Dorothy Kilgallen investigated stories that didn't add up right. If anyone had called her an 'investigative reporter' when she was writing, before that term became popular, she'd've laughed and said with a flip of her curls 'But that's what reporting IS'. Famous as a columnist with millions of readers, and a panelist on the 1950s TV show 'What's My Line', she thrilled viewers by guessing the occupations of guests like a woman who sold dynamite.
Explosive, too, was Dorothy Kilgallen's biggest case as a reporter. She befriended low-life Dallas night-club owner Jack Ruby, and was the only reporter to interview him after he had murdered Lee Harvey Oswald on nationwide TV. Media of the day fingered Oswald as the sole assassin of President Kennedy, a view endorsed by the Warren Commission in its September 1964 Report. Kilgallen thought Jack Ruby, who operated in and around the criminal underworld, could say more, but whatever he told her is lost. Well aware that after that interview she 'knew too much', she feared for her life. In November 1965, in the midst of her detailed inquiry into the circumstances of JFK's murder, the 52-year-old Kilgallen was found dead in her New York apartment. The New York Medical Examiner ruled Kilgallen's death a suicide by sleeping-pill overdose; others think she was murdered, most likely by someone familiar whom she invited into her apartment, who spiked her vodka-and-tonic.
Kilgallen's dossier on Jack Ruby has never been found.
As Detective Arbogast said to motel owner Norman Bates in Hitchcock's 1960 thriller 'Psycho', 'If it doesn't gel, it isn't aspic, and this ain't gellin'.'
Like Norman Bates's story, the official version of JFK's murder didn't gel then, and still doesn't gel now. Unexplained discrepancies of bullet trajectories, impacts, and fragmentation remain, as do contradictory witness statements and evidence tampering in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.
Dorothy Kilgallen's death occurred more than a year after the Warren Commission issued its Report. What additional information she may have had has never been disclosed. One close friend, Phyllis McGuire, told celebrity writer Dominic Dunne in 1989 'Kilgallen was murdered. She didn’t commit suicide. I saw her three days before, dancing at El Morocco with Johnnie Ray. She was murdered. I didn’t believe the suicide story then. I don’t believe it now.'
Phyllis McGuire should know. She was one of the McGuire Sisters, choir girls from Middletown Ohio singing mid-century dream-songs, like 'Sugartime' in exquisite harmony.
Their songs were so well-loved that even Phyllis's affair with mobster Sam Giancana didn't dent her popularity. Giancana and President Kennedy shared a girlfriend, Judith Exner, probably unbeknownst to JFK. Phyllis McGuire's familiarity with mobsters, her friendship with Kilgallen, and her lover's association with Kennedy, give credibility to her assertions about Kilgallen having been murdered. Still unanswered is why, and what exactly Dorothy Kilgallen discovered that had put her in mortal danger.
Detailed examination of ballistic evidence by gunsmith Howard Donahue, reported by Bonar Menninger in 2017, reaches the astonishing conclusion that Oswald's shots missed their target, but they caused Secret Service agent George Hickey in the car following the presidential limousine to fire his AR-15 accidentally.
The inexperienced agent had been employed for only four months, and his AR-15 was a new model with a unique 'signature' matching the size and destructiveness of the entry and exit wounds. Jarred by the driver's sudden braking to avoid a collision with the presidential limousine, Hickey, standing, pitched forward, and as he did so, in Donohue's analysis, accidentally fired only five feet away from President Kennedy. Several witnesses, including Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough, stated they smelled gunsmoke along the route of the motorcade. The subsequent behavior of the Secret Service in rushing the president's body away from Parkland Hospital and fabricating an X-ray with pasted-on bullet fragments, indicate a coverup — of a tragic accident, not necessarily of a conspiracy, though quick-reacting Government agencies might afterwards have brought forward otherwise unworkable plans.
The most plausible interpretation of that day 60 years ago is that a tragic accident took the eternally-adolescent JFK from America and the world. Sugartime dissolved into the bitter sting of napalm, Camelot into the sordid calculation of body-counts, and inquisitive journalism such as Dorothy Kilgallen's into canned press releases. May the truth of that day, November 22, 1963, enable Americans to shape their future with courage.