BROODING PERCUSSION MUSIC This is the secluded Spanish cottage in the exclusive Brentwood section of Los Angeles, where actress Marilyn Monroe died ` bottle of sleeping pills near her bed. In the golden age of Hollywood, Marilyn Monroe eclipsed all others. Through a series of hit films in the 1950s, her looks made her one of the most photographed women on the planet. I just love finding new places to wear diamonds. But at 3.40am on the 5th of August 1962, Marilyn was found dead in the bedroom of her Los Angeles home. CAMERA CLICKS Miss Monroe's remains were first removed to a mortuary, then to the county morgue for autopsy. After 12 days, the coroner faced the world's press, but his findings were inconclusive. On the basis of all the information obtained, it is our opinion that the case is a probable suicide. The word 'probable' opened the door to a host of conspiracy theories, including claims that she was murdered. Now, leading forensic pathologist Dr Richard Shepherd is using Marilyn's autopsy report and recently discovered private medical records to get to the truth behind her mysterious death. With the new medical evidence I've collated, I think I can end the rumour and speculation that surrounded Marilyn's death for over 50 years. Copyright Able 2015 World-renowned forensic pathologist Dr Richard Shepherd has been conducting high-profile autopsies for more than 25 years. His expertise has been called on for the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, the aftermath of 9/11 and the inquest into the death of Princess Diana. This is Marilyn Monroe's autopsy report. For its time, it's impressive in its detail, and if you know how to read it, it provides clues about what was happening in the days, hours and minutes before her death. And Dr Shepherd now has access to her private medical records to make his a unique, new investigation. August the 4th 1962 ` Brentwood, Los Angeles. Marilyn's at home during downtime on her new movie, Something's Got to Give. After a string of broken relationships with powerful men, including the president, John F Kennedy, her life is now at a crossroads. At 36, she longs to be taken seriously as an actress, but Hollywood is not interested, casting her again in a familiar role ` the dumb blonde. 9am ` Larry Schiller, a photographer from her new movie, arrives. The last time I saw her, which was the morning of the day she died, she was in a serious mood, not a playful mood. She didn't wanna mince around with any words. Marilyn had allowed Schiller to photograph her on set in a series of revealing poses. Marilyn said, 'What would happen if I jumped into the swimming pool with a bathing suit on, 'but I came out with nothing on?' I said, 'But, Marilyn, you're already famous. Now you're gonna make me famous.' Her body was in fantastic shape, and of course ` you name it ` we had the cover of every magazine in the world in the month of June 1962. Now, two months later, Schiller wants to know if Marilyn will agree to some of the pictures being published in Playboy. She actually turned on me a little bit, saying, 'Am all I good for is my body? Is`? Is that what it's all about? Just my body?' MYSTERIOUS MUSIC The autopsy report shows that Marilyn had kept herself in great physical shape. This is the unembalmed body of a 36-year-old, well-developed, well-nourished Caucasian female. It says, 'The scalp is covered with bleach-blonde hair, and the eyes are blue,' and of course, that confirms the iconic Marilyn image ` the blonde bombshell. Marilyn Monroe was born Norma Jean Mortenson in 1926. The person Norma Jean was kind, gentle, sweet, very very smart and rather shy, and she created Marilyn Monroe as a different persona that was extremely sexual. After a short career as a model, in 1946, a 20-year-old Norma Jean broke into Hollywood with this screen test. She was determined to become a star. It was a great fixation with her. She realised that Hollywood needed a new sex symbol. After signing a six-month contract with 20th Century Fox, she started creating a new persona and changed her name to Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn defines the word 'sexuality'. She knew exactly how to part her lips. She knew exactly how much of a smile to give. She knew exactly how much to look over her shoulder. Marilyn would use her body with no real sense of shame or guilt. At the age of 23, she posed for her first nude photograph. That nude photo circulated among the troops, and she became the largest pin-up of the Korean War. ARCHIVE: The US Army asks Marilyn to fly to Korea to entertain the troops. Marilyn puts on 10 shows in two days. She appears before 100,000 soldiers and marines. Back in Hollywood, Marilyn soon worked her way up the billing with a series of hit films, including Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. I just love finding new places to wear diamonds. The Marilyn Monroe persona ` the dumb blonde ` I regard as being one of the greatest comic characters of the 20th century. But with fame came the realisation that her success was almost entirely dependent