Robert Kennedy in the Guest Cottage with an Enema

While in her bedroom occupied with a telephone call, according to Jay Margolis and Richard Buskin, Marilyn heard a disturbance in her detached guest cottage. Marilyn did not hang up the telephone receiver: she set it down and went to investigate the disturbance. After leaving her bedroom, she turned left and walked through a short hallway before she stepped down into her living room. Did she notice that Mrs. Murray and Norman Jefferies, previously watching television according to Norman, had disappeared? She then maneuvered around some furniture and traversed her living room, before she stepped up into her small dining area. She passed her sunroom as she walked toward her kitchen, opened the door and entered. Once she passed her breakfast nook, she turned left and entered a small mudroom from which she exited outside and then entered her detached guest cottage. Once inside, a very agitated Robert Kennedy confronted her as the two LAPD Gangster Squaders, Case and Ahern, strangers to Marilyn we must assume, struggled to open her filing cabinets.

Robert Kennedy ordered Marilyn to relinquish her politically concussive Little Red Diary, her Red Book of Secrets. Incensed by Robert Kennedy’s affront and the invasion of her home, she refused, began to shout and scream at the intruders. Robert Kennedy, along with his LAPD cohorts, assaulted Marilyn, threw her onto the nearby bed. Once she was on the bed, the attorney general covered her face with a pillow in order to stifle her screams. He ordered Case and Ahern to give her something to calm her down. They complied; they injected Marilyn behind her knees and in her jugular vein, which suggests that Case and Ahern, if they injected behind each knee, injected Marilyn at least three times. Despite the multiple injections, Marilyn was so infuriated that she continued to wrestle with her assailants. Finally Robert Kennedy or Case or Ahern procured a conveniently handy enema bag, which Marilyn apparently stored in her nearby guest bathroom. After running some water into the bag, they broke apart more than a few barbiturate capsules, the powdered contents of which they emptied into the water. As they held her down against the bed, Case and Ahern removed Marilyn’s clothes and forcibly administered the enema. After a few minutes, those drugs, when absorbed by Marilyn’s body, finally tranquilized her.

The first question I must pose is this: how did our conspiracists writers know, for all intents and purposes, the exact number of capsules, possibly as many nineteen Nembutal and exactly seventeen Chloral hydrate capsules, that Case and Ahern broke apart and emptied into Marilyn’s enema bag? Margolis and Buskin insinuated that they obtained that data from the 1982 LADA’s Summary Report. They wrote:

Per the 1982 District Attorney’s Report, “The results of the blood and liver toxicological examination show that there were 8 mg. percent chloral hydrate [seventeen 500-mg pills] and 4.5 mg. percent of barbiturates in the blood [forty–fifty 100-mg Nembutals] and 13,0 mg. percent pentobarbital in the liver” (Margolis/Buskin KE:1).

The LADA’s declaration about the blood and liver toxicological examination appears on page 3 of the referenced report; however, the quantity of pills that Margolis and Buskin included in brackets does not appear anywhere in that document, at least not the copy I possess. Additionally, they suggested, guilefully using the Summary Re-port as a form of devious evidence, that Marilyn ingested as many as sixty-seven (67) capsules, when, in fact, the report stipulated concisely:

Although the blood and liver toxicological studies identified the toxic level of drugs in the system, no precise estimates could be made of the number of pills ingested to reach the toxic levels in the blood and liver.

Therefore, the quotation as offered by the conspiracist writers represents a prime example of disingenuous journalism that approaches being deceitful, certainly an intentionally incorrect quotation with an insidious in-tent. The coroner and the LADA did not know the exact quantity of capsules Marilyn consumed in 1962; and that quantity remains unknown.

Once they had finally tranquilized Marilyn, Robert Kennedy, along with Case and Ahern, returned to their search for Marilyn’s all-important diary.

Evidently, the Gangster Squaders successfully opened one of Marilyn’s two filing cabinets. I must note at this point, of the two filing cabinets Marilyn owned, she only kept one at Fifth Helena: she kept the other one in her dressing room at Fox Studios. Photographs of the filing cabinets display no evidence of damage that might have been caused by a violent attempt to open them; and the persons who possessed the cabinets over the years never mentioned that they had sustained any damage. Also, did Marilyn keep a cache of tools sitting in her guest cottage, tools appropriate for breaking into locked metal cabinets?―crow bar, hammer, chisel and hack saw. Perhaps the Gangster Squaders concealed those tools in their medical bag.

