Marilyn Monroe's last-ever pics were 'stolen by mafia'

Photographer's widow wants auction of negatives halted

- JUSTIN ROHRLICH

An enormous tranche of negatives from the last photo shoot Marilyn Monroe ever sat for before she died is set to be auctioned off next week, but the widow of the renowned lensman who took the snaps is now trying to stop the sale, claiming the iconic images were stolen by organised crime and later used in an attempt to extort $3m from her.

In court filings obtained by The Independent, actor and director Shannah Laumeister Stern, who in 2009 secretly married Bert Stern, a leading fashion photographer of the 1950s and 1960s, says the roughly 2,500 negatives long ago went missing “in the middle of the night” from Stern’s apartment.

The collection of photographs became known as “The Last Sitting”. Commissioned by Vogue magazine, they were taken in Suite 261 at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles during a three-day session in late June 1962. Monroe passed away six weeks later. Nowadays, individual prints from the shoot sell for up to $25,000 (£18,750). In 2018, an unrelated dispute found that the copyright to the images belonged to Laumeister Stern, but the physical ownership of the negatives has never been tested.

Stern, who died in 2013, always “suspected that the Mafia was behind the theft of the photo negatives, and that they also bore responsibility for Marilyn Monroe’s untimely death”, according to a complaint Laumeister Stern filed on Tuesday in New York County Supreme Court.

“Bert Stern’s fear and suspicion seemed to be confirmed as he periodically received anonymous messages from an individual in Las Vegas taunting him over the ‘missing’ photo negatives,” the complaint states. “As such, Bert Stern was legitimately scared and intimidated by the circumstances surrounding the theft of the photo negatives.”