The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

by Donald H. Wolfe

  Since James Hall’s statements surfaced another person, a Mr. Ken Hunter, has been located who claims to have been an ambulance driver who responded to the Monroe residence in the early morning hours of August 5, 1962. He reports that he arrived at the scene in the morning hours with his partner, whom he believes with reasonable certainty to have been a Mr. Murray Liebowitz, and entered the Monroe residence within one or two minutes of their arrival. He observed Miss Monroe in the bedroom, on her face or side. He reported to us that Miss Monroe was obviously dead and exhibited signs of lividity in the neck or front portion of her body…. Mr. Ken Hunter reports that after he and his partner made cursory observations of the body, they both left the scene. He reports that police officers were at the scene at the time he and his partner left.

  Ken Hunter’s story was accepted, and James Hall’s story was dismissed without investigation. The report states, “Mr. James Hall’s declarations concerning his conduct and observations at the scene of death are not credible.” However, there were intrinsic problems with Ken Hunter’s story. Hunter had said that “police officers were at the scene at the time he and his partner left.” But according to the official version of events, Sergeant Jack Clemmons was the first officer on the scene, arriving at 4:40 A.M. Clemmons confirmed in 1993, “There was no ambulance or attendants at the house when I arrived, or at any time while I was there.” Neither Sergeant Robert Byron, James Bacon, Joe Hyams, nor Billy Woodfield recalls seeing an ambulance in the early hours of Sunday morning after Clemmons’s departure.

  But there was a bigger problem with Hunter’s story: Ken Hunter didn’t work for Schaefer in 1962. Carl Bellonzi, vice president of the Schaefer Ambulance Service, who has worked for the company for over forty years, stated in 1993 that Ken Hunter wasn’t employed by Schaefer until the mid-1970s, and that Hunter never worked the West Los Angeles area. He was an employee in the 1970s and 1980s in the Orange County office.

  Robert Slatzer returned to the offices of Walter Schaefer in 1985 and again questioned him about the ambulance call, and in a recorded interview Schaefer changed his story for the third time. “I guess I can tell it,” Schaefer began. “I came in the next morning [Sunday, August 5, 1962] and found on the log sheet we had transported Marilyn Monroe. I understood that she had overdosed. She was under the influence of barbiturates. They took her on a Code Three, an emergency, into Santa Monica Hospital, where she terminated.” Again he named Hunter as the driver and Liebowitz as the attendant. When asked why the body was returned to her bedroom, Schaefer replied, “Anything can happen in Hollywood.”

  Ken Hunter disappeared after his statement to the district attorney’s office, but Anthony Summers located him in 1984. He proved to be evasive and refused further contact after an initial call. Murray Liebowitz, who had changed his name and moved, was found in 1985. He told Summers, “I don’t want to be involved in this…. I wasn’t on duty that night…. I heard about it when I came to work the next morning…. I’m not worried about anything…. Don’t bother to call me anymore.”

  In the gridlock of the ambulance chase, one thing becomes clear: an ambulance was called on the night Marilyn Monroe died. However, there have been four ambulance stories: 1) Schaefer’s initial story that no ambulance was called; 2) Hall’s story of Marilyn dying in the guest cottage; 3) Hunter’s story that Marilyn was dead in her bedroom; and 4) Schaefer’s second story that Marilyn died at the hospital and was brought back to her house.

  Story number one can be eliminated by Schaefer’s admission. Stories three and four can be eliminated, not only because of their improbability, but because of their impossibility—Ken Hunter was not employed by Schaefer in 1962. That leaves story number two, James Hall’s improbable tabloid account of Marilyn Monroe dying in the guest cottage.

  Hall’s social security records and Schaefer’s payroll deductions indicate that Schaefer wrongfully denied that Hall was his employee. A photo in the Santa Monica Evening Outlook shows James Hall transporting a crime victim for Schaefer Ambulance Service in September 1962. Interviews with Hall’s father, his former wife, his sister, and his longtime friend Mike Carlson confirm that Hall told them his story shortly after Marilyn’s death.