Robert Kennedy and the Gangster Squaders searched for Marilyn’s diary only an additional thirty minutes before departing at 10:30 PM without the Red Book of Secrets. According to Margolis and Buskin: […] Bobby is thoroughly frustrated that he, Case, and Ahern couldn’t find it despite more than a half-hour search (Margolis/Buskin KE:Timeline). How did the authors know that Robert Kennedy was frustrated?―did they interview the attorney general? Now that I think about it, consider this: prior to the arrival of Greenson and all the others who gathered around to watch Marilyn’s somewhat ritualistic sacrifice at the hands of her psychiatrist, who observed the argument between Marilyn and Robert Kennedy and who observed the gangster squaders injecting Marilyn and giving her the enema? Who? Only Maf the dog could have observed those alleged incidents. At that time in the saga described by Margolis and Buskin, only Marilyn, the attorney general and the gangster squaders were present; so was an unnamed observer or scribe also present, a scribe who took notes and provided the in-formation to and described the angry scene for the authors? According to the authors, they received that pertinent information from the testimony of persons who said they had listened to the secret tapes of the one and only Fred Otash. I addressed the mythology of those cryptic tapes in Section 10.

Our authors quoted C. David Heymann extensively and relied on Heymann’s purported extensive interviews with Peter Lawford. The validity of Heymann’s putative interviews with Lawford are questionable at best, as shown by David Johnston, previously quoted, and corroborated by the testimony of Patricia Seaton Lawford, who testified to Johnston that Heymann fabricated all of her husband’s testimony.

Margolis and Buskin also asserted that they received valuable information from a confidential source, meaning unnamed, an anonymous source who claimed that he or she heard a tape of Robert Kennedy’s sworn deposition, previously mentioned. The assertion that Robert Kennedy provided a sworn deposition raises more legal questions than I can address here, like, had formal charges been filed against the attorney general, making a deposition necessary; or which legal authority subpoenaed the attorney general to provide the deposition; or were attorneys present along with a certified court stenographer during the deposing process? Why would Robert Kennedy simply volunteer to give his statement to a police captain, as alleged; and if he was deposed under subpoena, why would the attorney general do so without legal representation present? Finally, and more to the crux of this issue, for Robert Kennedy to provide such a deposition is more than illogical: why would he murder or participate in the murder of the most famous woman on Earth to silence her, to prevent her from revealing their affair and then immediately admit as much in a statement, whether voluntary or sworn? To do that would have been, well, nonsensical, not to even mention completely idiotic.

Michael Rothmiller, who appeared earlier in the section dedicated to Marilyn’s Red Book of Secrets, testified that he saw the deposition in the OCID’s file room in 1978, along with a copy of Marilyn’s Little Red Diary, parts of which he quickly read. According to Jay Margolis and Richard Buskin, Rothmiller would later testify to writers Peter Brown and Patte Barham that he read a portion of Robert Kennedy’s explosive deposition as well, in which the attorney general admitted that he was romantically involved with Marilyn and that he had visited her on August the 4th in 1962. But again, I repeat, that odd and mysterious deposition provided by Robert Kennedy to law enforcement, originally mentioned by Robert Slatzer and referenced frequently by other conspiracists, has never been published and most certainly, I am convinced, never will be, because I am also convinced that it never existed.

Before proceeding, I must digress momentarily, yet again, and return to Peter Brown and Patte Barham’s publication, Marilyn-The Last Take. As I previously noted in this text, three editions of that publication are extant, two published in 1992, one in the US and one in the UK and a paperback edition published in the UK during 1993 by Mandarin. In their 2014 publication that closed Marilyn’s case, Margolis and Buskin referenced testimony putatively provided to Brown and Barham by Michael Rothmiller. In their source notes, Margolis and Buskin cited pages 430, 433 and 467 in Brown and Barham’s 1993 Mandarin UK paperback edition; on each of those pages, I expected to read testimony from Rothmiller pertaining to Marilyn’s Little Red Diary and Robert Kennedy’s sworn deposition. However, not one word of testimony from Michael Rothmiller appeared on the pages cited by Margolis and Buskin; and as I have already asserted, textually, all three editions of Brown and Barham’s last take regarding Marilyn are absolutely identical.

