Marilyn landed on the front page of the UK’s Daily Star today, with what may be her strangest headline story this year. James Campbell, a ‘former PR man’ to the Kray twins – the East London gangsters whose reign of terror spanned the 1960s – has made an extraordinary claim about the elder twin, Ronnie Kray.
“Campbell, 76, who won the Krays’ trust in the ’80s, said: ‘Ronnie suddenly started talking about how he had murdered Marilyn Monroe. I was very shocked and tried to change the subject, but he was on a roll.’
‘He went to America. He was on a fake passport so as not to leave a paper trail. He was picked up at the airport and briefed about the job he had to do. The mob drove him to Marilyn Monroe’s house in Los Angeles. Ronnie was dressed as a maintenance man, baseball cap and a tool bag.’
Kray claimed he was let in by Peter Lawford who was the brother-in-law to president John F Kennedy.
James added: ‘He knocked on the door of her house and Peter Lawford answered. Ronnie said “where is she?” and Lawford said ‘she’s in the bedroom’. They went into the bedroom, Marilyn Monroe was lying half-naked on the bed, it was a big bedroom with a big bed. Ronnie said to himself, this won’t take long. He force-fed her drugs and watched her die.’
‘He said it was a piece of cake.’
Campbell, speaking on the The Criminal Connection podcast, said the hit organised by the mob came from President John F Kennedy’s fear that Marilyn would tell all over their affair. He said the mafia boss Meyer Lansky took care of it so they could ‘have a hold’ over JFK.
He said Ronnie travelled back to London and a couple of weeks later, a visitor from America dropped a heavy package to the twins containing two gold bars, with a note from Lansky, saying: ‘Oh thank you very much.'”
While the Krays were certainly infamous in Britain, Campbell doesn’t explain why the Mafia would have hired an outsider from across the Atlantic. Ronnie Kray was sentenced to life imprisonment for two gangland murders in 1969 and later certified as criminally insane, living in isolation from other patients at Broadmoor Hospital until his death in 1995.
It’s difficult to know why Campbell would take the words of an ageing thug who had struggled with paranoid schizophrenia for most of his life quite so seriously. By the 1980s, when Campbell met Kray, scurrilous rumours about Marilyn’s untimely demise had become a tabloid craze.
If Ronnie Kray did claim to have killed Marilyn, it’s likely he was either delusional or simply craving attention. Even more implausibly, Campbell also says Kray told him he trained Lee Harvey Oswald to shoot President Kennedy in 1963.
Stories of this kind, conflating major and minor historic figures, make for great copy, despite having little or no basis in fact. While it’s easy to laugh off such a ludicrous tale, it will no doubt be lapped up by conspiracy theorists, and the squalid exploitation of Marilyn’s lonely death will continue.
And finally, a word from April VeVea, author of Marilyn Monroe: A Day in the Life…
“It’s interesting to me how the bar continually shifts when discussing Monroe’s death. For years, it was an injection, then an enema. Now that the general consensus (a large claim for the MM community, but I’m talking about people who genuinely study her) seems to match the autopsy results of a self-administered overdose, it’s becoming ‘Well someone else must’ve given it to her’ … The conspiracy theorists will continuously move the bar, and we will soon see that Marilyn was forced to take pills by the ghosts of starlets past who knew JFK, Dr. Greenson, the shellfish poisoner, the ufologist and whomever else has thrown their hat in the ring.”
The Marilyn Report 