The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

by Jon E. Lewis

  Joe DiMaggio, the baseball superstar who was Monroe’s first husband, went to his deathbed convinced the Kennedys offed the sex goddess with the help of the Mob, with whom they had been in cahoots since old man Kennedy bootlegged alcohol during Prohibition. Curiously, one of the Mob’s most effective and subtle methods of murder was a lethal enema of chloral hydrate. Such an enema would explain the lack of pill residue in Monroe’s body; it would also explain the bruising on her body, which was consistent with a violent struggle.

  In Double Cross by Sam Giancana, godson of the same-named Mafioso, a deadly enema is also the method by which Monroe is dispatched, but here the motive was radically different. According to Giancana, the Mob killed Monroe to frame the Kennedys and bring about their downfall. Listening to events in the bungalow on the evening of 4 August via Giancana’s wiretaps, Mob goons heard Robert Kennedy order that Monroe be sedated; when RFK left, the Mob sneaked in and administered the chloral hydrate enema to the stupefied star.

  The known facts of Monroe’s last evening are these. At around 6.00 p.m. on 4 August 1962 Monroe’s press agent Pat Newcomb left the bungalow at 12,305 Fifth Helena Drive in LA followed by Monroe’s psychiatrist Greenson, who had spent the afternoon with the movie star. At around 7.15 Monroe took a call from DiMaggio’s son Joe Jr, and half an hour later rat-pack star Peter Lawford (who was JFK’s and RFK’s brother-in-law) phoned to invite her to a party.

  Thereafter, the many sources differ wildly over how and when Monroe died. Not until 4.25 the next morning do undisputed facts re-enter the Monroe death story, when Sergeant Jack Clemmons of the LAPD got a call he would never forget. Dr Hyman Engelberg, Monroe’s personal physician, informed him she had committed suicide. When Clemmons arrived at Helena Drive there were three people there: Greenson, Engelberg and the housekeeper, Murray. They led Clemmons into the bedroom where Monroe’s nude body was lying covered with a sheet, and took care to point out bottles of sedatives. According to Clemmons, “She was lying face down in what I call the soldier’s position. Her face was in a pillow, her arms were by her side, her right arm was slightly bent. Her legs were stretched out perfectly straight.”

  Clemmons immediately thought Monroe had been arranged in that “soldier’s position”, since an overdose of sleeping tablets usually causes victims to suffer convulsions, so their corpses are typically found in a contorted display.

  The witness statements clanged with implausibility. Murray claimed that at about 3 a.m. she awoke and saw a light under Monroe’s door. Finding the door locked, she contacted Greenson to alert him. In fact, the deep-pile carpeting in Monroe’s bungalow would not have allowed light to seep under the bedroom door, on which there was no lock. Greenson allegedly forced entry into Monroe’s bedroom at around 3.50 and pronounced her dead. The trio claimed they had waited until 4.00 before contacting police because they needed permission to do so. (This clearly contradicts Murray’s statement that she had discovered Monroe’s body at around 3.30.) Clemmons further noted there was no glass in the bedroom from which Monroe could have drunk to help down the pills she was supposed to have swallowed.

  Despite Clemmons’ observations, Coroner Curphey determined that Monroe had committed suicide – her corpse, after all, was surrounded by bottles of prescription sedatives and she did have a history of suicide attempts. Doubtless Curphey was influenced too by the opinion of Greenson. A number of major forensic experts have argued, however, that there were no traces of Nembutal in Monroe’s intestinal tract or stomach and therefore she cannot have swallowed the barbiturates as tablets. Neither could she have injected herself with the overdose of barbiturates, since the injection of such a high dosage would have caused immediate death with evident bruising around the injection site – yet there were no needle marks or relevant bruises on her body. This leaves one possible explanation: that the OD was administered by an enema. Since a self-administered enema is a near-impossibility, Monroe did not commit suicide. She either died accidentally or was murdered.

