The Coroner Series

by Thomas T. Noguchi

  Her murder would have required a massive, in-place conspiracy covering all of the principals at the death scene on August 4 and 5, 1962; the actual killer or killers; the Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner; the autopsy surgeon to whom the case was fortuitously assigned; and almost all of the police officers assigned to the case, as well as their superiors in the LAPD … our inquiries and document examination uncovered no credible evidence supporting a murder theory.

  The report also noted: “The D.A.’s review was undertaken since there had been no D.A. investigation or full-scale case review in 1962 (although D.D.A. John Miner had been present at Dr. Noguchi’s autopsy).”

  I found the report fascinating on several levels. Personally, I hadn’t known until I read it that John Miner, twenty years ago, had officially reported to the District Attorney’s Office that I had performed a meticulous professional autopsy, including the use of a hand-held magnifying glass to search for needle marks. Miner was apparently unaware that all good pathologists do that in deaths where drugs are suspected, but I was gratified by his comment.

  Of more professional interest to me was the report by the independent expert Dr. Boyd G. Stephens, Chief Medical Examiner/coroner in San Francisco. He concluded not only that the original autopsy was scientifically correct in 1962 but that “even the application of more advanced—1982—state-of-the-art procedures would not, in all reasonable probability, change the ultimate conclusions reached by Dr. Noguchi in 1962.”

  The DA’s investigation was both conscientious and comprehensive. Almost every allegation had been followed up and found to be without basis so far as the DA’s office was concerned, ranging from the mysterious missing “diary” to the “doctor” who had administered a “killing” shot, to the Spindel tapes, to Robert Kennedy’s trip to LA on the weekend of Monroe’s death.

  But, of course, the investigation, two decades after the fact, could not answer the few legitimate questions that remained. There was no way, for example, it could determine the source of the bruise on Monroe’s hip. Nor why she was laughing happily with Joe DiMaggio, Jr., at 7:30 P.M. and dying only thirty minutes later. And what did the outstretched hand on the telephone mean?

  I was also concerned that the persistent rumors of a cover-up had not been entirely dispelled. Journalists had reported that Monroe’s FBI file, released to them under the Freedom of Information Act, had pages deleted, apparently for security reasons. And now, according to the DA’s investigative report, the FBI files on Monroe that had been given to his office were also “heavily censored.” I had to wonder. Why were the FBI files on a movie actress censored in the first place? What national-security concerns could be involved? And, more mysteriously, why in 1982 had the FBI felt that heavy censorship of her files was still necessary twenty years after Monroe died, even when the FBI was dealing not with journalists but with an official Los Angeles District Attorney’s investigation? What is in Monroe’s files?

  I had another concern. The very man who had watched me perform the autopsy, John Miner, the DA’s liaison with the coroner’s office back in 1962, had presented a problem to the current DA’s investigation. Miner had not only watched the autopsy, but he, alone among LA law officials, was granted an exclusive privilege by Dr. Greenson, Monroe’s psychiatrist: he was allowed to listen to tape recordings of Monroe’s own words in her sessions with Dr. Greenson.

  According to the DA’s report, Miner had pledged that he would never “repeat to anyone the details of Marilyn Monroe’s statements and tape recordings given to Greenson during therapy sessions.” But what he heard on the tapes, and his debriefing interview with Dr. Greenson, had convinced him that Marilyn Monroe had not committed suicide. The 1982 DA’s report goes on to say:

  Based on Miner’s conversations with Greenson, he harbored serious questions regarding the finding that Miss Monroe’s death was a suicide and felt compelled to express his reservations [in a memo to] the Chief Deputy District Attorney, [to] Dr. Curphey, and … others.

  That was in 1962. Twenty years later the DA’s investigators pressed Miner—and he apparently drew back. Now he said that what he had meant in 1962 was that Monroe had not committed intentional suicide. In Monroe’s case, however, an accidental overdose of that magnitude was extremely unlikely. From my forensic experience with suicide victims, I believe that the sheer number of pills Monroe ingested was too many to swallow “accidentally.” Thus, if Miner’s evaluation in 1962 was correct, the only conceivable cause of Monroe’s death was murder.

