Kilgallen thought that her book Murder One, about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, would earn her a fortune. Kilgallen began to tell friends that she was close to discovering who assassinated Kennedy. According to David Welsh of Ramparts Magazine Kilgallen "vowed she would 'crack this case.' And another New York show biz friend said Dorothy told him: "In five more days I'm going to bust this case wide open." Kilgallen handed a draft copy of her chapter on the assassination to her friend, Florence Smith. On November 8 , 1965, Kilgallen, was found dead in her New York apartment.Her friend, Florence Smith, died two days later.The copy of Kilgallen's articles were never found.
Dorothy Kilgallen, the daughter of renowned journalist James Kilgallen, was born in Chicago, Illinois, on July 3, 1913. Kilgallen studied at New Rochelle College before beginning work as a journalist at The New York Journal, owned by William Randolph Hearst.
Kilgallen became a crime reporter and covered important cases for her newspaper: the trials of Anna Antonio (1934), Eva Coo (1935) and Richard Bruno auptmann (1935).
In November, 1937 she wrote her own column, "Hollywood Scene". The following year she began writing a new column, "The Voice of Broadway", for the newspaper. In 1940 Kilgallen married Richard Kollmar. In April 1945 the couple began the morning radio show, Breakfast with Dorothy and Dick. By 1941 the column appeared in 24 other newspapers. Kilgallen became one of the most important gossip columnist in America.
Kilgallen became a television star; and during 15 years she was a panelist on the television programme, What's My Line? Kilgallen continued to report on famous criminal case. Her investigative work secured a new trial for Sam Shepard.
Kilgallen sometimes wrote articles about political issues. According to her close friends, Kilgallen received information from CIA. A study of her writings suggests she was an important CIA media asset. Kilgallen was every well-informed about Cuba. During 1959-1960 Kilgallen included a large number of anti-Castro stories in her column. Some of this information came from Cuban exiles based in Miami. Kilgallen included highly subversive material in her column. On July, 1959, Kilgallen became the first journalist to suggest that CIA and the Mafia were working together to assassinate Castro. This disclosure upset high-ranking government officials and J. Edgar Hoover opened a dossier on Kilgallen.
In 1961 Kilgallen covered the murder trial of Bernard Finch and Carole Tregoff. Bennett Cerf of Random House was very impressed with these reports and commissioned her to write a book called Murder One. The book was to contain a series of chapters on famous murder cases she had reported on since the early 1930s.
Kilgallen received a lot great of information about the affairs of John F. Kennedy, but she was a close friend of Kennedy; so he didn't write about it ine her column. Kilgallen broke this rule when on August 3, 1962, she became the first journalist to refer to Kennedy's relationship with Marilyn Monroe.
Dorothy Kilgallen, New York Journal American, August 3, 1962:
Marilyn Monroe's health must be improving. She's been attending select Hollywood parties and has become the talk of the town again. In California, they're circulating a photograph of her that certainly isn't as bare as he famous calendar, but is very interesting... And she's cooking in the sex-appeal department, too; she's proved vastly alluring to a handsome gentleman who is a bigger name than Joe DiMaggio in his heyday. So don't write off Marilyn as finished.
The following day, Monroe was found dead. Kilgallen must have realized that she had been set her up to smear the Kennedy brothers.
John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Kilgallen was convinced that Kennedy had not been killed by Lee Harvey Oswald. Kilgallen had a good contact within Dallas Police Department. He gave her a copy of the original police log detailing the minute-by-minute activities of the department on the day of the assassination, as reflected in the radio communications. This enabled her to report that the first reaction of Chief Jesse Curry to the shots in Dealey Plaza was: "Get a man on top of the overpass and see what happened up there." Kilgallen pointed out that he lied when he told reporters the next day that he initially thought the shots were fired from the Texas Book Depository.
Kilgallen also had a source within the Warren Commission who gave her an 102 page segment dealing with Jack Ruby before it was published. She published details of this leak ensuring that this section appeared in the final version of the report. In another of her stories, Kilgallen claimed that Marina Oswald knew a great deal about the assassination of JFK. If she told the "whole story of her life with Kennedy's alleged assassin, it would split open the front pages of newspapers all over the world."
