The Annals of Unsolved Crime

by Edward Jay Epstein

  Yet, whether or not she committed suicide, contradictory accounts of how and when her death was discovered leave open the possibility of a cover-up. Eunice Murray said that Monroe retired to her bedroom at about 8:00 p.m. on Saturday and that she did not see her again, or notice that anything was amiss, until about 3:00 a.m. on Sunday morning, when Monroe didn’t respond to Murray’s repeated calls. Only then did she call Monroe’s doctor. But Murray’s son-in-law, Norman Jeffries, who was working as a handyman in the Monroe house and was there that evening, said that between 9:30 and 10:00 p.m. he heard a panicked commotion in the house. He said three men then arrived and ordered both him and Murray to leave the house. He identified one of those three men as Attorney General Robert Kennedy. (Neighbor Elizabeth Pollard described a similar scene to police, saying that she saw Robert Kennedy and two other men approaching the house that night, although she placed this visit earlier than did Jeffries.) When Jeffries and his mother-in-law returned to Monroe’s house, it was about 10:30 p.m. He then saw Monroe’s lifeless body on the bed, and shortly after the doctor and others began to arrive.

  Jeffries’ story would help fill in the five-hour gap and also explain how several of Monroe’s associates had been informed, as they claimed they were, on Saturday night about her death. One problem with the story is that Robert Kennedy, who had been at the nearby Beverly Hills Hotel, had an alibi for Saturday night. He had checked out of the hotel and flown to San Francisco on Saturday afternoon. Although no flight record could be found, he was registered at the St. Francis Hotel on Saurday night. If so, Kennedy could not have been one of the three men whom Jeffries and Pollard saw that night—at least not at 9:30 p.m. The two had only ever seen Kennedy on television, so they both might have mistaken someone else for him. As other neighbors also saw unidentified individuals arriving and leaving well before midnight—one even claiming to have seen an ambulance—a mystery remains as to who these were, and why they ordered Jeffries and Murray out of the house for an hour.

  There is no shortage of theories about the death of Marilyn Monroe, including suicide, accident, and disguised murder. The coroner’s theory is probable suicide. Then there is the theory advanced on Court TV that her death was an accident. According to this investigation by Rachael Bell for Court TV’s Crime Library, her psychoanalyst might have given her a chloral hydrate enema to help her sleep, and then her internist, unaware of the other medical interventions, could have given her a prescription for the barbiturate Nembutal, and the interaction of the Nembutal and chloral hydrate then proved lethal. Finally, there is the murder theory advanced by Norman Mailer in his 1973 best-seller Marilyn. Mailer suggests that Monroe was murdered by U.S. intelligence operatives because of the threat she posed to the Kennedy clan, and that the murder was disguised to look like a suicide. While Mailer provides no evidence to support the murder theory, thirty-three years later the FBI released a report in its files written by a former FBI agent (whose name was deleted) saying that at the time of her death Monroe was threatening to reveal the extramarital relationship she had had with Robert Kennedy and that Kennedy’s intermediaries may have encouraged her to carry out a suicide threat to protect Kennedy’s political career.

  The driving force behind these theories is not the evidence. It is both Marilyn Monroe’s status as a media sex symbol and her putative liaisons with Robert and John F. Kennedy. My assessment is that Marilyn Monroe killed herself, and there may also have been an unnecessary cover-up.

  As for the drug overdose, Monroe had a long history of overdosing on drugs. According to the witnesses who had been in contact with her on the night of her death, she was prone to taking drugs to help her sleep. I believe that on the night of August 4, 1962, either by accident or design, she took, or allowed to be administered to her, all the drugs found in her body. As in all drug-overdose deaths, it is possible that her drug dosages were purposely altered to cause her to unintentionally swallow a lethal dose, but in this case there is no credible evidence to support such a murder scenario. The belated and uncorroborated reports in FBI files are not credible, in my view, and likely were placed in the files by Kennedy’s political enemies.