  My final concern stemmed from the fact that the notes and interviews compiled by the suicide panel that studied Monroe’s death remained confidential and were not released to the DA’s investigators. Dr. Robert Litman was one of the psychiatrists on that panel, and I recently spoke to him again about the Marilyn Monroe case.

  A founder of the Suicide Prevention Center and one of the nation’s leading authorities on suicide, Dr. Litman told me that, from the information he and the other panelists received from friends and associates of Monroe, he had no doubt that she had killed herself. They discovered that she had tried to commit suicide twice before and was rescued at the last minute. Also, various associates had said she was extremely depressed just before her death and was acting strangely.

  “Any chance of murder?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. “The door to the bedroom was locked from the inside. They had to break a window to enter the room. And Mrs. Murray was in her room all evening only a little way down the hall from Monroe’s.”

  What did happen in Marilyn Monroe’s bedroom on the evening of August 4, 1962? In my opinion, Dr. Curphey’s official conclusion stated the situation correctly (if evasively): “probable suicide.” On the basis of my own involvement in the case, beginning with the autopsy, I would call Monroe’s suicide “very probable.”

  But I also believe that until the complete FBI files are made public and the notes and interviews of the suicide panel released, controversy will continue to swirl around her death. The remaining questions will go unanswered, and no one will ever be able to say definitely what went on that evening which, in only thirty minutes, transformed Marilyn Monroe from a beautiful and talented actress, laughing and talking cheerfully on the telephone, to a dying movie star—and an undying legend.

  4

  * * *

  Medical Examiner’s Case No. 68-5731

  * * *

  Robert F. Kennedy

  At 10:15 P.M. on June 4, 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy opened the door of his fifth-floor suite in the Hotel Ambassador, Los Angeles, and slipped out into the corridor, surprising the three reporters down the hall. He leaned casually against the wall, arms folded, his blue suit rumpled, striped tie loose, and fielded the reporters’ questions.

  Downstairs in the Embassy Room the celebration of Kennedy’s victory in the pivotal California presidential primary was already under way. But the situation was confused. The raw vote tallied so far indicated that Senator Eugene McCarthy, not Kennedy, was winning the primary. Still, the television networks unanimously projected Kennedy as the victor.

  One of the men in the corridor with Kennedy was Jack Smith of the Los Angeles Times, who was neither a political nor a “hard news” reporter. So his question brought a smile to the Senator’s face. “Did you catch the ninth wave?” Smith asked. To Californians, the ninth wave is thought to be that great breaker you’re looking for in the surf that makes all the waiting worthwhile. It’s the biggest, and often the most dangerous. That afternoon Kennedy had been to Malibu Beach with one of his sons. In reply to Smith’s question, he said, “I guess that’s where I got this,” and touched a small purplish bump over his right eye. “I don’t know the number of the wave, but I know the result.”

  Behind him in his suite were gathered his family, and friends such as ex-astronaut John Glenn and writer Budd Schulberg. Across the hall in a separate suite, his campaign staff followed the primary results. But Kennedy lingered with the reporters. Like his brother Jack, he had
a congenial relationship with the working press and enjoyed bantering with newsmen. Finally, he finished the give-and-take with a typical Bobby Kennedy statement: “The only thing is to win.”

  Then he turned to the door of his suite, a slim, short, brown-haired man above whom the three newsmen seemed to tower. The door opened, and the reporters heard someone say from inside, “McCarthy isn’t conceding.”

  At ten-thirty that night, I was at home on Oxford Street in the Wilshire district of Los Angeles. Two lights were burning inside the house, one in the living room, the other in my bedroom upstairs. I was preparing for bed while my wife, Hisako, lingered below to continue watching the primary results on television.

