If asked to write a summary of the preceding topics and text, it would sound like what follows hereafter; and it would begin with a declarative statement followed by the most ancient of questions: Sgt Jack Clemmons was the only police officer of the many involved in Marilyn’s case to offer any substantial testimony, more than just a few opinions and speculations about her case: why?

His involvement in Marilyn’s death, certainly to an odd personal level, along with his freely offered testimony and speculations, must have been motivated by an overarching agenda. Always keep in mind that Jack Clemmons was acutely involved with anti-Communist activities, which included individuals who shared his ideology along with his anti-Kennedy sentiments, men like Maurice Reis, Frank Capell and Walter Winchell. Additionally, he must have perceived his forced retirement from the LAPD, evidently forced by Chief Parker and other upper level LAPD management, as an unwarranted slight that he needed to revenge. His continual denigration of that law enforcement agency’s procedures and honesty, their corruption, along with the denigration of that police force by other former officers, Michael Rothmiller for instance, contributed to the LAPD’s sensitivity to Marilyn’s case, a sensitivity that even I experienced firsthand during a telephone inquiry about several of the photographs taken that Sunday morning in August. What began as a pleasant conversation ended tersely: the LAPD’s job, the officer on the other end of the telephone informed me, did not include commenting on such things.

Admittedly, it is a dangerous strategy to rely on Robert Slatzer as a source for information pertaining to Marilyn, both her life and her death; and even as I wrote this text, I reminded myself that Slatzer was a notorious and well-known prevaricator. Could I rely on the quotations that Marilyn’s weekend husband had attributed to Jack Clemmons? Or were they possibly fabrications? Since Clemmons was one of the very few examples of an extant witness quoted by Slatzer, and considering that the sergeant appeared on KTLA’s broadcast version of The Marilyn Files, I concluded that the quotations attributed to the sergeant by Slatzer had to have been approved by Clemmons. That evident fact rendered the many inconsistencies and contradictions within Jack Clemmons’ testimony all the more remarkable and confounding.

It is apparent, considering Jack Clemmons history, that he was not an honest man, despite the eulogizing by his author friend, Donald Wolfe. Clearly, his testimony during the thirty-two years that elapsed from Marilyn’s death to his death, was fraught with inconsistencies, contradictions and outright fabrication. Additionally, virtually all of his statements over the years were actually just speculations or his personal opinions; and to paraphrase Anthony Summers, Sgt Clemmons personal opinions based on his observations that Sunday morning in August of 1962 were essentially worthless simply because he had no actual training or experience as an investigator or detective of any type, despite Robert Slatzer’s declarations to the contrary (Summers 660).

Considering Sgt Clemmons’ verified dishonesty, should we automatically accept his criticism and his denigration of Dr. Ralph Greenson? After all, the sergeant’s testimony regarding Dr. Greenson’s smirking leer is the only extensive testimony pertaining to the psychiatrist’s reaction to Marilyn’s death and how he conducted himself that Sunday morning; but I must denote here, at least one brief glimpse into a traumatized Dr. Greenson, a glimpse in opposition to Jack Clemmons’ allegations, a Dr. Greenson who apparently behaved differently that morning. According to Keith Badman, Sgt Marvin Iannone testified: While I was there, Dr Greenson was so visibly shaken that he would not return to the bedroom where Miss Monroe’s body lay (Badman KE:10). That being the case, speaking for myself, of course, I find it difficult to fathom and accept, as Jack Clemmons testified to Geraldo Rivera, that Dr. Greenson displayed no remorse or grief over the death of his patient, a lack of empathy and sympathy that neither Rivera nor the former sergeant could understand; but two decades would elapse, leaving Marilyn’s death an erstwhile tragedy, before Sgt Clemmons heard an amazing and controversial story, one that furnished him with the information he needed to deduce why Dr. Ralph Greenson behaved so mysteriously in 1962, that the sergeant felt bewildered. More about that story will appear in the following section.

Accordingly, I consider it wise and prudent to keep the former sergeant’s testimony about Dr. Greenson at least at arm’s length, view it with a healthy dose of skepticism and reasonable doubt. Besides, Sgt Clemmons’ belated assertions about Dr. Greenson’s demeanor that morning in August of 1962, along with his assertions about how Eunice Murray and Dr. Engelberg behaved, have no evidentiary value whatsoever regarding how Marilyn actually died, a fact that the Los Angeles District Attorney plainly recognized. During the LADA’s 1982 threshold re-investigation into Marilyn’s alleged murder, the LADA’s investigators re-interviewed Jack Clemmons. According to the LADA’s Summary Report, he told the investigators:

Mrs. Murray and the two physicians at the scene “didn’t act natural.” He observed that the housekeeper looked “scared”; that her regular medical doctor looked very “remorseful” and was quiet; and that the psychiatrist “had a smirk on his face and didn’t look natural to [him].” Mr. Clemmons’ conclusions lack evidentiary significance (SR 28).

Allow me to close this section by repeating and evaluating a few of Clemmons’ assertions, even though I have most certainly already mentioned them earlier during the unfolding of this text and even within this section.

Jack Clemmons frequently expressed his puzzlement over the lack of a drinking glass in Marilyn’s bedroom or her nearby bathroom, the absence of regurgitation in the same bathroom or in Marilyn’s bed and the absence of bodily contortions. In 1981, when he appeared on the program In Search Of: The Death of Marilyn Monroe, Clemmons noted:

The other thing that would obviously occurred had the situation been as that had been represented to me was that there would have been vomit from her because you simply cannot swallow that much barbiturates without throwing some of it up later on. It has a very violent reaction in the stomach.11In Search Of: The Death of Marilyn Monroe. 14 February 1981.

