The Unexplained - Howard Hughes - Edition 559 - Mike Rothmiller

July 23, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:02:29

Edition 559 - Mike Rothmiller

A specially extended version of my interview with Mike Rothmiller - former LA cop - who has produced a chilling and explosive book on the most controversial of all Hollywood deaths - Marilyn Monroe. "Bombshell" includes an astonishing account of Mike Rothmiller's conversation with Peter Lawford... The views expressed in this edition are solely those of Mike Rothmiller.

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast.
	My name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
	Very many thanks for all of your emails, the nice things that you've been saying, the suggestions for guests that you've made that I'll be working on and everything else as it comes.
	You can go to my website, theunexplained.tv, follow the link and send me a message from there if you'd like to.
	You can also check out, if you'd like to, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes, which is absolutely thriving, and thank you for that.
	That is the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
	And thank you to Adam, my webmaster, for his hard work.
	Okay, I'm not going to mess about here.
	I'm going to get straight to the guest.
	This is an extended version of a conversation that I had with a fascinating man, Mike Rothmiller, investigative author, former cop at the highest level, who has some astonishing revelations about Marilyn Monroe's death and the Kennedys.
	So we'll be hearing about that.
	He's going to speak about his new book called Bombshell.
	Not only are his revelations a bit of a bombshell, but also, of course, Marilyn Monroe herself was known as the blonde bombshell.
	And there have been questions for decades now about the nature of her death and what happened on that fateful night when she died.
	So we'll be talking with Mike Rothmiller about that.
	This is an extended version of the conversation that we had on the radio show simply because there was too much information.
	And in fact, I could have done even more than we have done.
	So there's about 20 minutes or so more here exclusively on the podcast for you than there was on the radio show.
	And as I said on the radio show, we had some sound problems on the connection with North America with Mike Rothmiller.
	He's now got himself some different equipment, but there is a little bit of distortion on this, but I have to say that I didn't stop the recording when we were doing it, simply because it wasn't possible to make it any better at his end, but mainly because the information that he was passing on was so interesting and so compelling that I forgot there were any issues.
	So I hope this will be okay for you.
	This is the full conversation, more than was broadcast on the radio by a long way with Mike Rothmiller about his book Bombshell.
	Thank you very much to Adam for his work on the podcast.
	Thank you to you for being part of this.
	You can always make contact with me wherever you are by going to the website theunexplained.tv and sending me an email from there.
	And I get to see all of the emails as they come into my inbox.
	Okay, here's the extended version of my conversation then with Mike Rothmiller about his book Bombshell to do with the death of Marilyn Monroe.
	Sometimes we tell you uplifting stories, eyebrow-raising stories, and sometimes we tell you disturbing stories and stories that I'm afraid may well leave you chilled, but will certainly leave you asking questions.
	The story we're going to tell now is a story that we have told before, but never in this way, and never with somebody so closely connected to it.
	This is the story of the most famous, probably iconic movie actress of her time, Marilyn Monroe, who, if you know anything about the movies, met a very sad death.
	They said it was probable suicide.
	She was found with barbiturates in her system.
	At the time, this was 1962, then people tended to be more accepting than they are today.
	But over the years, questions have been asked because Marilyn Monroe was very close to a lot of people at the very top of society.
	In particular, the Kennedys, John F. Kennedy, the president, and his brother, Robert Kennedy, both of whom, of course, ended up during the 60s being assassinated, both of whom were incredibly powerful men, one the president, one the senior law person in the country, the attorney general, a man who had a mission to try and deal with the mob, the mafia, and many other things.
	They had many agendas going.
	Marilyn Monroe became close with both of them, and there have been suggestions over many decades that that connection is ultimately what led to her death.
	Now, we're going to talk with somebody tonight who's written a book who isn't just somebody who's researched the case, and there are many diligent researchers who've written books about this down the decades over many, many years, and there are people who've collected files and talked to witnesses.
	The man we have on tonight is Mike Rothmiller, and he has been involved in this, personally involved in ways that you will hear.
	He's a New York Times best-selling author, a distinguished career in law enforcement across U.S. federal and state agencies and with American international intelligence services, 10 years with the LAPD, the Los Angeles Police, five years as a deep undercover detective with the Organized Crime Intelligence Division, the OCID.
	He was a member of the U.S. Department of Justice Organized Crime Strike Force and provided secret grand jury testimony regarding the assassination of Robert Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy.
	That's not the half, as they say here, of his curriculum vitae resume.
	Pretty impressive.
	He's on the line to us now from the United States.
	Mike Rothmiller, thank you very much for doing this.
	Listen, Mike, I don't know where to start with this because it is such an intertwined and complicated story and I want to do it justice.
	I guess the first question that I want to ask you is why have you done this now and why have you left it so many years to do it?
	When I left the police department, I went into television production.
	I was a newscaster and also I ended up working in the corporate world.
	And at that time, a number of things are going on.
	One, I was a senior executive in a major corporation, so that occupied my time.
	Two, I don't think the United States was ready to hear the truth, especially dating back, I started in the 1980s and did it.
	At that time, the Kennedy family was still viewed as our royalty, and they had the myth of Camelot around them, that they wouldn't do anything wrong, that they were great, that they were law-abiding, and so forth.
	Well, I knew differently from The intelligence that I had access to.
	And as time went by, and more and more documents, secret documents, were being released in the United States telling the truth behind the Kennedy administration, people became more receptive.
	And also, with the birth of cable news and cable programming in the United States, there was more access to tell the story and more people started telling their story.
	So as time went by, people evolved and now they're more receptive to hearing the truth because they've already learned a lot about what Robert and John Kennedy were doing, primarily with women and so forth, all the girlfriends they had and all the affairs.
	And so it was a matter of waiting until the time was right, waiting until I was out of the corporate world.
	And so I've been retired from the corporate world for a number of years, just focusing on writing books.