  The network forecasts that Kennedy would win the California primary had brought the first cheering note into my life in weeks. My involvement in the Marilyn Monroe case had caused me to study the young Senator, and I admired him very much. To me, he and his late brother represented what I called the “Great America.” I respected everything about them: their style, their leadership, their instinctive reaching out to all ethnic groups to say, Yes, you too are Americans.

  It had been another sixteen-hour day for me at work. When Dr. Curphey retired in 1967, I became his successor, and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors appointed me Chief Medical Examiner. As with all county department heads, my appointment began with a six-month probationary period. Still, that made me, at forty, the first Japanese-American chief medical examiner in a major metropolitan jurisdiction in the United States. But as my probationary period was drawing to a close, I heard rumors that I might be replaced. The Board of Supervisors wanted one of their own in the job, not an “outsider.”

  Perhaps because I was troubled by those rumors, I was half awake when my wife came to bed. I asked her if Kennedy was still winning the primary, and she said McCarthy hadn’t conceded but the networks were still firm in their projections that Kennedy would be the victor. A few minutes later that happy news helped me drift off to sleep.

  I was awakened by the jangle of the telephone. What time was it? Who could be calling? I reached for the phone, knocking a teacup from the night table to the floor. And even before I placed the receiver to my ear, I could hear the excited voice of one of my deputies: “Dr. Noguchi, Dr. Noguchi.”

  “Yes.”

  “Something’s happened. Something’s happened. Kennedy has been shot!”

  I immediately turned on the television set and saw the dreadful film replay of the shooting—people screaming, the close-up of the Senator’s face as he lay on the floor of a hotel kitchen. And when I heard a paramedic say the Senator had been shot in the head, I felt a terrible foreboding and was more shaken than at any other time in my career.

  Kennedy had won the California primary, and I prayed that he would live. But that night in my home the news of a gunshot to the Senator’s head, which I knew to be potentially life-threatening, galvanized me in a professional way too. As yet, according to the television reporters, the police didn’t have a full picture of what had taken place in that kitchen. A young man with a revolver had been apprehended on the scene, but were there other gunmen who had escaped?

  Even as that thought flashed through my mind, Sandy Serrano, a Youth for Kennedy worker, appeared on the television screen. Breathlessly, she informed a reporter that she had been out on the terrace “for some air” during the Senator’s victory remarks to the crowd inside when, suddenly, “a girl in a white polka-dot dress ran out of the hotel, shouting, ‘We shot him.’”

  That report caused a tormenting phrase to burn in my mind for the next forty-eight hours: “Don’t let Dallas happen again.”

  In 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, the Chief Medical Examiner in Dallas tried to take jurisdiction. Instead, the body was almost forcibly removed by Secret Service men and flown to Washington, where military doctors who were not qualified forensic pathologists completed the autopsy. They did the best they could, but, as the late Medical Examiner for New York City, Dr. Milton Helpern, said, “It was like sending a seven-year-old boy who has taken three lessons on the violin over to the New York Philharmonic and expecting him to perform a Tchaikovsky symphony. He knows how to hold the violin and bow, but he has a long way to go before he can make music.”

  Rushed by the White House staff, conducting their investigation thousands of miles away from the evidence they needed, the military doctors omitted some basic procedures, such as dissecting the neck wound. These omissions would form the basis for all kinds of rumors and conspiracy theories about the assassination for decades. FBI observers at the autopsy even misinterpreted the position of the neck wound in the autopsy report, stating that it was in the back rather than in the neck. And as a result, doubt had been cast on the forensic-pathology profession itself, which, in 1963, commanded little enough respect.

  Now, tragically, a Kennedy brother might die in my jurisdiction. And it would be an awesome responsibility for our small and understaffed office, for it was essential, I thought, that this time the autopsy be carried out with absolutely no errors. So, at two o’clock that morning, I made a decision. I would call on the wisdom and resources nationwide of the still young and almost totally unknown forensic-medicine profession. If Kennedy should die, I would make this examination a national effort for pathologists.