  Hall recently recalled, “The Globe flew me to Florida and gave me six separate polygraph examinations, and I passed them all with flying colors.” Polygraph expert John Harrison stated, “As skeptical as I was when I first heard about Hall’s story, I can say, unequivocally, there was no deception on his part during the tests. He was absolutely truthful.”

  Hall was then put under hypnosis by Henry Koder, a professional forensic hypnotist with more than twenty years of crime investigation experience. “Hall was a good subject,” Koder stated. “I was able to take him back to the night of Marilyn Monroe’s death under hypnosis and listen to his step-by-step description of his involvement. He was able to vividly recall that night and point out details that he hadn’t remembered in earlier questioning.” Hall later described the interior of the guest cottage, including the location of the bed, nightstand, and telephone, as well as a partition between the bed and foyer. Few people had seen the cottage’s interior during Monroe’s lifetime, and when the Monroe estate sold the home to a Dr. Nunez, he had removed the partition that Hall described.

  Hall was asked to assist in making an Identi-Kit composite drawing of the doctor. The composite drawing bears a likeness to Dr. Greenson. Hall later positively identified Greenson, Newcomb, and Lawford from photographs.

  In 1992, James Hall underwent another series of polygraph tests conducted by Don Fraser of Arcadia, California, a state-licensed polygraph examiner who majored in police science at the University of Southern California. Fraser states, “There’s no question that James Hall is telling the truth. His story regarding the scene and circumstances of Miss Monroe’s death is absolutely true. He passed every question in several exhaustive polygraph examinations.”

  Clemmons also believed Hall’s story. It explained to him why the death scene in the main house seemed disturbed, and why Monroe’s body had the appearance of being placed on the bed. “It wasn’t natural,” he recently stated. “I knew at the time that the doctors and Mrs. Murray were lying to me. Now I know that they must have moved the body and invented the locked room story. The district attorney wouldn’t listen to me. I kept telling them that the death scene was arranged, and they said I was hallucinating.”

  In 1993, Liebowitz was located in a Los Angeles suburb living under the name Murray Leib. He admitted, after thirty years of denial, that he had been with Hall on the call to Monroe’s residence. Stating that Hall’s account was accurate, he then confirmed that Marilyn Monroe had died in the guest cottage.

  Shortly before Walter Schaefer retired from the ambulance business he was once again visited by Robert Slatzer. Asked why he had not told the truth about the ambulance calls, Schaefer simply replied, “Eighty percent of my business came from the county and government agencies.” However, Schaefer’s explanation was still less than veracious.

  The ambulance chase, which began in 1962, finally came to an abrupt and startling conclusion when Clemmons discovered why Walter Schaefer had been such a willing instrument of artful disinformation.

  In 1995, Jack Clemmons met Bob Neuman, who had been a pilot for Walter Schaefer. Neuman revealed that in 1947 Schaefer had initiated an air ambulance service located at the San Fernando Valley Airport. During the period of time Neuman was employed by Schaefer in the late fifties and early sixties, the service occasionally made clandestine flights for the U.S. government. Under the pretext of a medical emergency, the air ambulance service could fly into almost any airport in the world. Though Neuman never knew the true identity of many of his passengers, several were easily recognizable. Among them were the president of the United States, the attorney general, and Marilyn Monroe. He recalls flying Marilyn and Jack Kennedy to a private ranch in Idaho in 1961, as well as other flights with the president and women he couldn’t identify. There were also seve
ral flights to Cal-Neva and Palm Springs in the early sixties, and Neuman specifically recalls piloting Robert Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe to the Bing Crosby ranch in Cabo San Lucas.

  Neuman’s revelations may also explain what publicist Arthur Jacobs’s wife, Natalie, said to Anthony Summers in 1985, “Arthur absolutely knew about the affair between Marilyn and the president. John Kennedy used to come here—Arthur told me this—very often not in Air Force One, but incognito…. God knows how he did it.”

  Today, the Schaefer Air Ambulance Service still soars into the wild blue yonder—ready for any emergency.

  12

  Tumblers of Truth

  The failure of the authorities to hold a full and open inquiry into the death of Marilyn Monroe is a violation of the people’s right to know the truth.

