Dorothy Kilgallen was born on July 3, 1913, in Chicago, Illinois, to James and May Kilgallen. Her father was a newspaper reporter, and in 1920 he took a job with the International News Service in New York City.
The family settled in Brooklyn, where Dorothy attended Erasmus Hall High School and graduated in 1932. She studied at the College of New Rochelle for a year before dropping out to take a job as a reporter at the New York Evening Journal, owned by the Hearst Corporation.
Kilgallen made a name for herself quickly. Her first big break came when she participated in a race around the world in 38 days, with her picture in the headlines each day. When she returned, she was famous.
She developed her own forceful style and entered what was then very much a man's world. In 1938 she got her own byline, covering Broadway for the Journal-American rather than the crime beat. Her column, "The Voice of Broadway," began locally and became nationwide, dealing mainly with theatrical people in New York.
In 1940 she married Broadway actor Richard Kollmar. The couple had three children, Richard Jr., Jill, and Kerry. They soon broke into radio with their own morning talk show, "Breakfast with Dorothy and Dick," broadcasting from their home in their night clothes.
In 1950 Kilgallen became a regular panelist on the TV game show "What's My Line." The show was a massive success and made her a household name. She was known for guessing contestants' occupations more often than anyone else on the panel.
Despite her celebrity, her columns and broadcasts mixed entertainment with serious issues. In 1954 she covered the Sam Shepard murder trial in Cleveland, Ohio, putting everything on hold to do so. Dr. Sam Shepard was tried for the stabbing murder of his wife Marilyn.
Kilgallen was convinced the doctor was innocent and believed the jury would agree. The jury did not, and Shepard was imprisoned. Twelve years later his exoneration proved she had been right.
She also covered the Lindbergh baby kidnapping case and the Lenny Bruce First Amendment case. The New York Post called her the most powerful female voice in America.
From the outside, Kilgallen appeared to have it all: a serious journalism career, a family, wealth, and celebrity. In time, however, her marriage to Richard Kollmar began to fall apart. The couple never divorced and remained married only for appearances.
Many people felt the marriage was always a little suspect because Dick had a roaming eye. Kilgallen was asked why she did not divorce Richard and said she could never do that because Richard had been too kind to her.
She also told a confidante that Richard Kollmar was not the father of Kerry, and said that singer Johnny Ray was the father of her youngest child. A strong resemblance between Johnny Ray and the child was noted.
Dick eventually put his foot down, threatened to kill Johnny, and threw him out of the house, telling Dorothy she was never to see him again. Johnny was scared and would not take her calls. She was frantic and fell apart to the point of being hospitalized.
Despite trouble in her family life, Kilgallen's public profile was at its peak in the early 1960s. Her credibility as a reporter was rock solid, and she maintained her status in the New York celebrity scene.
She had met President John F. Kennedy on several occasions, including a White House visit where she recalled he was especially warm to her youngest son, Kerry.
When Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, Kilgallen was devastated. Two days later, when alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was killed in the Dallas Police Station, her suspicions grew.
On November 29, she wrote a column urging President Johnson to satisfy the public's uneasy mind about what she called this peculiar assassination of the assassin. She asked how, in a big smart town like Dallas, a man like Jack Ruby, owner of a striptease honky-tonk, could stroll in and out of police headquarters as if it were a health club while a small army of law enforcers kept tight security on Oswald.
Kilgallen began to focus on Oswald's killer, Jacob Rubinstein, also known as Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner with connections to the Mafia and the Dallas Police. She was not interested in Lee Harvey Oswald. She looked at the one person she could investigate and where she believed she would find the truth: Jack Ruby.
Alone among mainstream press reporters, she began harboring suspicions that the so-called open-and-shut case against Oswald was not so open and shut. She found dissident witnesses, deposed them, and published their testimony.
Kilgallen traveled to Dallas to cover Jack Ruby's trial. She ingratiated herself with Melvin Belli, Joe Tonahill, and the defense team, having dinner with Belli and Tonahill and learning everything she could from them.
