Crypt 33

by Adela Gregory

  When Weiner read Hopper’s story, he wondered whether the truth about Marilyn would ever be known. Although the column would normally run again in the next edition, it was killed and the story only appeared once.

  Many periodicals ran stories about the life and death of the movie star that left smiles on the faces of those who adored her. And on every anniversary of her death, speculation about her murder resurfaced. On the twentieth anniversary, an article written by Leigh Weiner appeared in the “Calendar” section of the Los Angeles Times. Weiner was asked, “Have you ever taken a picture that bothered you?” and his first response was to mention the special assignment he had done on the death of Marilyn. He still wondered about it. The story he told then was the first time he recorded how he was able to take photographs of the corpse in Crypt 33 almost twelve hours after it was autopsied.

  After the story ran on August 9, 1982, Leigh received a phone call from the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office. The D.A.’s representative told the photographer he had read his story in the Times and wanted to meet with him. He invited Mr. Weiner to join him for breakfast.

  Weiner knew the District Attorney’s Office was looking for something, but decided to meet him as requested at the posh Pacific Dining Car restaurant where great food was served to the downtown Los Angeles elite. An Old English Pub atmosphere dominated the luxurious rooms furnished with red leather booths. The tables were covered with white linen tablecloths and the lights were set low even for breakfast.

  The ice water had yet to be poured when the most vocal of the three men who had showed up from the D.A.’s Office stated that they didn’t think the photos and negatives belonged to Mr. Weiner. They believed the photos belonged instead to their office.

  Weiner knew he was the rightful owner, and he told them so. After a few go-rounds he let them know that a subpoena from the District Attorney’s Office might not even get him to release the pictures.

  When breakfast was served, the group spokesman complimented Leigh on his initiative in getting the photos in the first place. No further mention was made of any District Attorney’s Office investigation or forthcoming subpoena.

  Of the three, the short stocky man with short black hair continually asked the most intelligent questions. His face was pleasant and kind. Weiner took a liking to him, but not enough to make him relinquish his photos.

  Breakfast lasted all of twenty-five minutes. The check was picked up. Weiner graciously thanked the men and the short man with black hair thanked him for his time. Cordial good-byes were exchanged. Weiner never heard from the District Attorney’s Office again. The district attorney did not consider Weiner’s photos to be of any use. And the photos remain in Weiner’s safe deposit box somewhere in Los Angeles.

  23

  The Final Autopsy

  By the 1960s, drug use was soaring to unprecedented levels. In 1962, when Marilyn Monroe died, sedatives and sleeping pills were fast becoming a major drug problem as physicians and psychiatrists, ill-informed of their addictive hazards and long-term side effects, were overprescribing and overmedicating. Careless prescribing of these drugs led to increased accidental overdoses and attempted suicides. However, sophisticated methods of detecting suicide or accidental overdose had not caught up with the growing magnitude of the drug epidemic. In 1972, the Uniform Rating System standardized detection of drug overdose. Widely used by coroners, pathologists, forensic physicians, and medical physicians since then, it has made drug overdose much more detectable and diagnosable. When Marilyn Monroe’s body was found, the accurate measure and analysis by the high-tech devices now in use by forensic scientists was not available to pathologists. In addition, the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office was ill-equipped, but the crucial test on her colon could have been done.

  To add to the confusion, Dr. Theodore Curphy had stopped the autopsy midstream. Otherwise, Marilyn’s death would have undoubtedly been declared a homicide immediately. Elton Noels, a retired investigator for the Coroner’s Office, stated that it was not uncommon to suddenly “stop” incomplete autopsies for a variety of reasons. The public’s right to know was less important than private or political pressure. With the longtime Hollywood practice of protecting the public image of its stars, Curphy had been pressured many times before by insurance companies, studios, and/or political factions. Considered a gentleman by his colleagues, he had come to barely tolerate politicians and Hollywood and the external pressures they exerted on his office. Curphy had been brought out from Long Island, New York, to upgrade the archaic Los Angeles Coroner’s Office to a modern medical system. He appointed medical doctors to be in charge of autopsies for the first time. (Prior to that time Los Angeles coroners were not required to have licenses to practice either medicine or forensic pathology.)

