On the morning of November 8, 1965, Mark Sinclair let himself into a townhouse on East 68th Street in Manhattan. He was Dorothy Kilgallen’s hairdresser, and he had a key. He climbed the stairs and found her in the master bedroom, a room she had not slept in for years. She was sitting up in bed.
Her false eyelashes from the night before were still on. Beside her lay a novel she had told him she had already finished. Her reading glasses were nowhere in the room. The night before, millions of Americans had watched her on live television.
Less than two years earlier, she had sat alone in a small room with Jack Ruby. So why was a woman who needed glasses to read sitting in bed with a book she had already finished? Dorothy Kilgallen was the daughter of a well-known journalist, and she grew up to become far more famous than he ever was. Her column appeared in more than a hundred newspapers.
On Sunday nights, she sat on the panel of What’s My Line? By Monday morning, she was back at her typewriter. During the last two years of her life, she was also working on something else. Friends spoke of her notes on the Kennedy assassination, notes that included interviews and names alongside her own reporting from Dallas.
She kept that material close. That file appears again and again in what follows, and it is the part of her story that has never been explained. She was born in Chicago on July 3, 1913. Her father, James Kilgallen, was a reporter for International News Service, a Hearst agency, and he was good at his job.
His daughter grew up hearing talk of deadlines and page one, and she never seemed to want any other life. At eighteen, she went to work as a reporter for Hearst’s New York Evening Journal. That was 1931, and no one in the city’s newsrooms was handing page one to a girl. She had to grab it herself.
The way she did it was by going where the big trials were. In 1935, she sat in the Flemington, New Jersey, courtroom for the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, the man accused of kidnapping and killing the Lindbergh baby. The whole country was following that trial, and reporters from around the world packed into the small town to cover it. She was twenty-one, and she was one of them.
The courtroom became her home turf. She learned what a witness looked like when lying, and what a judge looked like when his mind was already made up. She would need that second skill years later in a Cleveland courtroom. The assignment that made her famous came the next year.
In the fall of 1936, the Journal entered her in a race around the world against two men from two rival New York papers. The rules were simple. They could use only commercial transportation, the planes, ships, and trains anyone could buy a ticket for. She crossed the Atlantic aboard the Hindenburg, the great German airship that would burn at Lakehurst the following spring.
She continued from there and came home second of the three. Coming in second cost her nothing. She was twenty-three and suddenly famous. Hollywood turned her story into a movie.
By November 1938, the New York Journal-American gave her her own column, “Voice of Broadway. ” At its peak, it was syndicated to 146 newspapers. She has been described since as a gossip columnist, and that covers only part of what she wrote. The column included nightclub and theater news and who was seen with whom.
It also covered crime and courts and politics. A small fact from those years will return later in this story. Dorothy had weak eyesight, and the people who worked with her insisted she could not read a page without her glasses. Her married life, which would end in that house on East 68th Street, began in 1940.
On April 6 of that year, she married a Broadway actor named Richard Kollmar. They had three children. In 1950, she took a seat on the panel of a new CBS show called What’s My Line? Contestants came on, and the panel tried to guess their occupations with yes-or-no questions, broadcast live every Sunday evening.
She sat next to publisher Bennett Cerf and actress Arlene Francis, and she kept that seat for fifteen years. Living in the spotlight earned her enemies too. In 1956, she wrote a series of pieces about Frank Sinatra that he did not like. For a long time afterward, he mocked her from nightclub stages.
The family lived at 45 East 68th Street in a tall house near Park Avenue. From the outside, life looked the way everyone assumed it was. Inside, things were different. The marriage had gone cold.
According to those close to her, Dorothy stopped sleeping in the master bedroom on the third floor after something she found there, and she moved to the fifth floor. Her hairdresser knew exactly which floor to climb. That detail matters most on the morning she died. In 1954, a doctor named Sam Sheppard was on trial for killing his pregnant wife in Cleveland, and Dorothy was there to cover it.