  The cover-up is another story. Even if there was no involvement by President Kennedy, Attorney General Kennedy, or any member of the Kennedy entourage in the death of Marilyn Monroe, their political operatives may have taken actions, with or without higher approval, to protect the Kennedys’ reputations. So, as has been alleged, items may have been removed that might have linked the troubled Hollywood star to high-profile individuals, such as President Kennedy, Attorney General Kennedy, and their brother-in-law Peter Lawford.

  The lesson here is that a cover-up does not necessarily require an underlying crime. It can be done simply as a prophylactic to protect the reputation of parties not involved in the crime. Such prophylactic cover-ups often occur in high-profile cases. Immediately after the JFK assassination in 1963, for example, the FBI ordered agent James Hosty to burn a threatening letter he had received from Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the assassination, not because the FBI was in any way involved in the crime, but because its director, J. Edgar Hoover, was concerned that the letter could be used to tarnish the reputation of the FBI. As a result, a potentially crucial piece of evidence was intentionally destroyed by the agency then investigating the crime. In the Marilyn Monroe case there is persuasive evidence that the death scene was altered. This was presumably done during the five-to-seven-hour gap before the police were called in, and, if the witness Jeffries is believed, when the housekeeper and he were ordered to leave. This intervention left ample time to remove any items of evidence that compromised those with whom Monroe had had romantic liaisons. Even if the prophylactic cover-up was done with the best intentions, the contradictions it produced in witnesses’ testimony cast a permanent aura of mystery over the death of an international celebrity.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE CRASH OF ENRICO MATTEI

  Enrico Mattei, an extraordinarily ambitious Italian civil servant, had become by 1962 the arch-nemesis of the international oil cartel. He gained his power in postwar Italy by reorganizing a state entity called Ente Nazionale Idrocarburini, or ENI, which in 1948 had a chain of gas stations and a few natural-gas wells, into a huge conglomerate that supplied most of Italy with its fuel. To feed ENI’s refineries in southern Italy, Mattei attempted to make deals in the Middle East that undermined the near-monopoly of the cartel, and its three controlling partners, Exxon (then called Standard Oil of New Jersey), BP (then called Anglo-Iranian Oil), and Royal Dutch Shell. To get a concession in Iran, whose oil up to then went to the cartel for a small royalty, he offered Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran a much richer cut: a 50-50 partnership on newly discovered oil. The Shah agreed, but ENI failed to find any new oil in Iran. Then, in 1961, at the height of the Cold War, Mattei turned to the only other major source of oil not controlled by the cartel, the Soviet Union. He not only offered to pay them hard currency for oil but to build a pipeline through Eastern Europe so it could be delivered to Italy. This move was viewed with such deep concern by the new administration of President John F. Kennedy that the administration pressured American companies to cut off the steel exports that Mattei needed for the pipeline. The cartel was also concerned enough to use its leverage over the Italian politicians it was secretly financing, including those in Italy’s ruling Christian Democracy Party, to get the government to derail the Soviet oil agreement. After Exxon offered to supply ENI with Libyan oil on condition that it terminate the deal, Mattei asked for a personal meeting with President Kennedy. It was scheduled for November 1962. But on October 27 of that year, at a critical point in Mattei’s negotiations with both the Soviet Union and the United States, he was killed when his company plane crashed in Northern Italy.

  The circumstances of the crash were as follows: The Morane-Saulnier MS-760 plane had taken off from Catania, Sicily, around midday en route to Milan. Only three people were aboard the small jet: Mattei; the pilot Irnerio Bertuzzi;
and William McHale, an American reporter who was interviewing Mattei. All three men died when the plane fell from the sky and crashed in a blazing fire near the village of Bascape.

