The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe Read Free Page B

Newcomb or Arthur Jacobs. However, Byron stated that Newcomb was there when he arrived shortly after Clemmons’s departure.
    Although Newcomb claimed she spent early Sunday morning at Marilyn’s dealing with the press and making numerous phone calls, Norman Jefferies described Newcomb as distraught and hysterical. Recalling that the police had difficulty dealing with her, Jefferies stated, “She was looking through drawers and going into Marilyn’s bedroom. She had spent Friday night at the house and perhaps she was looking for something she left there. The police had to control her. When they told us to leave because they were going to seal the house, she became unglued. They had trouble getting her out of the door. She kept trying to get back inside.I don’t know if it was because she couldn’t find what she was looking for, or if she just couldn’t deal with everything that had happened.”
    According to Murray, “Pat Newcomb didn’t want to leave. She was sitting in the third bedroom [the telephone room] where she had so recently spent the night. She had quieted down from her previous hysterical state, but gave no impression of planning to move…. The police practically had to forcibly evict her.”
    In the bedroom, when Guy Hockett and his son placed Marilyn’s body on the gurney, he noted, “Rigor mortis was advanced, and she was not lying quite straight, and it took about five minutes to straighten her out…. We had to do quite a bit of bending to get the arms into position so that we could, you know, put the straps around her.” He added, “She didn’t look good, not like Marilyn Monroe. She looked just like a poor little girl that had died….” When the time of death is unknown, it is often determined by the extent of rigor mortis. Over the first four to fourteen hours after death the muscles of the body contract to rock-hardness. Hockett recalled that they placed the body on the gurney sometime between 5:30 and 6 A.M. He estimated that she had died approximately six to eight hours earlier, or sometime between nine-thirty and eleven-thirty Saturday night.
    As Marilyn Monroe’s body was wheeled out of the house, the mortician’s gurney passed over a tile embedded in the entryway, with the Latin inscription “Cursum Perficio,” which literally translates, “I have run the course.” Reporter Joe Hyams stated, “Mr. Hockett wheeled Marilyn Monroe’s body out of the front door at about six-thirty A.M. They wheeled it down to the courtyard near the gates where the mortuary van was parked. Her body had been wrapped from head to toe in a shroud made of a pale blue woolen blanket from the bed. They had placed the body, hands folded across the stomach, on the gurney and tied it down with leather straps at the feet and waist.”
    Hyams and photographer William Woodfield noted that Captain James Hamilton of the LAPD Intelligence Division was there along with several intelligence officers. Knowing that Hamilton rarely appeared at a crime scene, let alone a suicide, Hyams realized that there was more to be learned regarding the death of Marilyn Monroe. Neighbors told Hyams of the strange sounds heard in the night—a woman screaming, and later a hysterical woman’s voice yelling, “Murderers! You murderers! Are you satisfied now that she’s dead?” Others said they had heard a helicopter circling overhead shortly before midnight.
    Soon after Marilyn’s body was placed in the mortuary van, Newcomb, Jefferies, and Murray were escorted by Sergeant Marvin Iannone from the kitchen entrance. Coroner’s seals were then placed on the doors of the main house and the guest cottage. Though Newcomb said she had driven to the Monroe residence after Rudin’s call, her car wasn’t there. Photos and newsreel footage show that she was led from the house and got into the passenger seat of Murray’s