Forgive the delay. I intended to put this post up Friday night. My computer monitor had other plans, however. It conked out completely Thursday, and I wasn't able to replace it until yesterday.

As our friend Schaumi pointed out, there are three distinct theories on how Marilyn Monroe died: (1) she committed suicide; (2) her death came about accidentally; or (3) someone murdered her. Of that last theory, the suspects include the Kennedys, the Mafia, the Teamsters Union, and the CIA. Since 1962 another group emerged as a possible suspect.


Suicide
Argument for: Drs. Curphey and Noguchi had good reason to suspect suicide. Monroe had a history of suicide attempts. She also had a Nembutal addiction. Furthermore, she faced workplace pressures from her movie Something’s Got to Give. Her 1957 miscarriage had a devastating effect on her. On top of that, her alleged boyfriends, John Kennedy and his brother Robert, had recently spurned her. Murray’s supposed conversation with Monroe about oxygen would suggest that she had planned on making another suicide attempt that night. After all, if she were to down a handful of Nembutal tablets, she would have also wanted someone to revive her. And she recalled that paramedics gave her oxygen on the previous attempts.

More troubling to her general psyche was the fact that her father abandoned her. She never knew his identity. Her mother, Gladys, had dropped plausible hints that her father was none other than actor Clark Gable. For years, Monroe entertained the notion that the megastar might be her dad. The previous year, however, Gable suffered a fatal heart attack after filming a movie with Monroe titled The Misfits. Rumors swirled in Hollywood circles that Marilyn’s constant lateness to the set, her inability to remember her lines, and overall unprofessional conduct contributed to Gable’s stress and subsequent death. The gossip drove her into despair.

Argument against: While if left to her own doing Monroe might have eventually done herself in, the forensic evidence seriously challenges the notion that she actually did. If she had taken pills during her telephone calls that night, as some suicide adherents believe, there would have been some residual traces found in her mouth, stomach or digestive tract. The only way she could have committed suicide would have been to have administered an enema to herself--highly unlikely since she would have to have prepared it, inserted it, and disposed of it (so well that investigators could not find it) before lapsing into a coma. It’s even more unlikely that she would have administered an enema when she had fifty freshly prescribed Nembutal pills on hand, as she did.

Although Dr. Noguchi said that he had seen overdose cases where no traces of drugs were found in the victim's stomach or digestive tract, he conceded that such was very rare. That was his reason for ordering additional toxicology work. Toxicologist Dr. Robert Cravey, in his seminal 1972 book Toxicology and Pathological Studies on Psychoactive Drug-Induced Death (co written with neurologist Dr. Louis Gottschalk), found undigested drugs in the stomach of every one of the 1,500 oral lethal overdose victims he studied.

More important, however, is the question of whether or not Monroe felt particularly suicidal that night. Abundant evidence exists to show that this was not the case. True, Fox initially fired her after being late one too many times on the set of Something’s Got to Give, but she was triumphantly reinstated a couple of weeks later. She had been in contact with Joe DiMaggio that week, and seemed hopeful about a possible reconciliation. She had planned a press conference for August 6. While Lawford, Bolanos, Gullaroff, and Joe DiMaggio Jr. said that her speech was sluggish at times, she didn’t sound the least bit depressed to them. Bolanos’s take is extremely interesting in that one would hardly expect someone to commit suicide mid-sentence during a telephone conversation.

Odds for the suicide verdict: Not very likely. A 100-1 shot at best.


Accident
Argument for: The concentration of Nembutal in Monroe’s bloodstream was extremely high, but the amount in her liver quadrupled that. The amount in her liver could only have come about through Monroe’s deliberate consumption of pills. Since Dr. Hyman Engelberg had refilled her Nembutal prescription the day before, she would have had ample opportunity to metabolize a number of pills had she taken them the night before. They would still have been in her system, but there would not be any trace of them in her digestive tract.

According to Dr. Noguchi, she had eighty micrograms of chloral hydrate in her system. Thirty micrograms would be enough to make you sick. One hundred micrograms would kill you.

Dr. Greenson might have administered an enema of chloral hydrate the night of Monroe’s death for two reasons: (1) to help her sleep without the use of Nembutal, and (2) to slow down the metabolism of Nembutal. Dr. Greenson might not have known that Monroe had already metabolized a large dose of Nembutal. Furthermore, he might have assumed that Dr. Engelberg might have also prescribed chloral hydrate. As Monroe’s sister Bernice Baker Miracle stated in her 1994 biography of Marilyn, Engelberg and Greenson cooperated closely in their treatments of the starlet. Moreover, both physicians agreed that they had to wean her off of Nembutal. If they had been off in their communication that day, then the two doctors might have unwittingly set the stage for a lethal drug interaction.

Argument against: One would have to question why a doctor with only one patient would so cavalierly apply an extremely high dosage of chloral hydrate to said patient, despite knowing the potentially lethal interaction it could have with a drug he already knew she had taken. Furthermore, Monroe, like many pill-popping celebs, had considerable knowledge of pharmacology. It’s doubtful that she would allow Greenson to administer an enema without at least telling him she had already taken a lot of Nembutal in the past twenty-four hours.

Most important, neither the chloral hydrate alone nor in combination with Nembutal caused Monroe’s death. Her death was specifically caused by Nembutal poisoning. Since Greenson and Engelberg were trying to wean her off of Nembutal, they would more likely have administered chloral hydrate, not more Nembutal.

Even more sinister, the evidence that could have cleared Drs. Engelberg and Greenson of negligence—stomach contents, smear material and internal organs—conveniently disappeared after the autopsy, according to Deputy District Attorney John Miner’s investigation. Were this nothing more than an accidental overdose, one that involved no powerful elites in showbiz, organized crime or politics (assuming a disparity among these three things), the Medical Examiner’s office (or any other investigative body) would ostensibly have little motive for hiding such things, especially to protect a couple of Hollywood docs.

Odds of the accident verdict: Not very good, but certainly better than the suicide hypothesis. We’ll tout this as a 25-1 shot.


So what’s with the betting odds? Perhaps they’re my way of telling you that the smart money is on the third remaining possibility: murder. The question is, by whom?