  So what did happen during the “missing hours” of Monroe’s last day? According to the author Donald H. Wolfe, Murray’s son-in-law Norman Jeffries was at Monroe’s bungalow on the fatal night. At around 9.30 p.m., Robert Kennedy and two unknown men came to Monroe’s door and ordered Murray and Jeffries to leave. (This timing dovetails with the recollection of Jose Bolanas that his phone call to Monroe at around 9.30 was broken off because of people arriving at the door. A neighbour of Monroe’s, Elizabeth Pollard, confirmed that Bobby Kennedy arrived at the bungalow at around this time.) When Murray and Jeffries returned to the bungalow at 10.30, Jeffries says that he saw Monroe face down, naked, and holding a phone. Murray then called an ambulance and Dr Greenson. Jeffries’s story is corroborated by the chief of the local ambulance company, who is on record as saying that Monroe’s body was collected and taken to Santa Monica hospital, but then returned to Helena Drive. Sometime before midnight, Pat Newcomb and Peter Lawford turned up at the bungalow in high panic. They phoned Bobby Kennedy. Soon afterwards Monroe’s personal journals and telephone records were apparently taken.

  Did the Kennedy brothers have evidence of their affairs with Monroe removed? It would be astounding if they didn’t. Did Bobby Kennedy murder Marilyn Monroe? It would be astounding if he did. Given Bobby Kennedy’s personal moral compass, his position as Attorney General, his crusading against organized crime, he makes an unlikely hands-on killer.

  In his re-creation of the evening of 4 August 1962, Monroe’s biographer Donald Spoto makes a convincing case that the movie star’s death was neither suicide nor murder but an accident. To aid Monroe sleep that night, Greenson arranged with Murray that the latter would give Monroe an enema of chloral hydrate; Greenson was, however, unaware that Monroe’s physician Hyman Engelberg had supplied her with Nembutal. Monroe and Murray had no idea that Nembutal and chloral hydrate reacted adversely with each other. At around 9.30 Monroe began slipping into a coma. Bobby Kennedy arrived to find Monroe in a drugged stupor and called an ambulance, but when Monroe died en route to hospital he realized the public relations fallout of arriving at the hospital with an overdosed sex goddess could be lethal. He thus ordered the ambulance to return to Helena Drive, where Monroe’s body was laid out and incriminating documents removed. Greenson, Engelberg and Murray all had a reason to acquiesce in the cover-up because they had killed – albeit unwittingly – Marilyn Monroe, movie star. Their careers, like those of the Kennedys, would have been ruined had the truth become known.

  Bobby Kennedy murdered Marilyn Monroe: ALERT LEVEL 4

  Further Reading

  Robert Slatzer, The Marilyn Files, 1991

  Donald Spoto, Marilyn Monroe: The Biography, 1993

  Anthony Summers, Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, 1986

  Donald H. Wolfe, The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe, 1998

  MONTAUK POINT

  The conspiracy theories that surround Montauk Point, New York, call into doubt the whole existence of reality, truth and the universe as you have come to know it!

  Montauk Point lies at the top end of Long Island, New York State, and is sometime home of Camp Hero, a USAF Radar Station. The camp was commissioned by the US Army in 1942 to defend New York in the event of an invasion. Designed to look vaguely like a fishing village, it consisted of a group of fairly innocent buildings flanked by two large concrete bunkers, half submerged beneath topsoil, which housed four 16–inch naval guns. As it turned out, the guns were never needed and, in the 1950s, the camp housed a joint Army and Air Force radar surveillance unit, the US Army leaving in 1957 and turning the base over entirely to the Air Force. Five years later a five-storey cubical tower was commissioned, housing a gigantic 75–foot (23m) radar dish, and the base operated as a coastal defence warning system until the end of the 1970s. It finally ceased operating in 1981.

  That’s the official story. The authors of The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time (1992), Preston Nichols and Peter Moon, have a very different version to tell. It all
began, they claim, in 1943, when the US Navy and other government groups conducted experiments into possible secret weapons that could help the Allies win the Second World War. One of these experiments focused on achieving radar invisibility through the manipulation of electromagnetic waves (the forerunner of today’s stealth technology). Small-scale tests were carried out on the destroyer USS Eldridge, first with animals aboard and then, reputedly, with the crew. Huge generators were installed in the forward turrets to create an electromagnetic bottle around the ship (see Philadelphia Experiment). The sailors returned from a four-hour period of invisibility exhibiting not only physical but also mental distress.