	And I decided with consultation with my wife that now was the time to tell the story.
	Did you have to wait until certain people were dead to tell this story?
	Because we know that the United States is a very litigious country, and the possibility might have been that some of those people might have wanted to try and sue you.
	Oh, certainly they probably would have.
	But my main concern was just telling the story and also about, I'm jumping ahead now, but also I survived an assassination attempt when I was working LAPD intelligence about three months after I interrogated Peter Lawford.
	So that was never solved.
	And in the back of my mind, it was always there.
	Okay, who is behind this?
	Could it have been related to the investigation I was doing on Marilyn Monroe's death and so forth?
	So it was, you know, my own best interest and my family's interest just to keep that quiet for a while.
	But now I don't see any issue with it.
	I don't see any issue with the people who tried to assassinate me.
	I would assume they're all dead now.
	And also, I wasn't concerned with litigation because what I'm telling is the truth, what I read, what I saw, and what I learned.
	So that was never my big concern.
	But certainly, people here love to sue everybody for anything, and it probably would have happened.
	And you felt even until recent years that somebody might come for you, bearing in mind the experience that we will talk about later, where somebody certainly did have a try for your life.
	You obviously felt over a long period that somebody might be coming for you.
	Yes, yes, absolutely, because after the assassination attempt, I knew I was involved in several intelligence operations and a couple of them were very large worldwide.
	And there would have been people who had a motive and the means to do it.
	And so I was keeping a low profile.
	And also within, geez, I'm thinking probably was the mid-90s.
	So it was years after I left the police department.
	I caught some people trying to break into our house.
	And one was armed.
	And I learned later that they may have been associated with this group that I was investigating a decade before that.
	So there was always that possibility.
	And it was just best to keep a low profile, but as low as I could, stay out of a controversial issue.
	And so that was the choice that I made.
	I think it was a perfectly understandable choice if you're so close to something that is so hot and sensitive, which boy, if anything was, this absolutely was.
	And especially if you had access, which you did, to documents that could reveal things that people did not want to be known, then that puts a great big target on your back.
	So I can understand that.
	My listener needs to understand that periodically, including recently, there have been cases of investigative journalists who have paid with their lives for revealing information about people who really didn't want that information revealed.
	So I get that totally.
	And, you know, you being a cop and an intelligence guy, of course, you'd be acutely aware of those things, wouldn't you, Mike?
	Absolutely.
	More so than most people.
	Okay, let's talk in the remaining minutes then of this segment.
	And I just have to explain to my listener that we're doing this on a Zoom audio call here.
	So the audio isn't absolutely perfect, pristine, but I can hear every word that Mike is saying from the U.S. But just to explain to you that fact, there will be people today, and it's extraordinary for us, I think, Mike, and for anybody who's been around for a number of decades to understand this, but there will be people who don't understand who Marilyn Monroe was.
	They might have heard her name in a song, and maybe that's it.
	They might have seen a movie on TV, but they won't get the fact that this person was an icon.
	That word is banded around and thrown around all the time in this day and age, but she was an icon, an icon for her time.
	A beautiful woman, talented, incredibly intelligent, which a lot of people didn't understand, but she was.
	So she was a very special person.
	Talk to me about her and how she came to be in the orbit of the Kennedy family.
	Well, as you said, she was an icon at the time.
	She was probably the best-known sex symbol actress in the United States or possibly worldwide.
	And it was just a matter of if you took somebody today of the same statue, a lot of people, especially politicians, want to meet that person and be associated with them.
	She was invited to meet the Kennedys, primarily John Kennedy at the time.
	And she thought, great, you know, I'm meeting either the senator or the president during the different time stages.
	And she was impressed by that.
	And of course, John Kennedy, with his history of womanizing, was very anxious to meet her.
	And so everybody knew it within the United States.
	She was always getting massive media coverage.
	He was getting massive media coverage.
	I think in most parts of the world during that time frame, everybody that had a television set or a radio knew who Marilyn Monroe was, and they certainly knew who John Kennedy was.
	And as you say in the book, you say, quotes, JFK was a Marilyn enthusiast, interesting word, from their very first meeting.
	He wasn't, I'd say, taken with her romantically.
	He looked at her as a conquest that he wanted to make.
	So she was a notch on the bedpost.
	You bet, because I've got letters that his brother, Joseph, the one who died during World War II, sent to John Kennedy regarding setting up girls.
	And they were having, in women, they were having a contest to see who could bed more women.
	And so when you see that, that's what they grew up with, the entire family.
	So that sets the stage for what they were doing throughout their entire adult life.
	And quite frankly, at that stage, the media, they were covering for John Kennedy and the Kennedy family.
	So this stuff was an open secret.
	People in the media, cops who had to provide protection for the Kennedys, knew about all of this stuff.
	But the average Joe bought all of the stuff about Camelot and about the perfect family life.
	I think Bobby Kennedy was voted Father of the Year in 1962.
	You know, it was all a bit of a sham, but these were innocent times.
	People didn't understand it.
	You describe in the book, and I found it nasty, by today's standards, very nasty, the sex parties and the way that they were conducted.
	You tell one story about John F. Kennedy, if I'm right about this, piling out of a window at one venue and being taken in a cab, in a taxi cab, to another female star's home.
	I mean, that's the president.
	That information came directly from a person who was working OCID LAPD intelligence at the time.
	When Kennedy came to town, at that stage, he was the president, and he was staying at Peter Lawford's house in Santa Monica on the beach.
	And the Secret Service, they're supposed to be guarding him.
	But also when dignitaries would come to town, Los Angeles, OCID or the intelligence division, they would take care of additional VIP security.
	So a friend of mine, his father was working OCID at the time, and they were assigned to watch John Kennedy provide excess security.
	So they set up on Peter Rawford's house and they were on the site and they saw a window open.
