WEBVTT
1
00:00:03.200 --> 00:00:11.800
Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning. I'm Garrett Fisher and this
2
00:00:11.839 --> 00:00:15.679
is Daily Crime Injustice. It's Thursday, June twenty fifth, twenty
3
00:00:15.720 --> 00:00:20.679
twenty six. Tonight we're stepping back, way back, because this
4
00:00:20.800 --> 00:00:24.519
weekend marks a centennial. Norma Jean Mortensen was born on
5
00:00:24.600 --> 00:00:28.280
June first, nineteen twenty six. The world came to know
6
00:00:28.359 --> 00:00:31.440
her as Marilyn Monroe. And if one hundred years sounds
7
00:00:31.440 --> 00:00:35.039
impossible for someone who still feels that present, that modern,
8
00:00:35.240 --> 00:00:38.679
that alive on a screen, well that's part of the
9
00:00:38.719 --> 00:00:41.520
problem we're going to talk about. She never got old,
10
00:00:41.840 --> 00:00:44.960
she got famous, and then she got gone at thirty
11
00:00:45.000 --> 00:00:46.880
six in a small house at the end of a
12
00:00:46.880 --> 00:00:51.320
cul de sac in Brentwood, August fourth, nineteen sixty two late.
13
00:00:52.079 --> 00:00:55.880
The house is at one two three five fifth Helena Drive,
14
00:00:56.240 --> 00:01:00.320
the only home Marylyn ever bought on her own. Her housekeeper,
15
00:01:00.479 --> 00:01:04.439
Eunice Murray, is there overnight. Sometime in the small hours,
16
00:01:04.439 --> 00:01:07.840
she notices something that troubles her. A light, a phone
17
00:01:07.879 --> 00:01:11.200
cord under the bedroom door. Accounts have differed for sixty
18
00:01:11.280 --> 00:01:14.599
years on exactly what, and she can't get a response.
19
00:01:15.319 --> 00:01:20.079
She calls Maryland's psychiatrist, doctor Ralph Greenson. Greenson comes He
20
00:01:20.120 --> 00:01:22.959
can't get in either, so he goes around the outside
21
00:01:22.959 --> 00:01:26.640
of the house and breaks a bedroom window to reach her. Inside,
22
00:01:26.840 --> 00:01:30.560
Marilyn is on the bed. She's gone. A second doctor,
23
00:01:30.760 --> 00:01:34.840
her physician, Jyman Engelberg, arrives and confirms it. And here
24
00:01:34.959 --> 00:01:37.000
is the first thing I want you to sit with,
25
00:01:37.239 --> 00:01:40.120
because it's going to matter all night. By the time
26
00:01:40.159 --> 00:01:43.400
the Los Angeles Police Department is actually called to the scene,
27
00:01:43.640 --> 00:01:49.400
hours have passed, not minutes. Hours, The most photographed woman
28
00:01:49.439 --> 00:01:51.640
in the world is dead in her own bed, and
29
00:01:51.680 --> 00:01:53.799
the clock that should have started the second she was
30
00:01:53.840 --> 00:01:58.920
found instead just ran the corner. Ruled it a probable
31
00:01:58.959 --> 00:02:03.640
suicide overdose of barbiturates. That ruling has stood for sixty
32
00:02:03.640 --> 00:02:07.599
four years, and this year her hundred. The man who
33
00:02:07.680 --> 00:02:10.800
helped identify the Golden State Killer went on television and
34
00:02:10.879 --> 00:02:13.680
said in so many words that the scene he was
35
00:02:13.719 --> 00:02:18.039
looking at was staged. Nobody, he said, stages a suicide
36
00:02:18.080 --> 00:02:22.520
to look like a better suicide. I'm Garrett Fisher. This
37
00:02:22.759 --> 00:02:26.680
is part one of two tonight, who Marilyn actually was
38
00:02:27.039 --> 00:02:30.240
the night she died, the autopsy that named it, and
39
00:02:30.319 --> 00:02:35.039
the brand new investigation, reopening all of it tomorrow. The Kennedy's,
40
