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 News from Around the Americas | August 2005 
Ex-Prosecutor: Monroe Wasn't Suicidal
 Associated Press
| Marilyn Monroe poses over the updraft of a New York subway grating while in character for the filming of 'The Seven Year Itch' in Manhattan on September 9, 1954. The former Norma Jean Baker modeled and starred in 28 movies grossing $200 million.
(Photo: Matty Zimmerman/AP) |
On the anniversary of Marilyn Monroe's death, a former prosecutor has unveiled what he says are notes of her secret confessions to a psychiatrist that show her as anything but suicidal.
"There was no possible way this woman could have killed herself," John Miner told the Los Angeles Times for a story published Friday. "She had very specific plans for her future. She knew exactly what she wanted to do."
Miner, 86, said he would like to see another autopsy performed on Monroe and believes the large dose of barbiturates found in her body may have been administered by someone else.
Meanwhile, fans were holding their annual gathering Friday near her crypt at Westwood Village Memorial Park to honor the star of movies such as "Some Like It Hot."
Conspiracy theories about Monroe's Aug. 5, 1962, death have become part of her legend. Many continue to doubt the official conclusion of "probable suicide" reached after the 36-year-old actress was found naked and face down on a bed in her Brentwood home.
Miner is the former head of the Los Angeles County district attorney's medical-legal section. He provided the Times with notes he says he took of audiotapes made by Monroe's psychiatrist.
Miner said they show a motivated actress who wanted to do Shakespearean plays and promised her psychiatrist that she had thrown all her "pills in the toilet," a possible reference to her reported drug dependency.
The notes, which Miner called "extensive" and "nearly verbatim," also show Monroe obsessing about the Oscars, alleging she had a one-night stand with Joan Crawford and speaking candidly about the failures of her marriages to baseball star Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller.
There has been no independent confirmation of the tapes, which Miner said he believes may have been made close to the time of Monroe's death. Miner said the psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, played the tapes for him in 1962 on condition that he never reveal their contents, and that Greenson may have destroyed them before his 1979 death.
Miner said years after Greenson's death, he broke the promise after some biographers suggested that Greenson might be considered a suspect in Monroe's death.
Greenson's widow, Hildegard, told the Times that she did not know whether the tapes existed and never heard her husband discuss them.
According to Miner's notes, Monroe praised President John F. Kennedy but never indicates she slept with him. She does mention his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, saying "there is no room in my life for him."
"I want someone else to tell him it's over," she says, according to Miner's notes.
Miner has shown his notes to several people in recent years and excerpts appeared in Matthew Smith's book "Marilyn's Last Words: Her Secret Tapes and Mysterious Death."
However, the Times received previously unpublished parts from Miner.
The district attorney's office re-examined Monroe's death in 1982 and interviewed Miner but determined there wasn't enough evidence to open a criminal investigation.
At the time, Miner mentioned that Greenson had the taped interviews but never said he had notes of them, said Ronald Carroll, a former deputy district attorney who conducted the review.
If Miner had mentioned the notes, Carroll said he probably would have sought them through a grand jury subpoena. |
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