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(Young Monroe)
(Source)
Gladys was mentally unstable and financially unable to care for the young Norma Jeane, so she placed her with foster parents Albert and Ida Bolender of Hawthorne, California, where she lived until she was seven. One day, Gladys visited and demanded that the Bolenders return Norma Jeane to her. Ida refused, she knew Gladys was unstable and the situation would not benefit her young daughter. Gladys pulled Ida into the yard, then quickly ran back to the house and locked herself in. Several minutes later, she walked out with one of Albert Bolender's military duffel bags. To Ida's horror, Gladys had stuffed a screaming Norma Jeane into the bag, zipped it up, and was carrying it right out with her. Ida charged toward her, and their struggle split the bag apart, dumping out Norma Jeane, who wept loudly as Ida grabbed her and pulled her back inside the house, away from Gladys.
In 1933, Gladys bought a house and brought Norma Jeane to live with her. A few months later, Gladys began a series of mental episodes that would plague her for the rest of her life. In My Story, Monroe recalls her mother "screaming and laughing" as she was forcibly removed to the State Hospital in Norwalk.
A young Monroe in 1945
(Source)
Once again, Monroe faced life in foster care. But she had one way out—get married. She wed her boyfriend Jimmy Dougherty on June 19, 1942. A merchant marine, Dougherty was later sent to the South Pacific. Monroe went to work in a munitions factory in Burbank where she was discovered by a photographer. By the time Dougherty returned in 1946, Monroe had a successful career as a model. She dreamt of becoming an actress like Jean Harlow and Lana Turner.
Her marriage fizzled out as Monroe focused more on her career. The couple divorced in 1946—the same year she signed her first movie contract. With the movie contract came a new name and image, she began calling herself "Marilyn Monroe" and dyed her hair blonde. But her acting career didn't really take off until the 1950s. Her small part in John Huston's crime drama The Asphalt Jungle (1950) garnered her a lot of attention. That same year she impressed audiences and critics alike as Claudia Caswell in All About Eve, starring Bette Davis.
Marilyn Monroe and Dorothy Kilgallen before both of their sudden and mysterious deaths
(Monroe's room)
Dr. Thomas Noguchi
(Source)
He then began the internal examination. It was this that has given future generations of conspiracy theorists sufficient room in which to exercise their imaginations. In Monroe’s stomach, Noguchi found no visual evidence of any pills. Nor was there any sign of the yellow dye with which Nembutal capsules were coated – and which might have been expected to stain her stomach lining. All he found was what he describes as ‘a milky substance – there were no food particles or anything like that’.
Along with samples of blood, the internal organs were sent off for toxicology tests. Several hours after he had completed the autopsy, Noguchi received the toxicology report. The tests on the blood showed 8.0 mg per cent of chloral hydrate – another sleeping pill – while the liver tests revealed 13.0 mg per cent of pentobarbital (or Nembutal). Both of these were well above the fatal dose.
However, Noguchi admits he made a mistake at this point. The toxicology tests had only been performed on the blood and the liver – not on the other internal organs. He should, he feels now, have insisted that all the organs were examined. ‘I am sure that this could have cleared up a lot of the subsequent controversy, but I didn’t follow through as I should have.’ As a junior member of staff, he says, he didn’t want to risk displeasing anyone.
(Source)
The pathologist, Dr. Thomas Noguchi, could find no trace of capsules, powder or the typical discoloration caused by Nembutal in Monroe's stomach or intestines, indicating that the drugs that killed her had not been swallowed. If Monroe had swallowed the drugs, there should have been residue.[citation needed] If Monroe had taken them over a period of time (which might account for the lack of residue), she would have died long before ingesting the amount found in her bloodstream. Monroe was found lying face down, but lividity on her back[citation needed] and the posterior aspect of the arms and legs[citation needed] indicated she had died lying on her back. The body was covered in bruises[citation needed], all minor except for one on her hip.
