The Murder of Marilyn Monroe by Jay Margolis Read Free Book Online Page A

what I’m saying.”
    Jefferies relayed to Wolfe, “I went to the gates to wait for the ambulance, but before the ambulance got there Peter Lawford and Pat Newcomb arrived. Pat became hysterical and started screaming at Eunice. I had to take Eunice into the house. She [Pat] was a basket case. I think the ambulance arrived before Dr. Greenson.”
    Norman Jefferies took Mrs. Murray away from the guest cottage, into the living room. Detective Sgt. Robert Byron, who wrote the official police report, informed Anthony Summers: “Engelberg told me he’d had a call from the housekeeper who said Marilyn was either dead or unconscious. He came over and found Marilyn dead.”
    Matthew Smith interviewed Tom Reddin, who was William Parker’s deputy chief. Smith concluded that Chief Parker most likely protected Robert Kennedy from being implicated in any controversy surrounding Marilyn’s death simply by association. In other words, being present at the scene. Parker’s wife Helen told Anthony Summers that her husband relayed to her days later, “This thing has to be straightened out in more ways than one.”
    Parker saw to it that Kennedy was shielded from anything that would damage his career. After all, the LAPD chief had his own agenda. For The Marilyn Files documentary, Sgt. Jack Clemmons relayed that Parker “was a very ambitious man and he wanted to be head of the FBI . . . He went to the point of trying to plant false stories about J. Edgar Hoover.” In the same documentary, former Mayor Sam Yorty concurred: “I know that he would have liked to take the head of the FBI and he certainly would’ve been good at that. And of course to get that job you have to have Bobby Kennedy.”
    This seemed within reach considering Kennedy and Parker were close friends since first fighting organized crime together in 1956, alongside Captain James Hamilton. Although Parker could have overheard events via his own bug in Marilyn’s home during the time she died, he evidently didn’t know all the details. Summers wrote, “Weeks later, when his wife asked how the Monroe case was going, Parker was uncharacteristically vague. ‘It seemed to be a big question mark,’ Helen Parker recalls. ‘I remember him just doing this’—and she draws a big question mark in the air.”
    Marilyn’s first husband Jim Dougherty, himself an LAPD detective, wrote in his second book about her: “Did someone know she was in trouble? Robert Kennedy? Peter Lawford? . . . And were they so terrified about losing their careers, their reputations that they did nothing? If this is true, then they are accountable.”
    Biographer Ted Schwarz believed Marilyn committed suicide. However, he told fellow biographers Brown and Barham what he heard from Fred Otash: “Otash thought Bobby and Lawford knew what was happening and let her die . . . Otash viewed the death as a ‘case of negligent homicide’ and confided that ‘the Kennedy brothers had already murdered her emotionally.’”
    During the autopsy, Dr. Thomas Noguchi became distracted by the findings of the Suicide Prevention Team. He stated in a February 1976 article for Oui magazine: “Our physical examination was coupled with what we call a psychological autopsy. In the case of Miss Monroe, there had been previous suicide attempts. In fact, her whole lifestyle, as we reconstructed it, pointed toward suicide rather than an accident.”
    Funeral director Allan Abbott told Jay Margolis, “They had this first-time autopsy called the ‘psychological autopsy’ and they called in all these people that knew her, what kind of mood she was in, and so forth. That became a first but they knew it was such a big case that they had to do something over and above procedure to try and convince people of what happened.
    “I’m sure Noguchi was under a lot of pressure to consider ‘suicide’ over ‘murder,’ which would take the lid off the case. They knew who wanted her out of the way. Therefore, what makes the