Before the trial began, according to her account, the judge, Edward Blythin, told her privately that Sheppard was completely guilty. She kept that information unpublished at the time. But she told the story publicly much later. Sheppard’s lawyer, F.
Lee Bailey, used it in his long fight to clear his client. In 1966, the Supreme Court overturned that conviction because of the chaos the press had been allowed to create. In a second trial, Sheppard walked free. That incident tells you a lot about her character.
She was willing to face down a sitting judge publicly, and she was not easily frightened. On November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was shot in Dallas. Two days later, in the basement of Dallas police headquarters, a nightclub owner named Jack Ruby approached Lee Harvey Oswald and shot him in front of the cameras. Dorothy did not believe the story as it was being told.
She told friends she was going to get to the bottom of it. A week after the president’s death, she wrote a line that stuck with her readers. “Justice is a big carpet,” she wrote. “When you pull it from under one man’s feet, many others fall with him.
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Ruby was tried in Dallas in early 1964, and Dorothy traveled there to cover it. Ruby was a man on trial for his life. The accounts say she spoke with him twice, and that she was the only reporter able to speak with him alone. The second conversation is the one people still ask about.
In March 1964, Ruby’s lawyers and the trial judge allowed her to meet him in a small office next to the courtroom. Even the guards agreed to wait outside. According to most accounts, they talked for about eight minutes. There was no stenographer in that room, no recording.
No one heard what passed between them but the two of them. Dorothy walked out of that office and never wrote a word about what Ruby told her that week or at any time later. What she published a few months later caused the government far more trouble. On June 7, 1964, the Warren Commission came to Dallas to question Ruby.
Ruby spoke about wanting to be moved to Washington, saying his life was in danger where he was. Then Ruby said something that has been quoted ever since. “You don’t have a chance,” he told the chief justice. “You’re fighting a losing case.
” That testimony was supposed to remain secret until the commission finished its work. Within two months, it was leaked. In August 1964, Dorothy published Ruby’s testimony in three installments on the front page of the Journal-American and other papers across the country. Someone inside the operation gave it to her, and she never revealed who.
The commission was furious. Government investigators wanted to know the source of the leak. They never got it out of her. If you read the full text, what Ruby wanted in Washington was a lie detector test because he wanted to prove he had not been part of any conspiracy.
Dorothy read those same words the other way and kept digging. Donald Wilkes, a law professor at the University of Georgia, later wrote that after she announced she was gathering evidence on the assassination, the FBI monitored her and tapped her phones, and that the FBI and the CIA kept files on her. On September 24, 1964, the Warren Commission delivered its report. It concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
In that same week, Dorothy’s column carried the account of a woman the commission never called to testify. Her name was Acquilla Clemmons, and she lived near where Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit was shot less than an hour after the president was killed.
The official story put Oswald behind that killing too. Clemmons had seen something there that did not quite fit the official story and was afraid. “I’m not supposed to talk to anybody,” Clemmons told her. “I might get killed going to work.
” Other columns followed. She reported that ten people had signed sworn affidavits for the Warren Commission saying they knew Oswald and Ruby had known each other. This was the period in which the file took shape. Her friends watched it grow with clippings and notes from Dallas, material on Ruby, names she kept to herself.
She was working on a book, and those around her understood the Kennedy material was for it. In that same period, she told a friend something repeated in every account of her life since. “If the wrong people knew what I know, it would cost me my life. ”
By fall 1965, Dorothy was talking about New Orleans.
A makeup artist who worked with her later recalled she planned to go there to meet someone who would give her information on the case. On September 3, 1965, she published what would be her last column on the assassination. “This story will never die as long as there is a real reporter alive, and there are plenty of them. ” In her final days, according to a friend quoted in Ramparts magazine, she went further.
