Just over a month ago, retired CIA agent Normand Hodges made an astonishing confession: he was part of an assassination taskforce for the US government and murdered 37 people, including Marilyn Monroe…
An article by World News Daily Report reported on 25th March that 78-year-old retired CIA agent Normand Hodges had admitted to committing 37 assassinations between 1959 and 1972. He was immediately arrested in hospital by the FBI, who opened an investigation. He said he carried out these hits on the orders of Major James Hayworth, his commanding officer, as part of a secret CIA cell. This cell was assigned to assassinate individuals who represented a threat to the interests and national security of the US.
Hodges claimed to have killed a few scientists and artists who threatened US interests (artists?!), but unique among his victims was the only woman he ever killed – Marilyn Monroe.
He said that the CIA had evidence that Marilyn Monroe was having an affair with President John F. Kennedy. Worse, she was also sleeping with Fidel Castro, the Prime Minister of Cuba. Castro had overthrown Cuba’s previous leader and dictator, severed links with the US and formed an alliance with the Soviet Union. This ultimately led to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 just months after Marilyn’s death. Suffice it to say, Castro was a problem for the US, and the CIA was concerned about Marilyn passing strategic information to him – particularly as she was sleeping with JFK as well.
Now, as soon as I read all this, I was sceptical, mostly because I often hear about deathbed confessions being unreliable and unverifiable. Most of the time they come to nothing. What I perhaps should’ve checked first was where this news was actually coming from…
Normand Hodges = Michael Tyrrell
When you go to the disclaimer page on the World News Daily Report site, you find this:
WNDR assumes all responsibility for the satirical nature of its articles and for the fictional nature of their content. All characters appearing in the articles in this website – even those based on real people – are entirely fictional and any resemblance between them and any persons, living, dead, or undead is purely a miracle.
Ah. It’s a hoax.
The Normand Hodges pictured in the article is actually Michael Tyrrell, a prisoner in the UK dying of throat cancer after serving a 29-year sentence for drug smuggling. Tyrrell’s photograph was nicked from a 2013 article for The Guardian about the mistreatment of ill prisoners in the UK – probably because of the handy handcuff.
A few sites got hold of the article and re-reported it, not realising it was fictional. Loads of people have also commented on the article on the World News Daily Report site, not realising that the whole site is full of bogus news stories written for entertainment purposes.
But several websites like FACTually, Truth or Fiction and Snopes have revealed the truth about the story before it’s had time to embed itself in pop culture as an urban legend. It’s a similar state of affairs to what happened with Andrew Carlssin, an alleged time traveller from the future who appeared in an article by Weekly World News, another satirical, fictional news site. In that case a number of reputable news sites like Yahoo! re-reported the story as fact, inadvertently creating the Andrew Carlssin urban legend.
So that’s that.
So the CIA didn’t kill Marilyn Monroe?
I never said that, of course. Normand Hodges and his story of a CIA assassination cell may be fictional, but stories about the CIA bumping off Marilyn Monroe have been swimming around for years. Many people believe that the official story – namely that Marilyn committed suicide – is nonsense. The murder of Marilyn Monroe has become one of the most popular conspiracy theories of all time.
There are a lot of unanswered questions that surround Marilyn’s death. For starters, an actual time of death has never been established. The housekeeper who found Marilyn and the doctors who attended to her body suspiciously changed their stories. And even though she was a key witness, the housekeeper was allowed to travel to Europe and never be questioned again.
The medical evidence suggested that Marilyn had died from a drug overdose, but not from swallowing the drugs and not from an injection. So how did they get in her system? An enema, it’s assumed, but surely no one would commit suicide with an enema?!
While her death was marked a “probable suicide” – hardly conclusive – the results from the autopsy were never made public. Many detectives, including Jack Clemmons, the first LAPD officer to arrive at the death scene, believe she was murdered.
As to whether the CIA killed her, they certainly had a motive. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence of Marilyn having a relationship with Fidel Castro, but JFK is another matter. There is evidence of some kind of relationship between them, including calls made by Marilyn to the White House and evidence from actor Ralph Roberts that Marilyn and JFK shared a room at Bing Crosby’s house. It was reported that JFK was the last person Marilyn called before she died. There were also rumours that Marilyn was having an affair with Robert Kennedy, JFK’s brother.
If Marilyn really was having affairs with two members of the most powerful family in the US at the time, the CIA might’ve been concerned about government secrets being leaked.
Documents were then made public in the 1990s suggesting that the CIA had secretly recorded a conversation between Marilyn and JFK in which they discussed the recovery of UFOs. Conspiracy theorists claimed that Marilyn was killed either by the CIA or by Majestic-12 – the secret government agency charged with covering up UFO cases – because they feared she would reveal what JFK told her. Others have suggested that JFK himself was assassinated a year later for threatening to reveal what he knew about aliens.
While most people consider the above mentioned documents to be fabricated (largely because Majestic-12 is widely considered a hoax), the questions that surround Marilyn’s death are listless. In future articles I will look into these questions in more depth. And while I personally don’t think Marilyn and JFK were assassinated for talking about UFOs and aliens, I do think a conspiracy may be behind both of their deaths.
Certainly in Marilyn’s case, if the best conclusion made by doctors is “probable suicide” and the first police officer on the scene believes she was murdered, that’s good enough for me.
Next week: Is Yosemite National Park swallowing people?
C.R. Berry 