There was also evidence of cyanosis, an indication that death had been very quick. Noguchi asked the toxicologist for examinations of the blood, liver, kidneys, stomach, urine, and intestines, which would have revealed exactly how the drugs got into Monroe's system. However, the toxicologist, after examining the blood, didn't believe he needed to check other organs, so many of the organs were destroyed without being examined. Noguchi later asked for the samples, but the medical photographs, the slides of those organs that were examined and the examination form showing bruises on the body had disappeared, making it impossible to investigate the cause of death.
(Source )
As one Secret Service agent stated: 'We all knew about the weekend. It wasn't until she and the President were both dead that people started talking about an affair. Trust me, no one was saying anything about an affair in 1962.
'What we knew was that JFK and Marilyn had sex at Bing Crosby's, and that's it. We didn't think it was a big deal. He had sex with a lot of women. She was just one of many and it wasn't that noteworthy.
'If there was more to it between them, they somehow managed to keep it from us - and I don't think you can keep something like that from the Secret Service.'
The weekend in Palm Springs might have been no more to JFK than a thrilling conquest, but to Marilyn it meant much, much more. Afterwards she thought of little else and was obsessed with seeing him again
(Source )
One secret agent working for the Kennedy administration added: 'She was calling him a lot. She wanted to see him. Everyone knew it.'
But the interest wasn't mutual - he wasn't returning her calls to the White House. Sinatra's friend and valet George Jacobs enjoyed many conversations with JFK during the President's stays at the singer's home.
'I spent enough time with the man to know that no woman, not even his wife, was sacred to him,' he said. 'His need was like that of Alexander the Great: to conquer the world. To him, Marilyn was one more conquest, a trophy - maybe the Great White Shark of Hollywood, but still a record, not a romance.'
For Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn was a girlfriend too far. In fact, some months later Jackie made it clear to JFK that she was deeply unhappy about the televised Madison Square Garden concert in which Marilyn breathlessly sang 'Happy Birthday Mr President' to JFK. Jackie threatened to file for divorce immediately, before the next presidential campaign, thereby jeopardising his chances of being re-elected.
'But Jack was already done with Marilyn anyway, by that time,' said George Smathers. 'He had this other girl named Mary Meyer he was playing around with, and there was always [his mistress] Judith Exner... and there were others, one of whom was rumoured to be the actress Angie Dickinson.
'His view of Marilyn was that she was a very sweet girl, but to him sweet girls were a dime a dozen and Marilyn was trouble. She began to ask for opportunities to come to Washington, to the White House, that sort of thing. But he told Jackie: "Look, it really is over. It was nothing anyway."
'Jack told me: "It's not worth it, George. I have a free ride here with Jackie. She gives me great latitude. So if this one is going to be an issue for her and cause me problems with respect to her dealing with the other women, then, fine, I can live without this one. No problem. So let's just end it with Marilyn before it's too late.
(Source)
"The Secret Service had specific instructions not to photograph President Kennedy and Marilyn together because it would have been a national scandal," Morgan said.
The only photographer that was allowed into the party was Cecil Stoughton, the White House photographer and the person who snapped the photo.
Stoughton took several photos at the party, but once President Kennedy saw the camera, he turned his head towards the wall, Morgan said.
Later the Secret Service asked Stoughton to give them all of his photos of Kennedy and Monroe.
"He handed over all those negatives and photos. There [were] multiple ones," Morgan said. "And the only one that survived, ever, was that one that was in the dryer, you know, where they were drying the negative, and he kept it a secret for decades, decades and decades."
