My journey ends here...
MURRAY Eunice
Born Eunice Marjorie Joerndt.
Date of birth : March 3, 1902, Chicago, Illinois.
Portrait :
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Places of living :
1947 : 902 Franklin Street, Brentwood with her husband.
1950 : 431 West
Rustic Canyon Road, Santa Monica Canyon
1962 : 933 Ocean Avenue, Appt 11, Santa Monica.
Practise: Marilyn's housekeeper for the last 9 months of the actress life.
Story
She was the last daughter of a 6 children family, whise last one had died aged 3.
Her parents, Wilhelm Joerndt et Mary Miller, were fervent Jehovah's witnesses.The family left to Ohio, where she attended the grammar-school of the village, ran by some Swedenborgian sect disciples.
In 1917, aged 15, she attended the Swedenborgian Urbana School and Academy where her
sister Carolyn, 4 years elder than her, was a boarder.
Recently settled in Los Angeles, the parents
learned that Carolyn had contracted the Spanish flu and that a
doctor had been called.
Angry that the religious proscriptions about the medical care had been
broken, the Joerndt legally disowned their daughter Carolyn, who, to
them, didn't exist anymore. When the school learned about it, a tutor
of the
institution took care of Carolyn for a while.
Eunice escaped the flu and so the family abandonment. She loved her sister to who she considered herself as a pale reflection.
She was deeply affected by her parents violent reaction, and since this time, began to suffer from emotional disorders, mainly an inability to differentiate herself from her sister, as from her other friends, and a panic-fear of abandonment.
She left school in this year of 1918, before her 16th birthday, apparently because of her psychological and emotional fragility.In 1918, on the school records, Eunice was domiciled in Los Angeles and Carolyn in Chicago.
The Swedenborgian Religion influence on the two girls was significant. The 40 boarders of the Urbana high school had to try hard to imitate the founder (Emmanuel Swedenborg, Swedish savant and theosophist of the 18th Century), and they were encouraged to "constantly think about God, to salvation and man's spiritual illnesses, while following an arts and morale teaching". The ideal was to reach marriage which was supposed to last for eternity.
In 1929, she opened a small nursery in Urbana, a testimony of her love for children and her passion for a precocious and well-understood education.
John who wanted to become a priest, attended
the Yale Divinity School, but he left the seminary to come back to
his first love, the carpentry.
They had 3 daughters : Marilyn (born in 1924), and the twins Patricia (who would marry Norman Jefferies) and Jacqueline (born in 1926).
Having left school early, Eunice couldn't devote herself to teaching, but she continued to love and imitate her sister insomuch to define herself as "nursery nurse" or more simply "nurse", an identity she persisted in using it in Los Angeles, where this profession appeared in the phone book under her name.
Without any other skills than her experience as a mother, Eunice admired and idolized through her whole life her sister Carolyn and her brother-in-law, Franklin Blackmer.
He had a brother, Churchill Murray; this one ran
a radio station in Mexico; he had many political contacts, notably
within the Cuban and Soviet Embassies.
They knew the Kris and the Greensons.
John was an absent father and husband, and Eunice hadn't have enough money to repay the loan.
Dr Greenson purchased it in 1947 for the amount of 16 500$.
Eunice and her husband separated from each other shortly after the house sale and divorced in 1950.
Eunice lived it as a failure, a serious sinning to the principles instilled by her Swedenborgian education.
John Murray re married, settled in Texas, then in New Mexico, and died in 1958.
He immediately hired her and placed her to his
most important patients where she was kind of a guardian, companion and
mother hen, a role for which she hadn't any skills and experience.
He obtained her some work to his most famous
patients. Conscientiously, as Greenson demanded it, she reported
the slightest actions and gestures of his clients.
The most widespread opinion is that Eunice spied on Marilyn on Dr Greenson's behalf : she reported him everythings she saw or heard at his patients home.*
Back from Mexico, Marilyn lived for a week at the Greensons home, waiting for her house to be ready.
In May 1962 Marilyn's circle was relieved to learn that, Greenson being travelling for 5 weeks, Marilyn dismissed Eunice. But back from New York, where she had sung for John Kennedy at the Madison Square Garden, Marilyn found Eunice at home.
This one claimed that her dismissal wasn't definite, but only for Marilyn's stay in New York.
She had planned to travel to Europe since August 6, 1962, with her sister and her brother-in-law; she would have told Marilyn on August 1, in the aftermath, Marilyn would have given her a check, asking her not to come
back in September : 
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According several biographies, Marilyn had already contacted one of her former employees (Hattie Stevenson or Florence Thomas according the sources) to replace Eunice Murray.
Marilyn's friends considered Eunice's leaving as a positive fact (the evidence that Marilyn wanted to lead her life on herself) and as the first sign of her detachment from Greenson.
On August 4, 1962, Eunice reported for duty at 8.00 AM. No biographer contests the fact that she remained with Marilyn during the whole day, and that, curiously, she spent the night in Marilyn's house rather than going back home, in Santa Monica.
She accompanied Marilyn on the beach in the middle of the afternoon, then they came back so that Marilyn could follow her therapy. She kept on screen the phone calls, including those of very close friends of Marilyn who had understood that Marilyn wasn't well. She gave the most various answers not to give the calls to Marilyn.
In her official statement to the police about Marilyn's death, she declared that she woke up at 3.00 AM and saw the light under Marilyn's bedroom door, but that strangely, the door was locked. Worried, she called Dr Greenson who asked her to go out and to try to look through the curtains. She reported him that Marilyn was lying in the bed, naked, in a few natural position. He arrived, broke the bedroom's window and found Marilyn dead.
More strangely, about the fact that the bedroom's door was locked,some biographers claims that this door couldn't be locked and that Marilyn always slept, whatever the place, the door open.
Since her hard experience at the Payne Whitney Hospital, she hated the locked doors.
He asserted that when he arrived, at 4.40 AM, Eunice Murray was doing the cleaning : she had made a laundry and was cleaning the house.
On June 1, 1962, Marilyn's birthday on the set of "Something's Got to Give"
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On August 5, 1962
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On August 7, 1962, at Helena Drive
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On August 8, 1962
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After
According
to the Stocking family,
After the death of her sister in 1972,
Eunice married her brother-in-law Franklin Blackmer,a minister of the
Since Marilyn's death and the rumors suspected the Kennedy's brothers, the attention was focused on Eunice Murray. In 1985 she claimed to a team of filmmakers who directed a documentary for the BBC that Robert Kennedy had actually come in the afternoon of August 4, 1962. But then she foreswore, under the pretext that she was 82 years old, and that things became confused.
Bibliography
"Marilyn : the Last Months",
Eunice Murray et Rose Shade, New York, Pyramid Books, 1975.
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