  It must have been about 3 A.M. when I telephoned the head of the agency which we pathologists call “our own INTERPOL.” In 1966, Dr. William Eckert had founded INFORM, the International Reference Organization in Forensic Medicine, located in Wichita, Kansas. Today, years later, the agency is still unknown to the American public, but it is always working for them. Intelligence arrives daily in its headquarters from medical-examiner jurisdictions around America and is stored in computers so that forensic cases from cities thousands of miles apart can be compared, clues in mysterious deaths matched, and new medical innovations and scientific breakthroughs circulated to all pathologists for their use.

  The call to Dr. Eckert, my first step in the impending case, was the beginning of a fateful journey which would carry me through many peaks and valleys. I had no way of knowing that morning that, after Senator Kennedy died, my autopsy would appear to contradict what every single witness, at least seventy in all, had seen with his own eyes in that crowded kitchen.

  Or that the conflict between the eyewitness testimony and the autopsy would serve as the basis for review of the evidentiary portion of the case against the convicted killer, Sirhan Sirhan, in an attempt to overthrow his conviction. Sirhan had claimed that he brought the gun into the hotel kitchen but had no memory of what happened after that. It could not be denied that he had fired at the Senator, but his lawyer would allege that the fatal bullet was certainly triggered from another gun.

  Ethel Kennedy smiled tentatively for the first time since the shooting. She stood beside her husband, holding a stethoscope against his chest. Dr. Victor Basiluskas, one of the attending physicians at Central Receiving Hospital, smiled with her.

  “Will he live?” Mrs. Kennedy asked the doctor.

  “At this minute he’s doing all right. Let’s hope.”

  Senator Kennedy had suffered cardiac arrest in the ambulance and had been brought into the hospital breathless, pulseless and lifeless. Basiluskas and his assistants had given him closed cardiac massage and then placed him in a heart-lung machine. There they administered oxygen, inserted a tube into his mouth to facilitate breathing, and injected adrenalin into the muscles.

  Nothing happened. They waited. And miraculously, after ten or twelve minutes, there was a feeble breath and Kennedy’s heart began to beat.

  It was then that the doctor, on an impulse, handed Mrs. Kennedy the stethoscope, and her smile warmed him. Then he turned to an associate, Dr. Albert C. Holt, and told him that a neurosurgeon and a chest surgeon were waiting at “Good Sam.” A few minutes later, Senator Kennedy was being rushed to the Hospital of the Good Samaritan, which was equipped with the most advanced technology in Lo
s Angeles for dealing with the terrible wounds he had suffered.

  Meanwhile, the swarthy young man in police custody told detectives his name was “John Doe.” He was arrogant, uncooperative, and showed no remorse. But the gears of justice began to wear down his composure. In a few minutes the police discovered that the .22-caliber Iver Johnson pistol in his possession had been registered to a man named Munir Sirhan, of 696 East Howard Street, Pasadena. The man in custody was his brother, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan.

  Back at the Hotel Ambassador, another witness told police that he too had seen the girl in the white polka-dot dress run out of the hotel. But he added a troubling detail. A “dark-complected” man had been running with her.

  Only one dark-complected man, Sirhan Sirhan, was in custody. Had an accomplice escaped?

  In the small hours of that morning, I had telephoned not only Bill Eckert in Wichita, but two other distinguished pathologists, Dr. Cyril Wecht in Pittsburgh and Navy Captain Bruce Smith in Washington.

  Eckert had been insistent in his advice to me. “Take command of the examination right there in Los Angeles. Fight off any pressure to remove the body to Washington. No Dallas this time.”

  Then he had a shrewd idea. “This time bring Washington to you.”

  “How?”

  “Call AFIP and have their top pathologists fly to California to observe the autopsy.”

  Following up Eckert’s suggestion, I contacted Captain Smith, director of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington. He said that if Kennedy died, three AFIP experts would travel to Los Angeles aboard a supersonic military jet to participate in the autopsy. Then he said, “Do you mind if Pierre Finck is one of the team?”

  I told him I wouldn’t mind at all. Finck was one of the young doctors who had participated in President Kennedy’s autopsy.