This is a CIA document that appeared sometime in the early 1990s and has been (unwittingly) authenticated by the CIA itself, in that when Dr. Donald R. Burleson, author of UFOs and the Murder of Marilyn Monroe, filed his appeal of the CIA's refusal to release transcripts of government wiretaps on Marilyn Monroe's telephones, the appeal, which was based largely on the 3 August 1962 document in question, was accepted; ultimately no transcripts were released, but the acceptance-of-appeal process did demonstrate that the document is of authentic CIA provenance. The CIA could have denied the authenticity of the document and could thus have turned the appeal down, but they did not. It is contrary to Agency policy to accept any Freedom of Information Act request or appeal based on documents which the CIA does not acknowledge to be authentic; so, tacitly, they acknowledged that the document is genuine.
Please read this source
For easier reference, here is a transcription of the text of the CIA document:
Wiretap of telephone conversation between reporter Dorothy Kilgallen and her close friend, Howard Rothberg (A); from wiretap of telephone conversation of Marilyn Monroe and Attorney General Robert Kennedy (B). Appraisal of Content: [A portion redacted.]
1. Rothberg discussed the apparent comeback of subject with Kilgallen and the break up with the Kennedys. Rothberg told Kilgallen that she was attending Hollywood parties hosted by the "inner circle" among Hollywood's elite and was becoming the talk of the town again. Rothberg indicated in so many words, that she had secrets to tell, no doubt arising from her trists [sic] with the President and the Attorney General. One such "secret" mentions the visit by the President at a secret air base for the purpose of inspecting things from outer space. Kilgallen replied that she knew what might be the source of visit. In the mid-fifties Kilgallen learned of secret effort by US and UK governments to identify the origins of crashed spacecraft and dead bodies, from a British government official. Kilgallen believed the story may have come from the New Mexico story in the late forties. Kilgallen said that if the story is true, it would cause terrible embarrassment for Jack and his plans to have NASA put men on the moon.
2. Subject repeatedly called the Attorney General and complained about the way she was being ignored by the President and his brother.
3. Subject threatened to hold a press conference and would tell all.
4. Subject made reference to "bases" in Cuba and knew of the President's plan to kill Castro.
5. Subject made reference to her "diary of secrets" and what the newspapers would do with such disclosures.
[An indented block of text is redacted near the bottom of the page, and the document is signed JAMES ANGLETON, who at the time was the Chief of Counterintelligence for the CIA.]
Sam Giancana
I think she took the overdose around 7.00PM..that fits with her sounding slurred around 7.30PM.
It seems to me that her body was discovered around 11.00 to 12.00 and they made the mistake of cleaning the room before realizing it would be viewed as a potential crime scene.
(Source)
In October 1961, Mary began visiting John F. Kennedy in the White House. It was about this time she began an affair with the president. Mary told her friends, Ann and James Truitt, that she was keeping a diary about the relationship.
In 1962 Mary made contact with Timothy Leary, the director of research projects at Harvard University. Leary supplied '___' to Mary who used it with Kennedy. Leary also claimed that Mary helped influence Kennedy's views on nuclear disarmament and rapprochement with Cuba. It was later discovered that the FBI was keeping a file on Mary. Later, James Angleton, head of counterintelligence at the CIA admitted that the agency was bugging Mary's telephone and bedroom during this period.
Kennedy aide, Meyer Feldman, claimed in an interview with Nina Burleigh that the president might have discussed substantial issues with her: "I think he might have thought more of her than some of the other women and discussed things that were on his mind, not just social gossip."
(Source)
In January, 1963, Philip Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, attended a convention of American newspaper editors in Phoenix. Graham, who was suffering from alcoholism, disclosed at the meeting that John F. Kennedy was having an affair with Mary Meyer. No newspaper reported this incident but Kennedy decided to bring an end to the affair. However, they continued to see each other at social functions.
According to his biography, Flashbacks (1983) Timothy Leary claims that Mary phoned him the day after Kennedy was assassinated: "They couldn't control him any more. He was changing too fast. He was learning too much... They'll cover everything up. I gotta come see you. I'm scared. I'm afraid."
