Marilyn Monroe Died in the Most Watched House in America — and No One Secured the Scene (Part 1 of 2)

0:03 Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning. I'm Garrett Fisher and this is Daily Crime Injustice. It's Thursday, June twenty fifth, twenty twenty six. Tonight we're stepping back, way back, because this weekend marks a centennial. Norma Jean Mortensen was born on June first, nineteen twenty six. The world came to know her as Marilyn Monroe. And if one hundred years sounds impossible for someone who still feels that present, that modern, that alive on a screen, well that's part of the problem we're going to talk about. She never got old, she got famous, and then she got gone at thirty six in a small house at the end of a cul de sac in Brentwood, August fourth, nineteen sixty two late.

0:52 The house is at one two three five fifth Helena Drive, the only home Marylyn ever bought on her own. Her housekeeper, Eunice Murray, is there overnight. Sometime in the small hours, she notices something that troubles her. A light, a phone cord under the bedroom door. Accounts have differed for sixty years on exactly what, and she can't get a response. She calls Maryland's psychiatrist, doctor Ralph Greenson. Greenson comes He can't get in either, so he goes around the outside of the house and breaks a bedroom window to reach her. Inside, Marilyn is on the bed. She's gone. A second doctor, her physician, Jyman Engelberg, arrives and confirms it. And here is the first thing I want you to sit with, because it's going to matter all night. By the time the Los Angeles Police Department is actually called to the scene, hours have passed, not minutes. Hours, The most photographed woman in the world is dead in her own bed, and the clock that should have started the second she was found instead just ran the corner. Ruled it a probable suicide overdose of barbiturates. That ruling has stood for sixty four years, and this year her hundred. The man who helped identify the Golden State Killer went on television and said in so many words that the scene he was looking at was staged. Nobody, he said, stages a suicide to look like a better suicide. I'm Garrett Fisher. This

2:22 is part one of two tonight, who Marilyn actually was the night she died, the autopsy that named it, and the brand new investigation, reopening all of it tomorrow. The Kennedy's, the doctors, and the one question in this whole saga we can actually answer. Let's get into it. The woman, not the poster. Before she's a theory, before she's a crime scene, before she's one hundred candles, she never got to blow out. She was a person. And I want to start there because the entire reason this case curdled into sixty years of suspicion is that very few of the people standing closest to Marilyn Monroe were actually paying attention to her. She was born into nothing, a mother who couldn't care for her, a childhood handed between foster homes and an orphanage, a stretch of real instability before she ever saw a camera. She built Marilyn Monroe out of that. The name, the voice, the walk, all of it constructed deliberately by a woman who understood exactly what the studio system wanted and gave it to them while quietly fighting to be taken seriously. She started her own production company in the nineteen fifties when actresses simply did not do that. She wanted better roles. She studied, She read the dumb blonde was a character she played, and she knew it was a character, and it followed her out of every room she ever tried to be smart in.

3:50 By the summer of nineteen sixty two, she was thirty six and, depending on whose account you trust, either on the verge of a comeback or coming apart at the seams. She just been fired off a film and rehired. She was doing major magazine interviews. She was also, by every honest account, exhausted, isolated, dependent on prescription sedatives, and surrounded by men, doctors, studio executives, hangers on who each needed something different from her. Hold that picture a vulnerable woman, heavily medicated, managed by people with agendas. There's a playbook for this, and it almost never ends. Well. That's the woman who died on August fourth. Not a symbol, not a punchline, a thirty six year old human being who on her hundredth birthday, deserves to have her death looked at as carefully as her face was. The night and the hours that when missing, let me walk you through the scene as it was reported, and let me be honest with you up front. The timeline of that night is a mess, and it has been a mess from the very first telephone call. Different participants gave different times.

