed in a hollow silver dollar, to use if he was shot down, which he was. He chose not to inject himself.and the US Army worked jointly following the se­cond world war to develop biological agents, evidently the only source of sax­itoxin in the 1960s was the CIA.

According to a Saxitoxin Fact Sheet published by the Scientific Advisory Board in 2014, processing 9 US tons of butter clams, the primary source of Saxitoxin, will yield approximately 1 gram of the poison. According to that fact sheet, synthesizing Saxitoxin was very difficult, initially accomplished by a 17-step synthesis with an overall yield of 2/10s of 1%. A newer, 19-step synthesis improved the overall yield to 1.6%.

So, if the CIA had a large store of the toxin in 1962, they must have had a processing plant running 24/7 with a constant supply of butter clams; but according to my research, the CIA only had 10 grams or about 1/3 of an ounce of the poison. Even so, to produce 10 grams of the toxin, 90 tons of butter clams would have been required; and that 90 tons would need to be naturally infected by contaminated dinoflagel­lates, what are otherwise known as contaminated algae blooms.

At approximately 5:45 AM on August the 5th, Don and Guy Hockett arrived at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive in their modified white Ford station wagon. Dispatched from the Pierce Brother’s Westwood Village Mortuary to collect Marilyn, they found a severely rigid body in the advance stages of rigor mortis. Her body also displayed fixed lividity, and her skin was cold to the touch. The Hocketts, along with other employees of the funeral home where Marilyn remained briefly, estimated, based on her appearance and the presence of fixed lividity, that she died at approximately 10:00 PM on Saturday, August the 4th. Arthur Jacobs, Marilyn’s publicist, along with his fiancé, the actress Natalie Trundy, and some friends, attended a concert in the Hollywood Bowl on the evening of August the 4th. According to Natalie, just before the concert was scheduled to end at 11:00 PM, an usher arrived and informed Arthur that Marilyn was either dying or already dead.

The temperature of Marilyn’s liver at 10:30 AM on August the 5th, as noted on her autopsy report, was 89°F, 9.6°F below what is considered normal. After death, the human body cools at a fairly steady, measurable rate. Some pathologists stipulate that the temperature of a corpse declines 1°F per hour after death; but according to other pathologists, along with those who observe and record the esoteric modifications of human corpses, the temperature of a corpse does not begin to decline during the first hour following death. Based on empirical data derived from observations, a corpse’s temperature drop, after the initial hour, varies between 1.1±0.3°F/hour, depending on environmental conditions; and according to my research, the temperatures during the soft summer night of August the 4th and the morning of August the 5th were mild.

The Glaister Equation is a mathematical expression often used to calculate an approximate time of death; and using a temperature differential from normal of 9.6°F, Marilyn’s essential bodily functions possibly ceased between 9:30 PM on the 4th of August and 2:30 AM on the 5th with the median of 12:30 AM on the 5th. Regardless of what time Marilyn actually died, it is apparent that she became an unresponsive, comatose body at some point prior to midnight or 12:00 AM when August the 4th became August the 5th, an essential detail.

Marilyn’s autopsy report also included two other significant details: the concentration of pentobarbital in the tested sample of her unembalmed blood equaled 4.5 mg% along with a con­cen­tration of 13.0 mg% in her tested liver, both lethal concentrations and a relationship of essentially 1:3. That relationship is consistent with a large ingested overdose; but more significantly, that relationship indicates that Marilyn did not die immediately after she swallowed the Nembutal capsules.

The Los Angeles District Attorney’s Summary Report, prepared following that office’s 1982 threshold re-investigation of Marilyn’s death, noted that she lived for quite a period of time after she ingested the drugs that killed her; and Dr. Cyril Wecht opined that Marilyn possibly lived for a few hours, first dropping into a deep sleep, then a semi-coma or a stupor followed by a coma followed by death. Dr. Boyd Stevens, the medical examiner of San Francisco at the time of the 1982 threshold re-investigation, reviewed the 1962 autopsy findings. The Summary Re­port noted that

under Dr. Stevens’ analysis, absent information not included in the Autopsy Report and thus presumably not discovered, the person upon whom the autopsy was performed metabolized the pentobarbital [Nembutal] in a manner consistent with an oral ingestion of a large quantity of pills, and further that the metabolic process had reached the stage where much of the toxic material had already reached the liver and was in the process of at least beginning the excretion process. (SR 4).

