[dropcap]D[/dropcap]esperate to quieten her screams, Robert smothered her face with a pillow while his henchmen pumped her full of sedatives.
Then he had a doctor give Monroe a lethal injection and with his brother-in-law, British actor Peter Lawford, orchestrated a massive cover-up that led the coroner to declare her death a suicide. That is the astonishing claim of a new book, The Murder Of Marilyn Monroe: Case Closed by Jay Margolis and Richard Buskin. “Marilyn has got to be silenced,” Robert Kennedy told Monroe’s psychiatrist Dr Ralph Greenson (with whom she was also having a sordid affair), disclosed Lawford in a secretly taped confession.
“Bobby was determined to shut her up, regardless of the consequences.”
Details of the tragic final hours of Hollywood’s greatest screen siren are revealed almost 52 years after she died of a sleeping pill overdose at the age of 36 on Saturday, August 4, 1962.
“There was a premeditated plan to murder her on the part of Robert Kennedy, Ralph Greenson and Peter Lawford,” allege the authors.
The sensuous star of The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot had been having a secret affair with JFK, and then his brother Bobby, while also bedding Dr Greenson, the book claims.
But Monroe was spinning out of control, battling depression and anxiety as she struggled with the failure of three marriages, ageing in Hollywood where she feared typecasting as a “sex kitten”, and studios that were wearying of her diva antics.
Monroe lamented to her psychiatrist that the Kennedys were “passing her around like a football” and threatened to hold a press conference revealing her affairs.
According to the book, Robert Kennedy and Lawford arrived at the actress’s Spanish-style home in Los Angeles early in the afternoon on that Saturday, hoping to calm her down.
“Marilyn announced that she was in love with Bobby and that he had promised to marry her,” said Lawford.
Monroe refused to be tossed aside, vowing to expose the Kennedy brothers.
“Marilyn presently lost it, screaming obscenities and flailing wildly away at Bobby with her fists,” recalled Lawford.
“In her fury she picked up a small kitchen knife and lunged at him.
“I was with them at this time so I tried to grab Marilyn’s arm.
I believe we’ll still be arguing over this 100 years after Marilyn’s death but the reality is, the case is closed Jay Margolis, author “We finally knocked her down and wrestled the knife away.
“Bobby thought we ought to call Dr Greenson and tell him to come over.
“The psychiatrist arrived at Marilyn’s home within the hour.”
Kennedy’s bodyguard gave Monroe an “intramuscular pentobarbital shot in the armpit to calm her down,” the book claims, “while he and Lawford searched for her little red diary”.
They were desperate to find the diary that provided Monroe’s only proof of her affairs with JFK and Robert.
Kennedy and Lawford left emptyhanded but Kennedy returned around 10pm with two bodyguards.
Monroe found them searching through files in her office and began screaming.
“She’s in the bedroom and Bobby gets the pillow and he muffles her on the bed to keep the neighbours from hearing,” said Hollywood private detective Fred Otash, who had bugged Monroe’s home and kept the incriminating tapes. As Kennedy stifled Monroe, his henchmen gave her an injection of sedatives. “She finally quieted down.”
Yet the injections failed to silence an angry Monroe so Kennedy’s bodyguards allegedly stripped her and gave her an enema of crushed sleeping pills, finally rendering her unconscious.
Kennedy and his men left at 10.30pm but Marilyn was soon discovered naked in the guest bedroom by her live-in housekeeper Eunice Murray, who called an ambulance as well as Dr Greenson.
Monroe was having a fling with her shrink, seeing him at all hours, seven days a week, almost becoming part of his family - and driving him to distraction. “Bobby Kennedy lied and told Dr Greenson Marilyn was threatening to go public with her affair with the psychiatrist,” says Jay Margolis.
“It would have destroyed Greenson’s career. “Though Greenson was a psychiatrist, when he arrived at Marilyn’s house he carried a long syringe with a dark brown liquid, which no psychiatrist would usually carry.
Monroe’s death was a foregone conclusion.” Lawford confirmed: “Greenson had thus been set up by Bobby to ‘take care’ of Marilyn.”
Ambulance attendant James Hall claimed he found Monroe unconscious but breathing and she responded to resuscitation.
But then Lawford returned and Dr Greenson stepped in to inject the mysterious dark fluid directly into Monroe’s heart. Hall said he had assumed that this was an adrenaline shot but he later learned that adrenaline is a clear liquid.
“The dark liquid was almost certainly undiluted Nembutal, which the autopsy found in Monroe’s body,” says Margolis. “It would have paralysed her lungs and caused her death.
“Dr Greenson killed Marilyn Monroe, incited by Bobby Kennedy.”
Monroe died moments after she was given the heart injection but Hall insists: “We could have saved her. I felt sick.” Dr Greenson sent the ambulance away but waited more than four hours to call the police, while Lawford called private eye Fred Otash to clean Monroe’s home of all evidence that the Kennedy brothers had ever been there.
“Peter Lawford moved Marilyn’s body, which the ambulancemen had found face up, and put her in her own bedroom face down, so that blood could pool covering up the injection sites,” says Margolis. “Everything was done to protect Bobby Kennedy.”
The Kennedys spread the word that Monroe had killed herself in anguish after being fired in June 1962 from the movie Something’s Got To Give, co-starring Dean Martin, by producers angry with her tardiness and outrageous demands. However, she had been rehired three days before her death, for a $1million two-movie deal.
When police arrived at 4.45am on August 5, almost five hours after Monroe had died, Dr Greenson pointed to an empty bottle of barbiturates beside the actress’s bed, where they were among eight pill bottles arrayed, and said she had committed suicide.
Housekeeper Eunice Murray was allegedly coached, telling police that she didn’t find Monroe unconscious until hours later. The book claims that even Los Angeles police chief William Parker collaborated in the cover-up to protect the Kennedys in the hope that he would be named FBI chief.
Robert Kennedy flew in a private plane to San Francisco overnight so that he could claim he was not in Los Angeles when Monroe had died.
By the next day the Secret Service had seized and sealed the telephone company records for Monroe’s home.
Despite evidence of injections on Monroe’s knees, armpit and chest, the coroner’s report stated “No needle mark.” Mysteriously, all of Monroe’s autopsy tissue samples vanished from the coroner’s office.
Her incriminating diary, which coroner’s officers found in her home on the Monday, disappeared the next day, never to be seen again. “The evidence is conclusive,” says Margolis. “Marilyn Monroe was murdered by Dr Greenson on the orders of Bobby Kennedy.
She was not only killed but slandered in death by making it appear she had committed suicide. “But so many people refuse to believe that it was murder or suicide and want to think it was an accidental overdose, which isn’t medically possible. “I believe we’ll still be arguing over this 100 years after Marilyn’s death but the reality is, the case is closed.
“Marilyn Monroe was murdered.”