  One particular group of scientists became interested in the latter effects, noting that the human mind, once in the hyper-space created by the electromagnetic field, no longer had any terms of reference in the “real” world and was easily broken. The group, allegedly affiliated to MIT and the Brookhaven National Laboratories, took its findings to Congress, seeking further funding, but was rejected – no doubt on ethical grounds.

  Unwilling to give up what seemed like such a fascinating discovery, the group apparently approached the top brass of the US military claiming it had the means to make a potential enemy surrender without a shot being fired. Seduced by the thought of such a powerful weapon, the Army agreed to fund further research on a strictly hush-hush basis, and looked for somewhere suitably covert to carry out the work. Bingo! What better than a low-key coastal defence station near a sleepy little town, full of sleepy inhabitants?

  Camp Hero had the SAGE Radar system installed, vital for the scientists’ experiments. Psychically sensitive subjects were recruited and trained to focus their minds on particular objects; their powers were then hugely magnified by the radar system’s emitting gigawatts of electromagnetic force at them, and their thoughts manipulated by their controllers to discover the effects.

  One particularly able subject was a certain Duncan Cameron who, it was claimed, could make the distant objects upon which he focused his thoughts actually materialize at some location on the base. The scientists realized this materialization happened after his focusing, and concluded that not only matter but also time was being manipulated. Seeing the opportunity for more than just a little diverting mind control, the resident technicians got on the case and constructed a functioning portal through time using the power of the radar and the mental ability of the psychics.

  Help came also from a rather unexpected source, in the shape of aliens from the Sirius star system whose ship was sucked into the time tunnel. Finding themselves at Montauk, the aliens supposedly helped develope the “Montauk Chair”, in which Cameron sat during experiments, which helped hone his power and incorporated “orgone energy” (a concept dreamed up by Wilhelm Reich, onetime student of Sigmund Freud; Reich believed the power that fuelled the universe came from the sex drive).

  As the complexity of operations increased, the base expanded beneath the ground, layer under layer, spreading as far as downtown Montauk itself. During the 1970s this labyrinth reputedly housed even more sinister and dubious experiments. Thousands of young boys were abducted, some say by aliens, and delivered to Montauk. Subjected to extreme physical and mental torture (an extension, it is claimed, of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA project), their minds were broken and then repro-grammed. Some became willing participants in further experiments; others were designated as sleeper agents and returned to their communities, awaiting activation in the future. The Montauk Boys, as they became known, were supposed to exhibit typical Aryan characteristics – blue eyes, blond hair – and were selected for grooming as future leaders who would bring about the New World Order.

  Where this particular conspiracy theory leaps from the level of merely bizarre into the realms of mindbogglingly weird is in August 1983. At this point the Montauk Project became horribly entangled, through means of the time portal, with the USS Eldridge at the moment of its disappearance in a hyperspatial impasse. Back in Camp Hero, a splinter group had already taken the decision to crash the project by some means or other. The plan they came up with (after far too many nights watching the wrong kind of films, one imagines) was to subliminally introduce the idea of a monster to Cameron during his thought-into-matter sessions. In a scene worthy of the best of Star Trek, a Bigfoot-like creature ran amok on the base while other technicians battled to terminate the Rainbow Project, responsible for the disappearance of the USS Eldridge, from 40 years away and so disentangle the Montauk Project, presumably before the ship itself materialized inside the base. Someone, somewhere must have pressed the right switch, because eventually the time tunnel collapsed, the USS Eldridge found itself back in the Philadelphia Naval Yard, and the Bigfoot disappeared. The whole Montauk Project was subsequently abandoned, its subjects brainwashed or sworn to oaths of silence and returned to normality and the base closed.