00:02:35.280 --> 00:02:38.439
the doctors, and the one question in this whole saga
41
00:02:38.479 --> 00:02:45.599
we can actually answer. Let's get into it. The woman,
42
00:02:46.159 --> 00:02:49.360
not the poster. Before she's a theory, before she's a
43
00:02:49.400 --> 00:02:51.960
crime scene, before she's one hundred candles, she never got
44
00:02:52.000 --> 00:02:55.599
to blow out. She was a person. And I want
45
00:02:55.599 --> 00:02:58.560
to start there because the entire reason this case curdled
46
00:02:58.560 --> 00:03:01.319
into sixty years of suspicion is that very few of
47
00:03:01.360 --> 00:03:04.840
the people standing closest to Marilyn Monroe were actually paying
48
00:03:04.840 --> 00:03:08.159
attention to her. She was born into nothing, a mother
49
00:03:08.159 --> 00:03:11.199
who couldn't care for her, a childhood handed between foster
50
00:03:11.280 --> 00:03:15.080
homes and an orphanage, a stretch of real instability before
51
00:03:15.120 --> 00:03:18.759
she ever saw a camera. She built Marilyn Monroe out
52
00:03:18.759 --> 00:03:22.080
of that. The name, the voice, the walk, all of
53
00:03:22.080 --> 00:03:25.680
it constructed deliberately by a woman who understood exactly what
54
00:03:25.759 --> 00:03:28.560
the studio system wanted and gave it to them while
55
00:03:28.639 --> 00:03:32.599
quietly fighting to be taken seriously. She started her own
56
00:03:32.639 --> 00:03:36.199
production company in the nineteen fifties when actresses simply did
57
00:03:36.240 --> 00:03:39.879
not do that. She wanted better roles. She studied, She
58
00:03:40.039 --> 00:03:43.919
read the dumb blonde was a character she played, and
59
00:03:43.960 --> 00:03:46.479
she knew it was a character, and it followed her
60
00:03:46.520 --> 00:03:49.159
out of every room she ever tried to be smart in.
61
00:03:50.039 --> 00:03:52.479
By the summer of nineteen sixty two, she was thirty
62
00:03:52.520 --> 00:03:55.919
six and, depending on whose account you trust, either on
63
00:03:56.000 --> 00:03:59.000
the verge of a comeback or coming apart at the seams.
64
00:03:59.520 --> 00:04:03.039
She just been fired off a film and rehired. She
65
00:04:03.240 --> 00:04:07.199
was doing major magazine interviews. She was also, by every
66
00:04:07.280 --> 00:04:13.639
honest account, exhausted, isolated, dependent on prescription sedatives, and surrounded
67
00:04:13.639 --> 00:04:18.399
by men, doctors, studio executives, hangers on who each needed
68
00:04:18.439 --> 00:04:22.519
something different from her. Hold that picture a vulnerable woman,
69
00:04:22.800 --> 00:04:26.959
heavily medicated, managed by people with agendas. There's a playbook
70
00:04:27.000 --> 00:04:30.279
for this, and it almost never ends. Well. That's the
71
00:04:30.319 --> 00:04:33.279
woman who died on August fourth. Not a symbol, not
72
00:04:33.360 --> 00:04:36.720
a punchline, a thirty six year old human being who
73
00:04:36.879 --> 00:04:40.319
on her hundredth birthday, deserves to have her death looked
74
00:04:40.319 --> 00:04:47.079
at as carefully as her face was. The night and
75
00:04:47.199 --> 00:04:50.680
the hours that when missing, let me walk you through
76
00:04:50.680 --> 00:04:52.720
the scene as it was reported, and let me be
77
00:04:52.759 --> 00:04:55.399
honest with you up front. The timeline of that night
78
00:04:55.480 --> 00:04:57.839
is a mess, and it has been a mess from
79
00:04:57.879 --> 00:05:02.480
the very first telephone call. Different participants gave different times.