	Then they saw a person, a man, climb out of the window and climb over a neighbor's fence and then run up to the street.
	And they weren't sure who it was at first until they got to the street.
	Then they realized it was John Kennedy and a car pulls up and it was an actress, a pretty well-known actress.
	And she picked him up and they followed them to her house where they spent several hours together.
	Anyway, they followed them there and the OCID guys found a phone because they weren't cell phones in those days.
	They got a phone and they called the Secret Service and they said, do you know where the president's at?
	And they told them, well, yes, we do.
	He's in the house here.
	We have it under guard.
	And they said, well, you better check again because we're watching him and he's at so-and-so's house in Beverly Hills.
	And it just sent a panic through the Secret Service.
	They rushed in the house.
	They searched it.
	He was indeed gone.
	They raced to the scene where LAPD intelligence is setting up, really guarding Kennedy at the time.
	And they just stayed until he came out.
	They picked him up and secretly took him back to Peter Lawford's house.
	And so it was all done very quietly, no media attention, no attention by the public.
	God, they lived dangerously.
	Just to explain, we haven't done it before now.
	Peter Lawford made it in Hollywood, very suave dude, you know, in a lot of movies, instantly recognizable face.
	He married into the Kennedys, was very connected with, you know, the heights of showbiz and politics there, Sinatra, Dean Martin, all of those people.
	And because he married into the Kennedys, he became a kind of facilitator or fixer for them, didn't he?
	He was the middle man with Hollywood and the Kennedys.
	Just to finish this part off then, the Kennedys, the brothers often shared women.
	They passed, you know, one would finish, John would finish with a woman and pass her on to Bobby.
	And that's precisely what happened with Marilyn, isn't it?
	That's exactly true.
	That's right.
	Talking with Mike Rothmiller, his book is excellent.
	It's called Bombshell.
	Double meaning there because, of course, Marilyn Monroe, known as the blonde bombshell, and the information in this book is also a bombshell in itself.
	And what may be the real story of what happened to her, which people have been asking about and talking around for many, many years.
	And just to explain to you, the sound is not the best, but it is certainly better than a phone line.
	So we're going to persevere with it.
	Mike Rothmiller.
	So we have the situation where Marilyn is involved with John Kennedy and is also involved with Bobby Kennedy.
	Talk to me about the dynamic of that.
	It was a matter of pretty much being tossed aside by John Kennedy.
	From all the intelligence reports that I read, from transcripts of the telephone calls and so forth, what happened was John Kennedy was having an affair with her.
	She would sometimes fly to the city where he was at, and they would sneak her into the hotel room where he would come later.
	And so it was very secretive for quite some time.
	Then what the intelligence indicated was that he was picked up on a wiretap by the FBI, speaking with her and with other women, quite frankly.
	And J. Edgar Hoover took that information, told Bobby Kennedy what he had.
	And at that stage is when Bobby told his brother about the wiretap And he knocked it off.
	He just, he didn't talk to Marilyn any longer.
	Well, that upset Marilyn somewhat, and he sent Robert out to Los Angeles to really try to mend the fence, calm her down, keep things quiet, and so forth.
	Well, that was starting to happen, but then Robert became involved with her sexually.
	And she, from all the intelligence, it appears and from her diary, that she fell in love with Robert.
	And so that was continuing.
	And then he decided to break it off because she was getting quite serious.
	Well, from the book, it seems that, you know, this was pretty one-sided.
	You know, it was another fling for him.
	For her, she was becoming, because he was sent out to soothe her after JFK, you know, she was becoming deeply almost besotted with the man.
	So what happened then was when he broke it off, she was very upset.
	And Peter Lawford was brought in because he knew her prior to the Kennedys knowing her.
	He was given the task to smooth things over, keep her calm down, and so forth, and just have the world move on and for her just forget about it.
	Well, she wasn't about to do that.
	And she was getting more and more upset as time went by because she felt scorned and used.
	And she started placing a lot of telephone calls to the White House and to the Department of Justice where Robert Kennedy was at.
	And those phone calls would never be forwarded to the Kennedys.
	They would just say, thank you.
	We'll take a message.
	And that was the end of it.
	So she was getting really upset at that stage, more along the lines of a woman's scorn.
	And she was going to seek some retribution.
	Retribution.
	She was talking to Peter and she talked to other people because I saw the telephone transcripts.
	And she was, in fact, going to go public.
	She said that to a number of people.
	And one guy she was speaking to, Jose, an old friend of hers, told her, don't do it because it's too dangerous.
	It would be too dangerous for you if you go public and announce your affair you've had with the Kennedy brothers and also what they told you through pillow talk.
	But she was going to do it.
	And Peter Walford contacted Robert Kennedy and told him that she was on the verge of going public.
	So he immediately told John Kennedy about it, who came back and said, calm her down, get out there, keep her quiet.
	What do you think, Mike?
	Sorry to interrupt here, but, you know, I mean, I read through the book in the last couple of days.
	And I felt, as we all do, enormously sorry for Marilyn because she did clearly love Bobby Kennedy.
	And she'd been caught in this terrible, terrible world that was abusive to her in many, many ways.
	What do you think she wanted, though, if Bobby Kennedy was not willing to be serious about and with her?
	What do you think she was looking for?
	Well, basically in her diary that LAP intelligence had that I read, she thought that Robert Kennedy was going to leave his wife and marry her.
	She actually thought that.
	And everybody knew then, and they know now that was never going to happen.
	But she believed that.
	And when she was just being at the end, for a better term, tossed aside by him, she was just infuriated.
	And that's what I'm talking about.
	She was looking at going public, and that would have taken both of the Kennedys down.
	That administration would have been over in the 60s with them having an affair with her.
	So Peter was told to come in, calm her down because they were longtime friends, and he was trying to do that.
	He met with several times, had numerous telephone calls with her, trying to keep her calm.