In 2003, The Discovery Channel aired a program entitled “Unsolved History: The Death of Mari­lyn Monroe.” Dr. Nicholas Cozzi, a pharmacologist, appeared on the program. He had several experiments to perform. To replicate Marilyn’s digestive tract as closely as possible, Dr Cozzi arranged two glass vessels vertically, a conically shaped vessel, Marilyn’s stomach, which slowly drained into a second, spherically shaped vessel, the volume of blood in Marilyn’s body. He partially filled with upper vessel with a solution of hydrochloric acid mixed with digestive enzymes into which he inserted an agitation device to mimic the contracting action of Marilyn’s stomach.

Dr. Cozzi used a mathematical expression to predict the quantity of capsules that Marilyn probably ingested:

Q = (Bw) x (Vd) x (C)

The unknown quantities are:

Bw, the person’s body weight in kilograms;

Vd, the volume of distribution of the drug in liters per kilogram;

C, the drug’s concentration in milligrams per liter.

When Dr. Cozzi inserted values for the unknown quantities, the equation became:

Q = (53KG) x (1L/KG) x (45mg/L)

Solving for Q, the equation rendered a 2,385 milligram dose.

According to the arithmetic, therefore, Marilyn more than likely ingested at least 24 Nembutal capsules of 100 milligrams each. On August the 3rd, Marilyn had filled a prescription for 25 Nembutal capsules of that dosage, the vial for which was found empty on the morning of August the 5th. So, Dr. Cozzi concluded that the quantity of capsules rendered by his arithmetic directly correlated with the amount of Nembutal Marilyn had available.

After warming the digestive solution to 98.6°F, Dr. Cozzi introduced 24 exact replicas of the capsules Marilyn ingested. From the lower vessel, he obtained periodic samples for testing to determine the concentration of pentobarbital in Marilyn’s blood with the passing of time. Dr. Cozzi reached two conclusions: 1) Marilyn possibly remained conscious for as long as twenty minutes after she swallowed the capsules, but she would have become increasingly groggy, disoriented and inarticulate as she slipped into a deep sleep; and 2) Marilyn lived for at least two hours after she ingested the twenty-four Nembutal capsules, during which her metabolic processes would have continued to function. During that time, her liver continued to function; and, as Dr. Stevens noted, the excretion process had started.

In 1962, daylight savings time began on Sunday, April the 29th and ended on Sunday, October the 28th; and according to several websites dedicated to the creation of sunrise-sunset calendars, on August the 4th of that year, the sun began to set at 6:52 PM. Twilight lingered in the cool damp air and then finally faded as darkness descended on Marilyn’s hacienda at 9:26 PM. Oddly, in Bombshell, Rotson employed the terms evening and night as if those terms are interchangeable although each term represents a specific period of a day. At any rate, Rotson did not declare the exact time when Robert Kennedy and Peter Lawford arrived for their second visit to Fifth Helena following their initial afternoon visit, which began at exactly 2:00 PM; but consider the following.

According to Rotson, after witnessing Robert Kennedy murder Marilyn Monroe, Peter Lawford’s mind was, understandably, a tumble of fears and his spinning brain suddenly seized up and as a result of that brain seizure, he forgot the location of Los Angeles’ International Airport, where he needed to deliver Robert Kennedy, which was why at 12:10 a.m. on August 5, 1962, he was steering his Lincoln Continental the wrong way, speeding eastward at 70 MPH on Olympic Boulevard (Rotson 31). A Beverly Hills policeman, Lynn Franklin, stopped Lawford’s speeding hotrod Lincoln as it approached Robertson Avenue. It seems reasonable to conclude, based on the preceding account presented by Rotson, that Robert Kennedy and Peter Lawford arrived at Marilyn’s hacienda for their second Saturday visit at approximately 11:00 PM. Considering the angry and violent, invective laced encounter between the attorney general and his now rejected, former paramour, the entire episode must have consumed between thirty and forty-five minutes. Therefore after poisoning Marilyn, Robert Kennedy and his chauffeur, Peter Lawford, could have left her body at 11:45 PM and arrived on Olympic just in time for Officer Franklin’s purported traffic stop at 12:10 AM Sunday.