Kilgallen's reporting brought her into contact with Mark Lane who had himself received an amazing story from the journalist Thayer Waldo. I had discovered that Jack Ruby, J. D. Tippet and Bernard Weismann had a meeting at the Carousel Club eight days before the assassination. Waldo, who worked for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, was too scared to publish the story. He had other information about the assassination. However, I believed that if I told Lane or Kilgallen he would be killed. Kilgallen's article on the Tippit, Ruby and Weissman meeting appeared on the front page of the Journal American. Later she was to reveal that the Warren Commission were also tipped off about this gathering. However, their informant added that there was a fourth man at the meeting, an important figure in the Texas oil industry.
Kilgallen published several articles about how important witnesses had been threatened by the Dallas Police or the FBI. On 25th September, 1964, Kilgallen published an interview with Acquilla Clemons, one of the witnesses to the shooting of J. D. Tippet. In the interview Clemons told Kilgallen that she saw two men running from the scene, neither of whom fitted Oswald's description. Clemons added: "I'm not supposed to be talking to anybody, might get killed on the way to work."
Kilgallen contacted Jack Ruby's lawyer Joe Tonahill and claimed she had a message for his client from a mutual friend. It was only after this message was delivered that Ruby agreed to be interviewed by Kilgallen. Tonahill remembers that the mutual friend was from San Francisco and that he was involved in the music industry. Kennedy researcher, Greg Parker, has suggested that the man was Mike Shore, co-founder of Reprise Records. The interview with Ruby lasted eight minutes. No one else was there. Even the guards agreed to wait outside. Kilgallen never told anyone about what Ruby said to her during this interview. Nor did she publish any information she obtained from the interview. She decided to include what she knew about the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Murder One. She expected that this book would earn her a fortune.
Kilgallen began to tell friends that she was close to discovering who assassinated Kennedy. According to David Welsh of Ramparts Magazine Kilgallen "vowed she would 'crack this case.' And another New York show biz friend said Dorothy told him in the last days of her life: "In five more days I'm going to bust this case wide open." , Kilgallen handed a draft copy of her chapter on the assassination to her friend, Florence Smith.
On November 8, 1965, Kilgallen, was found dead in her New York apartment. She was fully dressed and sitting upright in her bed. The police reported that she had died from taking a cocktail of alcohol and barbiturates. The notes for the chapter she was writing on the case had disappeared. Her friend, Florence Smith, died two days later. The copy of Kilgallen's article were never found.
Some of her friends believed Kilgallen had been murdered. Marc Sinclaire was Kilgallen's personal hairdresser. He often woke Kilgallen in the morning. Kilgallen was usually out to the early hours of the morning and like her husband always slept late. When he found her body he immediately concluded she had been murdered.
CIA Operation 40 killed JFK and more than a hundred witnesses
Operation 40 was the code name for a Central Intelligence Agency-sponsored counterintelligence group composed mostly by Cuban exiles. It was approved by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in March 1960, after the January 1959 Cuban Revolution. The group was presided over by Richard Nixon and included Admiral Arleigh Burke, Livingston Merchant of the State Department, National Security Adviser Gordon Gray, and Allen Dulles of the CIA. CIA assembled virtually the same team that was involved in the removal of Arbenz: Tracey Barnes, Richard Bissell, David Morales, David Atlee Phillips, E. Howard Hunt, Rip Robertson and Henry Hecksher. Added to this list were several agents who had been involved in undercover operations in Germany: Ted Shackley, Tom Clines and William Harvey. Tracy Barnes functioned as head of the Cuban Task Force. He called a meeting on January 18, 1960, in his office in Quarters Eyes, near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, which the navy had lent while new buildings were being constructed in Langley. Those who gathered there included Howard Hunt, future head of the Watergate team and a writer of crime novels; Frank Bender, a friend of Trujillo; Jack Esterline, who had come straight from Venezuela where he directed a CIA group; psychological warfare expert David A. Phillips, and others. Vice-President Richard Nixon was the Cuban "case officer," and had assembled an important group of businessmen headed by George Bush Sr and Jack Crichton, both Texas oilmen, as fundraisers. Operation 40, Mexico-City-1963. Special operation allegedly charged with assasinating Fidel Castro (killed a bunch of other people instead), Other members: William King Harvey; Thomas G. Clines; Porter Goss; Gerry Patrick Hemming; David Sanchez Morales; Carl Elmer Jenkins; Bernard