80
00:05:03.120 --> 00:05:06.120
Eunice Murray, the housekeeper changed her account more than once
81
00:05:06.160 --> 00:05:09.319
over the years. So when I lay this out, understand
82
00:05:09.360 --> 00:05:13.879
these are the reported sequences, not stone tablets. What's consistent
83
00:05:14.000 --> 00:05:17.399
is this Murray is in the house overnight, in the
84
00:05:17.439 --> 00:05:21.120
early morning hours, she becomes alarmed. She summons doctor Greenson.
85
00:05:21.399 --> 00:05:24.120
Greenson breaks the bedroom window from outside and gets in.
86
00:05:24.839 --> 00:05:28.240
Engelberg comes and confirms the death, and the Los Angeles
87
00:05:28.240 --> 00:05:31.399
Police Department does not get the call until roughly four
88
00:05:31.560 --> 00:05:34.720
thirty in the morning. The first officer through the door
89
00:05:34.800 --> 00:05:38.680
is a sergeant named Jack Clemens. And Clemens, this is
90
00:05:38.720 --> 00:05:41.720
the part that has fueled six decades of doubt, said
91
00:05:41.800 --> 00:05:46.240
almost immediately that something felt wrong. The body, in his telling,
92
00:05:46.519 --> 00:05:51.399
looked too composed to arranged. He found the housekeeper doing laundry,
93
00:05:51.639 --> 00:05:53.839
running a washing machine in the middle of the night,
94
00:05:54.160 --> 00:05:56.560
in a house where the most famous woman in America
95
00:05:56.680 --> 00:06:00.120
had just died. To a working cop. That does and
96
00:06:00.160 --> 00:06:03.920
read like grief. It reads like cleanup. Now that is
97
00:06:04.000 --> 00:06:07.920
Clemens's impression, his interpretation, and he was one man with
98
00:06:08.120 --> 00:06:11.360
one view. But he's the first train set of eyes
99
00:06:11.399 --> 00:06:13.920
on that scene, and his gut said this was staged
100
00:06:13.959 --> 00:06:17.600
before anyone had ever heard of AI reconstructions. Here's why
101
00:06:17.600 --> 00:06:21.120
those missing hours matter so much, and it's not conspiracy,
102
00:06:21.399 --> 00:06:25.199
it's just police work. A death scene is a perishable thing.
103
00:06:25.560 --> 00:06:30.480
The first hours are when you photograph everything, bag everything, time, everything,
104
00:06:30.639 --> 00:06:34.600
before a single object moves in Brentwood that night. By
105
00:06:34.639 --> 00:06:37.040
the time the police owned the scene, an unknown number
106
00:06:37.079 --> 00:06:39.040
of people had been in and out of that bedroom
107
00:06:39.079 --> 00:06:44.480
for hours, doctors, a housekeeper, a washing machine running. Whatever
108
00:06:44.560 --> 00:06:47.480
the truth of what happened to Marilyn Monroe, the chance
109
00:06:47.560 --> 00:06:51.079
to document it cleanly was already gone. That's not a mistake.
