Free The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe by Donald H. Wolfe Page B

P RESSURES ON M ARILYN P ROBE
    â€œStrange ‘pressures’ are being put on Los Angeles police investigating the death of Marilyn Monroe,” sources close to the probers said last night.
    Police investigators have refused to make public the records of phone calls made from Miss Monroe’s home last Saturday evening, hours before she took an overdose of sleeping pills. The police have impounded the phone company’s taped record of outgoing calls. Normally in suicide probes here, the record of such phone calls would have been made available to the public within a few days.
    The purported pressures are mysterious. They apparently are coming from persons who had been closely in touch with Marilyn the last few weeks.
    Thad Brown later told Robert Slatzer that Parker had “called him on the carpet” for mentioning the phone records to Florabel Muir. When Slatzer asked Muir about the records, she said Parker had the phone records in his desk and had flashed them in front of her, stating that they were his insurance of heading the FBI “when the Kennedys get rid of Hoover.”
    â€œI asked her what phone calls Marilyn had made during that last billing period,” Slatzer said, “and Florabel told me she had learned from Thad Brown that a number of the calls were to Bobby Kennedy.” Slatzer then called Parker about the phone records. “He emphatically denied any knowledge of them and hung up on me,” Slatzer recalled. He then went down to the Central Division Headquarters and confronted Parker in thehallway about the records. Parker angrily retreated into his office and had Slatzer removed from the building.
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    Press coverage shows that Robert and Ethel Kennedy had arrived in San Francisco on Friday afternoon, August 3, with four of their children. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Kennedy arrived “without his usual flashing smile and shook hands woodenly with those who welcomed him.” After his speech, scheduled for Monday, the attorney general and his family planned a ten-day vacation in the state of Washington.
    A special FBI report on the attorney general’s activities that weekend specified that he “spent the weekend at the Bates Ranch located sixty miles south of San Francisco. This was strictly a personal affair.” The ranch, located in Gilroy, was owned by John Bates, a friend of the Kennedy family. Bates had met John Kennedy when they both served in the navy during the war, and their mutual friend Paul Fay had been named by the president as the undersecretary of the Navy. Bates was a frequent guest at Hickory Hill, Bobby Kennedy’s home, and Kennedy had asked him to head the antitrust division of the Department of Justice.
    Bates has steadfastly insisted that Bobby Kennedy spent the entire weekend at his ranch. “The attorney general and his family were with us every minute from Friday afternoon to Monday,” John Bates maintained to Monroe’s biographer Donald Spoto in 1992, “and there is simply no physical way that he could have gone to Southern California and returned.” Bates is certain that he would have known about it if Bobby Kennedy had left long enough to reach Los Angeles that day and return. The Gilroy parish priest confirmed that Bobby Kennedy and his family attended the 9:30 A.M. mass at the Church of St. Mary’s on Sunday, August 5, approximately when Marilyn Monroe’s body was being prepared for autopsy.
    In the process of his investigation, however, Thad Brown discovered something startling—the attorney general had been in Los Angeles on Saturday, August 4. Thad’s brother, detective Finis Brown, related, “I talked to contacts who had seen Kennedy and Lawford at the Beverly Hilton Hotel the day she took the overdose. I went to Thad with the information, and Thad said he had been informed of the fact. He knew Kennedy was in Los Angeles that night, and he told Chief