What happened inside Marilyn’s bedroom after she closed the door behind her, for some, remains a mystery. Her autopsy revealed that she died from acute barbiturate poisoning, a massive drug overdose. She apparently had enough barbiturates in her body to kill fifteen people, more than a few conspiracists have asserted, requiring her to ingest a colossally excessive number of capsules, somewhere between forty-five, seventy-five and even more, depending on account and conspiracist. Donald Burleson, for instance, opined that Marilyn must have swallowed in excess of one-hundred capsules considering the concentration of drugs in her blood. The Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office ruled her death a probable suicide although, as many persons have duly noted, the qualifying modifier probable was unusual and peculiar if not unique to Marilyn’s case. Renown forensic pathologist, Dr. Cyril Wecht, testified during his interview when he appeared on “Goodnight Marilyn Radio,” that he did not know of any other case where a pathologist declared a mode of death as probable suicide. The use of that unusual modifier opened the door for wild speculations, fuzzy ruminations and theories about what Marilyn did or did not do, or what was done to her, behind her closed bedroom door.

The first questions one might ask are these: why wasn’t, and why hasn’t, the probable suicide ruling by the Los Angeles County Coroner been accepted by most of the general public and most of the denizens residing in the Realm of Marilyn? During her life, she experienced impulses to kill herself. Once she considered throwing herself into the street below the window of her thirteenth floor apartment in Manhattan. She wrote about leaping from the Brooklyn Bridge into the cold, dark waters of the East River. She attempted suicide at least four times during her life, thrice by over­dose and once by asphyxiation. She was a known depressive under the constant care of a psychiatrist. She was known abuser of barbiturates and often swallowed the capsules with champagne, a practice her friends and various doctors informed her was potentially deadly, a caution about which she apparently cared little if at all. She often pricked the capsules with a pin so the onset of their effects would arrive faster. According to her poet friend, Norman Rosten, Marilyn hungered for death (Vitacco-Robles v2:568). Was it not plausible to conclude, considering her autopsy’s toxicology report, her history, and her somewhat nonchalant attitude about death, that she had killed herself?

Perhaps the reluctance to accept a probable suicide edict has something to do with who Marilyn Monroe was and what she represented to the millions of fans who adored her, adored her movies and her talent, adored her charm and her humor, adored her beauty. To them, she was a person, a woman, a goddess who had it all. They loved her and they sensed that she loved them. Those feelings about Marilyn persist today.

It is difficult to accept that a person who we love does not love us enough, in return, to stick around. Suicide? Simply unacceptable. The incongruity of an amazing life ended by a sad and lonely death, a death that repudiated life, simply could not, and cannot for many, be made congruous, could not and cannot be arranged into any sort of acceptable balance. Similar to the tragic assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, which at the hands of persons as inconsequential as Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, seem incredibly unbalanced, so does the death of Marilyn Monroe by her own hand seem incredibly unbalanced and even inexplicable. There must be more to this story, sinister and powerful forces at work behind the scenes, manipulating shadowy human pawns to do evil things, to assassinate, to murder death kill.

Conspiracy theories involving the untimely or mysterious death of a famous person invariably seem to have this in common: at least one association that can be classified as detrimental to the deceased or sinister in nature, leading to the inevitable conspiracy theories. In Marilyn’s case, she was certainly famous; her death was certainly untimely, certainly mysterious to most persons and presented more than one association that qualified as detrimental and sinister, although many of those associations fall within the category of unverified allegation and rumor. Marilyn’s alleged associations and the perceived murkiness surrounding her death, the many perceived to be unanswered questions, have resulted in more than a few conspiracy theories alleging homicide perpetrated by powerful men and faceless forces. As one conspiracy theorist assessed Marilyn’s situation, she simply got involved with wicked and powerful men, waded into the cold, black water so far that she simply got in over her pretty blonde head.

Apparently whispers that Marilyn might have been murdered began not long after her body was entombed at Westwood Village Memorial Park. Probable culprits in those whispers, even then, included the centrally important middle Kennedy Brothers; but the whispers became audible conversation with the publication of Norman Mailer’s biographical novel in 1973, became shouts with the publication of Robert Slatzer’s brazen tarradiddle in 1974, and then became guttural howls with the publication in 1985 of Anthony Summer’s often referenced and quoted orthodoxy, Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe. In those publications, and many that followed thereafter, Marilyn was reduced to a depthless and a peripheral victim in a contrived murder mystery.