Brittany Murphy’s brother speaks out on quest for ‘justice’ 13 years after ‘murder’ during hunt for star’s missing mom
IT has been 13 years since Brittany Murphy suddenly died but her brother is still searching for answers as he believes she was 'taken out'.
The Clueless actress was found dead at the age of 32 in the bathroom of her Hollywood Hills home on December 20, 2009.
Murphy's husband, British screenwriter Simon Monjack, 40, passed away in similar circumstances five months later.
The LA coroner ruled the deaths were due to pneumonia, anemia, and drug intoxication after dozens of prescription pills were found in the actress and Monjack’s system.
But Murphy's brother Tony Bertolotti believes that neither were an accident and both were murdered.
He’s disgusted that her mother Sharon - who lived with the pair and was rumored to be in a relationship with Monjack - has been allowed to lie low for over a decade without revealing any answers as to what happened that night and where all of Brittany’s $10 million fortune went.
The 74-year-old is linked to Brittany through father Angelo, who passed in January 2019 aged 92, after spending years trying to uncover the truth about his daughter.
Tony exclusively reveals for the first time that his father found out that there were three people in control of the estate after Brittany passed - Sharon, a newspaper editor, and a doctor she was being treated by.
Reports at the time said Monjack was written out of the will and the whole of the estate went to Sharon, but as Brittany’s assets were held in a trust, it avoids probate public record and her estate’s contents remain confidential.
It’s believed Monjack siphoned off hundreds of thousands with her business manager Jeffrey Morgenroth suggesting up to 80 percent disappeared, adding: "There were huge amounts of money in [Brittany's] pension plan and bank account, and all of that's gone.
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"I would see it on the statements. There was money being withdrawn by Simon, hundreds of thousands."
Speaking exclusively from his Florida home, Tony adds: "Sharon knows the truth and she hasn't picked up the phone with one member of the family and told them the truth.
"I’m the elder since my father's gone, and I've heard nothing. As far as I'm concerned, she's worthless to herself and to anybody else.
"It has nothing to do with [finding the] money. Believe me. I wouldn't touch that money anyway because it's all evil. I wouldn't go near that money. Forget it, that's dirty.
“But do I have faith that something's going to happen going forward? No, I don’t, it’s a dead issue. I don’t think justice will be delivered, absolutely not.
“The estate was left to Sharon, an editor of a major Hollywood newspaper, he was on the paperwork for her estate, and also a diabetes doctor from Miami she was seeing.
"Those were the controlling names on the estate. Brittany had no control over that estate.
"So they had the estate wrapped up. My father had the blood work done [toxicity report], which found impurities in her blood including arsenic.
"There’s no way she died of natural causes. It's impossible. It's bullshit, total crap.
"It was obvious to me, she was taken out.”
Tony has passed up interview requests from documentary makers and other media but says that someone would have to testify for a breakthrough to happen on the case.
He says if Sharon can’t do it, the butler is the most critical other link to the dead pair.
"Somebody would have to come forward with proof and testify. You have to have solid proof of a player,” says Tony.
"The guy that's got the real information, is the butler. He knows more than anybody else. He quit because the place was a nuthouse. He confided with my father.
"Pop passed away and wasn't able to get any more forward otherwise it would still be moving.
"She didn’t die of natural causes. She was lost to a flu? In my book, that's absurd. What are you kidding me? All she had to do is go five blocks away and they’d take care of her [at a hospital].”
Brittany was found unconscious on her bathroom floor by her mother Sharon at 8am, with Monjack hearing her screams before he put his wife in the shower in a bid to revive her.
But Tony suspects that someone, somewhere isn’t telling the truth and there's a cover-up.
But as Sharon's effectively disappeared off the face of the earth and Monjack’s dead, we’ll be forever asking, if Brittany was poisoned, by whom? And why?
“We see the corruption in the world today being exposed compared to then, and if you look at Brittany’s passing with those glasses that we have on now, then I feel that the circumstances were ignored by the detectives, who said there was no case to answer.
"Why did they put her in a hot shower, that's how you get the temperature up. They knew what the hell they were doing. She’d been dead for a very long time. Why?”
But he’s not holding his breath for Sharon suddenly popping into public life, but suspects she’s living under an alias somewhere in the US.
Tony, a former professional saxophone player who’s played with Bruce Springsteen and Diana Ross, now lives quietly at his Florida ranch, living off the land, as he can’t allow the issue to "burn" him anymore.
"Sharon is not dead as if she was somebody would tell me. In the business she was in, she had to have a few different name. It was done by the people in the house, whoever they were,’ he says.
"There's a difference between thinking about it and burning about it. I don't burn anymore. I just pray for my sister to rest in peace.
"I've had people contact me from all over the place to do documentaries, to do this, do that. I tell them, I only want one thing... I want my sister to rest in peace now.
"When that thing happened to Brittany, things happened to me, I had to go to the doctor, I had to get blood pressure medicine. I’ve now tried to stay away from going crazy, keep calm. I had to stop.
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"I had to stay home at my little ranch. I've been here for 25 years. We got chickens and goats and my neighbor got a bunch of cattle in the back, we bake our own bread. I got solar panels for when the power goes out and all that stuff.
"It's nothing elaborate, I live within my means. I feel content.”
