COVER

DEDICATION

For my sister, Denise

ONE

ONE

On the day she died, the body of Marilyn Monroe went missing for ten hours.

Usually the speculation around the circumstances of her death focuses on whether she accidentally overdosed, committed suicide, or was murdered. And if she was murdered, who would have wanted the thirty-six-year-old sex symbol dead? Was there a Kennedy conspiracy? Marilyn had been romantically linked to both President Kennedy and his brother Robert. And why was Kennedy cousin Peter Lawford one of the first to be called to the scene?

Eunice Murray, Marilyn’s housekeeper, found her a little after 1 AM on August 5, 1962, dead of an apparent overdose of barbiturates, which included pentobarbital (sleeping pills) and chloral hydrate. The police weren’t called to the scene for over four hours. Murray told the authorities she had to wait to get the okay from the Twentieth Century Fox Publicity Department and that it took a “bit of time.”

Officers knew as they drove up the private driveway to the bougainvillea-covered home that Marilyn lay inside, dead. Murray greeted police at the door with two of Marilyn’s physicians, Ralph Greenson and Hyman Engelberg. They escorted detectives back to Marilyn’s bedroom. The housekeeper seemed calm; she was even doing laundry, which was kind of weird considering it was five in the morning.

From the bedroom doorway, officers could see Marilyn’s nude body lying facedown in what investigators call the “soldier’s position.” Her arms were by her side, her legs stretched out, and her face was burrowed in her pillow. This arrangement was odd for someone who had overdosed, because ODs almost always have convulsions and vomit before they die, and their body is left usually on their back, their limbs twisted. OD’ing on pills ain’t pretty, but if you want to off yourself, it’s less messy than blowing your brains out.

Most female suicides don’t shoot themselves in the head.

Investigators found no glass by Marilyn’s bedside for her to have used when she swallowed all the pills, and many of the police files and interviews conducted after her death have disappeared.

But I’m most fascinated by the hours that Marilyn’s body seems to have disappeared—starting when the corpse left her house off Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills to the time it was checked into the LA County Morgue—over six hours later. Normally the drive would take half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes—but six hours?

I’d been told by someone who should really know that the transportation of her body was intercepted by members of a secret society of necrophiliacs. My person-in-the-know said that a lot of money changed hands so that several members of this society could have sex with her dead body.