on her looks and the character she had created. She was a product of publicity. She was totally aware of her image. She knew exactly how she wanted to look. She would spend hours making herself up. Sometimes she would take it all off and put it back on again, because she didn't like the way it looked. Marilyn was very good at constructing her image, and she worked at it all the time. Even the most routine operation was not allowed to jeopardise her perfect image. We know that she'd had her appendix removed, but there's no scar in the typical appendix area. But there is a scar lower down in the pubic area, and it seems to me that the surgeon has taken an unusual approach to preserve her good looks and made the incision below the bikini line. This wasn't the only time Marilyn had the help of surgery to improve her look. A note from her visit to Hollywood plastic surgeon Dr Michael Gurdin reveals she had cosmetic surgery at the age of 24. Only recently has the medical information become available that Marilyn actually had a chin implant to change the shape of her chin ` presumably to make her look more beautiful as part of the development of this Hollywood image. BROODING PERCUSSION MUSIC And just months before her death, Marilyn visited Dr Gurdin again, after a fall at home leaves her worried she has broken her nose. He examined her, and he found there was a small cut, there was some bruising, but X-rays showed no evidence of a fracture. However, they did reveal that the cartilage implant in her chin was dissolving, and she would need to go under the knife again. But by June 1962, it wasn't just her looks that were in danger of crumbling. Marilyn's personal life was coming apart at the seams. Based on the medical documentation, I can see that Marilyn has had some plastic surgery, but to all intents and purposes, she was a physically fit and healthy young woman, and I can see no immediate cause for her death. But the autopsy report does show some changes in her stomach, which are described as 'marked congestion with submucosal petechial haemorrhaging', and this means the lining of the stomach is reddened and angry-looking, and that's entirely consistent with someone taking a drug a short time before their death. But when the pathologist looks in the stomach, there's no drug left present for him to identify at that time. Evidence suggests Marilyn had taken drugs shortly before her death, but what those drugs were and how they came to be in her stomach is the key to the mystery. Examination of the scene... shows that there were eight different types of drugs around her as she died. What I want to know is what role did these drugs have, if any, in her death? 10am ` the morning of Marilyn's last day. Her personal masseur, Ralph Roberts, is trying to relieve her tension. One of the major causes of Marilyn's stress is her inability to sleep, an issue she has frequently sought medical help to combat. The toxicology report shows that a prescription was given to Marilyn four days before her death for 50 chloral hydrate capsules. Chloral hydrate is a sedative, and like all sedatives, it acts by depressing the central nervous system, causing you to become drowsy and fall asleep. But chloral hydrate can have a fatal effect on the respiratory system. Marilyn's battle with sleeplessness goes right back to her chaotic childhood. At the age of 2, she was given up by her mother for adoption and grew up in a series of orphanages. As a child, she was, uh, beautifully spoken. She played and was happy. After she went into the orphan asylum, she began stuttering. She became very unhappy. She didn't sleep well. She'd cried all the time. She was also cared for by a number of foster families. She was in at least nine foster homes, and Marilyn claimed ` and I believe her claims ` that she had been physically, sexually abused in at least one of the homes. You cannot get away from the fact that such beginnings in a person spells trouble further down the line, and this could have had an effect on fearing going to sleep, um, fear about what happens at night. By adulthood, her insomnia was a chronic condition. In 1961, 18 months before her death, Marilyn revealed the extent of her anguish in a private letter. 'Last night, I was awake all night again. Sometimes I wonder what the night-time is for. 