Within five more days, she would crack the case wide open. She never got those five days. Sunday, November 7, 1965, began like hundreds of Sundays before it. Late that evening, she appeared live with the rest of the What’s My Line?
panel, same panel member as always, with her evening makeup and her false eyelashes. The episode still exists today. What no one disputes is that she finished the show and said “goodnight” as she did every Sunday. When the show ended, she went out for a drink with Bob Bach, one of the program’s producers, at P.
J. Clarke’s on Third Avenue. Then she left for another destination. Bach later said she was on her way to meet someone.
A hotel employee at the Regency on Park Avenue at 61st later recalled that Dorothy Kilgallen came in around one in the morning on November 8. She was not there alone. Mark Shaw, a former attorney who spent years studying her case, and her biographer Lee Israel, both came to believe the man with her was Ron Pataki. Shaw’s account places them in a back booth inside the bar.
Pataki denied it, and kept denying it for the rest of his life. At some point after that, she went home. No one ever came forward to say they saw her come in the door. In the house on East 68th Street, Richard Kollmar was sleeping on another floor.
Kerry, their youngest, was only a boy, asleep in his room. If anyone heard her on the stairs that night, no one ever said so. The next morning, Mark Sinclair arrived to do her hair. He had been doing it for years.
He knew the house and her habits. He climbed to the fifth floor, to the bedroom she used, and she was not there. He went down the stairs past the fourth floor to the large third-floor bedroom she had abandoned years before. The lamp inside was still lit in the middle of the morning.
Dorothy sat in the middle of the bed. Sinclair noticed the small details first. Her makeup was still on her face, with her full evening appearance from the night before. Her false eyelashes were still on.
She was wearing clothes she would never have slept in. On her bedside table there was a cup. The body was taken to the medical examiner’s office. Assistant medical examiner Dr.
James Luke ruled that she died of acute ethanol and barbiturate intoxication, alcohol and sleeping pills. At the end of the finding, he added two words that have followed the case ever since: “circumstances undetermined. ” Dr. Luke did not claim to know more than he did.
“It could have been just one extra pill,” he said. “We really don’t know. ” The papers called it an accident, and most of America went back to its weekly routine. What’s My Line?
continued without her the following Sunday. That is the official answer. There is another answer too, and it took decades to surface. At the medical examiner’s office, there was a toxicologist named Charles Umberger.
According to Mark Shaw, Umberger kept samples from the case, and in 1968 he and a colleague ran further tests on them. Shaw says the results showed not one sleeping drug but three: Seconal, Tuinal, and Nembutal. He also says traces of Nembutal were found on the rim of the cup on her bedside table. Donald Wilkes wrote that she had no prescription for Tuinal.
If Shaw is right, perhaps someone else put the drugs in her drink. The case turns on that point. The official verdict has never been changed. Dr.
Luke’s words remain on the page. That leaves the file. After her death, the people who knew searched for her Kennedy notes, asked about them, and no one could find them. The Ruby material, the Dallas notes, the names, all gone.
Whatever she had gathered in the last two years never surfaced in the house, never surfaced at the paper, never appeared anywhere anyone thought to look. One story, never more than a story, says federal agents came to the house that morning and took the papers. It has been told many times and never verified. What is recorded is something her husband said.
Bob Bach asked Richard Kollmar what Dorothy had found out about the assassination. Kollmar’s answer has been quoted ever since. “Bob, I’m afraid that will have to go to the grave with me. ” He kept his word.
Whatever Dorothy found out, he never told anyone. Jack Ruby outlived them both, but not for long. In October 1966, a Texas appeals court overturned his death sentence and ordered a new trial. Before it could begin, he was in Parkland Hospital with cancer, and on January 3, 1967, he died.
In that same hospital where Kennedy and Oswald had been pronounced dead. On one point there is no dispute at all: the only two people in that small room are gone, and neither left an account of what happened. She once wrote that justice is a big carpet, and she believed pulling it from under one man would bring down others with him.
She spent her last two years pulling at that carpet, and she died before she could show anyone what was under it.