  —Anthony Summers, 1995

  While the district attorney’s 1982 “threshold investigation” accomplished its purpose in successfully blocking the grand jury inquiry, it proved to be the suasive factor in luring eminent journalist Anthony Summers into “the land of the scorpions.” The editor of London’s Sunday Express magazine commissioned Summers to write an article concerning the district attorney’s investigation. Arriving in September 1982, Summers anticipated that the assignment would be concluded within a matter of weeks. Three years later he completed Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe.

  Interviewing more than 650 people, Summers created a mesmerizing landmark of investigative reporting telling the revealing story of Monroe’s intimate relationships with President John Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. At the same time he presented a compassionate view of Marilyn Monroe’s tragic life.

  Dr. Robert Litman of the Suicide Prevention Team was interviewed in June of 1984, and in Goddess Summers writes:

  I talked to Dr. Robert Litman, one of the two Suicide Prevention Team members who questioned Greenson. He recalls that Greenson was terribly upset, to the extent that Litman felt as much a bereavement counselor as a formal questioner. He had studied under Greenson, respected him greatly, and ‘felt it right not to talk about this until after Dr. Greenson’s death.’…Referring to his notes taken in 1962, Litman disclosed:

  “Around this time, Marilyn started to date some very important men.” Greenson had very considerable concern that she was being used in these relationships…. However, it seemed so gratifying to her to be associated with such powerful and important men that he could not declare himself against it…. He told her to be sure she was doing it for something that she felt was valuable and not just because she felt she had to do it.

  Dr. Litman says today that Greenson spoke to him of a “close relationship with extremely important men in government,” that the relationship was “sexual”; and that the men were “at the highest level.” Dr. Litman says that while Dr. Greenson did not actually name the Kennedys, he had “no real doubt” whom he meant by “important men in government.” Litman also felt Dr. Greenson had not been “totally candid,” even with him.

  Monroe’s calls to Robert Kennedy at the Justice Department were confirmed by Summers’s discovery of the telephone records. The records, which had been recovered from Thad Brown’s garage by Daryl Gates, were smuggled from the files of the LAPD Intelligence Division and appeared in Goddess. They confirmed Florabel Muir’s and Robert Slatzer’s allegations of Marilyn’s numerous calls to Bobby Kennedy at the Justice Department.

  A treasure trove of papers kept by executrix Inez Melson was also found by Summers in a file cabinet stored in the Melson garage. It was the same file cabinet that had been broken into in the guest cottage on the night Marilyn died. Inez had repaired the lock and used it for storing what remained of Marilyn’s personal papers. Among the papers in Melson’s possession was an undated note to Marilyn from Jean Kennedy Smith that referred to Marilyn and Bobby as “the new item.”

  While Anthony Summers was preparing Goddess for publication, another key witness died. His health destroyed by drink and drugs, Peter Lawford succumbed to liver and kidney failure on Christmas Eve, 1984, at the age of sixty-one. At the end of his life he had been shunned by the film industry, alienated from the Kennedy family, and rebuffed by his friends. Frank Sinatra went so far as to refuse to do a performance at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas when he learned that Peter Lawford was in the audience. For all his failings, however, Lawford remained loyal to JFK and stuck to the set piece of his story when interviewed by Anthony Summers several months before his death. However, when Lawford was queried on his deathbed by a Los Angeles Times reporter about Marilyn Monroe’s involvement with the Kennedys, Lawford offered an interesting addendum.

  Suddenly sitting up in his bed, he stated, “Even if those things were true, I wouldn’t talk about them. That’s just the way I am.”

  Summers’s most significant discovery occurred during his interview with Natalie Trundy Jacobs, widow of Monroe’s publicist, Arthur Jacobs. Natalie revealed that the alarm regarding Monroe’s death was as early as ten forty-five Saturday night—over five and a half hours before Sergeant Jack Clemmons received the call from Dr. Engelberg at four twenty-five Sunday morning.

  Natalie recalled that she and her future husband, Arthur Jacobs, were attending a Henry Mancini concert at the Hollywood Bowl when a staff member came to Jacobs’s box with an urgent message from Pat Newcomb—Marilyn Monroe was dead.

  “We got the news long before it broke,” Natalie Jacobs told Summers. “We left the concert at once and Arthur took me home. He went to Marilyn’s house, and I don’t think I saw him for two days. He had to fudge the press.”