Needless to say, there are serious problems with the preceding scenario and timeline, the least of which is the reported presence of Dr. Ralph Greenson in the Continental with Lawford and the attorney general. According to Officer Franklin’s account of his encounter with the Lincoln, Dr. Greenson was in the rider’s seat next to Pete. When, then, and how did Dr. Greenson find his way into the Lincoln? Also, Lynn Franklin asserted that Pete’s Lincoln Continental was white while Rotson asserted that the Lincoln was black; but those issues pale in comparison to the following.

With Marilyn sitting on her sofa, weeping in her living room after Robert Kennedy knocked her to the floor twice, once in her bedroom and again in her living room, Peter Lawford tried to console her; but the actor noticed that the attorney general had disappeared. The actor found the attorney general in Marilyn’s kitchen, standing at her sink, stirring a glass of water with a spoon. After walking back into the living room, Robert Kennedy handed the glass of water to Marilyn and instructed her to drink it: she would feel better, he said, after she drank it. Hesitantly, Marilyn complied and commented on water’s obviously bitter taste. After ingesting the liquid, within moments, Rotson recounted, Marilyn became comatose and, within minutes, lifeless. Peter Lawford had stared at Marilyn, lying motionless, and knew she wasn’t simply “out of it”. There was a void where she should have been, where she’d always been. He’d known she was dead (Rotson 31). By then, her complexion was […] waxen (Rotson 158). According to the preceding account, only one conclusion is permissible: Marilyn Monroe succumbed to Robert Kennedy’s fast-acting poison just prior to midnight.

During the violent encounter with Robert Kennedy, Marilyn was conscious and an active participant; she was neither severely drugged nor intoxicated; she screamed at her former lover, flailed at him with her hands; so, at what point during the night did Marilyn ingest the massive overdose of pentobarbital revealed by her autopsy and the toxicological tests? If she ingested the pentobarbital prior to her visitor’s arrival, when did she do so? A passage of time in excess of a moment or mere minutes would have been required for the concentration of pentobarbital revealed by the toxicology tests to accumulate in her blood and liver. Such a massive concentration could not have accumulated instantaneously. Therefore, if Marilyn ingested the lethal overdose prior to her guest’s arrival, allowing for an adequate amount of time for the concentrations to build in her blood and liver, she most certainly would have been asleep, in a coma or dead by the time Peter Lawford and Robert Kennedy appeared at Marilyn’s front door. The preceding is a scientific fact, a certainty not open to debate.

However, recognizing the timing issue and a direct conflict with Marilyn’s autopsy, recognizing that the murder scenario presented in Bombshell created a serious problem, a conundrum, Rotson proffered two theories pertaining to what possibly transpired:

It is a possibility that Robert Kennedy gave her a high dose of chloral hydrate or Nembutal in the glass of water. Since she may have ingested the drugs or others earlier, the additional amount was enough to push her over the threshold into death (Rotson 169: emphasis mine).

In the preceding scenario, Rotson speculated that Marilyn had ingested an unknown quantity of Nembutal and Chloral hydrate earlier during the day; but before Robert Kennedy actually poisoned Marilyn, the attorney general emptied the contents of an unknown quantity, a high dose, of Marilyn’s capsules into a glass of water, which she immediately drank. Does the preceding quotation suggest to you as it does to me that Rotson needed for Marilyn to die simultaneously from Robert Kennedy’s poison and a massive drug overdose, an occurrence far outside the realm of possibility; and still recognizing the statically indeterminate nature of their problem, Rotson offers another curious, somewhat humorous and nearly insulting solution. Rotson creatively speculated:

After Marilyn drank the glass of liquid given her by Robert Kennedy, they left her alone as they searched her home.2Obviously a reference to her murderer’s search for Marilyn’s nonexistent Little Red Diary.Out of sight of the two men, and clearly distressed, did she elect to ingest another liquid form of drug which pushed her toxicology levels into the zone of death. I can’t answer that question. No one can. But, if it was a designer toxin, toxicology testing at the time would not have discovered it. It was a scenario for the perfect murder (Rotson 224: emphasis mine).