She told a friend that she had contact with a friend of Jack's from San Francisco, believed to be an opera singer he was very fond of, and wanted to pass along a message to him. Ruby said he would like to talk with her.
Ruby was shielded by deputy sheriffs who sat behind him and never left his side. When the judge declared the noon recess, Ruby went over and spoke with her at the rail behind his chair. The press had already left the courtroom.
The interview was a significant point in Ruby's life, and he cooperated with her in every way he could and told her the truth as he understood it. What Ruby told her is unknown, because when Kilgallen died her files and documents disappeared and have never been found.
Shortly afterward, she did not go to Washington to look into the government, did not stay in Dallas looking into LBJ, and did not go to Cuba or Russia. She went to New Orleans.
She told a friend that when they traveled in the future she wanted to stay in a separate hotel. In New Orleans, she called the friend, who came to do her hair so she would look better in photographs being taken, then left the hotel.
Kilgallen then called and said she wanted the friend to leave immediately, not to tell anyone she had ever been there with her, and not to ask any more questions. The friend got on a plane and flew back to New York.
On August 9, 1964, Kilgallen shocked the nation by publishing Jack Ruby's testimony to the Warren Commission before it was released to the public. She printed it on the front page of the Journal-American before the president received it.
After that, she said, they were stalked. Her phones were tapped, and efforts were made to find out where she got her information. The FBI immediately undertook an investigation into how she had obtained Ruby's testimony.
She refused to reveal her source to the FBI agents who interviewed her, saying she would die rather than reveal his identity. She later quipped in a column that the FBI might be more profitably employed probing the facts of the case rather than how she got them.
When the Warren Report was released, Kilgallen remained a vocal critic of the lone-assassin conclusion. She told those close to her that she was working on a book that would reveal what she learned in her interview with Jack Ruby and on her subsequent trips to New Orleans.
She would say she was going to New Orleans to meet a man there, describing it as all very cloak-and-dagger. She brought a folder into the "What's My Line" dressing room and said it contained all the stuff she had learned and was working on, and that nobody could look at it.
She carried around a big packet of papers she said pertained to the assassination. She said it would be the case of a lifetime, a story of a lifetime, and that she would prove who assassinated the president.
She never quit. She dug up something about the assassination of President Kennedy that somebody did not want her to know. She told friends that she used to share things with them, but after what she had found out, if the wrong people knew what she knew, it would cost her her life. She was dead about nine months later.
Kilgallen seemed bent on following the organized crime angle of the case, a world she knew well as a New York socialite and journalist. She even had a mob connection of her own: an acquaintance with Frank Costello.
Costello gave her a diamond cross so large she said she could not wear it, and it was broken up and made into earrings. At a little Italian restaurant downtown one night, he was there, bought a round, and was very nice to them. She later told a friend who he was; the friend had not known.
Author Mark Shaw believes Kilgallen may have been investigating New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello, who had a clear motive for revenge against the Kennedy family. She went to New Orleans because Marcello was one of the most dangerous mafiosos in the country and had the greatest motive to have killed Jack Kennedy.
Arkansas Senator John McClellan established a committee to investigate labor racketeering and organized crime. McClellan's chief counsel was 33-year-old Robert Kennedy.
On March 24, 1959, Marcello appeared before the committee and was not forthcoming. One senator asked how in the name of God he had been allowed to remain in the country eight years after being officially deported. Marcello replied that he really would not know and knew nothing about it. Bobby Kennedy then told associates that someday he was going to get rid of that guy.
When John F. Kennedy became president in 1961, he installed his younger brother Robert as attorney general. One of Bobby Kennedy's first targets was Carlos Marcello.
The law allowed a candidate for deportation to file an unlimited number of motions to stay deportation, and Marcello had almost unlimited economic resources while his lawyers worked the legal system. He paid regular visits to the Immigration and Naturalization Service to maintain his resident alien status.