The violent reaction to which Sgt Clemmons alluded would have, as a matter of what is usually discovered at the scenes of suicides, according to Jack Clemmons, caused Marilyn to regurgitate and convulse; and in 1988, the former sergeant asserted to Geraldo Rivera: There was no evidence of a person dying in this fashion. There was no vomit or regurgitation in the room. None in the bathroom. The former sergeant also mentioned to Geraldo: There was not a glass of water sitting by the bed.12Op. Cit. The Geraldo Show. 9 November 1988.

Police photographs snapped that morning revealed that Marilyn, in fact, had a glass at her bedside. One of those photographs depicted a policeman’s hand pointing at Marilyn’s cluttered bedside table, indicating the many prescription bottles, along with many other items, resting thereon; and that photograph clearly revealed a glass sitting on the floor to the right of the bedside table and to the left of Marilyn’s bed. More often than not, when that tragic photograph has appeared in either a conspiracist’s book or a newspaper article, a magazine or an Internet story proclaiming a murder orthodoxy, the drinking glass has been disingenuously cropped. Apparently impounded by the Los Angeles Police Department as evidence, the glass was part of a tumbler set purchased by Marilyn while she visited Mexico during the February preceding. According to biographer, Gary Vitacco-Robles, as of 2016, a Marilyn memorabilia collector possessed eleven of the dozen tumblers that Marilyn purchased. The twelfth and impounded tumbler has never reappeared as far as I know and have been able to determine. Additionally, resting on the floor and to the left of Marilyn’s bed side table, a Mexican water jorum, which Marilyn purchased during her trip to Mexico in February of 1962, can be seen. Upended and placed over the neck of the jorum is a drinking vessel.

In later testimony, when confronted with the photographic evidence confirming the presence of a drinking glass at the base of Marilyn’s bedside table, Sgt Clemmons had an answer for what he considered to be the mysterious appearance of that glass: he informed Donald Wolfe that the glass must have been placed on the floor by Marilyn’s bed after he departed. The duplicitous police officers dispatched by the LAPD, namely Chief Parker, planted the drinking glass as a part of the massive cover-up following Marilyn’s murder, the coordinated and concerted effort to protect the Kennedy clan in general and Robert Kennedy specifically. Are we to assume that the duplicitous police officers also planted the Mexican water jorum and associated drinking vessel?

Regarding the absence of vomit at the scene or a contorted Marilyn, as I have already noted, occasionally victims of suicide by barbiturate overdose will vomit or convulse; but according to my research, the large majority do not. Additionally, the LADA’s 1982 Summary Report effectively refuted the allegations that vomit and contortions should have been found at the scene of Marilyn’s death, if she was a victim of suicide. In short, Marilyn neither vomited nor experienced convulsions, meaning, that her reaction to swallowing a large quantity of barbiturate filled capsules was, in fact, the majority reaction. And too, Marilyn had abused barbiturates for many years and her body had acclimated to that abuse.

I have already posed the question regarding the lack of a formal report written and filed by Sgt Clemmons; and neither the sergeant nor his willing scribe, Robert Slatzer, knew how to handle that glaring omission and dilemma. For instance, according to the scribe, many questions disturbed Sgt Clemmons; and after departing from Fifth Helena, the disturbed sergeant returned to the police station to write his report; but then, later in the same publication, the scribe asserted that Clemmons, the first officer on the scene of Marilyn’s death, never prepared a report (Slatzer 312). Still, in The Marilyn Files, Slatzer referenced a report that Sgt Clemmons allegedly wrote (Slatzer Files 9). Either the first officer on the scene prepared a written report or he failed to do so: both situations cannot be factual. If he wrote and filed a report memorializing his observations, personal opinions and feelings about the scene that Sunday morning, why has it never surfaced? In a way, though, we have his written report, in the considerable amount of testimony he gave and the opinions he offered during the thirty-two years following Marilyn’s death; and his testimony was never consistent.

The position of Marilyn’s body in death and the condition of her small bedroom that morning was all the evidence, the proof Sgt Jack Clemmons needed: Marilyn Monroe did not commit suicide. He asserted on more than one occasion that no person ever died in that soldier’s position. Even so, Donald Wolfe reported: upon entering Marilyn’s bedroom, Sgt Clemmons noticed that Marilyn’s body lay sprawled across the bed (Wolfe 9), certainly a contradictory delineation in opposition to the rigid, soldier-like position  of Marilyn’s body often described by the first sergeant. Likewise, no person ever committed suicide when surrounded by neat environs, especially a drug overdose induced death. Certainly Sgt Clemmons’ assertions represented statements he could not possibly make or begin to defend: he did not have photographs of every death experienced by human beings since the beginning of human beings, neither homicide nor suicide.

A logical fallacy, his promulgation against suicide based on something as gossamer as a neat bedroom, when logically, based on his testimony, his declarations, he should have concluded, considering the visible evidence of clutter and disarray, should have asserted, based on that evidence, that Marilyn’s death was, in fact, a suicide. The entire foundation of Clemmons’ argument rested fallaciously on a false correlation, not to mention this overwhelmingly simple fact: Sgt Jack Clemmons simply and frequently did not tell the truth.

And in closing, one quick observation.

Each and every publication purporting to be the case closing definitive account, the final word, the final truth regarding Marilyn Monroe’s unfortunate and tragic death is filled to the brim with inconsistent and contradictory testimony, vagaries and approximations pertaining to any and all timelines—severe deficiencies, obviously, that are acceptable to the conspiracist writers. And yet, those same writers expect a near mathematical precision, an unreasonable expectation to say the least, from Eunice Murray, doctors Greenson and Engelberg, unreasonable considering the emotions and pressure they must have experienced that morning; but those same accusatory writers lack any semblance of mathematical precision themselves. Needless to say, that certainly is humorously hypocritical.