  The official inquiry was headed by Giulio Andreotti, the defense minister and political strongman of the Christian Democracy party. In 1962, the forensics for determining the cause of air crashes was heavily dependent on recovering the plane’s flight instruments, as there were no black boxes or flight recorders on small planes. In this case, however, key pieces of the plane’s instruments had been inexplicably destroyed at the scene. The flight gauges, for example, had been dissolved in acid. So, without any direct evidence of an explosion, the investigation was stymied. After determining from weather reports that there had been thunderstorms in the area, it was ruled that the crash was a “probable accident” caused by bad weather.

  Even with this official finding, there was considerable suspicion in Italy that more was involved than a thunderstorm, and the Mattei crash became the subject of countless journalistic investigations. In 1995, the remains of Mattei and his pilot were exhumed by court order and reexamined by a panel of experts. Even though thirty-three years had elapsed, there were now more accurate forensic tools. And through them, the panel found tiny bits of metal in the crash victims’ bones. They further determined that these fragments had been deformed by an enormous pressure before the fiery crash, and they concluded that there was an explosion inside the plane. This new analysis suggested that Mattei had been the victim of an assassination. In light of the international intrigue surrounding Mattei at the time of his death, numerous conspiracy theories have been advanced as to who was behind the assassination. To begin with, there is the contract-killing theory. According to Tomasso Buscetti, an ex-Mafia “pentito” who also provided leads in the Roberto Calvi case, the Sicilian Mafia was given the contract to kill Mattei on behalf of American oil interests and had one of its men put a bomb aboard the plane in Catania. Even though Buscetti’s allegation was unsubstantiated, it led to the 1995 exhumation of the bodies. (Buscetti claimed that the Andreotti investigation was merely a cover-up.) Next, there is a “French Connection” theory. According to Philippe Thyraud de Vosjoli, a former agent of the French secret service SDECE, Mattei’s plane was sabotaged by a SDECE operative code-named Laurent, who placed high explosives on board that would be triggered by its landing gear. And finally, the CIA theory: that CIA operatives sabotaged Mattei’s plane to prevent him from building the pipeline to the Soviet Union.

  The fact that a small plane crashed in 1962 in bad weather is not in itself suspicious, but if there was an explosive device aboard it, there can be little doubt that Mattei was murdered. My assessment is that this was the work of an intelligence service. In an exhaustive review of the forensic evidence in 2009, Italian academics Donato Firrao and Graziano Ubertalli concluded that “a small charge bomb had been planted behind the dashboard from the exterior of the plane.” This job was most likely done by the agent of an experienced intelligence service. In this context, I find the account of Philippe de Vosjoli credible. I spent two days interviewing de Vosjoli in Lighthouse Point, Florida, in 1980, and I believe he was in a position to know about SDECE’s covert operations. He recalled that French intelligence had mounted a similar attack on March 29, 1959, on a plane carrying Barthélemy Boganda, the prime minister of a French territory that is now the Central African Republic. Boganda’s plane exploded in midair about 100 miles west of the airport at Bangui. According to de Vosjoli, a miniature explosive was used by French intelligence operatives to make the assassination appear to be an accident. De Vosjoli said the same technique was repeated by French intelligence in 1962 to eliminate Mattei. Even though de Vosjoli had no evidence to back his theory, his description of the explosive device is consistent with the findings of the 1997 forensic analysis and, in my view, gives further weight to his story that French intelligence had a hand in the downing of Mattei’s aircraft.

  In 1962, before forensic investigative techniques for determining the cause of plane crashes had been fully perfected, the theory that Mattei’s plane crashed because of bad weather was perfectly plausible. In 1995, more highly developed forensics changed the scientific verdict from a likely accident to a likely murder.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE DISAPPEARANCE OF LIN BIAO