110
00:06:51.560 --> 00:06:53.639
When you're dealing with the death of the most famous
111
00:06:53.680 --> 00:06:56.120
person in the country and you let the scene sit
112
00:06:56.199 --> 00:07:00.600
for hours, that's a choice, or at minimum, are so
113
00:07:00.759 --> 00:07:14.560
large it might as well be won. The body went
114
00:07:14.639 --> 00:07:17.720
downtown to the Los Angeles County Coroner's office and the
115
00:07:17.759 --> 00:07:21.879
autopsy was performed by a deputy medical examiner named Thomas Nogucci,
116
00:07:22.360 --> 00:07:24.600
a name that would later become famous in its own
117
00:07:24.680 --> 00:07:28.240
right as the coroner to the Stars. Nogucci found a
118
00:07:28.319 --> 00:07:31.680
lethal level of barbiturates, the drug at the center of
119
00:07:31.720 --> 00:07:37.680
it was nembaal pentobarbital, a powerful sleeping medication, along with
120
00:07:38.000 --> 00:07:43.639
chloral hydrate, a sedative. The coroner's conclusion acute barbiturate poisoning
121
00:07:43.879 --> 00:07:47.959
the manner of death probable suicide. To support that finding,
122
00:07:48.160 --> 00:07:51.959
Los Angeles did something fairly novel for the time. They
123
00:07:52.000 --> 00:07:55.399
convened a panel from the Suicide Prevention Center to perform
124
00:07:55.480 --> 00:08:00.519
what's called a psychological autopsy, essentially reconstructing marylyn state of
125
00:08:00.560 --> 00:08:04.959
mind from her history, her prescriptions, her mood, the testimony
126
00:08:05.000 --> 00:08:08.000
of people around her. The panel looked at a woman
127
00:08:08.079 --> 00:08:12.680
with documented depression, mood swings, a long reliance on sedatives,
128
00:08:12.759 --> 00:08:14.839
and a large quantity of pills in the house, and
129
00:08:14.920 --> 00:08:19.199
concluded the probable suicide ruling fit. The official Corners report
130
00:08:19.279 --> 00:08:23.040
leaned on that same picture, her history, her medications, the
131
00:08:23.079 --> 00:08:27.160
sheer amounts of medicine within reach, and look, I'm going
132
00:08:27.199 --> 00:08:30.680
to be honest with you, that is a coherent, defensible conclusion,
133
00:08:30.839 --> 00:08:34.799
and I'm not here to wave it away. A grieving, medicated,
134
00:08:34.879 --> 00:08:38.519
isolated person dies of an overdose of her own prescribed
135
00:08:38.519 --> 00:08:41.840
sleeping pills. On its face, it's the simplest reading and
136
00:08:41.879 --> 00:08:44.600
the simplest reading is usually the right one. But there
137
00:08:44.600 --> 00:08:48.440
were details even in nineteen sixty two that nagged at
138
00:08:48.480 --> 00:08:52.240
the people who looked closely. And these are the things
139
00:08:52.279 --> 00:08:54.960
that critics of the ruling have pointed to ever since,
140
00:08:56.120 --> 00:08:59.039
the question of how that much barbiturate got into her
141
00:08:59.080 --> 00:09:02.759
system the way it did, Questions about what was and
142
00:09:03.039 --> 00:09:08.080
wasn't found in her stomach, the thinness of the physical documentation.
143
00:09:08.840 --> 00:09:13.440
None of those questions by themselves prove anything sinister. Reasonable
144
00:09:13.480 --> 00:09:17.080
forensic people have argued both sides for sixty years, but
145
00:09:17.279 --> 00:09:19.919
every one of those questions exists because the scene was
146
00:09:19.960 --> 00:09:24.559
handled the way it was handled. A clean investigation answers questions.
147
00:09:25.039 --> 00:09:29.200
A sloppy one manufactures them. Brentwood manufactured them by the dozen,
148
00:09:29.600 --> 00:09:34.480
and they've been compounding interest ever since. Enter the Golden
149
00:09:34.519 --> 00:09:37.879
State Killer Investigator, which brings us to right now, to
150
00:09:38.000 --> 00:09:42.240
twenty twenty six, to the centennial. Because television networks do
151
00:09:42.279 --> 00:09:44.559
not let one hundredth birthday pass without a reason to
152
00:09:44.559 --> 00:09:46.759
put a face back on the screen, and Fox and
153
00:09:46.799 --> 00:09:51.159
TMZ found theirs. The special is called Celebrity Crime Scene
154
00:09:51.480 --> 00:09:55.440
Marilyn Monroe. It premiered on Fox on June twenty first,
155
00:09:55.519 --> 00:09:59.559
and streamed the next day on Hulu TMZ's Harvey Levin
156
00:09:59.600 --> 00:10:02.559
is behind and he said flatly that what his team
157
00:10:02.600 --> 00:10:06.519
found challenges the suicide ruling and points to something his
158
00:10:06.639 --> 00:10:11.799
word far more sinister. The hook is the technology. They
159
00:10:11.919 --> 00:10:15.440
used artificial intelligence to rebuild the interior of Maryland's home,
160
00:10:15.919 --> 00:10:20.480
the bedroom, the nightstand, the window, so investigators could walk
161
00:10:20.480 --> 00:10:22.759
a virtual version of a scene that in the real
162
00:10:22.759 --> 00:10:26.639
world was barely photographed at all. And the lead investigator
163
00:10:26.759 --> 00:10:30.480
is not a tabloid talking head. It's Paul Holes, the
164
00:10:30.559 --> 00:10:33.799
retired cold case detective who spent more than two decades
165
00:10:33.799 --> 00:10:37.080
in California law enforcement and played a central role in
166
00:10:37.200 --> 00:10:40.840
finally identifying the Golden State Killer. He's joined by senior
167
00:10:40.879 --> 00:10:46.039
crime scene analyst Alena Burrows and true crime journalist Kiki Monique. Now,
168
00:10:46.080 --> 00:10:49.159
I want to be precise here because this is exactly
169
00:10:49.200 --> 00:10:51.759
the kind of thing that gets twisted in the retelling.
