The coroner who performed the autopsy on Marilyn Monroe is breaking his 63-year silence to reveal he never agreed that the cause of her death was suicide and was even prohibited from probing into whether the tragic blond bombshell was murdered — possibly to silence her from spilling secrets about the politically powerful Kennedy family, per Daily Mail.
Thomas Noguchi, now 98 and full of regrets, is telling the startling truth about what really went down behind the scenes of the Aug. 4, 1962, death at 36 of Marilyn, the lover of then-President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
He has given his shocking, unvarnished account to Anne Soon Choi, author of the new book L.A. Coroner: Thomas Noguchi and Death in Hollywood, in which he admits that the autopsy was never fully and properly performed, that evidence quickly went missing, and that he was not on board with the official — and hasty — ruling of death by suicide.
He also claims he was not allowed to further investigate how a body that was found surrounded by bottles of powerful sedatives did not have any visual evidence of pills inside the stomach and small intestine.
As previously reported, Monroe was said to have been carrying President Kennedy’s baby — and threatened after he dumped her, as he ran from the scandal, that she would tell the world all about her abortion, giving the Kennedys what sources say was ample motive to see her silenced.
Choi writes that Noguchi quickly became suspicious — especially when he pressed for the actress’ stomach contents and organs to be further tested, only to learn that head toxicologist Raymond Abernathy “disposed of them once the coroner’s report was issued. Without a complete analysis, it was impossible to rule out that Monroe had died by injection rather than by swallowing pills.”
Also, Choi writes, Noguchi feared that if the autopsy was someday proven shoddy, “ultimately, as the pathologist who conducted the physical autopsy, he would be held responsible.”
Noguchi was especially troubled because he was only 35 at the time, a newbie in the department and still on probation, when he was oddly assigned the task of examining the corpse of arguably the most famous woman in the world — instead of such a high-profile case going to Chief Coroner Theodore Curphey.
“Why would the Chief Coroner have passed on such an opportunity?” writes Choi. Noguchi “couldn’t shake the sense of uneasiness that had dogged him since the beginning. Was there a chance that she was murdered? Was he a pawn in a cover-up?”
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