The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe Read Free

“Mickey” Rudin, was there along with Engelberg, Eunice Murray, publicist Patricia Newcomb, and handyman Norman Jefferies. Apparently Greenson had left sometime between Clemmons’s departure and Byron’s arrival. In retrospect Clemmons believed that Rudin, Newcomb, and Jefferies were on the premises when he arrived at approximately 4:40 A.M. A number of cars had been parked in the courtyard, and he hadn’t entered all the rooms or the detached guest cottage.
    When Byron asked Murray about the discovery of the body, she basically repeated the story she had told Clemmons, except that she altered the time frame by three and a half hours. Instead of saying that she had gotten up at midnight and seen the light under Marilyn’s door, Murray stated that it was closer to 3:30 A.M. , and that she called Greenson at 3:35. Apparently, Murray, Greenson, and Engelberg had decided to change the chronology. Engelberg also advanced the time by three and a halfhours, telling Byron that he had pronounced the actress dead at 3:50 A.M. —not “shortly after twelve-thirty A.M. ,” as he had stated to Clemmons. In a follow-up report dated August 6, 1962, both Greenson and Engelberg reiterated the altered chronology. The time discrepancy wasn’t an aberration or an error on the part of one of them—all three had changed their story.
    In his report, Byron described Murray as “possibly evasive,” and he recalled in a recent interview, “My feeling was that she had been told what to say. It had all been rehearsed beforehand. She had her story, and that was it.” As for Engelberg and Greenson, Byron reflected, “There was a lot more they could have told us…. I didn’t feel they were telling the correct time or situation.”
    On Sunday morning Time and Life correspondent Tommy Thompson taped a lengthy interview with Eunice Murray in which she recounted the events surrounding the film star’s death in a sincere, soft-spoken voice, carefully measuring her words in a precise manner. In the following decades evidence would contradict her story, and she would ultimately refute many of her statements preserved on the Thompson tapes.
    In her initial statements to the police and the press, Murray recalled that she first became concerned about Marilyn when she got up to go to the bathroom and saw the light on under the door. She clearly stated, “It was the light under Marilyn’s door that aroused my suspicions that something was terribly wrong.” However, Murray’s bedroom was adjacent to Monroe’s and had its own bath with its own entry from the Murray bedroom. On the way from Murray’s bedroom to her bathroom there is no view of Marilyn’s bedroom door. Only if Murray had walked out into the hallway would she have had a view of a light under the door. In any case, the “light under the door” would prove to be an impossibility (see floor plan in “Source Notes” of the Appendix).
    After Marilyn Monroe’s friend Robert Slatzer learned of her death, he went to the Monroe residence with the executrix, Inez Melson, on Thursday, August 9. * Slatzer noted that the recently installed carpeting was so thick that it was difficult to close Marilyn’s bedroom door. The door scraped along the surface of the carpet, and it was impossible to see lightbeneath it. Murray, who was present during Slatzer’s discovery, admitted that he was correct and that she must have been mistaken.
    The question remained—what actually led Murray to believe that “something was terribly wrong” in the middle of the night?
    In the book Marilyn: The Last Months , which Eunice Murray cowrote in 1975 with her sister-in-law, astrologist Rose Shade, she again altered her story. Instead of saying that she got up to go to the bathroom, she attributes the discovery that “something was terribly wrong” to her “Piscean qualities.” The