Kennedy had federal agents kidnap Marcello when he went to report to the INS office in New Orleans. They put him on a plane and dropped him off in Guatemala. After three days in the wilderness, Marcello made it to civilization by methods that remain unclear, and he sneaked back into the U.S. two months later.
Courts upheld the legality of Marcello's deportation, and Kennedy increased efforts to get the mobster out of the country. Marcello seethed under the heat of Bobby Kennedy's attention.
Businessman Ed Becker, who had ties to Marcello, said that in 1962 the usually discreet boss let it slip that he had murder on his mind. Becker warned him that killing Bobby Kennedy would bring the whole United States government down on him. Marcello replied that you cut off the head and the tail dies.
In 1965, Kilgallen had begun a romantic affair with a younger journalist from Ohio named Ron Pataki, 22 years younger than she was. He latched on to her right as she was investigating the JFK assassination, and they had a torrid love affair. He once sent her cut-out Valentines, all strung apart, which she showed to a friend.
Meanwhile, Kilgallen began to experience threats and intimidation allegedly meant to scare her from revealing her findings. She told a friend, a few weeks before she died, that she was going to get a gun because her life was being threatened and she was scared for her life and for her family.
She woke up one morning to find a picture of Kerry in a New York newspaper, running across Central Park. It scared her to death because she thought somebody was following her son. She was very worried Kerry would be kidnapped, since she would never have allowed such a picture of him alone to be taken and published.
A friend suggested that the only new person in her life was Ron Pataki and asked why she did not ask him whether all the information slipping out about her was coming from him.
On the evening of November 7, 1965, Dorothy Kilgallen appeared on a live broadcast of "What's My Line." A fellow guest later recalled seeing her in a corner with a man sitting close beside her, both with drinks, talking quietly as if they did not want anyone else to hear. The guest had the feeling they were discussing some kind of business.
The next morning, her hairdresser arrived at the house before nine, using her key to let herself in at about 8:30 or 8:45. She went upstairs, saw the light on, and found Kilgallen was not in her usual place.
She walked into the bedroom, not thinking Kilgallen would be there, and found her sitting up in bed. She touched her and knew immediately that she was dead.
Kilgallen was dressed very peculiarly, in a way the hairdresser had never seen before. She always dressed in pajamas and old socks, with her makeup off, but now everything was done. She was completely dressed as if she were going out, with her hair in place, makeup on, and false eyelashes on.
A book lay out on the bed, a drink was on the table, the light was on, and the air conditioning was running even though it was not needed and Kilgallen was always cold. The hairdresser wondered why the air conditioning was on, possibly to keep the body at a certain temperature.
She went back to the dressing room, picked up the intercom, and rang for the butler, James, saying she was unable to wake Miss Kilgallen and asking him to come up. He ran up the stairs, came in very flustered and not himself.
The hairdresser said she was going home and left. When she got downstairs and went out the front door, there was a police car sitting in front of the house with two officers in it. They paid no attention to her as she came out.
She found it very strange that the officers were sitting directly in front of the house while Dorothy lay dead upstairs.
Mark called and told a friend he had found her dead, saying that when he told him the bed she was found in and how he found her, the friend would know she was murdered. When he told him, the friend knew it was abnormal. The woman did not sleep in that bed, much less that room, which was Richard's bed, the one he had set fire to.
Kilgallen's death was quickly ruled an accidental overdose by a combination of alcohol and barbiturates. No police investigation ever took place.
The details struck those close to her as a stage death scene: eyelashes, makeup, hairpiece, clothes she never wore to bed, not in the bedroom she ever slept in, a book upside down, no reading glasses. Despite that, investigators took one look at an empty Seconal bottle and decided to close the case. The medical examiner's office at that time was controlled by the Mafia.
A witness on the East Coast whose father was with the medical examiner's office said that three years after Dorothy died, a toxicologist there had kept some of her bodily fluids hoping technology would help analyze the specimens. They found three barbiturates in her stomach.