Also, I would be remiss if I did not denote: Margolis and Buskin insinuated that Michael Rothmiller’s testimony to Peter Brown and Patte Barham could also be found in Rothmiller’s 1992 publication about corruption in the LAPD’s OCID, L.A. Secret Police: Inside the LAPD Elite Spy Network. For instance, Margolis and Buskin quoted the following statement by Rothmiller, apparently made to either Peter Brown or Patte Barham: This is precisely what they did with the Monroe investigation […] they protected the name of the Kennedy dynasty […] (Margolis/Buskin, KE:Source notes for Ch. 31). Obviously, Rothmiller’s they was a reference to the LAPD’s OCID. Since I could not locate Rothmiller’s preceding declaration within the text of Brown and Barham’s Marilyn-The Last Take, I expected to find it in Rothmiller’s 1992 publication; but I did not. Additionally, I did not locate any of the other declarations attributed to Rothmiller by Margolis and Buskin in the text of Brown and Barham’s 1993 paperback publication; and I did not locate those declarations within their 1992 publications or the 1992 publication written by Michael Rothmiller. I cannot explain the discrepancies between source notes and texts; and I am not going to speculate.

Robert Kennedy’s departure at 10:30 PM prompted the return of Mrs. Murray and Norman Jefferies to Fifth Helena from the next door neighbor’s residence. Upon entering the guest cottage, housekeeper and handyman discovered Marilyn lying face down on her guest cottage bed, which means that Case and Ahern must have removed Marilyn’s clothes and they must have rolled Marilyn from her back―certainly her position when Robert Kennedy covered her mouth with a pillow―onto her stomach. So, when she attempted to reach Ralph Roberts by telephone right after the enema had been given to her, but before it had been expelled and before she lapsed into a state of unconsciousness, Marilyn was lying on her stomach. The frenzied and ghoulish scene in the detached guest cottage involving Peter Lawford and Fred Otash would soon begin.

Peter Lawford and Fred Otash purportedly lifted an unconscious Marilyn’s prone and nude, soiled body off the guest cottage bed, in order to change the soiled bed clothes, meaning the sheets. Where did they temporarily deposit her body? Did they place her on a nearby sofa or chair? Did they place her on the floor? What follows is the navel of this issue.

In August of 1962, Marilyn’s detached guest cottage was not actually used as a guest cottage; and it was not furnished at that time with bedroom furniture: it contained a card table and some chairs. Marilyn had borrowed the table from one of her housekeepers, Hazel Washington. In fact, according to Gary Vitacco-Robles’ Marilyn biography, Hazel and her husband Rocky, who was an LAPD detective, came to Fifth Helena on August the 5th to reacquire the card table before it vanished. The absence of bedroom furniture is why Pat Newcomb slept on the cot inside Marilyn’s house when she spent Friday night with her friend. That is why Eunice Murray slept on the same cot when she spent Saturday night at Fifth Helena. In short, there was no bed on which Eunice Murray, Norman Jefferies, James Hall or his partner could have found Marilyn, no bed from which Hall could have pulled her onto the floor, no bed on which a nude Marilyn Monroe could have died. Additionally, while Marilyn’s guest cottage was not the size of a ballroom, neither was it as cramped as reported by Hall; and the space was not subdivided into hallways and rooms by demising partitions, except at the small private bathroom.

After Marilyn’s body expelled the enema liquid from her colon, and soiled the bed clothes, certainly that liquid would have wicked through and soiled the mattress; but Margolis and Buskin left that certain reality unaddressed and unresolved.

Lawford and Otash then cleaned and dried Marilyn’s soiled body to remove evidence of the expelled enema. Did they wear protective rubber gloves? Margolis and Buskin reported: The linens used to clean and dry her off were easily accessible from a nearby linen closet down one of the guest bedroom hallways (Margolis and Buskin KE:Timeline). The preceding assertion is certainly curious in the geographical sense. The only linen closet in Marilyn’s hacienda was located at the end of the short hallway, the only hallway, in the hacienda, which allowed access to the three small bedrooms. The curious assertion also implies the existence of multiple guest bed-rooms, which was not the case. Therefore, we can only surmise that Lawford or Otash must have walked briskly into the main house to get the washcloths to clean and the towels to dry Marilyn and the fresh bed linens for the imaginary guest cottage bed; however, Margolis and Buskin did not mention that dash in their timeline reconstruction. After installing fresh bed clothes, Lawford and Otash returned Marilyn to the imaginary bed. They placed her on her back―face up.

