Death of Marilyn Monroe

Death of Marilyn Monroe

New York Daily Mirror front page article, August 6, 1962
Date	August 4, 1962; 62 years ago (1962-08-04)
Time	Late evening
Location	12305 Fifth Helena Drive, Brentwood, Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Cause	Barbiturate overdose
Burial	August 8, 1962, at the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery, Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Inquest	August 17, 1962, Los Angeles
Coroner	Theodore Curphey
Charges	None
Verdict	Probable suicide

On the evening of August 4, 1962, American actress Marilyn Monroe died at age 36 of a barbiturate overdose inside her home at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive in Brentwood, Los Angeles, California. Her body was discovered before dawn the following morning, on August 5. Monroe had been one of the most popular Hollywood stars during the 1950s and early 1960s, and was a top-billed actress for the preceding decade. Her films had grossed $200 million by the time of her death.^[1]

Monroe had suffered from mental illness and substance abuse, and she had not completed a film since The Misfits, released on February 1, 1961, which was a box-office disappointment. Monroe had spent 1961 preoccupied with her various health problems, and in April 1962 had begun filming Something's Got to Give for 20th Century Fox, but the studio fired her in early June. Fox publicly blamed Monroe for the production's problems, and in the weeks preceding her death she had attempted to repair her public image by giving several interviews to high-profile publications. She also began negotiations with Fox on being re-hired for Something's Got to Give and for starring roles in other productions.

Monroe spent the day of her death, August 4, at her home in Brentwood. She was accompanied at various times by publicist Patricia Newcomb, housekeeper Eunice Murray, photographer Lawrence Schiller and psychiatrist Ralph Greenson. At Greenson's request, Murray stayed overnight to keep Monroe company. At approximately 3 a.m. on Sunday, August 5, Murray noticed that Monroe had locked herself in her bedroom and appeared unresponsive when she looked inside through a window. Murray alerted Greenson, who arrived soon after, entered the room by breaking a window, and found Monroe dead. Her death was officially ruled a probable suicide by the Los Angeles County coroner's office, based on information about her overdosing and being prone to mood swings and suicidal ideation.

Despite the coroner's findings, several conspiracy theories suggesting murder or accidental overdose have been proposed since the mid-1960s. Many of these involve U.S. President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert F. Kennedy, as well as union leader Jimmy Hoffa and mob boss Sam Giancana. Because of the prevalence of these theories in the media, the office of the Los Angeles County District Attorney reviewed the case in 1982 but found no evidence to support them and did not disagree with the findings of the original investigation. However, the report conceded that "factual discrepancies" and "unanswered questions" remained in the case.^[2]

Per a CIA document, a former coroner's aide, Lionel Grandison, claimed in 1982 that he was forced to sign Marilyn Monroe's death certificate and a file on the actress was altered and that her diary disappeared from a safe.^[3] Additionally, the reinvestigation also revealed that (as Dr Thomas Noguchi revealed) all lab work, tissue samples, and test results from the autopsy had disappeared from the county coroner's office immediately after the official ruling had been made public. (Noguchi claimed that misplacement of samples had never happened in another case, before or since).^[4]