Even though it has never been suggested by anyone, of which I am aware, that Marilyn had a liquid form of any drug in her possession, Rotson created a speculative scenario that also created a question that the creator of the speculative scenario admittedly could not answer. Now, that is humorous! Later, I will answer the question.

The quantity of the saxitoxin that Robert Kennedy delivered to Marilyn in water was not declared in Bombshell; but according to Peter Lawford according to Rotson, a soon to be dead Marilyn Monroe commented about the water’s strangely unpleasant and bitter taste (Rotson 158), an obvious contradiction since Rotson noted that one main benefit of saxitoxin was its tastelessness. It was also tasteless and odourless, Rotson declared, so, when added to a variety of drinks and food, did not advertise its presence (Rotson166). Should we conclude, therefore, that the quantity of the poison used by the inexperienced poisoner, Robert Kennedy, was so large that it affected the water’s taste? However, according to a chemist who I consulted, a tasteless poison will always be tasteless, regardless of the quantity deployed.

Pardon me, but it all smells slightly fishy, like contaminated butter clams.

Still, regardless of the poison’s type, early in their book, on page 31, Rotson declared, as I noted earlier, that within moments after Marilyn ingested Robert Kennedy’s poisonous concoction, she became comatose and, within minutes, lifeless; and then on page 166, Rotson declared: As we learned from Lawford’s confession to Mike Rothmiller, she went from comatose to apparently lifeless in a matter of minutes: within moments, within minutes, in a matter of minutes. How does a fellow quantify those rather vague time oriented idioms? Several websites that I consulted noted that within moments means very quickly or exceedingly fast and a syn­onymous phrase for a matter of minutes is a few minutes? According to Miriam-Webster.com and Dictionary.com, the word few means the following: consisting of or amount­ing to only a small number; at least some but indeterminately small in number; as in scarcely any or hardly any. Clearly the word lifeless, as used in the context of Marilyn’s condition after swallowing the poisonous water, means DEAD.

That being the case, the strong implication is that Marilyn died almost immediately. Therefore, how could a lifeless Marilyn awaken from death, as intimated in the second quotation above, the one lifted from page 224. If we accept that the poison the attorney general used was a saxitoxin, or a similar deadly toxin, if Marilyn awoke miraculously, and finding her muscular coordination severely impaired, how could she locate her vial of Nembutals, deftly break apart twenty-four of them and then mix their powdery contents in a glass of water, drink the solution and then return to the sofa, on which she promptly became lifeless a second time? How? Even if we momentarily accept such a ludicrously imbecilic scenario, the problem with the timeline, as it relates to the concentration of pentobarbital in Marilyn’s blood and her liver, will not be ameliorated. If Marilyn died a few minutes after ingesting another liquid form of drug, as Bombshell suggests, her metabolic processes would have promptly ceased. Not only would Dr. Thomas Noguchi have found the liquid in Marilyn’s stomach during autopsy, the concentration of barbiturates found by Dr. Abernathy’s toxicological tests would never have been attained, since I must repeat, with death, the body’s metabolic processes promptly cease.

Did Marilyn, her body tormented and racked by the symptoms of Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning, search for and find another liquid form of drug, which must have been pentobarbital, then create for herself a Mickey Finn and upon drinking the concoction, remain alive long enough for the toxic levels in her liver and blood to reach the known and necessary levels? Speaking only for me, of course, in view of all the preceding information, the only considered conclusion that I can reach is this: the alternate liquid drug, Mickey Finn scenario postulated by Rotson is well beyond ludicrous; and the poisoning scenario that Peter Lawford allegedly reported to Michael Rothmiller is equally as ludicrous. Neither scenario could have occurred, proven so by Marilyn’s autopsy, the amount of barbiturates in her blood along with the amount of barbiturates in her liver. The answer to all questions: Robert Kennedy never poisoned Marilyn Monroe. It simply never happened. Never.