Signs of a Struggle?

 

  See The Photographs 

The first person to enter former Secretary of Defense James Forrestal's fully-lighted room at the Bethesda Naval Hospital after his fatal, late-night plunge from a 16th floor window saw broken glass on his bed.  The Navy photographer who took pictures of the room at some unknown time later took a picture of broken pieces of what looks like either a petri dish or an ash tray on the ornate carpet in the room, but in the photograph, the bed had nothing but a bare mattress and a couple of bare pillows on it, not even the turned-back bed covering that the nurse who saw the glass on the bed described.  The two photographs of the room, taken from different angles, also failed to show either the slippers under the bed or the razor blade beside it that the nurse saw.  In fact, the barren room with nothing on the bed or any of the furniture, no reading or writing material, no clothing, no spectacles, no pipe, tobacco, or lighter, in short, no sign that James Forrestal or anyone else had, shortly before, been a patient there, is clearly not the room as described by the nurse, Lieutenant junior grade Dorothy Turner.   

The scene that Navy corpsman chief John Edward McClain captured was not what a proper police crime-scene photographer would have captured.  The room had been stripped down and scrubbed up, except that the cleaners seem to have overlooked the clear pieces of glass two feet, or so, from the foot of the bed. A suspicious police investigator, encountering this broken glass on the bed and the floor and noting the bathrobe cord tightly tied around Forrestal's neck, might well have concluded that these were signs of a struggle, quite inconsistent with the quick conclusion of suicide by the county medical examiner and the inferences drawn by the news accounts.