  Since then the US government has donated Camp Hero to New York State as a public park, but the inner base containing all the buildings remains off-limits. Unsurprisingly, the place still holds a fascination for those intrigued by the stories of the Montauk Project, and many people visit the area hoping for a glimpse of the underground caverns. However, Jonathan Kostecky and Sean Rubinstein, in their article posted on www.geocities.com, are quick to dispel the whole myth. Photographs of their visit to the inner base reveal rotting and vandalized buildings, with no evidence to suggest these buildings were used for anything other than as a radar surveillance unit. Talk of an underground city is impossible, they say, because geological surveys show the area on which the camp is built to be made up of unconsolidated sand and gravel with jointed limestone: any tunnels would cave in or be flooded.

  Of the continuing presence of State Park Police patrols on the site, Kostecky and Rubinstein say the officers are required to keep people from injuring themselves in buildings which are nearing collapse. However, the two authors are at a loss to explain why, in the building dubbed “The Acid House”, individual rooms are wallpapered in gold paisley patterns, vertical black and white stripes, leopard print and aquamarine psychedelic – surely out of the ordinary for a coastal defence station? Neither can Kostecky and Rubinstein give a good reason why electricity still runs through the high-voltage power lines to an abandoned and derelict base.

  The known survivors of the project who have been willing to speak of their experiences, including Preston Nichols and Al Bielek, have all stressed that their accounts relate merely what they understood happened to them, and have come up with no further evidence of a conspiracy to cover up goings-on at Montauk. There have been reports of local wildlife going berserk, a direct result some say of being bombarded by UHF/microwave mind-bending emissions from the radar, but again no firm evidence.

  Strangely enough, it is other, less direct, occurrences which unsettle the obvious dismissal of the myth of Montauk. TWA Flight 800, SwissAir 111 and Egypt Air 990 all crashed inexplicably in the sea off Montauk Point. It is also close to the scene of the light airplane crash that killed John F. Kennedy Jr, his wife and a friend. Famous occultist Aleister Crowley, who purportedly used sexual “magick” to open holes in time, stayed at Montauk for some reason just after the First World War and complained of mysterious blisters he acquired while there that refused to heal for several years. The real owners of the site, the Montauk tribe, deemed to be extinct by the US government even though they have campaigned for their land to be returned to them, believe the place is sacred and hold a tribal memory of a stone pyramid that once existed there.

  If stories of time travel, mind-control and Bigfoot seem too far-fetched for even the most hardened conspiracy theorist, it may be more plausible to consider that the secret to Montauk may lie not in what was done there but in the energy of the place itself which, perhaps, exerts a power over the people and objects which enter its sphere of influence.

  No wonder conspiracy theorists themselves dub this one TBTB – “Too Big To be Believed”.

  Montauk Project developed means of mind control
and time travel: ALERT LEVEL 2

  Further Reading

  Preston Nichols and Peter Moon, The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time, 1992

  MOON LANDING HOAX

  “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” said Neil Armstrong on 20 July 1969, as he stepped down from the lunar landing module on to the face of the moon and proudly planted a fluttering Stars and Stripes.

  Except Armstrong wasn’t really on the moon. He was in a lunar mock-up in the Nevada desert at Area 51. Despite being bunged $30 billion by John F. Kennedy, NASA had failed to achieve a viable moon landing project, so decided upon a hoax one. How could the flag flutter when there is no wind on the moon?

  Rumours that Apollo 11 didn’t truly put a man on the moon were widespread by 1970, and are archly acknowledged in the 1971 Bond film Diamonds are Forever when 007 crashes through a staged lunar scene in the desert. However, the “Apollo Moon Landing Hoax” industry really hit its stride in 1976 with the publication of the book We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle! by Bill Kaysing, an Apollo engineer and aeronautics writer. According to Kaysing, not only was the 1969 landing a fake but astronaut Gus Grissom was murdered to prevent him exposing the whole Apollo scam. There was more grist to the conspiracy mill with the release of the 1978 movie Capricorn One, which featured a faked mission to Mars. Kaysing himself repeated his claims in a 2001 TV programme called Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land On The Moon?, in which Gus Grissom’s widow and son concurred that the launchpad fire which obliterated Grissom’s Apollo 1 mission had been deliberately staged. Bart Sibrel’s 2001 movie A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon re-aired the hoax theory with the addendum that the faked landings were an intentional distraction from the disastrous Vietnam War.