  But apparently Theodore Curphy had buckled before outside pressures when, on June 16, 1959, he had declared the death of television’s Superman, George Reeves, a suicide. There had been plenty of evidence to contradict a verdict of suicide that time, too. The firm of Nick Harris Detectives, retained by Reeves’s mother, proved Superman was murdered.

  As he relates in his own book, Coroner, published long after Marilyn’s death, L.A. County Coroner Thomas Noguchi had a part in the controversies surrounding the deaths of Natalie Wood and William Holden. And he had learned to fudge the facts well from his predecessor, Dr. Curphy. Noguchi’s introductory lesson came when Curphy assigned him his first celebrity autopsy, Marilyn Monroe.

  Marilyn Monroe’s autopsy report includes several areas of dispute in the findings and the conclusions. There are a number of discrepancies in the evidence gathered to determine the cause of death. First is the matter of the barbiturates purportedly ingested orally by Miss Monroe. The lethal dose that caused the actress’s death was the high concentrations of pentobarbital (Nembutal), 13.0 mg. percent in her liver and 4.5 mg. percent in the blood, and chloral hydrate, 8 mg. percent in her blood sample. These two drugs detected in her blood and liver constituted a lethal dose. The twenty-five 1½ gr. capsules of Nembutal ordered by her internist Dr. Engelbert on August 3, 1962, was her last prescription, filled just two days prior to her death. The Nembutal vial was found empty by her bed. Based upon the high Nembutal concentration in her liver, it is estimated she would have had to orally ingest forty tablets (a minor variance, depending on her absorption rate). By August 4, Miss Monroe would not have had more than twenty-five capsules at her disposal. With her chronic insomnia, it is very likely she had already taken several the previous days. Therefore, ingesting twenty-five Nembutals or fewer would hardly account for the concentration of 13.0 mg. percent in her liver, a gross discrepancy. Whitey Snyder states that during the sixteen years he knew Marilyn, she would usually start by taking one or two sleeping pills from seven-thirty to eight, and by nine-thirty she would have taken one or two more. Shortly after that time, the medication would take effect and she would fall asleep. Were she to wake up, she repeated the dosage of one or two into the early morning.

  According to interviews with publicist Arthur Jacob’s ex-wife, Natalie, she and her then-boyfriend Arthur were attending a Hollywood Bowl Concert featuring Henry Mancini and Ferrante and Teicher on the night of Monroe’s death. In compliance with a curfew law, that event must have concluded by 11 P.M. Natalie remembers the evening clearly. A messenger from the Hollywood Bowl interrupted their evening with the news of Marilyn Monroe’s death. She went home immediately after the concert and did not see Jacobs for two days. He later told her that Marilyn’s death had been awful and that everything publicized about Marilyn’s life was “fudged.”

  That story narrows the time of death to prior to 11 P.M. Although both Dr. Greenson and Dr. Engelberg claimed she expired in her home around three-thirty Sunday morning, in actuality she died before 11 P.M. on Saturday, August 4, 1962.

  More corroborating evidence of an earlier time for Monroe’s death came from Sergeant Jack Clemmons, the first policeman to arrive on the scene. He reported twelve minutes after D
r. Engelberg called the LAPD at 4:35 A.M. He noted the lividity (purplish-colored skin) on the back (posterior) of her body and the absence of lividity on the front (anterior) part of her body. Since blood settles downward due to gravity after death, his conclusion was that she had died on her back. He also noted that rigor mortis had already set in. Several variables determine how long after death rigor mortis occurs, among them temperature, age, weight, amount of clothing, degree of activity, and general circulation. The stiffening in Marilyn’s body indicated that the time of death had been six to eight hours prior to Clemmons’s arrival. That would make the probable hour of death between 8 and 10 P.M., not 3:40 A.M. Saturday, August 4, 1962, as the doctors reported.

  Monroe frequently used prescription drugs and was sophisticated and knowledgeable about her usage. Whitey Snyder says he never saw Marilyn unable to walk or so drugged that she fell down, as some would have the public believe. He claims she was always aware of what and how many pills she had taken, how much she needed, and the time intervals necessary to ensure her sleep or to attain the calming effect she was looking for. Marilyn was not a recreational drug user. Incidentally, no alcohol was found in her blood or liver samples. An accidental overdose also seems out of the question.

