#marilyn-monroe

The Death of Marilyn Monroe: The Star, the Overdose, and the Theories

In the early hours of 5 August 1962, Marilyn Monroe — the most photographed and adored star of her age, an icon of Hollywood glamour recognised the world over — was found dead in the bedroom of her modest home in the Brentwood district of Los Angeles. She was thirty-six years old. The Los Angeles County coroner determined that she had died of acute barbiturate poisoning, a lethal quantity of sleeping pills in her system, and classified the death as a 'probable suicide,' consistent with her long and painful history of depression, insomnia, and dependency on the drugs that both sustained and endangered her. It should have been, and in its essentials was, the tragic end of a brilliant, fragile woman whom fame had exploited more than it had protected. But the investigation that night was careless and confused, the timeline muddled, the accounts of those present contradictory; and Monroe's rumoured connections to President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, gave rise almost immediately to whispers, and then to an enduring industry, of conspiracy — that she had been murdered, or silenced, to protect powerful men. Sixty years on, those theories persist, unproven and unpersuasive, while the documented evidence points, as it did from the start, toward a lonelier and more ordinary tragedy. This is the story of the death of Marilyn Monroe — what is known, what is not, and why the difference matters.