  Natalie Jacobs was absolutely certain that the news of Marilyn’s death reached them shortly before the end of the concert. Summers checked the Los Angeles Times for that date and found that the Mancini concert had begun at 8:30 P.M., and it was established that the concert had concluded by 11 P.M. Because of the Hollywood Bowl’s proximity to a residential neighborhood, a local ordinance required that Bowl concerts must conclude by eleven.

  While Guy Hockett had estimated the time of death as occurring between nine-thirty and eleven-thirty Saturday evening, Natalie Jacobs’s revelation allowed for a more precise time frame. If Marilyn Monroe was known to be speaking coherently and quite normally with Joe DiMaggio, Jr.; Sidney Guilaroff; Henry Rosenfeld; Jeanne Carmen; and José Bolaños between 7:30 and 10 P.M., and the Bowl concert necessarily concluded by eleven, then the fatal dose of barbiturates was administered at some time shortly after ten and she succumbed at some time prior to eleven.

  Natalie Jacobs’s disclosure coincided with the Naars’ statement that there was no alarm regarding Marilyn until they had returned to their home sometime after ten o’clock. According to the Naars, it was approximately ten-thirty when Peter Lawford called in a panic about Marilyn, stating that she was incoherent, her voice was fading away, and the phone was left off the hook. The Naars’ statement further narrowed the time frame—Marilyn Monroe died between ten-thirty and eleven.

  Allowing for the events that necessarily took place between ten-thirty and eleven—the ambulance arrival, the attempts at resuscitation, Greenson pronouncing her dead, and the message being delivered to Arthur Jacobs at the Bowl—the time of Monroe’s death can be established as occurring close to 10:30 P.M.

  The passage of time and the many variants of disinformation circulated in the following decades dulled the startling significance of Natalie Jacobs’s disclosure. The revelation that the alarm regarding Monroe’s death had gone out as early as 10:45 P.M. unalterably confirmed that all the key witnesses had conspired to lie in their statements to the police, the coroner’s office, and the press.

  Natalie Jacobs’s statement in 1984 came forward after the conclusion of the 1982 “threshold investigation” by the district attorney; and in 1986, Ronald Carroll, the district attorney’s investigator, stated, “Had we known of Natalie Jacobs’s statement at the time, it would have cast an entirely different light on our investigation, and perhaps we would have arrived at diff
erent conclusions. If her statement proved to be correct, it would have meant that many of the witnesses had lied and there would have inevitably been a full investigation.”

  Natalie Jacobs maintains that Pat Newcomb sent the message to Arthur Jacobs at the Hollywood Bowl, but Newcomb stated to the press that she first heard about Marilyn’s death when she received a 4 A.M. phone call from Mickey Rudin.

  In Donald Spoto’s book Marilyn Monroe: The Biography, published by HarperCollins in 1993, Newcomb insists that she first heard the news of Marilyn’s death when called at her Beverly Hills apartment by Mickey Rudin at five o’clock Sunday morning. However, the 1962 Beverly Hills phone directory reveals that Pat Newcomb and Natalie Trundy, the future Mrs. Jacobs, were next-door neighbors. Newcomb lived at 150 South Canon Drive, and Natalie Trundy resided at 152 South Canon Drive. When recently asked if she had discussed Marilyn’s death with her neighbor when she returned home from the Bowl, Natalie stated, “Pat Newcomb wasn’t home Saturday night, and didn’t return to her apartment until late Sunday.”

  Where did Newcomb go after driving off from Marilyn’s house at approximately 6 P.M. Saturday? Witnesses attest that she arrived at Peter Lawford’s beach house sometime after nine. Bullets Durgom said, “The one thing I remember clearly is Pat Newcomb coming in at maybe nine-thirty. She stood on the step and said, ‘Peter, Marilyn’s not coming. She’s not feeling well.’” In 1985 Patricia Seaton Lawford, who was Lawford’s last wife and lived with him for eleven years, also confirmed that Newcomb was at the beach house that night.

  Ambulance driver James Hall’s identification of Lawford and Newcomb being at the scene when the ambulance arrived establishes an evident sequence of events.