ABSTRACT
In 1957, to address such matters, the Los Angeles County Coroner, eodore Curphey, MD, contracted with Dr. Edwin Shneidman and his colleagues at the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center to provide behavioral science consultation with respect to manner of death determinations in “equivocal” cases, where it was unclear whether the death was intentionally self-inicted (Botello et al. 2013). Shneidman devised a protocol, christened the “psychological autopsy,” to help investigators “make a reasonable determination of what was in the mind of the decedent visà-vis his or her own death” (Shneidman 1994, 75). As one high-prole example, investigators employed Shneidman’s protocol in examining Marilyn Monroe’s death from a barbiturate overdose in 1962 and concluded it was the result of a “probable suicide” (Botello et al. 2013).