They also found a glass with residue of phenobarbital on it, which suggested that whoever decided to do away with Dorothy had poured the powder into that particular drink.
A friend said Kilgallen had told him something was coming up, that she had latched on to something, and that she had notes and notes about it, which disappeared after her death. The file was supposedly very thick, and it was suspected it was either stolen or that her husband had it and may have destroyed it.
Richard Kollmar, the actor and producer, was asked what was in Dorothy's filing. He said he was afraid that was a secret that would have to go to the grave with him.
The daughter of Dorothy's butler, James Clement, said that FBI agents swarmed Dorothy's townhouse the morning she died and took all of her documents.
Although several people may have had a motive to kill Dorothy Kilgallen, many of her friends believed her new love interest, Ron Pataki, had something to do with her death. One friend believed he was the snitch she was telling so much to, and that she found out and was going to confront him. The friend did not think Pataki did the actual work but was sure that he, or whoever his employers were, did.
On Ron's website was found a poem titled "Vodka Roulette," which described spilling guts, fetching two drinks on the run, and making one of them poison without telling which one. Those were facts only the killer could know, since nothing had been publicized about how Dorothy could have died.
Pataki admitted to having a close friendship with Kilgallen and even helping on some of her articles about the JFK assassination. He publicly denied being with her on the night of her death, but two of his cousins told researchers they knew for a fact that he was.
Pataki told another researcher that he had attended an assassin school in Panama in 1954. Some researchers believe he was working for the CIA or perhaps the FBI. He once bragged in an interview about having Mafia connections. Ron Pataki died in 2022 at the age of 86.
He was not the only person suspected of murdering Kilgallen. Her husband, Richard Kollmar, also fell under suspicion. A news photograph showed Dorothy's mother with Richard after a big fight, and the picture ran in the paper. She was pointing a finger at Richard, saying he killed her daughter and that she would prove it. James Kilgallen took her away.
Fifty-eight years later, Dorothy Kilgallen's friends and loved ones are left to speculate about the many unanswered questions surrounding her death. Why did the New York police never do a thorough investigation to rule out the possibility of homicide?
Why did police lie to the press about the time the body was discovered? They did not report Dorothy's death until the afternoon, then said her body was discovered around noon, even though the hairdresser was at the house between 8:30 and 9.
Why was Kilgallen found in the wrong room, in the wrong bed, fully dressed, and holding a book without her reading glasses? Why was the air conditioner running on a cold November night in New York?
What happened to Kilgallen's folder of research on Jack Ruby and the JFK assassination? What did Jack Ruby tell her in their interview? What happened in New Orleans that frightened Dorothy Kilgallen?
Why did the FBI or the Warren Commission not investigate Ruby's and Oswald's connections to Carlos Marcello? On November 22, 1963, Marcello learned of his acquittal in a deportation case while the nation learned the fate of its president.
The assassination happened in Dallas, Marcello's territory. With the arrest of suspect Lee Harvey Oswald, people from New Orleans came under scrutiny. Oswald had lifelong family ties to Marcello's organization; he had an uncle who had become a bookmaker in the Marcello organization.
When Oswald was arrested for disturbing the peace in New Orleans, he was sprung from jail by a man who had close connections to the Marcello organization. Jack Ruby's Warren Commission conclusion was that he had no significant organized crime connections, with the word "significant" doing the work.
The women in his Dallas strip club were on a circuit that included the Show Bar in New Orleans, which was tied to Carlos Marcello. Information about Marcello and the Mafia was absent from the Warren Commission's investigation, and the FBI never gave up the electronic surveillance indicating what the mob thought about killing Kennedy. The mob escaped any connection to the assassination, and grief-stricken Bobby Kennedy's efforts against organized crime disintegrated.
Was the death of Dorothy Kilgallen indeed a peculiar accident with some innocent explanation? Was she killed by a jealous husband? Or was her death the result of a sinister plot to suppress her investigation into Jack Ruby and the Kennedy assassination?