Marilyn Monroe, Robert Kennedy, Sharon Tate: Dr Thomas Noguchi, Hollywood's coroner to the stars, tells all about the dark age of Hollywood homicide.
As you talk to Thomas Noguchi, it’s hard not to glance down at his hands. He has long, delicate fingers and as he talks he folds them together. When he closes his eyes, it looks as if he is in prayer. And what a strange, often terrible, story these hands have to tell. Perhaps none stranger than what happened on the morning of Sunday, August 4 1962 when Noguchi, then a junior medical examiner, reported for work at the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office.
As soon as he arrived, he was told that the Chief Medical Examiner wanted him to perform an autopsy on a young woman. She had been found eight hours earlier in a small house in Brentwood – the victim, it appeared, of a drugs overdose. There was, Noguchi was warned, a good deal of press interest in the case. He was, he says, rather taken aback by the request. In prominent cases, the Chief Medical Examiner, Dr Theodore Curphey, invariably conducted the autopsy himself. But for reasons that still puzzle him, this did not happen.
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When Noguchi looked at the police report, he saw that the dead woman was 5ft 4in tall and weighed just over 10 stone. Various bottles of pills, including an empty bottle of the sleeping pill Nembutal, had been found close to her body. Her name meant nothing to him. It was only after he had read the report that someone told him that she was better known as Marilyn Monroe. ‘Even then,’ says Noguchi, ‘I didn’t think for a moment he meant the movie star. I just assumed it was someone else who had the same name.’
But when he walked into the autopsy room and lifted up the sheet that had been placed over the naked body, any doubts were swept away. When he’s asked how Marilyn Monroe looked in death, Noguchi, who has a fondness for poetry, quotes the Latin poet, Petrarch: ‘It’s folly to shrink in fear, if this is dying. For death looked lovely in her lovely face.’ At the time, though, it’s safe to assume that Petrarch was not uppermost on his mind. ‘Of course, I felt pressure, but I remember thinking very clearly that I must make sure I was not distracted by who she was.’
First of all, Noguchi did what he always did. He took out his magnifying glass and examined every inch of the dead woman’s body. ‘When you are a coroner, you start from the assumption that every body you examine might be a murder victim.’ He was looking, principally, for needle marks in case she had been injected with drugs. Also, of course, for marks indicating physical violence.
Noguchi found no needle marks, but just above Monroe’s left hip, he did find a dark reddish-blue bruise. Judging by its colour, the bruise was fresh rather than old. Under the External Examination section of his autopsy report, Noguchi noted: ‘The unembalmed body is that of a 36-year-old, well-developed, well-nourished Caucasian female… the scalp is covered with bleach blonde hair… a slight ecchymotic area is noted on the left hip and left side of lower back.’
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.
At a press conference later that day, his boss, Dr Curphey, announced that Monroe had committed suicide. Noguchi did not disagree with his conclusion. None the less, he was sufficiently troubled by the oversight to go back to the toxicology lab a few weeks later and ask if they could test the other organs that he’d sent over. But when he did, he was told that the organs had already been disposed of as the case had been marked as closed.
‘I think that was a great shame,’ he says, speaking very deliberately. ‘Not suspicious. I’m not saying that; it was a perfectly no