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

case so important is who wants the case to go away. If she had taken all the drugs orally, she would’ve died well before the time she did . . .
    “Noguchi seemed to be very cooperative with everyone involved and seemed to come to different decisions at different times, changing his mind about what he claimed were the circumstances. The best way for them to ever convince him to not talk would be to offer him the job as permanent coroner. He was certainly qualified to do the job, but I think he thought he would be the best coroner they ever had. He tried to stay as neutral as possible when he made statements on Marilyn Monroe, but I think he knew an awful lot more than he talked about.”
    As it turned out, Noguchi curiously replaced Theodore Curphey as LA’s chief medical examiner in 1967, an impressive promotion for a man who had been a deputy coroner just five years earlier.
    The Suicide Prevention Team investigating Marilyn’s “suicide” was comprised of Robert Elkon Litman, M.D., Norman Donald Tabachnick, M.D., and Norman Louis Farberow, Ph.D. Since Marilyn’s psychoanalyst Dr. Ralph Greenson was at the death scene when the police were called, they each consulted with Greenson over what happened to Marilyn. Spoto interviewed Dr. Litman, who had been a former student of Greenson’s. Litman told Spoto that the Team “didn’t consider the murder hypothesis” yet “Greenson wasn’t at all sure if she committed suicide. Greenson felt very much undecided in his own mind . . . All I heard from Greenson was that she was involved with men at the very highest level of government. The name Kennedy was not mentioned specifically . . .” Oddly, Litman next said to Spoto that, in 1962, at the time of the Marilyn Monroe investigation, “I didn’t see any record of no drugs in the stomach.”
    In addition, Litman said Curphey told the Team it was suicide and that their function was to determine Marilyn’s state of mind: did she or did she not intend to kill herself? Curphey instructed them not to determine how she died but only to determine whether she accidentally or intentionally killed herself according to her past history of suicide attempts. Anthony Summers noted, “The head of the Team, Dr. Norman Farberow, said neither Kennedy brother was questioned. He added, ‘I’m sure discretion entered into it.’” Farberow attempted to interview Marilyn’s last publicist and long-time Kennedy confidant Pat Newcomb, but “she stone-walled me, was uncommunicative.”
    Dr. Farberow told Jay Margolis that Marilyn’s housekeeper Mrs. Murray was also interviewed and that she believed Marilyn accidentally took her life. Farberow relayed, “She said she didn’t realize how many pills she had taken.” Regarding Marilyn, he explained, “The general pattern that we had found common among women of her age was that she was unhappy and it [suicide] was not a very difficult possibility,” yet he conceded, “I have no idea now, at this time, what her intention was in taking so many.”
    In his own book, Coroner to the Stars , Noguchi wrote that, back in 1962, he had asked Dr. Robert Litman, a member of the Suicide Prevention Team who’d participated in the psychological autopsy, “Any chance of murder?” Litman’s reply: “The door to the bedroom was locked from the inside. They had to break a window to enter the room. And Mrs. Murray was in her room all evening only a little way down the hall from Monroe’s.” Noguchi remained skeptical. Yet, with no further evidence at his disposal, he eventually agreed with Dr. Curphey’s official conclusion: “probable suicide.”
    In the early 1980s, Noguchi had more details, including John Miner’s memorandum that emphatically discredited the suicide theory. Noguchi would write that, regarding Marilyn’s alleged ingestion of 64 pills, “An accidental overdose of that magnitude was extremely unlikely. From my forensic experience with suicide victims, I believe that the sheer