'It all seems like one long, long, horrible day.' With chronic insomnia, it goes on for weeks and weeks and months. It affects people on every level ` how they think, how they feel and how they behave. She may have been on that awful treadmill of just not getting sufficient rest. So Marilyn took chloral hydrate to try to beat her insomnia, but it only made it worse. The problem with these drugs is they have a hangover period. The person has difficulty, then, in waking up and starting the next day. And so what often happens, they will then take another drug to start the day, and the drug that Marilyn used was a drug called Dexedrine ` an amphetamine-type drug. The prescription for Dexedrine, dated just a month before her death, is amongst Marilyn's private papers sold at Julien's auction house in 2013. But the trouble, then, with taking Dexedrine is you are wide awake, and the whole thing becomes a vicious cycle. Sedatives at night to go to sleep; amphetamines in the morning to wake up. To counter the effects of Dexedrine, Marilyn was taking more and more chloral hydrate. She was prescribed four capsules of chloral hydrate per day, but the autopsy report shows there were only 10 left in that bottle, so 40 had been taken in the four days before her death. Could Marilyn have died from a simple overdose of sleeping pills? We know from the toxicology that the level of chloral hydrate in her bloodstream was raised at 8mg per cent... but that that level is not in the lethal range, and so it wasn't what killed Marilyn, and so I'm looking for another reason for her death. 1 12pm ` 4th of August 1962. Marilyn is joined in the garden by her publicist, Pat Newcomb, who has stayed at the house overnight and has woken up late. Despite taking a number of sedatives, Marilyn has been awake most of the night, and she's angry with Pat for sleeping in. Marilyn suffered from a huge amount of anger. She calls it 'a demon and a monster'. But anger is not the only negative emotion she is suffering. Another of the drugs found in Marilyn's bedroom was Librium; it's a drug that is commonly used to treat anxiety. The autopsy reveals the drug was prescribed on the 7th of June 1962, less than two months before her death, but significantly, it's also the date she was fired from her latest Hollywood movie. Did this rejection cause her to take her own life? Marilyn began working on Something's Got to Give in April 1962, again as the dumb blonde. Now in her mid-30s, she's tired of playing the role and wanted to be cast in more serious parts, but she was locked into a contract with her studio, 20th Century Fox, who insisted. Something's Got to Give was a movie that she didn't wanna make. What you could see in Marilyn was that she was tired. She was tired of trying to prove to the world that, uh, she was a fine actress. Everybody, uh, kind of thought of her as a joke. Marilyn did feel trapped by being Marilyn Monroe. She can't get away from what she had created. It had become her reality. And her anxiety was playing havoc with the production. Marilyn was so distressed that in the first two months, she'd had to cancel her filming on 17 separate occasions. She was also using alcohol to help manage her feelings. I think she was under enormous stress, and the fact that she was drinking a lot negatively affected her performance. The final straw for 20th Century Fox came 10 weeks before her death, when she flouted studio orders and flew to New York to be with her lover on his birthday ` the president, John F Kennedy. Well, Marilyn Monroe didn't care what the studio said. She just walked out of the studio one day, got on a plane and left. Marilyn was attracted to older and powerful men. Her second marriage had been to the baseball legend Joe DiMaggio. Just 18 months before her death, her third marriage ` to playwright Arthur Miller ` had ended in divorce. Her relationship with Kennedy began shortly afterwards. She'd known JFK for years and had seen him occasionally. The last year or so, it became very hot. It was a risky and dangerous affair. Mr President, the late Marilyn Monroe. May the 19th 1962 ` Madison Square Garden, New York. CROWD GASPS # Happy birthday # to you. # Happy birthday... I remember watching it live and wondering just what influences she was under. # ...Mr President. CROWD LAUGHS # Happy birthday # to you. # She seemed to be either drunk or on pills. She didn't seem quite real. Marilyn's overtly sexual performance backfired. John Kennedy really disliked the birthday celebration the May before she died ` when she did the very sexual presentation of herself ` and that's when John Kennedy ditched her. 20th Century Fox decided to ditch her too. The sensational news was leaked in a Hollywood gossip column on the 7th of June. There's evidence in the autopsy report that it caused a great increase in her level of anxiety, and on that day, her doctor prescribed her 5mg of Librium. Next day, Marilyn's sacking was confirmed by the studio. And the medical records show she returned on that day, and her doctor doubled the dose of Librium. The key features that the dosage of the drug she was being given by the doctor is increasing, and this points very strongly to someone who is suffering greater levels of stress and anxiety in the final months of her life. Rejected by her lover and Hollywood, a week later, Marilyn returned to her physician, Dr Hyman Engelberg. But this time, he prescribes her something even stronger than Librium. I can see here, in Marilyn's medical records, she goes back to her doctor, and he prescribes her Parnate ` a strong antidepressant drug ` and the significance of this is that it shows that Marilyn's mental health is spiralling downwards. Marilyn's personal and professional life are in ruins. She's locked into a vicious cycle of sedatives to make her sleep and amphetamines