5:03 Eunice Murray, the housekeeper changed her account more than once over the years. So when I lay this out, understand these are the reported sequences, not stone tablets. What's consistent is this Murray is in the house overnight, in the early morning hours, she becomes alarmed. She summons doctor Greenson. Greenson breaks the bedroom window from outside and gets in. Engelberg comes and confirms the death, and the Los Angeles Police Department does not get the call until roughly four thirty in the morning. The first officer through the door is a sergeant named Jack Clemens. And Clemens, this is the part that has fueled six decades of doubt, said almost immediately that something felt wrong. The body, in his telling, looked too composed to arranged. He found the housekeeper doing laundry, running a washing machine in the middle of the night, in a house where the most famous woman in America had just died. To a working cop. That does and read like grief. It reads like cleanup. Now that is Clemens's impression, his interpretation, and he was one man with one view. But he's the first train set of eyes on that scene, and his gut said this was staged before anyone had ever heard of AI reconstructions. Here's why those missing hours matter so much, and it's not conspiracy, it's just police work. A death scene is a perishable thing.

6:25 The first hours are when you photograph everything, bag everything, time, everything, before a single object moves in Brentwood that night. By the time the police owned the scene, an unknown number of people had been in and out of that bedroom for hours, doctors, a housekeeper, a washing machine running. Whatever the truth of what happened to Marilyn Monroe, the chance to document it cleanly was already gone. That's not a mistake. When you're dealing with the death of the most famous person in the country and you let the scene sit for hours, that's a choice, or at minimum, are so large it might as well be won. The body went downtown to the Los Angeles County Coroner's office and the autopsy was performed by a deputy medical examiner named Thomas Nogucci, a name that would later become famous in its own right as the coroner to the Stars. Nogucci found a lethal level of barbiturates, the drug at the center of it was nembaal pentobarbital, a powerful sleeping medication, along with chloral hydrate, a sedative. The coroner's conclusion acute barbiturate poisoning the manner of death probable suicide. To support that finding, Los Angeles did something fairly novel for the time. They convened a panel from the Suicide Prevention Center to perform what's called a psychological autopsy, essentially reconstructing marylyn state of

8:00 mind from her history, her prescriptions, her mood, the testimony of people around her. The panel looked at a woman with documented depression, mood swings, a long reliance on sedatives, and a large quantity of pills in the house, and concluded the probable suicide ruling fit. The official Corners report leaned on that same picture, her history, her medications, the sheer amounts of medicine within reach, and look, I'm going to be honest with you, that is a coherent, defensible conclusion, and I'm not here to wave it away. A grieving, medicated, isolated person dies of an overdose of her own prescribed sleeping pills. On its face, it's the simplest reading and the simplest reading is usually the right one. But there were details even in nineteen sixty two that nagged at the people who looked closely. And these are the things that critics of the ruling have pointed to ever since, the question of how that much barbiturate got into her system the way it did, Questions about what was and wasn't found in her stomach, the thinness of the physical documentation.

9:08 None of those questions by themselves prove anything sinister. Reasonable forensic people have argued both sides for sixty years, but every one of those questions exists because the scene was handled the way it was handled. A clean investigation answers questions. A sloppy one manufactures them. Brentwood manufactured them by the dozen, and they've been compounding interest ever since. Enter the Golden State Killer Investigator, which brings us to right now, to twenty twenty six, to the centennial. Because television networks do not let one hundredth birthday pass without a reason to put a face back on the screen, and Fox and TMZ found theirs. The special is called Celebrity Crime Scene Marilyn Monroe. It premiered on Fox on June twenty first, and streamed the next day on Hulu TMZ's Harvey Levin is behind and he said flatly that what his team found challenges the suicide ruling and points to something his word far more sinister. The hook is the technology. They used artificial intelligence to rebuild the interior of Maryland's home, the bedroom, the nightstand, the window, so investigators could walk a virtual version of a scene that in the real world was barely photographed at all. And the lead investigator is not a tabloid talking head. It's Paul Holes, the retired cold case detective who spent more than two decades in California law enforcement and played a central role in finally identifying the Golden State Killer. He's joined by senior

10:40 crime scene analyst Alena Burrows and true crime journalist Kiki Monique. Now, I want to be precise here because this is exactly the kind of thing that gets twisted in the retelling. Holes is not standing up and saying he has solved the murder of Marilyn Monroe. He's saying this scene as documented doesn't sit with him. So let me give you his actual red flags and you can weigh them yourself. One the lack of documentation, there are Hole says, very few photographs of the death scene at all, and from the one image showing her in the bed, he says, his eye immediately caught in consistencies. The sheets, in his description, were clean and perfect. The body, he says, was arranged in a way that doesn't look like an overdose to him.