	And he probably absolutely believed that he would be able to calm everything down.
	It may be difficult, but he would be able to convince her just to keep the secrets, go on with life, and everybody will be good.
	But unfortunately, that's not what happened.
	What documents have you seen about this side of Marilyn's life?
	Oh, I've seen hundreds of intelligence documents.
	And I'll tell you why.
	LAPD intelligence, dating back to the 30s, would gather intelligence on anybody that wielded power, anybody that was influential, whether that's judges, movie stars, sports stars, the president, the attorney general, you name it, they gathered intelligence on them.
	So when I was in that unit, I saw all these intelligence dossiers on the Kennedys and on Marilyn and Peter Lawford and so forth.
	And I read them and I was amazed because these dossiers weren't five or six or 10 pages.
	Literally, they had hundreds of pages of information, intelligence information.
	And that was wiretaps, transcripts, surveillance photographs, surveillance notes and reports when the Kennedys came to Los Angeles, what they were doing.
	And also the favoritism that LAPD was extending to them.
	And what I'm talking about there, the chief of police at the time, Parker, was very close with John Kennedy, and he hoped that when John Kennedy became president, he was going to fire Hoover and appoint him as the FBI director.
	Well, that never happened.
	Also, when Robert Kennedy or Jack Kennedy would come to town before he was president and so forth, the chief of police would set up a hotel room at the Billmore Hotel.
	It was comped, but they were allowed to stay there under assumed names.
	While they were in Southern California, the captain of LAPD intelligence, a guy named Hamilton, he would serve as their driver, bodyguard, procurer of women.
	He would do whatever they wanted and help them out.
	So he had a long-term relationship with them.
	And he even assisted a few times.
	Frank Sinatra at that stage in the early 60s, he had a house in the San Fernando Valley on a hilltop.
	Well, that was mainly farmland, scrub area.
	There weren't a lot of homes out there.
	So what he would do, he would have parties, basically sex parties up there, and invite other entertainers.
	And he would bring in quite a few prostitutes.
	And a few times, both the Kennedys were there, Peter Lawford was there, and so forth, and a lot of women.
	And the captain of OCID and another gentleman from the police department would serve as security.
	And what their function was to keep people away, even those on a hilltop with a private driveway, if people in that area saw a lot of, let's say, limousines or expensive cars going there, they knew it was Sinatra's house.
	They would get curious.
	And so they would make the people leave.
	The media at the time, they didn't have helicopters or anything.
	So even if somebody from the news media showed up, OCID, those people, they would escort them out of there.
	And presumably, if anybody did get the story, this was an era when people who tried to publish such stuff would be quite easy to shut down.
	Oh, absolutely.
	Because I saw the intelligence in the files on, for instance, the owner and then all the editors, chief editors of the Los Angeles Times, then the Herald Examiner, of radio stations, of TV stations.
	The media, they were always a target of intelligence gathering because the chief of police wanted to be able to kill a story if it was going to be negative to the chief or to the police department in general.
	And I saw quite a few stories that were killed even into the 80s when I was there.
	And now we're talking into the early 60s.
	It was very easy to kill a story.
	So this is, I'm looking for a word and the only word that I can come up with, and it doesn't really serve it too well, but is sleazy.
	It's a sleazy world in which Marilyn becomes embroiled because that is the world for people who are in entertainment, in Hollywood, in politics.
	It all melds together and it melds together with her.
	So towards the fateful occurrence when she dies of a barbiturate overdose, Peter Lawford goes there and Bobby Kennedy shows up there.
	What happens?
	I had already seen all the intelligence on Marilyn, Peter, and so forth.
	I'd seen the wiretaps.
	The gentleman who installed the wiretaps and bugged the houses of Peter Lawford and Maryland's, a guy named Fred Otash, he was an informant of mine.
	He told me everything that he did and everything that he learned from the wiretaps and so forth and who paid him to do that.
	So with that, it's just by pure accident, we had working intelligence access to the Playboy Mansion.
	And most people at that time wanted to see the Playboy Mansion for a number of reasons.
	So one particular weekend, I took my wife and a friend and his wife to the Playboy Mansion just for a tour.
	And I had it set up.
	And as they were going through the house, I noticed a small room with, and I heard a TV playing.
	And I looked in there and I saw this man seated watching TV.
	And this was early in the morning on a weekend.
	And I kept staring at him.
	And I thought he looked familiar, but I couldn't place him.
	Then he finally turned and looked at me and I realized it was Peter Lawford.
	So I spoke to him briefly.
	He was drunk or on drugs or a combination thereof.
	And then I walked up to him and put one of my business cards that said Detective So-and-so, LAPD intelligence, and into his shirt pocket.
	And I called my wife over and my friends and said, oh, look at this.
	It's Mr. Lawford.
	And he just kind of looked at us and nodded and went back to watching TV.
	Right.
	And what year was this?
	That was in the spring of 82.
	Right.
	So this is a long time after these events and actually only a couple of years before Lawford himself died.
	That's correct.
	That's correct.
	And so several days later, I was at work and I received a call from Peter Lawford.
	He just said, I found your business card in my pocket.
	I want to know why and how I got it.
	And so I reminded him of the meeting at the Playboy Mansion.
	He was pretty much so drunk, he didn't remember it.
	Anyway, I got into conversation with him.
	He said, what do you want?
	And I said, well, I'd like to talk to you to clarify some things from the old days in Hollywood and so forth that I heard.
	And then curiously, he says, well, okay, but he says, are you the CIA?
	And I said, no, I'm not the CIA.
	I'm an LAPD.
	And he says, okay.
	And he's thinking for a while.
	Then he asked again, are you the C, are you sure you're not the CIA?
	And I said, no, I'm not the CIA.
	And I thought that was very curious that he would even ask.
	So a meeting was arranged, a place that he felt safe and he knew, which was a public park, not far from the Playboy Mansion.
