Dorothy Kilgallen And the Murder of JFK

Circumstances Undetermined: Dorothy Kilgallen and JFK’s Murder was written by the late Professor Donald E. Wilkes, Jr., UGA Law, who died in 2019. In it, he addresses the theory that the famous Journal American crime reporter was murdered for what she had uncovered about JFK’s death. He refers to Mark Shaw’s The Reporter Who Knew Too Much for this article.

“It had to be a conspiracy.”

Dorothy Kilgallen believed the murder of JFK “had to be a conspiracy.” She felt the investigation was “woefully inadequate.” She also did not accept the FBI theory that Jack Ruby, the sleazy owner of a honky-tonk strip joint who murdered the handcuffed Oswald in a Dallas police station on live TV two days after JFK’s assassination, was not involved in organized crime and had shot Oswald for purely personal reasons and without the knowledge, encouragement or assistance of anyone.

There was, Kilgallen asserted, “something queer” about the killing of Oswald. Jack Ruby, she maintained, was a gangster with ties to local police, and his murder of Oswald was a Mafia rub-out. In a column published exactly one week after the President’s assassination, Kilgallen wrote: “I’d like to know how, in a big, smart town like Dallas, a man like Jack Ruby…can stroll in and out of police headquarters as if it was a health club at a time when a small army of law enforcers is keeping a ‘tight security guard’ on Oswald. Security! What a word for it!”

She called the Warren Report laughable and conducted her own probe. She walked around with a big file that she said could get her killed. After her death, the folder was never found.

Kilgallen announced her pursuit of the story of the JFK assassination. After that, she was under FBI surveillance, and her phones were wiretapped.

Mark Shaw’s The Reporter Who Knew Too Much draws our attention to a number of relevant, mostly little-known facts/ They include the following:

• In July 1959, Kilgallen became “the first reporter to allege that the CIA and organized crime were teaming up to eliminate [Fidel] Castro.”
• Just before Jack Ruby’s murder trial began, Kilgallen in a February 1964 column noted that the Government had refused to provide Ruby’s defense counsel with certain requested information concerning Lee Harvey Oswald. She described the refusal as “Orwellian.” “[I]t does make you think, doesn’t it?” she commented. “It appears that Washington knows or suspects something about Lee Harvey Oswald that it does not want…the rest of the world to know…Who is Oswald anyway?” Kilgallen was, therefore, one of the first journalists in this country to suggest, contrary to what the FBI claimed, that Oswald had not been a lone nut whose pre-assassination activities were below the radar of the U.S. intelligence community.

The Jack Ruby Interviews

• Kilgallen attended and covered Jack Ruby’s March 1964 murder trial. She was the only reporter to interview Ruby privately. (There were two such interviews, each lasting about 10 minutes.)
• In August 1964, in an astonishing exclusive, Kilgallen published the then-classified transcript of the testimony Jack Ruby had given at a secret session of the Warren Commission two months earlier. (The transcript, leaked to Kilgallen by an undisclosed source, startled the public for two reasons. First, it revealed that the questioning of Ruby by Commission members—the men chosen to officially investigate and report on the murder of an American president—had been shockingly inept. Second, it disclosed that even though Ruby told the Commission that “I want to tell the truth, and I can’t here,” and that “maybe certain people don’t want to know the truth that may come out of me,” the Commission without good reason had flatly turned down Ruby’s earnest plea to be transferred to a jail outside the state of Texas, where he could speak freely.)

The Death of Dorothy Kilgallen

Kilgallen did die under mysterious conditions. She died from alcohol and barbiturates. Some say she was not addicted. Others say she appeared to have a substance abuse problem.

Kilgallen was found dead in a bedroom in her New York City townhouse on Monday, Nov. 8, 1965. Her close friends, including the friend who discovered her dead body, thought she had died somewhere else. They also thought the scene in the room where she was found was abnormal and had been staged.

She was in a room she never slept in, and in a bed she never used. (Kilgallen had once caught her unfaithful husband committing adultery with another woman in that very bed in that same room.) She was positioned in the middle of that bed, which was described as “spotless.” Killgallen was still wearing the makeup, hairpiece, and false eyelashes she always took off before going to bed. She was dressed in clothes she never wore when going to sleep. The book she allegedly had been reading was not in the right position. It should have been in if she had laid it down before falling asleep.

The Autopsy, Circumstances Unknown

Kilgallen had a prescription for the barbiturate sleeping pill Seconal and would take two capsules nightly. However, the amount of secobarbital sodium (the active ingredient of Seconal) found in her bloodstream would have required she ingest 15 to 20 capsules.

Kilgallen definitely was not suicidal and could hardly have taken this many capsules by accident.

The “circumstances undetermined” language in the autopsy report may have been due to unanswered questions the examiner had about (1) where the Tuinal had come from and (2) whether Kilgallen had ingested the drug knowingly and willingly.

Some of the officials in the medical examiner’s office thought Kilgallen had been murdered and that her corpse had been moved before it was found.

The police investigation of Kilgallen’s death was perfunctory.

The Weakness in the Book

A weakness of the book is the author’s basic assumption that the Mafia alone was responsible for the JFK assassination. It is certainly true that organized crime figures may have been part of the conspiracy behind the assassination. But not even the Mafia could have carried out the assassination without the connivance of the Secret Service (responsible for presidential protection), the FBI (in charge of domestic intelligence), and the CIA (in charge of foreign intelligence). President Kennedy’s murder undoubtedly was due to a conspiracy, but at most the Mafia could only have been one part of it.

The Death of Dorothy Kilgallen

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