Milo Speriglio, Longtime L.A. Private Eye, Dies

Milo Speriglio, a veteran Los Angeles private investigator who ran one of the oldest detective agencies in the country and wrote three books claiming Marilyn Monroe was murdered, died April 30 at his Encino home. He was 62.

Speriglio died of lung cancer, said his wife, Patricia.

Once described as so unassuming he could pass as a bank clerk, Speriglio ran Nick Harris Detectives in Van Nuys for three decades.

He was romanced into the business by watching “Peter Gunn,” the legendary TV series about a suave private eye.

Most of the thousands of cases Speriglio handled over his 41 years as a private detective were not glamorous: He chased down missing persons, spied on unfaithful spouses and gathered evidence on scalawags suspected of fraud.

But he had his share of celebrity cases too, examining the deaths of Natalie Wood and TV “Superman” George Reeves, for example. The longest and most controversial of Speriglio’s investigations focused on the death of Monroe. The books he wrote or co-wrote on the case all argued against the official accounts that the actress committed suicide.

“He was among the first to say she was a victim of foul play,” said Marc Laikind, a private investigator and former associate who knew Speriglio for 22 years.

Speriglio was born in Greenwich, Conn., and moved to California with his family when he was 3. He once told a reporter that his first case involved a hunt for a missing panther when he was 16. He armed himself with a baseball bat and set off in pursuit. He never found it but got his picture in the newspaper, which led his fellow students at Belmont High School near downtown Los Angeles to call him Panther Boy.

Later, he became a rock ‘n’ roll disc jockey--Mad Milo, he called himself. That career was low-paying and short-lived.

Then he saw “Peter Gunn”--the 1958-61 series featuring the late Craig Stevens as one of the first coolly aggressive, lady-killer private eyes on television--and decided he wanted to be just like him.

Some say Speriglio was more like Phillip Marlowe, the shrewd gumshoe of Raymond Chandler mysteries. “He was the Marlowe of our industry. He saw himself that way,” Laikind said.

Speriglio didn’t mind tipping back a Black Russian before heading home. But he bore little else in common with the private eyes spawned in TV shows of the ‘70s. “Milo is half the size of Cannon, not nearly as handsome as Mannix and a lot shorter than Barnaby Jones,” The Times’ William Overend wrote in 1976. “He’s a quiet, soft-spoken guy, on the small side, with glasses. He could pass for a bank clerk. But he’s handled more cases than all the television sleuths combined, about 35,000 over the years.”

Speriglio had a talent for blending into almost any environment. In the course of a day, he could play the part of a small-time con man passing off junk watches or a mild-mannered insurance investigator making a routine check on a potential client. He didn’t need disguises, explaining that “if you sound convincing, people will believe you.”

He launched into the Monroe case about 1972, a decade after her death, after a phone call from Al Stump, a reporter with the old Los Angeles Herald Examiner. Stump introduced him to a writer and photographer named Robert Slatzer, who claimed to have been married to Monroe for five days in 1952. Slatzer later wrote a book suggesting that the actress had been murdered. Speriglio “wanted to solve it, if he could,” his wife said.

He would spend more than two decades on the investigation, at one point offering a $10,000 reward for recovery of a red diary that Monroe supposedly kept.

Authorities scoffed at his theories then. The idea that Monroe was murdered is still widely discounted today. But that never discouraged Speriglio, who believed he had evidence that the killers were a Mafia hit team.

“There’s an awful lot to it,” he said some years ago of his theory on the demise of the screen goddess. “They said she died from swallowing 47 sleeping pills, for one thing. But there wasn’t a trace of them in her digestive system. All the evidence suggests somebody gave her an injection.”

Speriglio’s allegations in the Monroe case caused many to write him off as an attention-seeking kook. To be sure, he wasn’t the type to avoid media coverage, sure that any publicity was good publicity as long as the reporter spelled his name right.

The detective once ran for Los Angeles mayor, one in a field of unknown or nearly unknown challengers to Tom Bradley in 1977. About the same time, Speriglio hit upon a sure-fire publicity stunt when a dial-a-Santa service had a phone number that was one digit off the number at Nick Harris Detectives. When the misdials flooded his phone lines, Speriglio and his undercover experts did what came naturally: They played along.

“He enjoyed it so much,” Patricia Speriglio recalled, “that he publicized it,” letting the agency number appear in newspapers and on TV as the Santa hotline when the original one folded. More than a million calls from pint-size believers around the world poured in over the next four years.

In the late 1980s, Speriglio garnered attention with a new yuletide scheme. Calling it the Finder of Lost Loves Christmas Reunion, he promised to track down long-lost sweethearts in exchange for nothing more than personal satisfaction.

According to Laikind, Speriglio’s high profile nearly backfired on him once, when he was undercover on a case involving organized crime. An underworld figure he was working on told him, “You know, you look just like that guy on TV, that Milo guy.”

Speriglio barely faltered. “I don’t appreciate that,” he shot back. “That guy is ugly, he doesn’t appear very intelligent, and I don’t like the fact you compared me to him.” The thug shut up.

In addition to his wife, Speriglio is survived by two daughters, Janelle of San Diego, and Holly Skodis of Burbank; and a sister, Amelia, of Torrance.