Over six years later, Brittany Murphy‘s death case could be reopened, the L.A. County Assistant Chief Coroner Ed Winter confirms to Us Weekly after a new report was published Friday, March 25 — but there are numerous conditions.
Winter first spoke to E! News and said: “We would have to have direct evidence. In all honesty, it would take something like a confession. Something connecting somebody with it.”
He tells Us that the situation would have to be specific, and authorities have no plans to reopen anything for now. “If the police wanted to conduct an investigation or if somebody came to us and said, ‘This is the following circumstances, did you guys find this or this?'” Winter speculates to Us, “then we would contact the law enforcement agency also and say, ‘The family or somebody came and said that somebody confessed to actually putting some sort of poison in her food.'” For now, he adds: “We have no plans on reopening the case.”
The Clueless actress died at age 32 in December 2009, from what was ruled as an “accidental death.” She died from a combination of pneumonia, anemia and multiple-drug intoxication.
In November 2013, Murphy’s father, Angelo Bertolotti, commissioned a lab to test Murphy’s hair samples. The report alleged that the test revealed heavy metals found in rat poison. In an interview with Good Morning America that same month, Bertolotti said: “I have a feeling that there was a definite murder situation here. Yeah, it’s poison. Yes, yes, I know that.”
“There’s a lot of speculation, but our findings are pretty set,” Winter tells Us Weekly. “I think that if she had gotten medical attention instead of just delaying it, that they’d taken her to a doctor, she’d probably still be alive as we speak today.”
Winter added to Us that Bertolotti’s lab findings varied from the coroner’s report. “One of the things that was found in the other private test was the fact that there were some heavy metals found in the test and those metals are attributed to people that dye their hair,” he says. “And if you dye your hair you’re going to have heavy metals there. It was not at the level that would warrant reopening the case because Brittany did dye her hair.”
The conspiracy theories about Murphy’s death emerged after her husband, Simon Monjack, died of similar circumstances five months after she passed away.
Murphy’s mother, Sharon, who was living with the star and Monjack at the time, was unreachable, according to E! News.
“She’s just checked out,” Sharon’s former publicist Roger Neal told the outlet. “Her whole world fell apart. I don’t know how she did it. I felt so bad for her. She is [a] very strong person I don’t know how she kept from having a mental breakdown. I don’t know how she put two sentences together . . . I don’t think she ever had the proper time to grieve.”
