The housekeeper who found Marilyn Monroe dead in the early hours of August 5, 1962, spent decades telling a story that conflicted sharply with the official account of the actress’s death. Eunice Murray, who discovered Monroe’s body in her Brentwood bedroom, later made an explosive claim that reignited one of Hollywood’s oldest conspiracy theories and gave people reason to question everything they thought they knew about that night. The woman the world would come to know as Marilyn Monroe was born Norma Jeane on June 1, 1926. Her mother, Gladys, had been through a divorce and a painful separation, which meant Norma Jeane was labeled illegitimate in the moral climate of the 1920s.
Her father was absent, and her mother, battling serious mental illness and money problems, placed her daughter into foster care. When Norma Jeane was about seven, her mother brought her back and tried to build something stable. The stability did not last. Gladys’s teenage son from a previous marriage died suddenly, her own father took his life, and then she lost her job.
By 1934, when Norma Jeane was just eight, authorities intervened and hospitalized Gladys with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. Norma Jeane passed through an orphanage and then through roughly a dozen foster homes. In one home, a man who was supposed to protect her sexually abused her. She was 10 years old.
Her school performance collapsed, she developed a severe stutter, and she became even more withdrawn. In another home, she was assaulted behind a barn, and in another, she was attacked by the boyfriend of a foster sibling. By the time she was 16, the last family she lived with decided to move out of state without her. Facing a return to the orphanage, she chose marriage instead.
On June 19, 1942, she married a neighbor’s son, James Dougherty. It was not a love story but an escape plan, since marriage was the only way she could legally avoid being sent back into the system. She later described that marriage as suffocating boredom. While working at a munitions factory during the war, a photographer noticed her and took a few pictures.
Something clicked inside her. By 1945, she had ended the marriage and started working as a model. Then her past walked back in when Gladys reappeared after another hospital stay, emotionally distant and unstable, before vanishing again. Norma Jeane became obsessed with reshaping herself.
She exercised relentlessly, lost weight, and dyed her auburn hair blonde. Hollywood did not open its doors easily. She landed tiny roles, often uncredited, and sometimes her scenes were cut entirely. She became entangled with powerful studio men who treated access to acting work like a transaction for her body.
When she refused one arrangement, she lost her contract and disappeared for months. By 1949, she was broke again, and desperate people make desperate decisions. She agreed to pose for nude photographs, not knowing those images would follow her for the rest of her life. Under the guidance of her agent, Marilyn began reshaping herself in ways that were extreme even by Hollywood standards.
Her teeth were altered, she used hormone-based creams to lighten her skin tone, and she underwent cosmetic surgery. One of the beauty routines caused soft, pale hair to grow across her face like a faint beard, but she refused to stop the treatment. Her career finally began to move when she appeared in All About Eve. Behind the scenes, though, Marilyn was unraveling.
She prepared obsessively, but anxiety would wipe her mind clean once the camera rolled. Lines vanished and scenes had to be repeated again and again. Her vulnerability made her more captivating, especially to the men around her, causing tension on set. Over the next few years she worked at a relentless pace, appearing in 16 films in four years.
Right before one audition, she admitted to her acting coach that she was hearing voices. Then came a devastating loss when her agent and closest emotional support, Johnny Hyde, died suddenly of a heart attack. At his funeral, she reportedly screamed his name. Not long afterward, her acting coach found her unconscious in her apartment with dozens of sleeping pills in her mouth.
Her career reached a turning point with Clash by Night, but reporters uncovered the nude photographs she had taken years earlier. The media frenzy exploded. Rather than retreat, Marilyn leaned into it, responding with humor and confidence and reframing the narrative. Privately, she reached out to the man she believed was her biological father, who rejected her coldly and told her to call his lawyer.
In 1952, she suffered from endometriosis and needed surgery. Terrified of losing her ability to have children, she taped a note to her stomach begging the surgeon not to remove her ovaries. By 1953 she was a full-fledged star, but she was underpaid and overworked. The studio pushed her into the role of the blonde bombshell, the beautiful fool.
Marilyn hated it. She was introduced to baseball star Joe DiMaggio, and they married quickly. He wanted a quiet domestic life while she wanted movement and purpose. His jealousy clashed violently with her public image, reaching a peak during the filming of the famous scene where air from a subway grate lifted her dress.
DiMaggio watched, furious and humiliated. Later that night, their argument turned physical, and Marilyn arrived on set the next morning bruised. After only nine months, she ended the marriage, citing emotional cruelty. DiMaggio claimed he still loved her, but his behavior became obsessive.
He hired a private investigator to follow her, and in one mistake, the investigator broke into the wrong apartment, terrifying an unrelated middle-aged woman. That same year, Marilyn revealed a different side of herself. When segregation kept jazz legend Ella Fitzgerald from performing at elite Los Angeles nightclubs, Marilyn promised to sit in the front row every night if the club hired her. The club agreed, the performances sold out, and Ella’s career gained a major boost.
