When actress Brittany Murphy was found at age 32 on Dec. 20, 2009, the news sent
shock waves through the entertainment community.
What started as an open-and-shut case transformed into anything but.
Questions still linger today about her shocking passing.
When the cause of Murphy's passing was revealed in February 2010, Assistant Chief Ed Winter
of the Los Angeles coroner's office told People Magazine that her passing could've been prevented.
The primary cause was pneumonia, and no illegal substances were found in her system.
Winter revealed that Murphy, who was anemic, was planning on seeing a doctor, but she unfortunately
passed away before she got around to it.
She was taking medication, but he believes that she should've gotten medical treatment.
"We didn't find illicit or bad substances.
We did recover some of her medication."
Murphy's passing was officially ruled accidental, with the elevated levels of over-the-counter
and prescription medications she had taken reportedly having adverse effects on her.
Her husband, English film producer Simon Monjack, told People Magazine that she had visited
a doctor and was on antibiotics, but Winter disputed this version of events.
For the record, authorities have never considered Monjack a suspect in Murphy's passing.
However, his past still became the subject of intense scrutiny, as he had a history of
alleged credit card fraud, evictions, and financial troubles.
His supposed rush to the altar with Murphy also raised the eyebrows of several of her
friends.
While Monjack is known as a filmmaker, his resumé is sparse.
In fact, one of his few credits was achieved by suing the makers of 2006's Factory Girl,
claiming they stole his script.
Following Murphy's death, director George Hickenlooper reportedly unloaded on Monjack
in some since-deleted comments on the movie site Hollywood-Elsewhere.
He declared that Monjack didn't produce Factory Girl, claiming,
Hickenlooper supposedly attempted to contact Murphy before her passing to see if she was
all right, but Monjack allegedly wouldn't allow it.
In February 2010, barely two months after Murphy's passing, Monjack and Brittany's mother,
Sharon Murphy, attempted to launch the Brittany Murphy Foundation by hosting a charity event.
TMZ reported that Monjack raised suspicions when word got out that he was charging a donation
of $1,000 per person just to attend.
The situation became even shadier when he abruptly cancelled the event and claimed that
there was "an illness in the family."
Two weeks later, TMZ reported that the foundation hadn't filed the proper paperwork to be listed
as a nonprofit organization, meaning it couldn't solicit charitable donations.
As if things weren't fishy enough, when TMZ attempted to reach Monjack for comment, the
foundation website went offline.
In an interview with People Magazine, Sharon took the blame for the fiasco.
Both she and Monjack claimed the whole thing was a mix-up exacerbated by their grief and
lack of experience with nonprofit work.
On May 23, 2010, Sharon Murphy found Monjack in her daughter's Hollywood home, where
the two of them had continued to live following Brittany's passing.
As if Monjack's passing occurring within six months of his wife's wasn't strange enough,
an autopsy revealed that he passed of pneumonia and anemia, the exact same causes as Murphy.
The only difference was that Monjack's passing reportedly didn't involve substance intoxication.
Needless to say, a husband and wife passing of the same medical issues within a year of
each other added to the mounting speculation surrounding Murphy's passing.
Further contributing to the weirdness was a piece of information in the coroner's report
for Monjack's passing, in which Sharon Murphy allegedly told investigators that she shared
a bed with her widowed son-in-law.
The report didn't suggest any inappropriate conduct between the two, but sleeping in the same
bed is plenty strange itself.
With Murphy and Monjack both passed from the same causes, mold in their Hollywood home
was suspected as a contributing factor.
Investigators had already considered this possibility after the actress' passing, but
like everything surrounding the case, things took a weird turn.
While responding to a CNN report about speculation that mold could've played a part in both passings,
coroner Ed Winter said there were "no indicators" that viral mold was a factor.
However, in a strange twist, Sharon Murphy issued a statement that said she had:
Winter said that was "an absolute lie," insisting that he had talked with her, Monjack, and
their lawyer about mold during the investigation.
In 2013, Brittany Murphy's father, Angelo Bertolotti, released the results of an independent
lab report that suggested his daughter's passing wasn't an accident.
It found amounts of heavy metals in Murphy's hair strand sample "at levels above the WHO
high levels recommendation."
The report read,
However, the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office stood by its results, and a toxicologist
at the University of Florida told ABC News that hair test results can't be used to support
an allegation of poisoning or "establish a cause and manner of passing."
That didn't stop Bertolotti from pursuing the forced passing angle, and he already had a prime
suspect.
In a 2014 interview with the Examiner, he made it explicitly clear that he believed
his ex-wife forcibly caused their daughter's passing.
He noted that there were three people living together in the same house, but only one survived
and went on to benefit financially.
"The fact is that she was poisoned and she was caused to pass away, far as I'm concerned."
Though Murphy's passing was officially ruled an accident, after everything that's transpired
since her passing, it's no surprise that lingering questions and suspicions remain.