11:27 Overdose scenes, he points out, are typically not tidy. The body purges, things get messy. This one was pristine. Two the pill bottles on the small nightstand by her head, Hole says. The bottles were lined up with all the labels facing the same direction, including the most important one, the empty nembutal bottle. That prescription had been filled two days earlier for fifty capsules, empty, lid back on, set neatly in place. His point, a person about to take that many pills does not typically tidy up the nightstand first, and cap the empty bottle. Three the water. This one is almost absurd in its simplicity. If you've just swallowed dozens of capsules, you needed something to swallow them with, and reportedly there was no glass of water found in that bedroom. None. Four And this is the one that stopped me. The window. The window doctor greenson supposedly broke from outside to get in. Holes points out that the broken glass was on the outside of the house. Think about that for one second. If you break a window from the outside to reach in, the glass falls inward, it falls into the room. Glass on the outside suggests the window was broken from the inside out. As Holes put it, nobody stages a suicide to look like a better suicide. And the analyst on his team made the plane observation that if you're already inside a house trying to make a scene look a certain way, you don't run around to the yard to break a window in.

12:58 You just break the glass. That's the case the special makes about the scene itself, and I'll give you my honest read. As a murder accusation, it proves nothing, and we are going to be very careful tomorrow about the much wilder claims this special also makes. But as an indictment of the nineteen sixty two investigation, it's devastating because every single one of those red flags is really the same red flag wearing a different hat. They all come back to a death scene that was never properly secured, never properly photographed, never properly worked. A scene that was contaminated before the police even arrived. What we actually know tonight.

13:42 So let me tell you where we honestly stand at the end of part one. Because I refuse to send you to bed thinking I just proved a murder. I didn't. Here's what's true. It's true that the official ruling, the only legal conclusion ever reached, is probable suicide by barbiturate overdose. It's true that in the sixty four years since the case has been reopened and re examined more than once, and that no official body has ever publicly produced evidence of foul play that matters. I'm not going to let as slick ai reconstruction overrule six decades of that just because it makes better television. But it is also true, undeniably on the record, agreed upon by skeptics and believers alike, that the investigation into the death of the most famous woman in the world was a shambles, hours lost, a scene walked through and possibly cleaned, barely any photographs, a housekeeper running laundry while a sergeant stood there with his stomach turning. That's the real crime I can prove tonight, not who did what to Marilyn Monroe, But the simple infuriating fact that when she died, nobody, not the people in that house, not the system that showed up at four thirty in the morning, nobody was paying attention to her with the care she was owed. Tomorrow we go where this story always goes, the Kennedys, the FBI files, Paul Holes wants unsealed, the mob the claim in this very special that she may not have even died at home,

15:16 and the thread I find most credible and most damning of all the doctors, the two physicians who had this woman on a cocktail that could kill, and the question of whether anyone was ever held to account for it. That's part two. Before you go. If this one got under your skin, share it. Tell a friend who loves a real mystery. That word of mouth is the whole ballgame for a show like this. And if you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment and tell me where you land botched investigation or something worse. I read them. I'm Garrett Fisher. This was part one. Come back tomorrow and until then, do better. A few important things before we close.

16:00 Marilyn Monroe's death was officially ruled a probable suicide from acute barbiturate poisoning by the Los Angeles County Coroner in nineteen sixty two, and that remains the only official conclusion ever reached. The case has been reviewed since, and to date, no law enforcement agency has publicly identified evidence of foul play or homicide. The claims that the scene was staged and any suggestion of murder come from the Fox and TMZ special Celebrity Crime Scene Marilyn Monroe and the opinions of its investigators, including Paul Holes. They are interpretations and theories, not legal findings, and no one has been charged in connection with her death. Reporting on this case, including the timeline of who found her and when police were notified, has been inconsistent for more than sixty years. Where accounts conflict, we've flagged them as reported rather than settled. This episode discusses suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling, you can call or text nine eight eight in the United States to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Sourcing for Tonight includes Box News, Digital, The Mirror, AOL, Yahoo, and TMZ.