Why did Margolis and Buskin make a point of noting that Lawford and Otash placed Marilyn on her back? Why was that important? Marilyn could not be left face down, as she was discovered by Mrs. Murray and Norman Jefferies. The authors would later repeat the assertion of James Hall: he and his partner found a naked Marilyn lying face up on her the bed with her head hanging over the edge, still unconscious with no sheet or blanket underneath her (Margolis and Buskin KE:Timeline). That’s odd. Did Lawford and Otash position Marilyn with her head hanging off the bed? If so, why? Also, Margolis and Buskin clearly asserted that Lawford and Otash replaced the soiled sheets. Why was Marilyn’s guesthouse imaginary bed suddenly without sheets or blanket? What happened to the bed clothes? Also, the conspiracist authors conveniently addressed the issue of Mrs. Murray and Sgt Clemmons’ washing machine fable.

Accordingly, someone on site―I previously assumed that someone to be Fred Otash because the authors did not reveal whom―instructed Mrs. Murray to wash the sheets after the ambulance had departed. Did Otash instruct Mrs. Murray to include the enema bag in that load of sheets? Now that I think about it, what became of that enema bag? The disposition of that bag notwithstanding, if the ambulance departed at midnight, why was Mrs. Murray still washing sheets at 4:35 AM? Washing and drying one load of sheets would not have taken four hours and thirty-five minutes, maybe forty-five minutes at the most. Besides, there were certainly more effective ways to dispose of those sheets and destroy that evidence. For instance, the sheets could have been tied into a neat bundle and tossed temporarily into the garbage outside, concealed beneath some other garbage. Then, at the appropriate time, Fred Otash could have recovered the soiled sheets and had them burned. After all, the bed clothes were not contaminated with nuclear waste; and once again I must pose this question: why begin to wash the sheets immediately after the police had been notified of Marilyn’s death?

It has been reported by several conspiracists, and accepted as a statement of fact, that the water supply to Marilyn’s hacienda had been stopped due to her remodeling activity. According to Donald Wolfe, Sgt Clemmons discovered that the water had been shut off during remodeling (Wolfe 12). Stopping the water supply certainly would have affected the guest cottage’s bathroom; and that being the case, where did the Gangster Squaders obtain the water they used to concoct, as asserted by Margolis and Buskin, the enema’s lethal potion of Nembutal and Chloral hydrate? Did the gangster squaders bring a couple of buckets or jars of water with them? More importantly, how could Mrs. Murray have been operating a washing machine without a water supply? A niggling issue, water-on, water-off; and  a niggling issue that will appear again later.

When the ambulance finally arrived at 11:00 PM, a hysterical Pat Newcomb escorted James Hall and Murray Liebowitz into the guest cottage. Hall testified that as he approached Marilyn, the beauty of her naked body transformed the scene into something that approached a surreal dream. Even so, according to Margolis and Buskin, James Hall reported that he did not detect the odor of pear emanating from Marilyn’s mouth, an odor always present with Chloral hydrate overdoses; and remarkably, the ambulance attendant did not detect the odor of feces emanating from the enema stained exposed mattress.

When Dr. Noguchi performed the autopsy just a few hours later, why did the autopsy surgeon find fecal matter in Marilyn’s colon? Additionally, even an examination of Marilyn’s body with a magnifying glass did not reveal even one injection site, not the one in Marilyn’s armpit or the ones behind her knees or the one in her jugular vein and, remarkably, not the one in her chest? Certainly, those injection sites would not have healed by the time Dr. Noguchi performed Marilyn’s autopsy. Still, Sgt Jack Clemmons opined that Dr. Noguchi simply missed the injection site on Marilyn’s chest because Dr. Greenson cleverly injected Marilyn in the crease of her breast, implying ridiculously that Noguchi would not have investigated under Marilyn’s breasts, an indefensible implication; but more importantly, when Noguchi opened Marilyn’s chest cavity, how did he miss the needle track into her chest and then into her heart? The preceding facts, in and of themselves, should cast more than a reasonable doubt regarding James Hall’s preposterous and untenable Dr-Greenson-injected-and-murdered-Marilyn-Monroe-yarn, along with the Jay Margolis and Richard Buskin recounting thereof.

The Norman Jefferies Conundrum
Interior Photograph: Marilyn's Detached Guest Cottage in 1962
Marilyn's Filing Cabinets