The Marilyn Tapes

Questions Still Remain About The Movie Star's Death

(CBS) 
But the next investigator on the scene was experienced and he quickly zeroed in on the witness who discovered Marilyn’s body, housekeeper Eunice Murray.

"The investigator at the scene did have some concerns about Mrs. Murray. He thought that her answers were evasive, and that she might have either been distressed or hiding something," Carroll explains.

The key to the mystery of Marilyn's last night is all about the timing - questions swirled around the account of Murray.

On the morning of Aug. 5, 1962, police were called at 4:25 a.m. but allegations persist to this day that Murray sounded the alarm about Marilyn much earlier.

Was news of Marilyn's death somehow delayed? Was evidence removed from the death scene? And if so, why?

"There was some form of cover-up surrounding the circumstances of her death," says Summers.

At the center of the cover-up theory are the Kennedy brothers.

"I think Marilyn Monroe was in love with John Kennedy for a while, then I think she fell in love with Bobby," says Carmen.

In the months prior to Marilyn's death, no one could have imagined how dangerous those secret relationships had become.

During a vacation in February 1962 in Mexico City, the movie star was mobbed by reporters. But away from the flashbulbs, she had a series of private, controversial meetings.

"She spent time socially, talked late at night with people who were American communists," says Summers.

Most people didn't know it, but Summers says Marilyn was passionate about politics. "Marilyn Monroe wasn't a dumb blonde. She devoured books on politics. She liked to talk to people about politics," he says.

Marilyn's political talks in Mexico were being monitored, and the FBI had opened a file on the movie star.

According to newly released FBI documents, Monroe was considered a potential security risk.

"Here you have a woman who is close to the President of the United States and to the attorney general who goes to Mexico and talks into the night with known communists," says Summers. "She was a security risk."

This was the height of the Cold War; the president was consumed with the threat of the communist regime in Cuba.

"This was perhaps the most sensitive time on nuclear matters in the history of the United States," says Summers.

Marilyn also was apparently having some highly sensitive conversations with the president.

One report details a lunch conversation at the beach house with JFK. "During that lunch nuclear matters, nuclear testing was discussed," Summers explains. "Marilyn Monroe was very pleased as she'd asked the president a lot of socially significant questions concerning the morality of atomic testing," he says.

That meeting was just three months before the Cuban missile crisis.

"Discussing nuclear matters at a time of horrendous international crisis, if anything like that would have got out, it would have been enormously damaging to the Kennedys," says Summers.