(Source)
In the summer of 1964 Meyer told friends that she believed someone had been inside her house while she was away. On another occasion she told Elizabeth Eisenstein that "she thought she had seen somebody leaving as she walked in". Mary reported these incidents to the police. Eisenstein said Mary was clearly frightened by these incidents.
On 12th October, 1964, Mary Pinchot Meyer was shot dead as she walked along the Chesapeake and Ohio towpath in Georgetown. Henry Wiggins, a car mechanic, was working on a vehicle on Canal Road, when he heard a woman shout out: "Someone help me, someone help me". He then heard two gunshots. Wiggins ran to the edge of the wall overlooking the tow path. He later told police he saw "a black man in a light jacket, dark slacks, and a dark cap standing over the body of a white woman."
Mary appeared to be killed by a professional hitman. The first bullet was fired at the back of the head. She did not die straight away. A second shot was fired into the heart. The evidence suggests that in both cases, the gun was virtually touching Mary’s body when it was fired. As the FBI expert testified, the “dark haloes on the skin around both entry wounds suggested they had been fired at close-range, possibly point-blank”.
(Source)
In March, 1976, James Truitt, a former senior member of staff at the Washington Post, gave an interview to the National Enquirer. Truitt told the newspaper that Meyer was having an affair with John F. Kennedy when he was assassinated. He also claimed that Meyer had told his wife, Ann Truitt, that she was keeping an account of this relationship in her diary. Meyer asked Truitt to take possession of a private diary "if anything ever happened to me".
Ann Truitt was living in Tokyo at the time that Meyer was murdered on 12th October, 1964. She phoned Bradlee at his home and asked him if he had found the diary. Bradlee, who claimed he was unaware of his sister-in-law's affair with Kennedy, knew nothing about the diary. He later recalled what he did after Truitt's phone-call: "We didn't start looking until the next morning, when Tony and I walked around the corner a few blocks to Mary's house. It was locked, as we had expected, but when we got inside, we found Jim Angleton, and to our complete surprise he told us he, too, was looking for Mary's diary."
James Angleton, CIA counterintelligence chief, admitted that he knew of Mary's relationship with John F. Kennedy and was searching her home looking for her diary and any letters that would reveal details of the affair. According to Ben Bradlee, it was Mary's sister, Antoinette Bradlee, who found the diary and letters a few days later. It was claimed that the diary was in a metal box in Mary's studio. The contents of the box were given to Angleton who claimed he burnt the diary. Angleton later admitted that Mary recorded in her diary that she had taken '___' with Kennedy before "they made love".
Leo Damore claimed in an article that appeared in the New York Post that the reason Angleton and Bradlee were looking for the diary was that: "She (Meyer) had access to the highest levels. She was involved in illegal drug activity. What do you think it would do to the beatification of Kennedy if this woman said, 'It wasn't Camelot, it was Caligula's court'?" Damore also said that a figure close to the CIA had told him that Mary's death had been a professional "hit".
There is another possible reason why both Angleton and Bradlee were searching for documents in Meyer's house. Meyer had been married to Cord Meyer, a leading CIA operative involved in a variety of covert operations in the early 1950s. Were they worried that Meyer had kept a record of these activities? Was this why Mary Pinochet Meyer had been murdered?
After leaving the CIA in 1977 Cord Meyer wrote several books including an autobiography, Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA. In the book Meyer commented on the murder of his wife: "I was satisfied by the conclusions of the police investigation that Mary had been the victim of a sexually motivated assault by a single individual and that she had been killed in her struggle to escape." Carol Delaney, the longtime personal assistant to Meyer, later admitted: "Mr. Meyer didn't for a minute think that Ray Crump had murdered his wife or that it had been an attempted rape. But, being an Agency man, he couldn't very well accuse the CIA of the crime, although the murder had all the markings of an in-house rubout."
In February, 2001, the writer, C. David Heymann, asked Cord Meyer about the death of Mary Pinchot Meyer: "My father died of a heart attack the same year Mary was killed, " he whispered. "It was a bad time." And what could he say about Mary Meyer? Who had committed such a heinous crime? "The same sons of bitches," he hissed, "that killed John F. Kennedy."