	And we met there.
	And I arrived first and I scanned the area, make sure there wasn't anybody else around.
	And then I waited.
	And about, oh, it must have been pretty close to an hour later.
	He still was a no-show when I was ready to leave.
	And then I spotted him walking into the park.
	Walked up to him.
	He didn't recognize me from the meeting.
	I introduced myself and said, oh, oh, okay.
	And I said, let's just have a seat.
	And there was a park bench there.
	So we sat.
	And he was very guarded during our initial conversation.
	And he said, okay, what do you want to know?
	And so instead of an interrogation interview, something that happened 20 years prior to that, I started testing his memory, asking him questions about the early 1960s, what he was doing, what the entertainment industry was doing and so forth in the Kennedys.
	And he remembered all that.
	He was very detailed and accurate.
	So I thought, fine, his memory is sound.
	He's not under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
	So now I'll get to it.
	So finally, I said, okay, here's what I want to know.
	I want to know what happened the night Marilyn died.
	Let's park it there.
	We have another segment to do.
	Mike Rothmiller with the key question of seemingly the key person in this whole story, the sad story of the death of Marilyn Monroe.
	They said it was probable suicide.
	She was found full of barbiturates.
	And the world has been talking about it ever since.
	Mike Rothmiller in the United States was with the LAPD, the, well, the OCID, the Organized Crime Intelligence Division, which brought him into contact with a lot of secret documents.
	And a lot of what we're hearing is based on some of that material.
	And just, Mike, before we get into the story of your conversation with Peter Lawford, where are these documents now?
	Well, that's a good question.
	When I was still there, we were in the process of moving a lot of documents and also hiding a lot of documents because the LAPD was involved in a lawsuit with the ACLU over one of its other intelligence divisions who were spying on the Parent Teachers Association, on churches, on every organization you can imagine.
	They were spying on them, gathering illegal information.
	So they were concerned that the ACLU may get wind of what OCID had been doing since the 1930s.
	Right.
	This is the American Civil Liberties Union.
	That's correct.
	And so we're in the process of shredding, destroying a lot of documents.
	A lot of documents were being sent home with guys to keep at their house.
	And then there are some storage units that you can rent that a lot of documents were sent there and placed there.
	And the reason being is that if a subpoena was served on the police department for, let's say, all the files on the Kennedys and Meryl Monroe, those files were safely moved to somebody's house or to an off-site location.
	So the LEPD would, in their sense, would tell the truth in saying, we don't have any of those files within OCID.
	We don't have any, which technically is true.
	But isn't true, and nobody followed up with, well, if you don't have them, who does?
	Exactly.
	And the problem that they'd always deal with is that the only people who knew what was in OCID files are the guys who work there, because there were no computers at the time.
	And everything was written and filed an old-fashioned way with papers.
	And there was a unique filing system where if you didn't know the codes, you wouldn't find anything.
	And so it was always safe in that respect that nobody, even if you want to say the chief of police, if he walked in, he could not find anything.
	So it was a very secretive organization, and we only worked for the chief of police, getting the chief of police whatever information he wanted.
	Okay, so, I mean, just quickly, we have to get into the story of what Peter Lawford told you.
	If I wanted to, if somebody wanted to, through Freedom of Information requests and that kind of thing, to see these documents, the probability is that they wouldn't be able to lay their hands on them to expose them.
	Oh, no, because they're exempt.
	I tried that.
	I filed a California State Freedom of Information Act with them asking for documents that I wrote, that cases that I opened and I wrote about, then I closed, and it came back under the exception to the law is that those are still considered active investigations.
	So what we have in your book is your recollection of documents that you've seen.
	That's right.
	And also with her diary and Peter Lawford's interview when I did that, I took notes at the time, and I still have those notes.
	So you find yourself a couple of years before Peter Lawford's death, and I think he died of liver failure or something like that.
	It wasn't a nice death the man had.
	I think it was 1984.
	You met him in 1982 when he was already not a well man, and you asked him the question that a lot of people would have been wanting to ask him.
	What happened on the night that Marilyn Monroe died?
	What did he say?
	Correct.
	Well, at first, like I said, we were in the park, and at first he started to repeat the script that he was given by LAPD intelligence way back when, when Marilyn died.
	He was at home having dinner.
	He didn't know anything, so forth.
	Well, I knew that was false information because I had access to all the intelligence.
	And so as we're sitting there, I turned to him and I just, I kind of laughed and I said, Peter, that's a lie.
	It's BS.
	I know what happened.
	And that's not what happened.
	That's the script you were given.
	And he looked at me.
	He was kind of taken back.
	And I said, here's something else you don't know, that your telephone and your house were bugged and your phone wiretapped, as was Maryland's.
	And all of those conversations that were had, the transcripts, LNPD intelligence has them, plus the CIA and probably the FBI.
	So don't tell me this story because I know it's a lie.
	Well, he seemed to get upset at that and he stood up and I thought he was going to walk away.
	So at that stage, it went from an interview to a hostile interrogation.
	And there's a distinct difference in those and how you handle them.
	So I stood up and I just laid it out to him.
	I said, you know, there's going to be a lot Of people who want to know what you're telling me or why we're meeting, and no matter what you say, they're not going to believe you.
	So, either you can tell me what happened, and this whole thing ends here because you're not under investigation, you're not going to be charged with anything, nobody's going to be arrested, and everybody's dead.
	You know, Robert, Meryl, and so forth.
	So, I said, I don't want to hear that story again.
	I want to hear the truth.
	And he looked at me, and then he was just thinking, he sat down on the bench again.
	He cradled his hands on his face and looked down.
	And he was just quiet.
	So I sat down next to him.
	And then he just said, pretty much in a soft voice, he says, what do you want to know?
	Boy.
	And I just told him, I just want to know the truth.
	Tell me what you did and what Robert did the day she died and that night.
