The Death of a Journalist Who Knew Too Much

Was Dorothy Kilgallen Murdered? What Was She About to Learn?

by Jeff Schechtman, Who What Why:

Dorothy Kilgallen was one of the most powerful voices in America. She had a role on the popular TV show, “What’s My Line,” and she was a journalist who wrote an insightful gossip column. She especially loved covering high profile murder trials. In fact, she singlehandedly caused Sam Shepard’s murder conviction to be overturned by the US Supreme Court.

More important, she was excellent at investigating. She asked incisive — even dangerous — questions. This may have led to her death on November 8, 1965.

Kilgallen jumped at the chance to cover the trial of Jack Ruby, the man who shot and killed alleged JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in a Dallas police station.

As the New York Post put it, covering that trial would put her on a path that ended with her body being found “sitting up in bed, naked under a blue bathrobe, with the makeup, false eyelashes and floral hair accessory” she had worn for her TV appearance the night before.

At the time of her death, she was following a lead that some believe might have blown apart the official story of the Kennedy assassination. Her death was considered “suspicious.”

It is understandable that JFK assassination researchers are suspicious of the many deaths of witnesses in this case, and the unlikely explanations given for them. Here is one spectacular example: Gerald Posner, defender of the Warren Commission and author of Case Closed, said that Dr. Mary Sherman — another woman who knew too much — died in an accident.

Well, Dr. Sherman was stabbed multiple times, then set afire. Some accident.

In this week’s WhoWhatWhy Podcast we talk to attorney Mark Shaw, who has spent the past ten years seeking the truth about the JFK assassination, an undertaking that would lead him to investigate the suspicious death of Dorothy Kilgallen, and resulted in his book, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much: The Mysterious Death of What’s My Line TV Star and Media Icon Dorothy Kilgallen. (Published by Post Hill Press, December 6, 2016).

It’s a story that makes us wonder: In today’s political environment, how safe are journalists?

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