At 3:30am on August 5, 1962, Marilyn Monroe’s psychiatrist Dr. Ralph Greenson, broke into her bedroom by smashing a window to find the actress dead in her bed, with an empty bottle of sleeping pills on her nightstand. Monroe's housekeeper, Eunice Murray, had awakened in the middle of the night to find a light on in Marilyn’s room and the door locked. Murray called Dr. Greenson, worried that something was amiss.

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Or at least that’s what was reported at the time. In a new Netflix documentary, The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes, Monroe's biographer, Anthony Summers, presents a new timeline of events of the night Monroe died, deduced from hundreds of interviews conducted for an updated version of his 1985 biography, Goddess. Featuring new audio interviews with members of Dr. Greenson’s family, the new documentary addresses rumors and inconsistencies surrounding Monroe's death. The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe also digs into the Niagara actress' alleged romantic relationships President John F. Kennedy and his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

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An interview with the widow of Monroe’s press relations manager, Arthur Jacobs, produced the most significant breakthrough for Summers in disputing the well-known timeline of Monroe's death. According to the documentary, around 10:30pm on August 4, an attendant alerted Jacobs that something was terribly wrong while they were at the Hollywood Bowl—evidently, much earlier than the highly publicized 3:30am discovery of Monroe's dead body. “That’s not true, because my husband was there. My husband fudged everything off,” Jacobs’s wife says in the tape played in Netflix’s doc. Instead, Summers corroborates with several members of the ambulance team that Marilyn had in reality been taken to the hospital by ambulance late that evening still alive, and died en route to the hospital.

In the documentary, Murray states on tape that Robert Kennedy was at Monroe’s home in the afternoon on the day she died. In the days leading up to her death, according to Summers’ reporting, Monroe told a friend that she was “very much in love and was going to marry Bobby Kennedy.” Murray also states that Kennedy and Monroe had a terrible fight the day of her death. The documentary confirms that Kennedy flew to the airport in a helicopter to catch a flight around 2 or 3am on the night of Monroe's death.

Monroe and the Kennedy brothers in the only known picture of all three on May 19, 1962, after Monroe sang Happy Birthday to JFK at Madison Square Garden. Less than three months later, she would be dead.

Marilyn Monroe’s untimely death at the age of 36 has always been shrouded in mystery. Though Summers debunks inconsistencies in the timeline of the events of Monroe's death, the ultimate mysteries presented in The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe—the role that the Kennedys played in Marilyn’s life, government fears of her ties to Communism, who was there on the day of her death, and what they know—still remain mysteries by film's conclusion.

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