(Source)
Over the years Kilgallen received a great deal of information about the affairs of John F. Kennedy. However, she was a close friend of Kennedy (they had met via his mistress,Florence Pritchett). One day she was gossiping about Kennedy with her friend Allen Stokes. He asked her why she did not write about it in her column. She replied "I couldn't possibly". It would have been a great scoop. But she decided to protect him.
However, Kilgallen broke this rule when on the 3rd August, 1962, she became the first journalist to refer to Kennedy's relationship with Marilyn Monroe. She did not actually name him but left enough clues for the readers to identify Kennedy as the secret man in Monroe's life (later Kilgallen told friends she was actually referring to Robert Kennedy). One can only assume that she came under severe pressure from someone to write this story.
The following day, Monroe was found dead. Kilgallen must have realized that she had been set her up to smear the Kennedy brothers. Rumours soon began circulating thatRobert Kennedy had arranged Monroe's death to protect his brother's reputation.
John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on 22nd November, 1963. Kilgallen took a keen interest in the case and soon became convinced that Kennedy had not been killed by Lee Harvey Oswald. Kilgallen had a good contact within the Dallas Police Department. He gave her a copy of the original police log that chronicled the minute-by-minute activities of the department on the day of the assassination, as reflected in the radio communications. This enabled her to report that the first reaction of ChiefJesse Curry to the shots in Dealey Plaza was: "Get a man on top of the overpass and see what happened up there". Kilgallen pointed out that he lied when he told reporters the next day that he initially thought the shots were fired from the Texas Book Depository.
(Source)
Kilgallen was keen to interview Jack Ruby. She went to see Ruby's lawyer Joe Tonahill and claimed she had a message for his client from a mutual friend. It was only after this message was delivered that Ruby agreed to be interviewed by Kilgallen. Tonahill remembers that the mutual friend was from San Francisco and that he was involved in the music industry. Kennedy researcher, Greg Parker, has suggested that the man was Mike Shore, co-founder of Reprise Records.
The interview with Ruby lasted eight minutes. No one else was there. Even the guards agreed to wait outside. Officially, Kilgallen never told anyone about what Ruby said to her during this interview. Nor did she publish any information she obtained from the interview. There is a reason for this. Kilgallen was in financial difficulties in 1964. This was partly due to some poor business decisions made by her husband, Richard Kollmar. The couple had also lost the lucrative contract for their radio show Breakfast with Dorothy and Dick. Kilgallen also was facing an expensive libel case concerning an article she wrote about Elaine Shepard. Her financial situation was so bad she fully expected to lose her beloved house in New York City.
Kilgallen was a staff member of Journal American. Any article about the Jack Ruby interview in her newspaper would not have helped her serious financial situation. Therefore she decided to include what she knew about the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Murder One. She fully expected that this book would earn her a fortune. This is why she refused to tell anyone, including Mark Lane, about what Ruby told her in the interview arranged by Tonahill. In October, 1965, told Lane that she had a new important informant in New Orleans.
Kilgallen began to tell friends that she was close to discovering who assassinated Kennedy. According to David Welsh of Ramparts Magazine Kilgallen "vowed she would 'crack this case.' And another New York show biz friend said Dorothy told him in the last days of her life: "In five more days I'm going to bust this case wide open." Aware of what had happened to Bill Hunter and Jim Koethe, Kilgallen handed a draft copy of her chapter on the assassination to her friend, Florence Smith.
On 8th November, 1965, Kilgallen, was found dead in her New York apartment. She was fully dressed and sitting upright in her bed. The police reported that she had died from taking a cocktail of alcohol and barbiturates. The notes for the chapter she was writing on the case had disappeared. Her friend, Florence Smith, died two days later. The copy of Kilgallen's article were never found.