Shortly after her death, the L.A. County coroner concluded that Murphy died as a result of pneumonia combined with anemia and “multiple drug intoxication” from prescription and over-the-counter medication.
“She was really sick with pneumonia, very anemic, and she was taking medication,” Ed Winter of the Coroner’s office said, “and all that combined killed her.” Apparently, no illegal substances were involved: “It was only prescription and over-the-counter meds,” the Coroner’s Office asserted.
Her hubby, Simon Monjack, was far from universally liked (although that’s true of any man who wins the hand of the princess, so to speak) and some accuse him of keeping her from adequate medical care. He denied that and claims the family simply underestimated her illness, they thought she had the flu
. “I had no idea she had pneumonia.”
Keep in mind that Brittany’s mother Sharon shared the 10,000 square foot home. Her daughter died in her arms, she too bears the burden of “if only.” And grim circumstances continued for Sharon, she apparently found her son-in-law deceased, five months later in the same bedroom..Simon Monjack was barely 40.
Remarkably, the paperwork on his death was the ghost of his wife’s diagnosis: pneumonia, complicated by anemia.
Everyone agreed with the Los Angeles police official who called it ” just a tragic set of circumstances, a sad, sad case.” But would everyone agree with the celebrated forensic pathologist Cyril H. Wecht (one of the very few in his field with both medical and legal training), who felt that the coincidence was terribly strange, that perhaps more testing, more investigation of some stripe would be called for?
Cyril H. Wecht
“I had questions initially and those questions remain,” Wecht said. “I would have checked to see if the private lab results were valid and if they could be corroborated and analyzed whether there was exposure and where did the exposure come from. You have two people, a husband and a wife (dying within) five months of each other, and, not engaging in any wild speculation… you’ve got to check it out.”
Rarely in the modern age do young people die of pneumonia, much less in upscale circumstances. Two such deaths, only months apart in the same mansion in the industrialized world has no precedent we’re aware of. Any medical Sherlock would ask, “What’s happening here?”
In addition to doubts raised by mainstream sources, family and fringe (a bit different from family and friends) have been heard from. We’ll return to some of that perspective in the next section but note for now:
In a Holly-world of paparazzi-speak some of Brittany’s friends, like Jamie Pressly, weighed in with speculation. Jamie–who seemed to feel that marriage to Simon Monjack was the beginning of the end for Murphy–was dubious about the final results in the medical examination. She sought an answer from somewhere, even if it was a psychic, a medium.
And there were suspicions, some whispers, that Brittany’s husband had not only been a negative influence on her but may have been in some way involved with her death. No evidence of that has ever surfaced.
In pursuit of a reason for Brittany’s death her father, Angelo Bertolotti, had asked for testing of her system (the private lab results Dr. Wecht had referred to). It supposedly came back positive for “heavy metals”– to him it suggested “a third party perpetrator.”
Bertolotti, not to put to fine a point on it, was both estranged from his family and his life’s resume reads, essentially, “gangster.” But even someone’s who’s path was not traditional could be following good instincts. His subculture may not believe in coincidence, they may assume foul play because they initiate so much of it, but…his conclusions or suspicions ought not to be tossed aside automatically.
Something about Brittany in her last months looked very wrong, it’s more than believable that her body chemistry was all screwed up. Was it all a self-inflected health collapse, or were there environmental factors that set a trap for her?
Were the psyches of those two–Brittany and Simon–intermingled in unhealthy ways, deeply twisted as in some mutual Munchuasen Syndrome by Proxy? Or did they simply make all the wrong moves with their health, and have rotten luck besides?
We’re unlikely to ever find a precisely parallel case to compare it to, so we have to figure the odds, figure the lives of Murphy and Monjack, as the special story that they were.