Barker William Robert “Tosh” Plumlee; William C. Bishop; Ted Shackley – CIA station-chief in Miami after the Bay of Pigs invasion; Jose Sanjenis Perdomo – former Chief of Police during Cuban President Carlos Prio’s regime; Frank Sturgis; Felix Rodriguez Mendigutia; Antonio Veciana; Luis Posada Carriles; Orlando Bosch; Rafael ‘Chi Chi’ Quinterol Roland Masferrer; Eladio del Vallel Guillermo Novo; Carlos Bringuier; Eugenio Martinez (‘Musculito’); Antonio Cuesta; Hermino Diaz Garcia;m Juan Manuel Salvat; Ricardo Morales Navarrete; Isidro Borjas; Virgilio Paz Romero; Jose Dionisio Suarez; Felipe Rivero; Gaspar ‘Gasparito’ Jimenez Escobedo; Nazario Sargent; Pedro Luis Diaz Lanz; Jose Basulto; Alvin Ross; William “Rip” Robertson; Ricardo Morales Navarrete; Bernard Barker; Paulino Sierra; Barry Seal
(1) Kilgallen was not sleeping in her normal bedroom. Instead she was in the master bedroom, a room she had not occupied for several years; (2) Kilgallen was wearing false eyelashes. According to Sinclaire she always took her eyelashes off before she went to bed; (3) She was found sitting up with the book, The Honey Badger, by Robert Ruark, on her lap. Sinclaire claims that she had finished reading the book several weeks earlier (she had discussed the book with Sinclaire at the time); (4) Kilgallen had poor eyesight and could only read with the aid of glasses. Her glasses were not found in the bedroom where she died; (5) Kilgallen was found wearing a bolero-type blouse over a nightgown. Sinclaire claimed that this was the kind of thing "she would never wear to go to bed".
Dorothy Kilgallen, New York Journal American, November 29, 1963
President Lyndon Johnson has been elevated so swiftly to his new high post that in one sense, he has been snatched up into an ivory tower. As Chief Executive, he is no longer in a position to hear the voices of ordinary people talking candidly.
If Oswald was President Kennedy's assassin, he was the most important prisoner the police of this country had in custody in 100 years, and no blithe announcement in Dallas is going to satisfy the American public that the case is closed."
The case is closed is it? Well I'd like to know how in a big smart town like Dallas, a man like Jack Ruby - operator of a striptease honky tonk -could stroll in and out of police headquarters as if it were a health club at a time when a small army of law enforcers was keeping a "tight security guard" on Oswald.
Security! What a word for it.
I wouldn't try to speak for the people of Dallas, but around here, the people I talk to really believe that a man has the right to be tried in court.
When that right is taken away from any man by the incredible combination of Jack Ruby and insufficient security, we feel chilled.
Justice is a big rug. When you pull it out from under one man, a lot of others fall too.
That is why so many people are saying there is "something queer" about the killing of Oswald, something strange about the way his case was handled, and a great deal missing in the official account of his crime.
The American people have just lost a beloved President.
It is a dark chapter in our history, but we have the right to read every word of it. It cannot be kept locked in a file in Dallas
Dorothy Kilgallen, New York Journal American, February 21, 1964
Herbert Miller (assistant attorney general) informed Tonahill that (although it was unusual to be sure) the FBI would be instructed to turn over to the defense the names and present addresses of persons who knew Ruby, or had met him at some time in his life, or who had expressed opinions about his personality or recalled incidents which might be important to the case. The "kicker" - the punchline? Mr. Miller's sentence: "information concerning Oswald's assassination of the President will not be available as it does not appear to be relevant."
Say that again, slowly. Information concerning Oswald's assassination of the President will not be available. Perhaps it is dramatizing to say that there is an Orwellian note in that line.
But it does make you think, doesn't it?
It appears that Washington knows or suspects something about Lee Harvey Oswald that it does not want Dallas and the rest of the world to know or suspect... Lee Harvey Oswald has passed on not only to his shuddery reward, but to the mysterious realm of "classified" persons whose whole story is known only to a few government agents... Why is Oswald being kept in the shadows, as dim a figure as they can make him, white the defense tries to rescue his alleged killer with the help of information from the FBI? Who was Oswald, anyway?
Lee Israel, Kilgallen (1979)
Under the headline NEW DOROTHY KILGALLEN EXCLUSIVE - TALE OF "RICH OIL MAN" AT RUBY CLUB - Dorothy printed Mark's secret testimony. But his testimony implicated a trio at the Carousel: Ruby, Tippit, and Weissman. Reexamining the transcript of Ruby's testimony before the commission, she noticed that the questions posed to him concerned not a trio, but a quartet. Earl Warren, in his questioning, informed Ruby that Lane had said: "In your Carousel Club you and Weisman (sic) and Tippit... and a rich oil man had an interview or conversation for an hour or two."