to wake her up. She's drinking heavily and is clinically depressed. With her bedside table now stocked with potentially lethal drugs, did Marilyn give up and deliberately take her own life? Marilyn had been suffering from depression for most of her life, and so I'm not convinced that her depression was so severe that it would have caused her to commit suicide. There's no evidence in the autopsy report to show that she'd taken enough Librium or Parnate to have killed her. In spite of her mental distress, Marilyn began a fightback against the studio. She rallied, and she called her press agent and the` she got her publicist there, and then she launched a campaign against 20th Century Fox. They fought through lawyers and through the press for several months, and finally, 20th Century Fox capitulated. Five days before her death, 20th Century Fox reinstated her on Something's Got to Give and signed her to a new $1.2 million two-picture deal. 1 4.30pm ` Marilyn's last day. After a row with her publicist a few hours earlier, her mood has darkened dramatically. Her housekeeper, Eunice Murray, is so concerned that she calls Marilyn's psychiatrist, Dr Ralph Greenson. KNOCKING AT DOOR Dr Greenson was one of the most famous psychiatrists in the nation. He was the psychiatrist for the Hollywood stars. Marilyn thought that he could help her to get over all of her fears, her insecurities and help her to become a whole human being. By the time Greenson arrives, half an hour later, Marilyn is visibly distressed. He found her to be hysterical. He felt as though he was being completely overwhelmed by her. Greenson spends over an hour trying to calm her. According to the police report, before leaving, Greenson asks Marilyn's housekeeper, Eunice Murray, to stay overnight to keep an eye on her. This is the first time he's ever made such a request. 7pm. It's Joe Jr. Marilyn takes a phone call from a former stepson, Joe DiMaggio Jr. Her mood has significantly altered. Eunice Murray told investigators that Marilyn spoke in a loud and happy manner and was in very good spirits. CRICKETS CHIRP 8pm ` Marilyn tells Eunice Murray she is going to bed. I think I'll turn in now. Goodnight. This is the last time Marilyn is seen alive. The autopsy report contains a psychological history of Marilyn, which provides evidence to explain her regular, damaging mood swings. It says, 'Miss Monroe suffered from psychiatric disturbance for a long time. 'She experienced severe fears and frequent depressions. 'Mood changes were abrupt and unpredictable.' Marilyn was suffering from a form of depression that today we'd call bipolar disorder. The exact cause of bipolar disorder is unknown, but it's widely believed to be due to imbalance of chemicals in the brain. The brain's functions are controlled by chemical neurotransmitters, like noradrenaline, serotonin and dopamine, and it's the imbalance of one or more of these chemicals that may be the cause of bipolar disorder. Bipolar is a serious mental disorder characterised by extreme shifts in mood, and a person can go from being very very high and have feelings of grandeur to very very low and feeling very deeply depressed. In a very low mood, a person may even have thoughts of suicide. And Marilyn was no stranger to suicidal thoughts. February 1961 ` Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, New York. Recently divorced from her third husband, Marilyn was at rock bottom. She was in a bad state after the divorce from Arthur Miller. She was heavily into drugs and alcohol, and her psychiatrist decided that she needed to go to the hospital. She was considered to be a risk to herself and was locked in a secure ward. It's clear that Marilyn Monroe was suffering from severe psychiatric illnesses and was in need of psychiatric help. Emotional stress can trigger suicidal thoughts in bipolar patients, and now, 18 months on from hospital, was the abrupt ending of her affair with John F Kennedy the trigger for her suicide? 8.30pm ` Marilyn takes a call from John F Kennedy's brother-in-law, actor Peter Lawford, who invites her to dinner. Lawford later states that Marilyn sounded groggy. She declines the invitation and ends cryptically, 'Say goodbye to the President.' We know from the autopsy report, the toxicology and the examination of her stomach that at about this time, Marilyn had started taking sleeping pills, and the quantities of those drugs found in her blood and her liver mean that her speech would have been increasingly impaired. 