  Death from oral ingestion of pentobarbital, as the autopsy concluded, is highly suspect. Marilyn’s stomach cavity was devoid of any refractile crystals of either pentobarbital or chloral hydrate. The contents of 20 cc of mucosa removed from her stomach were examined under a polarized microscope after a crystallization process to form drug crystals, and not even a trace of Nembutal or chloral hydrate was detected. A suicide victim who orally ingested an overdose of those two drugs would certainly retain at least traces of them in the stomach.

  In his book Coroner, Noguchi would later attempt to defend his findings by rationalizing,

  To answer the first question concerning the empty stomach, I began my explanation with a common experience. Sometimes when you eat exotic food that doesn’t “agree” with you, you suffer from indigestion, which means that the stomach is rejecting the food and not passing it into the intestines easily. But when you swallow food like steak that you’ve eaten for years, there is no indigestion, because the food is passed smoothly on to the intestines.

  So it was with pills swallowed by habitual drug users. Marilyn Monroe had been a heavy user of sleeping pills and choral hydrate for years. Her stomach was familiar with those pills, and they were digested and “dumped” into the intestinal tract. In my experience with pill addicts, I expected to see no visible evidence of pills—a fact that only proved they were addicts, not that they were murder victims who had been injected.

  Thence his “reason” for no trace of the psychoactive drugs in the stomach cavity.

  Joseph Mato, a toxicologist at the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office spells out the contradiction in Noguchi’s argument. With death through oral ingestion, the concentration of drugs would be highest in the stomach when compared to stomach levels resulting from intramuscular or intravenous ingestion. Death through anal suppository or enema would also produce minute amounts, if any, in the stomach. Mato stated it is nearly impossible for a subject to die precisely at that moment when the entire medication would be absorbed beyond the stomach. Mato does not consider the frequent drug usage of the deceased as a variable.

  Two leading specialists in the field of psychoactive drug-induced deaths, psychiatrist and neurologist Louis A. Gottschalk and toxicologist Robert H. Cravey, were pioneers in developing the Standard Uniform Rating System in 1972. Their findings, published in their book, Toxicological and Pathological Studies on Psychoactive Drug-Involved Death, enumerate autopsies of over fifteen hundred frequent drug users. Each and every autopsy of a death caused by oral ingestion included drug analysis of the stomach contents. In every case, large concentrations to lesser amounts of the specific drug taken orally were found in the stomach. These studies completely dispel previously held beliefs that “frequent drug users” have extraordinary capabilities to digest the drugs they frequently use that cause their death.

  In his vast experience as the retired chief toxicologist of the Office of the Coroner of Orange County, California, Dr. Cravey states that in every case of a drug overdose through oral entry, “I have always found [drugs] in the stomach.”

  Accepting the premise that Marilyn Monroe’s death was not caused by her own ingestion of barbiturates, the next possibility to consider would be an overdose from another method such as intravenous and intramuscular entry using a hypodermic needle. Using a magnifying glass, Dr. Noguchi examined Monroe’s entire body and found only one injection site on her left hip. In his tape recording of the actual examination of the body, he stated, “I see an area of slight ecchymosis on the lower left back,” described it as being reddish-blue and dark, indicating it was fresh. Medically this is termed an extravasated blood tumor, a swelling that results from the accumulation of blood in subcutaneous tissue—commonly called a bruise. Though it suggested that Monroe could have been involved in a struggle, Noguchi chose to downplay the bruise. And he later dismissed it as a bruise from the injection given to Marilyn by Dr. Hyman Engelberg on August 3, thereby eliminating that avenue of entry. Regarding any further examination of Monroe’s body, only the lower intestinal tract was visually and physically checked. Dr. Noguchi originally sent samples to UCLA laboratories, since the Coroner’s Office was not outfitted to conduct organ testing. Through negligence, ignorance, political or business pressure, Dr. Ralph Abernathy, a Coroner’s Office chief toxicologist, discarded the intestinal samples. When a suspicious Noguchi asked Abernathy what happened to them, he answered he believed the case was settled. Obviously not so to Noguchi, who later stated he wanted them analyzed due to the body’s suspicious condition, specifically the empty stomach, and, as important, because of “the marked congestion and purplish discoloration of the colon.”