Dorothy, who did not have access yet to the complete Warren Report, had to deduce:
"The mention of the "rich oil man" by Chief Justice Warren would indicate then, that the Commission was informed of the meeting by a source other than Mr. Lane, and that this second source provided the name of a fourth party - the oil man. If that is not the case, if the Commission had only Mr. Lane's testimony to go on, it would appear that the oil man was "invented" by the investigators. And it is difficult to imagine the Commission doing any such thing.
The introduction of the rich oil man into the questioning effectively discombobulated the already-confused Jack Ruby.
When the report was released, it was clear that no testimony was given by any of the 552 witnesses about a rich oil man. Either there was a significant omission in the report of the Warren Commission, or the oil man was part of the unofficial corpus of information to which Warren was privy, or Dorothy's thesis - however "difficult to imagine" - was correct.
Dorothy Kilgallen, New York Journal American, September 3, 1965
Those close to the scene realize that if the widow of Lee Harvey Oswald (now married to another chap) ever gave out the "whole story" of her life with President Kennedy's alleged assassin, it would split open the front pages of newspapers all over the world. Even if Marina explained why her late husband looked so different in an official police photo and the widely-printed full-length picture featured on the cover of Life magazine, it would cause a sensation. This story isn't going to die as long as there's a real reporter alive - and there are a lot of them. This story (the Kennedy assassination) isn't going to die as long as there's a real reporter alive - and there are a lot of them.
William Penn Jones, The Midlothian Mirror, November 25, 1965
I have a concern for the strange things happening in America in recent months. With the passing of the second anniversary of the murder of President Kennedy, we take not of some of the strange things which continue to plague those around the principals.
Miss Dorothy Kilgallen joins the growing list of persons who have died after a private interview with one of the two members of the Jack Ruby-George Senator team. We have printed the strange deaths of Bill Hunter and Jim Koethe after they had a private interview with George Senator and Ruby’s attorney, Tom Howard. Hunter and Koethe were murdered. Lawyer Tom Howard died under strange circumstances...
Now Miss Kilgallen dies under clouded circumstances. During the Ruby trial in Dallas, Judge Joe B. Brown granted Miss Kilgallen a privilege given no other newsman. She had thirty minutes alone in a room with Jack Ruby. Even the guards were outside the door. Miss Kilgallen told some of what went of during the interview in her columns. But was someone afraid she knew more? Is she another victim of possibly knowing the secret that still moves in the troubled mind of Jack Ruby?...
What is happening in our land? How many murders of persons connected in some way with the assassination principals can go unnoticed by our people? How many lies must we prove on The Warren Commission before a demand for reopening becomes a commanding one?
David Welsh, Ramparts Magazine, November, 1966
We know of no serious person who really believes that the death of Dorothy Kilgallen, the gossip columnist, was related to the Kennedy assassination. Still, she was passionately interested in the case, told friends she firmly believed there was a conspiracy and that she would find out the truth if it took her all her life.
Miss Kilgallen was the first to make public the existence of Acquilla Clemons, a witness to the Tippit killing whose name does not appear once in the Warren Report or volumes. She was also the only reporter ever to interview Jack Ruby privately since the killing of Oswald. During the Ruby trial, which she covered for the now defunct New York Journal-American, Judge Joe E. Brown granted her 30 minutes alone with Ruby in the judge's chambers; the other reporters were furious.
One of the biggest scoops of Miss Kilgallen's career came when she pirated the transcript of Ruby's testimony before the Warren Commission and ran it in the Journal-American. Thousands of New Yorkers were shocked at the hopelessly inept questioning of Ruby by Chief Justice Warren, by Warren's almost deliberate failure to follow up the leads Ruby was feeding him.
Miss Kilgallen died in her bed on November 8, 1965. Dr. James Luke, a New York City medical examiner, said the cause of death was "acute barbiturate (sic) and alcohol intoxication, circumstances undetermined." Dr. Luke said there were not high enough levels of either alcohol or barbiturates (sic) to have caused death, but that the two are "additive" and together are quite enough to kill. This cause of death, he observed, is not at all uncommon. Was it suicide? Accident? Murder? - Dr. Luke said there was no way of determining that.