In 1956, Marilyn married playwright Arthur Miller. The public was fascinated by the pairing, but the marriage was troubled almost from the start. Miller privately wrote cruel things about her in his journal, and when Marilyn discovered it, the emotional damage was done. Between 1956 and 1958, she became pregnant three times.
She lost two pregnancies to miscarriage and one to an ectopic pregnancy. In 1958, she began filming Some Like It Hot. The finished film was beloved, but the production was chaotic. Marilyn relied heavily on medication, making her unreliable on set.
Simple lines took dozens of takes. By the end of filming, her behavior had cost the studio a significant amount of money, and her reputation as difficult began to overshadow her talent. Even during this period, her kindness never disappeared. When she overheard a crew member struggling to pay for his wife’s funeral, she quietly arranged for him to receive the money anonymously.
Her marriage to Miller collapsed, and she began an affair with her co-star Yves Montand. Then came The Misfits, a film that brought together too many fragile people at once. The script was written by Miller, forcing the collapsing couple to work together daily in the desert heat. Instead of saving their marriage, the film destroyed what was left of it.
During filming, Marilyn’s mental health deteriorated rapidly. She admitted to hearing voices and began taking dangerous amounts of sleeping pills. In November 1960, Marilyn and Arthur Miller divorced. Not long after, she quietly admitted to friends that she had thought about ending her life.
Instead of help, her psychoanalyst had her committed against her will. The letters she wrote during that time are filled with fear, shame, and despair. Joe DiMaggio stepped in and helped get her out. In May of 1962, Marilyn stepped onto the stage at Madison Square Garden and sang a soft, breathy version of Happy Birthday to President John F.
Kennedy. She wore a skin-tone gown covered in thousands of tiny rhinestones, so tight it had to be sewn onto her body. Many historians now agree that Marilyn and President Kennedy were more than casual acquaintances. Marilyn was also spending time with the president’s younger brother, Robert Kennedy.
By the early 1960s, her mental health had reached a dangerous low point. Her makeup artist later recalled applying her makeup while she lay motionless, staring at the ceiling, trying to gather enough strength just to face the day. She signed on to a new film called Something’s Got to Give, but the strain was too much. She missed rehearsals and arrived late, and the studio eventually fired her, then quickly offered her a new contract.
She would never return to the set to use it. One of the last people to spend time with her was a young actor named Warren Beatty. They met at a party, talked for hours, listened to music, and walked along the beach together under the night sky. The next day, she was dead.
On August 5th, 1962, Marilyn Monroe was found in her Brentwood home, lying in her bed with a telephone still in her hand. She was 36 years old. The official ruling was a probable suicide caused by a barbiturate overdose, but the circumstances surrounding her death were unusual enough that questions and alternative theories have never fully disappeared. Just past midnight, housekeeper Eunice Murray woke up and noticed a light still shining beneath Monroe’s bedroom door.
Then she noticed a telephone cord running underneath the door, which stood out because Monroe normally kept her phones plugged in outside the bedroom at night. Murray tried the door, but it was locked. She grabbed a fireplace poker, went outside, and pulled back the curtains of an open window. Through the security bars, she could see Monroe lying naked on her bed with one hand resting on the telephone.
Murray contacted Monroe’s psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, and her personal physician, Dr. Hyman Engelberg. Greenson arrived at around 3:40 in the morning.
He broke through a window and climbed into Monroe’s bedroom. Murray waited outside for roughly two agonizing minutes before Greenson stepped out and told her Marilyn was gone. About 10 minutes later, Engelberg arrived and officially pronounced her dead. The police were not called until roughly 35 minutes after Engelberg arrived.
An autopsy found a lethal amount of sedatives in Monroe’s system, and authorities classified her death as a probable suicide. But that conclusion never stopped the speculation. The most famous theories claimed Monroe had been killed because of alleged affairs with President Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
According to these theories, the Kennedy brothers feared Monroe might expose their alleged relationships along with sensitive information she may have learned through her connections to powerful political figures. One detail made the story even more intriguing. On August 4th, 1962, Robert Kennedy was in Los Angeles. That fact is documented.
Decades later, Murray made an explosive claim of her own. She alleged that Robert Kennedy had visited Monroe’s home on the night she died and that the two had gotten into a heated argument. The problem was that Murray’s story came years after the death, and historians have questioned the reliability of her account along with several of her other claims about what happened that night. While Monroe’s final hours remain surrounded by unanswered questions and endless theories, the evidence never established that the Kennedys were responsible for her death.
What remains certain is that sometime during the early hours of August 5th, 1962, Marilyn Monroe died alone in her bedroom, and almost immediately, her death became a mystery that Hollywood has never completely let go.