	And then he just started into the story.
	And I knew basically what the story was from transcripts I read.
	And he was laying it out pretty accurately.
	You know, you're talking about something happening 20 years prior to that.
	And he just started talking about how they went, he and Robert went to Marilyn's house in the afternoon.
	He told Marilyn ahead of time that Bobby was coming to town to see her.
	I asked him how Bobby got there.
	And he said, well, he flew in on a chartered plane.
	And he picked him up at the airport and took him to his house where Bobby called John Kennedy.
	And they had a conversation.
	Peter said he didn't know what the conversation was about, but obviously it was about Marilyn.
	And so after the first meeting, they go back in the evening and I asked him, so who was at the house when you arrived?
	And he said, just Marilyn.
	I said, there was no housekeeper.
	There was no cook, no anything there.
	He said, no, there was nobody there, just Marilyn.
	And then he says, Robert and I. And I said, okay, fine.
	Now tell me what happened.
	And basically paraphrasing, he said that they got into the house and Marilyn was upset and they immediately got into a heated argument.
	It was going back and forth between Robert and Marilyn.
	And Peter was trying to be the middleman as a referee to separate everybody and calm everybody down.
	But he said it was August, some windows were open in the house.
	It was very warm and they were screaming at each other, Robert and Marilyn.
	He was very concerned that the neighbors would hear this, the fight that was going on, and call the police.
	So he was able to calm them down a little bit.
	And then Robert started talking to her.
	He said, well, what do you want?
	What do you want?
	And Peter said, the way he took that is that, tell us how much money you want and we'll give it to you to keep quiet.
	That set her off.
	She was very upset with that and started screaming at Robert and they went back and forth.
	And then they started going through the house.
	He said he and Robert started going to various rooms looking for anything that connected John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy to Marilyn Monroe.
	In particular, Marilyn's diary that would have incriminated all of them.
	Whether it was her diary, photographs, anything, anything, phone numbers, so forth.
	So he says, while they were going through the house, Marilyn came in to the primarily into the bedroom, and Robert was going through the dresser, looking through what she had in there, see if she had anything in there.
	And she grabbed him, pushed him away from it.
	Then he grabbed her, pushed her down.
	She fell on the floor.
	They're yelling at each other again, very high-pitched screaming.
	Along the line in there, he said that she tried to slap Robert.
	He grabbed his hands.
	And so he says, Robert reached over and reached down to her.
	She's on the floor at that stage, grabbed her by the wrist.
	And Peter was very concerned because he says he was losing his temper big time.
	He grabs him, pulls him off, and takes him back.
	Marilyn gets up.
	The argument continues.
	So he gets them to move into the living room area, sets Marilyn down on the sofa.
	He sits next to her and he's kind of holding her down, talking to her.
	And Robert is standing over saying, where is it?
	Where is it?
	So forth, which Peter thought is talking about the diary, once again, photographs, whatever it may be.
	And Marilyn was just still screaming at him to get out and so forth.
	So he says, after a couple minutes, Robert leaves and he went into the kitchen area and he's staying there with Marilyn on the sofa, consoling her, getting her calm down.
	And he says he's wondering what he was doing in there after a couple of minutes.
	So he gets up, he walks into the kitchen, and he sees him there with a clear glass with what he thought was water in it, but he has a spoon in the glass and he's stirring it.
	And so I said, well, why was he stirring a glass of water?
	He says, well, you know, he put something in it.
	And I said, well, what did he put in it?
	He said, well, I don't know.
	And so I asked questions.
	Was the water clear?
	Did it have any tint to it, smell?
	Was there any debris in it?
	What?
	And he said, no, no, nothing I remember.
	And so they walk out to the living room.
	Bobby's carrying that.
	And he tells Marilyn, he says, here, take this, drink this, you'll feel better.
	You'll calm down.
	And Peter thought, after I spoke to him, I said, what do you think?
	He says, well, I thought there was a sedative.
	He put a sedative in it to calm her down.
	And I said, okay.
	And so Marilyn took a sip because Peter was telling her, go ahead, go ahead.
	As a friend, he was telling her.
	And she took a sip.
	She complained of the taste.
	And then she didn't want to drink anymore.
	But then both of them said, no, no, drink, drink the rest of it.
	You'll feel better.
	You'll feel better.
	It'd help you to calm down and so forth.
	So she does.
	And Robert takes a glass, puts it back into the kitchen area.
	And then they continue searching the house, leaving Marilyn seated on the sofa crying.
	They go into the bedroom again.
	They go to other rooms.
	They're searching.
	Peter's still worried that the police may be called because of all the noise they're making, the screaming.
	So he says they start walking back into the living room and he looks at Marilyn and he says, She looks like she's just out now.
	Maybe she passed out.
	He wasn't quite sure.
	So they continue looking around.
	Then they hear a knock at the door and Peter said he thought it was the police.
	Well, he didn't realize, but he was correct.
	And he about panicked.
	And he says, with that, they came back in and Robert just said, we've got to leave.
	He said, he looks at Marilyn.
	And he said, at that stage, he says, I don't think she was breathing.
	She looked very waxen and pale, but she's just still on the sofa.
	So he says, Bobby says, come on, let's go.
	They go to the front door.
	He opens the door and he sees these two men standing there in plain clothes.
	And he says, no words were exchanged, which was very bizarre.
	He says, Robert just took him by the arm.
	These guys stepped back.
	They walked out to the car.
	And he says, I kept asking Robert, who are these guys?
	What are they doing here?
	He says, those guys walked in the house, closed the door, and Robert just said, take me to the airport.
	And that's when they left the location.
	So are we to assume that somebody finished her off?
	Well, not really.
	So she was already dead at that point.
	He thought she was dead, but at that point.
	So are we to assume here that she was given too much of whatever she was given?
	Exactly.
	Wow.
	Exactly.