10pm ` Marilyn makes one final telephone call to her close friend Ralph Roberts, but he never picks up. According to the operator who answered the call, Marilyn is barely capable of speech. She fades out on the phone. Nobody knows what happens next. SOFT SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC 3.30am ` Eunice Murray goes to check on Marilyn. Marilyn's light is still on. Marilyn. (KNOCKS) Marilyn. But unusually, the door is locked. From outside Marilyn's bedroom window, Murray sees her lying face down on the bed. She calls Marilyn's psychiatrist, Ralph Greenson, saying she looks strange. At 3.40am, Greenson forces entry to Marilyn's room. GLASS BREAKS According to the police report, Greenson tells Eunice Murray a few moments later, quote, 'We've lost her.' Minutes later, Marilyn's physician, Hyman Engelberg, arrives and checks for vital signs. But at 3.50am, he pronounces Marilyn dead. 4.35am ` 45 minutes later, Engelberg and Greenson alert the emergency services. They later claim they were too stunned by Marilyn's death to make an earlier call. 1 SLOW PIANO MUSIC You know, when I was called and told that Marilyn had died, I didn't believe it. I hurried over to Marilyn's house and got there at, uh, 5.45 in the morning. I was there at the time that they wheeled her lifeless body out on a gurney and into the coroner's van. All the reporters were shouting at me all sorts of questions like, 'How did she die?' 'Was she murdered?' 'Did she commit suicide?' I said I didn't know, because we didn't know. The press, picking up on the bottles of pills found by her bedside, quickly report a suicidal overdose as the most obvious cause. This is not the first time Marilyn has tried to kill herself, as the autopsy reveals. The psychological autopsy report also tells us that Marilyn had made several previous suicide attempts using sedative drugs... but on each occasion had called for help and was rescued. So was Marilyn's final call to Ralph Roberts a failed cry for help? The psychologist concluded that on the night of her death, quote, 'The same pattern was repeated, except for the rescue.' After 12 days, the LA coroner announced his official findings. On the basis of all the information obtained, it is our opinion that the case is a probable suicide. At first sight, there is compelling evidence for this official verdict. There are multiple pill bottles on the bedside table, and there's a strong psychiatric history of depression, and evidence in the autopsy report suggests this is an unanswered cry for help. But there's been speculation since her death that Marilyn was actually murdered. One of the suspicions is that the Kennedys had her killed. John F Kennedy had ended his affair with Marilyn, but a new, powerful suitor within the Kennedy clan was waiting to pick up where the president had left off. Jack would start, uh, with a woman, and then, when he got bored, pass them on to Bobby. So Marilyn began an affair with Bobby Kennedy, the president's brother. She was under the mistaken impression that Bobby Kennedy would leave Ethel and his seven children and marry her. But Bobby, like his brother, dumped her just weeks before her death, and it's believed she was about to blow the lid on her affairs with the Kennedys in a kiss-and-tell press conference. She was known as a loose cannon in Hollywood and knew a lot of things that the Kennedys wished they hadn't told her, and I think they simply wanted her to go away. SINISTER MUSIC If 50 years of rumour are to be believed, Marilyn's death may have been a carefully covered-up murder. I've investigated thousands of suspicious deaths, and I know that it's often the tiniest clues that reveal whether someone was murdered. Hollywood private investigator Fred Otash claimed he'd been bugging Marilyn's house and overheard an argument and a violent struggle. (SCREAMS) He alleged that Bobby Kennedy smothered Marilyn with a pillow and left her dead. MUFFLED SCREAMING The marks from smothering can actually be quite subtle. I'd be looking to see if there were any pinpoint haemorrhages in the eyes or on the face associated with asphyxiation. I'd be looking at the mouth and the gums to see if there was any bruising or small cuts associated with the pressure from a pillow or a blanket, and we know from the autopsy report, in this case, there were none. Otash's allegations have never been corroborated, and tapes of the murder he claimed to have have never been produced. There's nothing to support the theory that Marilyn was smothered. But in 1991, another theory emerged, implicating the Kennedys in another version of events. Emergency responder James Hall says he arrived to find Marilyn unconscious. SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC He claimed he was bringing her round when her psychiatrist, Dr Ralph Greenson, intervened, produced a syringe of phenobarbital and plunged the needle into her heart, cracking her ribs. CRACK! MUFFLED MOANS Hall says she died shortly afterwards, and he claimed Greenson was acting on Bobby Kennedy's instructions but offered no evidence in support. The autopsy's quite clear ` there is no injection site on the front of the chest, and there is no fractured rib, and this theory, like all of the conspiracies, can be discounted. 