As we say, Dorothy Kilgallen probably does not belong on any list of Kennedy-related deaths. But questions do remain. An editor of Screen Stars magazine, Mary Brannum, says she received a phone call a few hours before Dorothy's body was discovered, announcing that she had been murdered. Miss Kilgallgen's "What's My Line" makeup man said that shortly before her death she vowed she would "crack this case." And another New York show biz friend said Dorothy told him in the last days of her life: "In five more days I'm going to bust this case wide open."
William Penn Jones, Volume II: Forgive My Grief, 1967
Tom Howard knew too much from Ruby and he knew too well how the Dallas power structure and Police Department worked. Howard had to die.
At the Ruby trial in Dallas during March of 1964, Dorothy Kilgallen had a private interview during one of the noon recesses with Judge Joe B. Brown. This was immediately followed by a thirty minute private interview with Jack Ruby in Judge Brown’s chambers. Even Ruby’s bodyguards were kept outside the Judge’s chambers. Joe Tonahill and others thought the meeting room in the jail was “bugged,” but it is doubtful if the Judge’s own chambers would be bugged. Judges have the power of contempt of court for such irregularities.
This then, was the second person Ruby had talked to who could know for whom Ruby was acting; therefore Miss Kilgallen had to be silenced along with Tom Howard.
Shortly before her death, Miss Kilgallen told a friend in New York that she was going to New Orleans in 5 days and break the case wide open. Miss Kilgallen 52, died November 8, 1965, under questionable circumstances in her New York home. Eight days after her death, a ruling was made that she died of barbiturates and drink with no quantities of either ingredient being given.
Also strangely, Miss Kilgallen’s close friend, Mrs. Earl E.T. Smith, died two days after Miss Kilgallen. Mrs. Smith’s autopsy read that the cause of death was unknown.
Many skeptical newsmen have asked: “If Miss Kilgallen knew anything, surely as a journalist wouldn’t she have left some notes?” This is a legitimate question. Possibly Mrs. Smith was the trusted friend with the notes. No one will ever know now.
Jim Marrs, Crossfire, 1989
Whatever information Kilgallen learned and from whatever source, many researchers believe it brought about her strange death. She told attorney Mark Lane: "They've killed the President, (and) the government is not prepared to tell us the truth . . . " and that she planned to "break the case." To other friends she said: "This has to be a conspiracy! . . . I'm going to break the real story and have the biggest scoop of the century." And in her last column item regarding the assassination, published on September 3, 1965, Kilgallen wrote: "This story isn't going to die as long as there's a real reporter alive - and there are a lot of them." But on November 8, 1965, there was one less reporter. That day Dorothy Kilgallen was found dead in her home. It was initially reported that she died of a heart attack, but quickly this was changed to an overdose of alcohol and pills.
Donald Nolen, review of Lee Israel, Kilgallen, Amazon, January, 2004
So posterity needs to evaluate each mysterious death according to how plausible the murder theory is. Lee Israel puts in this book some evidence that a broken love affair with Johnnie Ray and the fall of the Hearst newspaper empire gave Dorothy Kilgallen trouble sleeping, and she could have mixed barbiturates with booze. But Lee also details the strange circumstances of Dorothy's death. Police and medical examiner reports say her body was found in a bed in which she never slept. Nobody slept in it. It was a showroom to convince celebrity houseguests who partied in the next room that everything was hunky dory in the 25 - year marriage of Dorothy and her husband Richard Kollmar.
There was no pill bottle on the bedside table or anywhere else in the death scene. Dorothy had fallen "asleep" while reading a new novel by Robert Ruark, even though she had said in her newspaper column four months earlier that the protagonist of the book dies in the end. She had discussed said novel with her hairdresser Marc Sinclaire some weeks before cops and doctors found the book in her dead hand. She had told Mr. Sinclaire that she had enjoyed the work
John Simkin, Florence Pritchett and the Kennedy Assassination (24th November, 2004)
There has been no investigation into the death of Florence Pritchett. Officially she died of a cerebral haemorrhage. Is it possible that she was murdered? Maybe it was because she had Kilgallen’s notes for her article on the Kennedy assassination. However, I think if she was murdered it might have been more about what she knew rather than what property she had in her possession. I believe that Florence Pritchett had been her main source of information on political issues connected to Kennedy. Not only because she was had been having an affair with Kennedy for nearly 20 years, but because she was the wife of Earl Smith, a leading figure in the anti-Castro community in Florida. Pritchett was ideally placed to know what had been going on during 1963. The greatest puzzle of all is why she was allowed to live as long as she did.
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