170
00:10:52.360 --> 00:10:54.879
Holes is not standing up and saying he has solved
171
00:10:54.879 --> 00:10:58.519
the murder of Marilyn Monroe. He's saying this scene as
172
00:10:58.639 --> 00:11:01.840
documented doesn't sit with him. So let me give you
173
00:11:01.879 --> 00:11:04.679
his actual red flags and you can weigh them yourself.
174
00:11:05.879 --> 00:11:11.440
One the lack of documentation, there are Hole says, very
175
00:11:11.440 --> 00:11:13.919
few photographs of the death scene at all, and from
176
00:11:13.919 --> 00:11:16.240
the one image showing her in the bed, he says,
177
00:11:16.279 --> 00:11:21.000
his eye immediately caught in consistencies. The sheets, in his description,
178
00:11:21.120 --> 00:11:24.559
were clean and perfect. The body, he says, was arranged
179
00:11:24.600 --> 00:11:26.679
in a way that doesn't look like an overdose to him.
180
00:11:27.240 --> 00:11:30.720
Overdose scenes, he points out, are typically not tidy. The
181
00:11:30.759 --> 00:11:35.200
body purges, things get messy. This one was pristine. Two
182
00:11:35.720 --> 00:11:39.480
the pill bottles on the small nightstand by her head,
183
00:11:39.720 --> 00:11:41.759
Hole says. The bottles were lined up with all the
184
00:11:41.840 --> 00:11:45.279
labels facing the same direction, including the most important one,
185
00:11:45.639 --> 00:11:49.399
the empty nembutal bottle. That prescription had been filled two
186
00:11:49.440 --> 00:11:53.919
days earlier for fifty capsules, empty, lid back on, set
187
00:11:54.039 --> 00:11:57.639
neatly in place. His point, a person about to take
188
00:11:57.679 --> 00:12:00.960
that many pills does not typically tidy up the nightstand first,
189
00:12:01.000 --> 00:12:05.200
and cap the empty bottle. Three the water. This one
190
00:12:05.240 --> 00:12:08.679
is almost absurd in its simplicity. If you've just swallowed
191
00:12:08.720 --> 00:12:11.559
dozens of capsules, you needed something to swallow them with,
192
00:12:12.080 --> 00:12:15.120
and reportedly there was no glass of water found in
193
00:12:15.159 --> 00:12:20.279
that bedroom. None. Four And this is the one that
194
00:12:20.399 --> 00:12:25.240
stopped me. The window. The window doctor greenson supposedly broke
195
00:12:25.279 --> 00:12:28.399
from outside to get in. Holes points out that the
196
00:12:28.399 --> 00:12:31.399
broken glass was on the outside of the house. Think
197
00:12:31.440 --> 00:12:34.240
about that for one second. If you break a window
198
00:12:34.240 --> 00:12:37.360
from the outside to reach in, the glass falls inward,
199
00:12:37.759 --> 00:12:41.080
it falls into the room. Glass on the outside suggests
200
00:12:41.080 --> 00:12:44.440
the window was broken from the inside out. As Holes
201
00:12:44.480 --> 00:12:47.360
put it, nobody stages a suicide to look like a
202
00:12:47.399 --> 00:12:50.679
better suicide. And the analyst on his team made the
203
00:12:50.679 --> 00:12:53.759
plane observation that if you're already inside a house trying
204
00:12:53.799 --> 00:12:56.240
to make a scene look a certain way, you don't
205
00:12:56.279 --> 00:12:58.360
run around to the yard to break a window in.