1 But Dr Shepherd has now pieced together all the evidence in the autopsy report and Marilyn's medical records, so he believes he can now finally reveal who was responsible for the death of Marilyn Monroe. The toxicology report shows there is another drug present in Marilyn Monroe's bloodstream the night that she died. It's a drug called Nembutal, and it's the presence of an empty bottle of this drug by her bedside that leads me to what I believe is the real story of her death. Nembutal is a powerful barbiturate drug that's used to treat insomnia. Marilyn had previously used barbiturates to combat her sleeplessness. But the psychological report commissioned with her autopsy reveals that there had been a concerted effort by her doctors to tackle this dependency. It says here, 'One of the main objectives of her psychiatric treatment 'was the reduction of her intake of drugs. 'This has been partially successful over the last two months.' In particular, Ralph Greenson, with the help of her physician, Hyman Engelberg, was weaning Marilyn off her reliance on Nembutal. The plan was to substitute Nembutal with the less addictive and faster-acting sedative chloral hydrate. The doctors were under pressure by the studios, uh, for her to show up and, uh, act like a normal person. But the toxicology report provides evidence that this plan had fallen apart two days before her death. Marilyn was prescribed 25 1.5-grain capsules of Nembutal on the 3rd of August 1962, but Marilyn was already being prescribed chloral hydrate for her sleeplessness. And the autopsy shows that Marilyn had taken a large dose of chloral hydrate the night she died. Chloral hydrate and Nembutal taken together can have a fatal effect on the respiratory system, and it's curious that she should be given both drugs together. It's possible that Marilyn demanded the barbiturate and one of her doctors simply caved in. She was a powerful, beautiful and seductive woman who was used to getting her own way, and I can imagine she would have been really hard to resist. But prescribing Nembutal on top of the chloral hydrate was like signing her death sentence. Marilyn's prescribing doctor, Hyman Engelberg, denied this double dosing of sedatives. It's a denial he repeated under oath in 1982. This is the original recording of his interview. But Dr Shepherd has found evidence in Marilyn's recently disclosed medical records that shows Dr Engelberg's statement ` that he didn't prescribe chloral hydrate ` was false. Amongst the prescriptions, I have one for chloral hydrate, written out by Hyman Engelberg on the 7th of June 1962, and this is one of the three prescriptions for chloral hydrate that he gave to Marilyn in the two months before her death. Further evidence of Engelberg's double dosing is provided in this photo ` the significance of which was previously ignored. It's a bottle of chloral hydrate found on Marilyn's bedside table the day she died, and it clearly shows Engelberg's name and the date 25th of July 1962 ` a prescription just 10 days before her death. The new prescription evidence shows clearly that Dr Engelberg prescribed chloral hydrate in addition to the Nembutal. This is a damning piece of evidence, and it's the final piece in the true story about the death of Marilyn Monroe. No evidence of either drug was found in her stomach, but in the long hours between when she was last seen alive and when she died, the drugs would have been absorbed into her bloodstream. And the autopsy report shows clearly there were high levels of both of those drugs in her system at the time she died. Marilyn had not taken a lethal dose of chloral hydrate the night she died, but in low doses, the sedative can adversely impact the short-term memory. The effects on the short-term memory of chloral hydrate might mean that Marilyn simply forgot she'd taken a Nembutal, and so took another dose... and another... and another. There was an empty bottle of Nembutal at her bedside, and the toxicology report shows there was a large quantity of the drug in her body ` 4.5mg per cent in her blood and 13mg per cent in her liver, which represents a lethal dose. So it's clear that Marilyn did take the drugs, and it's most likely that she did so with the intention of calling for help. But the combined effects of the chloral hydrate and the Nembutal were so quick in their action that she was unable to make that call. Marilyn's body had been affected by two powerful sedative drugs that would have depressed parts of the brain. At high level, the parts of the brain that are affected are the control centres, including the part of the brain that controls respiration, and once that happens, breathing becomes slower and shallower and eventually stops, and once the breathing has stopped, the body is deprived of oxygen, and Marilyn would have died. DIAL TONE HUMS Prescribing Nembutal and chloral hydrate together was an obvious risk, given Marilyn's history of suicide attempts and cries for help, and my opinion is that it is a combination of those two drugs that killed Marilyn Monroe. It was not a suicide attempt, but it was an accidental death associated with medical negligence. Tragically, sleep was Marilyn's safe haven, and, you know, she would go into that harbour of sleep, uh, to run away from all of her problems. Tragically, one night, she went into that safe harbour but didn't come out. Captions by Alex Walker Edited by Ingrid Lauder. www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2015