Marilyn Monroe’s death has haunted Hollywood for more than six decades.
Now a man who spent his career catching one of America’s most elusive killers says the official story doesn’t hold up.
And the retired investigator behind the Golden State Killer case just dropped one jaw-dropping finding about Monroe’s 1962 death scene that the original detectives never had to answer for.
Paul Holes built his reputation over more than two decades of cold case work in California. The retired cold case investigator played a pivotal role in identifying the Golden State Killer. Now he’s turned that same eye toward one of the most picked-over celebrity deaths in American history.
Holes is applying his expertise to the movie star’s 1962 death in TMZ’s “Celebrity Crime Scene: Marilyn Monroe,” premiering on FOX. Using artificial intelligence to recreate Monroe’s home, the special follows Holes, senior crime scene analyst Alina Burroughs, and true crime reporter Kiki Monique as they examine the questions and theories that have surrounded Monroe’s death for more than six decades.
“I was aware of how she died — a drug overdose ruled a probable suicide, but I knew very few details about it until I started digging into this case,” Holes told Fox News Digital.
What he found when he did start digging bothered him.
Authorities officially ruled that Monroe overdosed on sedatives, a probable suicide, when she was found deceased in her bedroom in August 1962. Monroe was found dead, lying nude in her bed with a telephone receiver dangling from her hand. Near the bed, police said they recovered an empty bottle that had contained about 50 Nembutal capsules, a powerful prescription sedative used to treat insomnia, according to Variety’s reporting at the time. No note was found.
To Holes, the scene itself told a different story.
“We know what overdose scenes look like when you’re in law enforcement. This is too pristine,” Holes said. “Death is ugly. People who overdose, they vomit, they purge out of their mouth, out of their nose. (There is) Incontinence.” Monroe, on the other hand, was lying in clean bedding, and her medicine bottles were neatly organized with the labels facing outward.
That’s not a minor detail. That’s the kind of thing that should have triggered a homicide investigation on the spot.
“They should have seen these inconsistencies, and, in fact, one officer — Jack Clemmons — he goes, ‘This doesn’t look right,'” Holes said. Still, Los Angeles police were quick to assume Monroe overdosed, and homicide detectives were not brought in to take a closer look.
Clemmons was the first officer on the scene. He said it plainly: “No it was not a suicide. Marilyn Monroe was murdered and there’s no question about it,” Sgt. Clemmons, the watch commander that night, told the BBC. His concerns were dismissed. His career eventually paid the price for speaking up.
“This is definitively a staged crime scene, and nobody stages a suicide to look like a better suicide,” Holes said. “They stage a homicide to look like a suicide.”
That’s about as direct as an investigator gets.
The circumstances surrounding the night Monroe died have always been murky. On the night Monroe died, her housekeeper, Eunice Murray, phoned psychiatrist Dr. Ralph Greenson after becoming concerned that Monroe had locked herself in her bedroom. Greenson arrived at the house, broke a window to get into her room, and found Monroe’s lifeless body. He then called physician Dr. Hyman Engelberg, who pronounced her dead.
There was a delay of nearly an hour before Engelberg called the police and told officers that Monroe had committed suicide. Nearly an hour. To this day, no one has offered a satisfying explanation for that gap.
Monroe had been prescribed Nembutal by her physician, Dr. Hyman Engelberg, although she also received medications from psychiatrist Dr. Ralph Greenson. The Times of London recently reported that Engelberg maintained that he prescribed Monroe Nembutal, but not the chloral hydrate that was also found in her system. So where did the chloral hydrate come from? That question was never properly answered in 1962, and it hasn’t been answered since.
“I think a lot of the questions about her death really come down to how poorly her death scene was documented and processed by investigating authorities back in 1962, leaving questions unanswered that could have been answered if they had done things properly,” Holes said.
And the incompetence theory only goes so far. Holes doesn’t buy it as a complete explanation.
Holes says he doesn’t buy the idea that the LAPD was simply that incompetent. He believes there were other forces at play.
The reason those forces may have been involved goes straight to the top of American political power at the time. If investigators had delved into the circumstances of Monroe’s life, Holes said, they would have discovered she had become romantically involved with President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, both of whom told her national security secrets.
That’s not a small thing. A woman who knew what the Kennedy brothers were sharing with her in private — at the height of the Cold War, just months before the Cuban Missile Crisis — was a liability of the highest order to the most powerful family in American politics.
“What kinds of documents did the FBI keep on her that have never been released?” said Holes. “There are documents, heavily redacted documents, concerning the FBI’s monitoring of Marilyn Monroe.”
“But if Marilyn Monroe is being told, let’s say, national security secrets by President John F. Kennedy and the attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy, the FBI is going to have those classified to this day. And at some point, through Freedom of Information Act requests, maybe those documents can be released. That would be a huge investigative treasure that somebody like me would love to dig into,” Holes said.
That’s the part of this story that tends to get buried under the celebrity gossip angle. Monroe wasn’t just a Hollywood star with powerful admirers. By Holes’ account, she was a woman who knew things — and who died under circumstances that no competent homicide detective would have waved off as quickly as the LAPD did in August 1962.
The 1982 District Attorney’s review of the case found no credible evidence of murder, but even that inquiry conceded that factual discrepancies and unanswered questions remained. That’s a quiet admission that the original investigation left real gaps. Sixty-plus years later, those gaps are still there.
What the AI recreation in the FOX special does is something the original investigators never attempted: it puts modern forensic eyes on a scene that was poorly documented from the start. A revolutionary virtual recreation rebuilds the scene of her death with unprecedented precision, allowing a team of crime scene investigators to step back into 1962 and reexamine the evidence as never before. What they uncover undermines the official story of probable suicide. It could be far more sinister.
Holes has seen a lot of death scenes. He knows what real overdoses look like. And his read on what happened to Marilyn Monroe in that bedroom is that someone cleaned it up before the police arrived — and that the LAPD, for reasons that may never be fully explained, let them get away with it.
TMZ’s “Celebrity Crime Scene: Marilyn Monroe” airs on FOX, with next-day streaming available on Hulu.
If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, please contact the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988 or 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
Sources: Fox News Digital; NewsNation, “Jesse Weber Live”; TMZ Live; CBS News, “The Marilyn Tapes”; Variety (original 1962 reporting)