206
00:12:58.799 --> 00:13:02.000
You just break the glass. That's the case the special
207
00:13:02.039 --> 00:13:04.480
makes about the scene itself, and I'll give you my
208
00:13:04.559 --> 00:13:08.200
honest read. As a murder accusation, it proves nothing, and
209
00:13:08.240 --> 00:13:10.440
we are going to be very careful tomorrow about the
210
00:13:10.519 --> 00:13:13.879
much wilder claims this special also makes. But as an
211
00:13:13.919 --> 00:13:18.720
indictment of the nineteen sixty two investigation, it's devastating because
212
00:13:18.759 --> 00:13:20.960
every single one of those red flags is really the
213
00:13:21.000 --> 00:13:24.120
same red flag wearing a different hat. They all come
214
00:13:24.159 --> 00:13:26.879
back to a death scene that was never properly secured,
215
00:13:27.120 --> 00:13:31.399
never properly photographed, never properly worked. A scene that was
216
00:13:31.480 --> 00:13:42.279
contaminated before the police even arrived. What we actually know tonight.
217
00:13:42.759 --> 00:13:44.679
So let me tell you where we honestly stand at
218
00:13:44.720 --> 00:13:47.320
the end of part one. Because I refuse to send
219
00:13:47.360 --> 00:13:50.639
you to bed thinking I just proved a murder. I didn't.
220
00:13:51.120 --> 00:13:54.399
Here's what's true. It's true that the official ruling, the
221
00:13:54.440 --> 00:13:59.480
only legal conclusion ever reached, is probable suicide by barbiturate overdose.
222
00:14:00.080 --> 00:14:02.600
It's true that in the sixty four years since the
223
00:14:02.720 --> 00:14:05.360
case has been reopened and re examined more than once,
224
00:14:05.799 --> 00:14:09.080
and that no official body has ever publicly produced evidence
225
00:14:09.120 --> 00:14:12.919
of foul play that matters. I'm not going to let
226
00:14:12.960 --> 00:14:16.360
as slick ai reconstruction overrule six decades of that just
227
00:14:16.360 --> 00:14:19.720
because it makes better television. But it is also true,
228
00:14:19.960 --> 00:14:23.919
undeniably on the record, agreed upon by skeptics and believers alike,
229
00:14:24.559 --> 00:14:27.360
that the investigation into the death of the most famous
230
00:14:27.360 --> 00:14:32.320
woman in the world was a shambles, hours lost, a
231
00:14:32.399 --> 00:14:36.720
scene walked through and possibly cleaned, barely any photographs, a
232
00:14:36.799 --> 00:14:39.799
housekeeper running laundry while a sergeant stood there with his
233
00:14:39.879 --> 00:14:43.279
stomach turning. That's the real crime I can prove tonight,
234
00:14:43.879 --> 00:14:47.600
not who did what to Marilyn Monroe, But the simple
235
00:14:48.000 --> 00:14:52.720
infuriating fact that when she died, nobody, not the people
236
00:14:52.720 --> 00:14:55.639
in that house, not the system that showed up at
237
00:14:55.639 --> 00:14:59.480
four thirty in the morning, nobody was paying attention to
238
00:14:59.559 --> 00:15:02.919
her with the care she was owed. Tomorrow we go
239
00:15:03.000 --> 00:15:07.879
where this story always goes, the Kennedys, the FBI files,
240
00:15:07.960 --> 00:15:12.039
Paul Holes wants unsealed, the mob the claim in this
241
00:15:12.360 --> 00:15:15.440
very special that she may not have even died at home,
242
00:15:16.159 --> 00:15:19.039
and the thread I find most credible and most damning
243
00:15:19.080 --> 00:15:23.360
of all the doctors, the two physicians who had this