CovertAction Magazine - Exposing Covert Action Since 1978
On January 31, New York City councilman Robert Holden wrote a letter to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg calling for reopening of the investigation into the death of Dorothy Kilgallen.
Described by Ernest Hemingway as “one of the greatest women writers in the world,” Kilgallen was a regular on the CBS game show What’s My Line who wrote a column for the New York Journal-American during the early 1960s that was syndicated to 200 newspapers.[1]
After John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, Kilgallen was one of the few journalists to question the findings of the Warren Commission report that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin.
Kilgallen interviewed Jack Ruby at his trial and exposed his Warren Commission testimony before its release date, causing FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to become a mortal enemy.[2]
If she had lived past the age of 52, Kilgallen’s goal was to expose evidence pointing to the truth about the JFK assassination and corruption at the Warren Commission passed on to her by Commission member Senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky in a “tell-all” book she was writing for Random House.
Kilgallen’s body was found in her Manhattan townhouse on the morning of November 8, 1965, sitting upright in a bed in the master bedroom.
Kilgallen’s death was officially determined to have been caused by a combination of alcohol and barbiturates, with the police stating that there was no indication of violence or suicide. New York City Medical Examiner James Luke said that the circumstances of her death were undetermined, though “the overdose could well have been accidental.”
However, numerous people close to Kilgallen recognized at the time that the overdose was not accidental. The chief counsel of 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), G. Robert Blakey, said that though the HSCA’s look into Kilgallen’s death was not substantial, “we thought it was fishy.”[3]
Kilgallen’s hairdresser Marc Sinclaire, the first to report Kilgallen’s death at 9:30 a.m. on November 8 after passing by her home, was suspicious because a) Kilgallen was found in a room where she did not normally sleep wearing fancy clothes she would not have gone to sleep in; b) was found sitting up with a book turned upside down (The Honey Badger by Robert Ruark) she had finished weeks before; c) had poor eyesight and required glasses to read but no glasses were found in the room where she died; and d) because a police car was parked outside the townhouse when Sinclaire got there, though Kilgallen’s death had not yet been reported.
Sinclaire ruled out suicide further because Dorothy was a) religiously Catholic; b) cheerful about life; c) at the peak of her fame, earning an income of $200,000 per year (equivalent to $1.5 million today); and d) intent on completing her tell-all book on the JFK assassination.
Sinclaire also knew that Kilgallen would not overdose because she did not have a drug problem or drink heavily. In the days before her death, additionally, she had confided in him her belief that someone close to her was a “snitch” who was watching her closely and feeding information to people who wished to do her harm.[4]
Johnnie Ray, Kilgallen’s lover whom Tony Bennett called “the father of rock ’n’ roll,” told a friend that he did not believe Dorothy had died of natural causes. Dorothy had told him that she had been investigating the JFK assassination and was “close to breaking the whole case open” and had “been threatened as a result of her work.”[5]
Other people who expressed suspicion about Kilgallen’s death included:
- Melvin Belli, Jack Ruby’s lawyer, who said: “They killed Dorothy; now they’ll go after Ruby.”
- Gossip columnist Liz Smith, who wrote in her column: “Dorothy knew too much. Her murder was very mysterious.”
- Bob Schulenberg, a good friend of Dorothy’s daughter Jill, who told him: “My mother was murdered [because of her work on the JFK assassination].”
- Eileen Broich, the wife of toxicologist John Broich, who said that her husband told her that “Dorothy was bumped off.”[6]
- Dr. Charles Umberger, Director of Toxicology in the Department of Pathology at the New York City Medical Examiner’s office.
- Watergate Burglar and undercover CIA operative Frank Sturgis, who told Marita Lorenz, Fidel Castro’s lover and a fellow CIA agent, that “Kilgallen got whacked” because of her intention to publish a book which included information from her exclusive interviews with Jack Ruby.[7]
Cracking the Case
Mark Shaw is a former criminal defense attorney and TV legal analyst who researched the Kilgallen case for a long period and appears to have solved it.
Shaw first learned about the Kilgallen case while practicing law with Melvin Belli, Jack Ruby’s attorney in the 1980s, and developed great admiration for Kilgallen.
In three books—The Reporter Who Knew Too Much (2016); Collateral Damage (2021); and Fighting For Justice (2022)—he lays out the evidence about Kilgallen’s murder and shows who was behind it.
One of the oddities that Shaw found was that Kilgallen’s death certificate—which pointed to her death being accidental—was signed by Dr. Dominick DiMaio, the deputy chief of the Office of the Medical Examiner (ME) in Brooklyn, even though Kilgallen was found dead in Manhattan.
Shaw was told by one of his sources, Stephen Goldner, a forensic toxicologist at the Manhattan ME’s office, that it was “known or rumored that DiMaio was known to take care of things for the mafia.”[8]
Goldner had told Eileen Broich, the wife of his colleague John Broich, that he was writing a book about how the Mafia “controlled the New York City ME’s office in the mid 1960s.” He also told Broich’s son Chris that his dad had been “one of the heroes because he wouldn’t alter toxicology reports like others did in the MEs office.”[9]
Kilgallen was found with two barbiturates in her bloodstream that she had never before consumed—Nembutal and Tuinal—which indicated foul play.
There were two glasses present at her bedside table, which meant that someone was in the bedroom with her when she died. Kilgallen’s butler James Clement, told Kilgallen’s daughter that he remembered that Dorothy was accompanied by a man when she arrived home during the early morning hours before she died.
Evidence that her drink had been spiked was reflected in the fact that powdered traces of the barbiturates were found on one of the glasses at her bedside. If by some chance she had committed suicide, Kilgallen would have taken it in capsule form, which would have left no residue. Shaw writes that the “powdered barbiturates undercut the accidental death conclusion of ME Dr. Luke.”[10]
The accidental death conclusion is further undercut by the fact that Kilgallen was found wearing false eyelashes, a hairpiece and makeup that she never wore to bed, which indicated that she was dressed up after she had been killed…
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