	And because she probably already had some in her system, and at that stage, one, it could have been another sedative in a liquid form that she would have taken, or it could have been some sort of designer drug from the CIA that would leave no residue, and there was no test for it.
	So they leave and takes them to the airport, and that's it.
	And he says, I said, well, why did they wait so long?
	Do you know, to call the police after Marilyn was dead?
	You know, waited hours.
	He said, well, what I understand, what I've heard, that was to give him time to get back to Central California to build an alibi.
	Well, what's interesting is time went by in 93 when I was out of the police department, a guy named Jack Clemens calls me.
	Jack Clemens was the first guy, first cop at Marilyn's house the night she died.
	He was the watch commander.
	He answered the phone call and he went to her house immediately.
	And he says, I'm going to tell you, because he trusted me, he says, what happened?
	He said, I've never told the whole story, what happened that night and afterwards, the cover-up that he knew about.
	And one thing in particular, he said, that about a week or so after she died, two guys come to his police station, and they said, here, we want you to sign this report.
	And what it was was a report that he supposedly wrote about the events that night.
	He said, I read it and he says, it wasn't true.
	He said, I didn't write that report and it wasn't true.
	And they said, sign it.
	And he refused to sign it.
	Then the guy identified himself.
	He was the captain of LAPD intelligence, Hamilton.
	Now, Hamilton is the same guy who later on, when I spoke, when I was talking to Peter Lawford, he said, yes, it was Hamilton who was one of the cops that came into Marilyn's house when he and Robert left.
	So now you have Hamilton in the middle of all this.
	And he refused to sign it.
	Then Hamilton said, here, look at these photographs.
	We want you to initial these photographs and what they were of the scene, Marilyn's house, Marilyn's body, and so forth.
	He said he looked at the first one and he said, well, wait a minute.
	This isn't how it looked when I was there.
	This is all staged.
	And they said, now just sign it.
	So he said, the most interesting photograph and most of the world has seen it where it shows Marilyn lying dead in bed and she's holding the telephone receiver.
	He said, when I went in there, she was not holding the telephone receiver.
	And he said, there were two photographs, one with the telephone receiver in her hand and another not holding the telephone receiver.
	He says, now, when somebody's dead, that doesn't happen.
	So he says, he knew it was being staged.
	He knew the whole thing was a major cover-up that was being directed by LAPD Intelligence, Hamilton primarily, with the approval of the chief of police.
	And all the information that I saw, intelligence-wise, all the secret reports, it all absolutely says that.
	It confirms it.
	And that's the crux of the book, isn't it?
	I mean, I know there was a cop also who stopped Peter Lawford, who was driving fast and erratically around that time.
	So that kind of corroborates this, doesn't it?
	Yes, it does.
	That was a Beverly Hills cop.
	They were speeding during 70, 80 miles an hour down a major street in Beverly Hills, and they were stopped.
	And that cop looked in and he recognized Peter Lawford, obviously driving.
	And then he saw Robert Kennedy, too.
	And he just let him go because he saw it was the Attorney General.
	And he just said, you know, slow down, drive carefully.
	And that was the end of that policeman seeing those two people together.
	But as time went by, that policeman made several, several public statements over the years that that absolutely happened.
	He knew who they were and that Bobby Kennedy was there that night.
	Now, I knew Bobby Kennedy was there the night because I saw the surveillance photographs.
	The chief of police knew it.
	Later, after I wrote my first book in 93 about LAPD intelligence, the mayor, Sam Yorty, who is mayor there, called me because we were on a radio talk show together.
	And he wanted to know what happened to Marilyn Monroe.
	And he was the mayor then, and he said, I know I was lied to.
	What happened to her?
	So I basically told him.
	I received a call later From a man named Thomas Redden.
	Thomas Redden was a deputy chief of LAPD when Marilyn died.
	He was in Chief Parker's office when Hamilton, the head of intelligence, came in and gave the chief of police all of the telephone toes that he pulled from the phone company, because they were all handwritten at the time, of Marilyn's house and Peter Lawford's house.
	He said, I saw them, the chief and I discussed them, then the chief put them in his safe.
	Well, Tom Ren, we're on the same radio talk show.
	He told me that when he became chief of police, the first call he made was to LAPD Intelligence.
	And he said, do you have files on the Kennedys and Marilyn Monroe and Peter Lawford?
	And the guy who answered the phone, he thought he was a lieutenant, says, yes, we do.
	Yes, we do, Chief.
	We have a lot, lot of it.
	And he said, I want those in my office this afternoon.
	And he said, okay, fine.
	That afternoon comes, who shows up?
	Captain Hamilton.
	And he says, I understand you want files on the Kennedys, Marilyn Row, and so forth, and on her death.
	And he says, yes.
	He says, we don't have any.
	Now, here it shows you the power and how things were done is that the captain that ran LRT intelligence just lied to the chief of police, told him, no, we don't have it when the chief knew they had it.
	But because the way the filing system worked and so forth, the chief would never find those files.
	Boy, and that's one of the reasons why this has remained a mystery.
	I just want to ask you a couple of other questions, but I'm going to have to do that on my podcast.
	So if you go to my podcast in a couple of days, theunexplained.tv, you will hear an extended version of this conversation that I'm having with Mike Rothmiller about Marilyn Monroe.
	So there we let go of the radio listeners.
	Mike, I just want to ask you, there was an attempt, you think, on your life because you were investigating all of this.
	We talked about it at the beginning.
	It's one loose end we need to tie up.
	I was involved in several intelligence operations, a couple of them involving the CIA and so forth at the time.
	And this investigation into Marilyn's death was really starting to intrigue me because I saw all the intelligence and I knew this was not a suicide.
	And after I spoke with Peter Lawford, that confirmed everything that I knew because he wasn't lying to me.
	He broke down.
	It was a man who had been carrying a burden for many, many years.