  Also present at the autopsy was John Miner, legal-medical adviser to the D.A.’s office (who would become renowned for exposing fraud in oncologists’ practices in Los Angeles) was interviewed and quoted by criminologist Fenton Bressler, stating “There is one thing about Noguchi’s autopsy report that has always bothered me. The reference to the congestion and purplish discoloration of the colon. I must say that I originally did not mention it to Thomas Noguchi, but I have asked another eminent pathologist about it and he says that it is consistent with an enema [anal entry] having been used. I confronted Dr. Noguchi about the congestion and discoloration and he said, “I don’t know. It is very rare that I see that in autopsy. I have no explanation.” (At the time, Noguchi had been in practice for only five years.) Bressler explains that “the anal entry is like giving a high dosage level of the drug and [the drug] would have rapid absorption into the body.”

  Dr. Joseph Davis, currently a practicing pathologist in Dade County, Florida, explains the discoloration of the intestines. When you apply secobarbital (Seconal) to a litmus test (7 being neutral), it ranges between 9.7 and 10.5. The more alkaline drug pentobarbital (Nembutal) scores between 9.6 and 11. In Davis’s experience an orally induced overdose of an alkaline barbiturate like Nembutal would definitely cause purplish discoloration in the stomach, and the lining would show visible damage in the autopsy. He adds, “As long as the alkalinity of the substance was as high as either Seconal or Nembutal, then it is reasonable to expect a similar reaction in the colon.”

  Narrowing down the possibilities and probabilities, anal entry of the drug seems most probable through enema or suppository use. Although Noguchi at that time could not have been trained about the criminal use of suppositories or enemas, they were then being used by international spy organizations, including the CIA and the Mafia. In the 1950s, the manufacture of barbiturate suppositories continued in Puerto Rico and in Europe, although they were not commonly used. When murder was not prescribed by gunshot and when the victim was known to take psychoactive drugs, the underworld could almost guarantee undetected murder by employi
ng suppositories or enemas. The Mafia would take advantage of the victim’s reputation for either using or misusing drugs, since most pathologists consider personal habits of the deceased when making their diagnosis of death. Undoubtedly the Los Angeles Coroner’s Office was either too unsophisticated or guilty of hiding pertinent facts (as it had done many times before). Either way, Marilyn’s autopsy was grossly mishandled

  Dr. Noguchi would eventually be appointed chief of medical examiners, only to be demoted later from his position for “mishandling of the coroner’s office and sensationalizing celebrity deaths” among other publicly reported reasons.

  The cyanosis described by photographer Leigh Weiner (and mentioned by Hedda Hopper) was not noted by Noguchi. But his evaluation of the skin was performed after embalming, when the blood had been withdrawn from the body; by then the skin showed only slight signs of lividity or discoloration.

  Eliminating the possibility of heart failure or an obstruction of her esophagus, the next most feasible cause of cyanosis would be a quick death from rapid absorption of barbiturates into the bloodstream through either I.V. or intramuscular injection or suppository or enema, not through oral intake.

  Dr. Cyril Wecht, an internationally renowned pathologist, adds, “When a body is cyanotic [has bluish skin tone] other than from lividity, then the pathologist usually looks for the means of death to be other than by an oral overdose of a drug or compound. A rapid loss of oxygen causes deprivation and death to the skin cells, explaining the discoloration of the skin.”

  After erroneously declaring the cause of death “probable suicide,” three death certificates were prepared by the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office. The first two, known as pending certificates, were normally used while an investigation was in progress. The final certificate becomes the official document. Once signed, arrangements then can be made for burial or cremation. Lionel Grandison, deputy coroner’s aide, was assigned to case number 81128. Signing Marilyn Monroe’s death certificate was one of his minor duties. Oddly, each certificate listed a different cause of death: one being “suicide,” the second “possible suicide,” and the third “probable suicide.”