  In the fall of 1971, Marshal Lin Biao, the designated successor of Mao Zedong to rule China, suddenly disappeared from view. The annual National Day celebration, in which he was expected to appear on the podium in his customary place next to Mao, and which had been held every year since the Communists took power in 1948, was abruptly canceled, and Lin Biao was not mentioned in any newspaper or television broadcast for nearly two years. During this period, only the top leadership learned that he was dead. Mao explained that Marshal Lin, who had been his comrade-in-arms and Communist China’s most decorated hero, was a traitor who had been planning to assassinate him and then stage a coup d’état that September. After the putative plot was uncovered, Mao had the entire military command secretly purged and ordered Lin arrested. According to Mao, Lin then attempted to defect to the Soviet Union, which was now China’s enemy, but his military aircraft ran out of fuel and crashed in Mongolia, killing Lin Biao and all aboard the fleeing plane. So, in this official account, released to the public in 1973, Lin died in an accidental plane crash.

  The basic facts emerged only gradually. On September 13, 1971, a British-made Trident airliner, powered by three jet engines, took off from Shanhaiguan Airbase in eastern China, flew less than 1,000 miles into Mongolia, a vassal state of the Soviet Union, and then crashed into the grasslands near the town of Ondorkhaan. Aboard the doomed aircraft were Lin Biao, his entire family, and a half-dozen of his top aides. No one survived the crash. The weather was clear that day, the plane was well within its range of 2,000 miles at the time of the crash, and the officer at the plane’s controls, Colonel Pan Jungyin, who was a deputy commander of the Chinese air force, was one of China’s most experienced pilots.

  Mongolia, which was not an ally of China’s in 1971, conducted only a perfunctory investigation. It established that the plane had not run out of fuel. Indeed, there was so much excess fuel in the pods that it fed a blazing fire that incinerated most of the plane, including all of its flight instruments. No autopsies were conducted on the badly charred bodies, which were buried in a shallow mass grave near the crash site. Because the plane was well beyond the range of China’s primitive surface-to-air missiles, the investigators ruled out the possibility that the aircraft had been downed by a Chinese missile. And as there was no other aircraft detected in this area, they concluded that the crash was an accident caused by pilot error.

  Moscow, apparently not satisfied that it was an accident, subsequently sent in a KGB team to exhume the remains. The results of this investigation were kept secret but, according to a KGB defector who claimed that he had had access to the investigation, Soviet pathologists determined that some of the passengers aboard the plane died before it crashed and burned.

  U.S. intelligence was also suspicious of the circumstances surrounding the crash. The NSA was closely monitoring communication, radar, and other signals in China as part of the preparations for President Richard Nixon’s trip to China. Through its signal intercepts on September 13, 1971, it learned that China had grounded all military plane flights just before Lin’s flight took off and that the flights only resumed after his plane crashed. This extraordinary shutdown suggests that a decision was made by Mao to allow the flight. At no point did Mao seem concerned that the plane would make it to the Soviet Union. When Mao was told by his premier Chou En-Lai that Lin’s plane was about to take off, he calmly recited to Chou an ancient Chinese proverb that began “Rain must fall.” According to Dr. Li Zhisui, Mao’s personal physician, who wrote his memoirs after he emigrated to the United States, after the plane crashed Mao was greatly relieved to hear that there were no survivors. But if Mao wanted Lin Biao dead, could he have depended o
n a random accident to bring about this outcome? All that is known for certain is that the counter-coup that Mao feared never took place.

  The vacuum left by the suppression of virtually all the evidence concerning the crash has been filled by numerous theories. Even the official finding that the crash was caused by pilot error is no more than a theory. An alternative theory is that the plane was sabotaged. According to this theory, Lin Biao was encouraged to leave China with his wife, son, and military aides, but a time or pressure-activated bomb was planted aboard their plane. There is also the staged crash theory advanced by Stanislav Lunev, who had served as a high-ranking intelligence officer on the Russian General Staff. According to Lunev, Lin Biao and his party had been executed and their corpses then placed on the plane and that after flying the corpse-filled aircraft towards the Mongolian border, the Chinese pilot set the controls on auto-pilot, and parachuted out. Lunev does not explain what purpose would be served by such an elaborate staging of an accident.