	And he unloaded at that stage.
	And I saw that with other people that I interrogated.
	They would finally tell the truth.
	And he did.
	So that really put up a red flag for me.
	So wait a minute.
	Okay.
	It was only 20 years later that there's still people around who would have been involved in it or could have been.
	So I was being very cautious about it.
	And finally, about maybe 60, 70 days later, I had to go to a meeting in the California desert with an informant.
	So I went out there when I was returning home to Orange County, California, which is south of Los Angeles.
	It was around midnight.
	And I started to pull into the house.
	And I remembered I had a note for another LA cop who just lived a couple blocks away.
	So I started driving over there to his house and I see a motorcycle following me, the headlight, which was kind of unusual in a suburban area at midnight.
	You just don't see motorcycles that often.
	So it followed me to this guy's house.
	And then after I put the note there, I was paying attention to him and I started driving down a street.
	It's all a dirt field on one side and housing on the other.
	And all of a sudden, this motorcycle just raced up next to me on the driver's side.
	And I knew something was strange then.
	Excuse me.
	And as I looked to the side, I saw the silhouette of a hand with a gun in it.
	And instantly, I hit the brakes and I spun the car to the right.
	And at that instant, I see some muzzle flashes in out of the corner of my eye.
	And I hear the bang, bang, bang, bang like that.
	The car goes down an embankment into this field.
	The motorcycle takes off.
	And I, as the car was still moving, I rolled out of it.
	I jumped out of it because the worst place you can be when somebody's trying to shoot you is inside of a car.
	You're an automatic target and it's a rolling coffin.
	So I damaged my spine when I jumped out and I had a gun attached to my ankle, but I couldn't reach it.
	And about that stage, the car just rolls to a stop, maybe 30, 40, 50 feet in front of me.
	And I hear somebody coming through the brush.
	And I thought it was the shooter coming to finish me off.
	I couldn't reach my gun.
	And also, I hear the guy calling to me.
	And what it was was a fireman off duty who lived nearby.
	And he heard the gunshots and the crash.
	And he came running.
	So that happened.
	And they take me to a trauma center.
	I'm in the hospital under an assumed name.
	And a day later, while I'm still in the hospital in the private room under a fake name and so forth, two guys come in.
	They close the door and I didn't know who they were.
	And they identified themselves from an intelligence service.
	And they said, listen, here's the deal.
	The guy who tried to kill you last night is already back in Nicaragua.
	Boy.
	People wanted to kill you because you're getting too close to something they didn't want anybody to interfere with or go public with.
	And it says, and also keep in mind that your wife was also targeted for assassination because they wanted to send a strong message.
	Anybody start getting into this, looking into this area, they're going to pay a price.
	And when would remind me again when that was?
	That was when I was in the hospital right after the shooting.
	And what year?
	That was 1982.
	Okay.
	So, you know, that was long time after the incident itself.
	Marilyn had been long dead by then.
	But now it's, you know, 40 years on, almost, 39 years on from there.
	You feel safe enough to be able to tell this story.
	The problem with the story is, of course, without the documents and, you know, without, you know, Peter Lawford isn't here, and presumably there are diminishing numbers of people who were directly connected with this, it's very hard to absolutely corroborate it, isn't it?
	I mean, it sounds a very compelling and extremely plausible story to me, but there is no way to stand it up, is there?
	Well, no, because what I have is the notes I took at the time regarding her diary.
	I wrote them as I read her diary, and I still have those notes.
	And of course, you know, we have to say that in the U.S. and the U.K., a police officer's notes are accepted in a court of law.
	That's right.
	And testimony is.
	And also I have the notes I made right after I spoke to Peter Wofford.
	I went back to the car and made those notes.
	But within California, there's two things.
	One, when I was working OCID, okay, I thought I was going to be there until I retired.
	So there was no need to make copies of reports because they're always there.
	And that's the way I viewed it.
	And also, if you remove any official document without approval from a load of people, it's considered a crime in California.
	And it's not when you do it, it's when they discover that you did it.
	And so I never thought about taking a report or making a copy of it because I had daily access to it, unrestricted access.
	I could look at any report I wanted at any time.
	That sounds absolutely acceptable because in many, many fields, people just think, well, the files are over there.
	I look at them every day.
	No need to worry about those.
	And you don't realize that maybe one day they will disappear and then you won't be able to reference them.
	I'm sure that you've had an awful lot of response to this book and you're going to get more.
	Do you think that you have done justice?
	Do you believe that you have done justice to Marilyn?
	I believe so.
	I believe so because it's correcting the record.
	There's been a false history about her tarnishing her reputation that she committed suicide.
	Now, she used alcohol and drugs.
	That's true.
	She may have had various mental issues.
	That's true.
	However, did she commit suicide?
	I don't think so.
	And I think a lot of people, whichever version of the story that you've read over the years, and there have been quite a few, I think a lot of people would be completely on side with that, that there's something wrong with that story.
	And this, to me, sounds extremely plausible.
	And Mike, thank you for telling me the story.
	Just remind me the title of the book and how we can get it.
	The book is called Bombshell: The Night Bobby Kennedy Killed Marilyn Monroe.
	It's available on Amazon through dozens or hundreds of bookstores.
	They can order it and also through Barnes Noble in the United States.
	Have you had any comeback from the Kennedy family?
	No, no.
	You're expecting it?
	No, no, really not, because they've never commented on other books and articles that have been written about Marilyn and the Kennedys.
	Shocking story needs to be told.
	Mike, thank you very much indeed.
	You're welcome.
	Mike Rothmiller here on The Unexplained.
	What a story that is.
	Thank you very much for bearing with the audio issues, but a hell of a compelling story.
	I have not noticed the time pass at all.
	Thank you very much for being part of my podcast.
	My name is Howard Hughes.
	This has been The Unexplained, and please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
	And above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

▲