Kilgallen's Ruby Interview Notes?
Vern Pascal
assassination can roll there eyes with disdain about Dorothy Kilgallen's
untimely demise thru an overdose of barbiturates, but have no answer for
the following.
Kilgallen was the only journalist allowed access to Jack Ruby in his
jail cell in late 1965, and obtained an exclusive interview, presumably
in a bug-free setting. Anyway, shortly afterwards she announced that she
was "gong to bust the cae wide open". This doesn't sound like the usual
hyperbole from overzealous reporters. Ruby must have told her something
sensational, whether it was true or not. She had plenty of experience in
interviewing famous people, and would not fall for a tansparent wild
goose chase. She said she was going to New Orleans. Remember, this is a
couple years before Garrison, and hardly anyone had delved into that
area in any depth, certainly not the WC. So she had at least one good
lead which Ruby had provided her, and it lay in N.O. of all places.
But then her trip was suddenly interrupted by her death, either by
suicide or murder. So what I'd like to know is what happened to her
notes from the interview with Jack Ruby? She must have written something
down. A good writer like her would not trust her memory to recall all
the salient details. Apparently, after her death disappeared all
evidence of her visit with Ruby, and what he may have communicated to
her. If these notes were innocuous and non-conspiratorial, wouldn't they
have been preserved? The fact that nothing in the way of notes or rough
draft of a column or manuscript of any kind have come down to us, is
very suspicious in itself. As suspicious as the circumstances of Dorothy
Kilgallen's tragic death.--------------------------------------Vern
Leo Sgouros
briefly, while he was in court.
The circumstances dont seem to be conducive for a big scoop.
_L_
Vern Pascal <lazu...@webtv.net> wrote in message
news:21504-37...@newsd-151.iap.bryant.webtv.net...
Dave Reitzes
>From: lazu...@webtv.net (Vern Pascal)
>
>Those who believe there are no mysterious deaths associated with the JFK
>assassination can roll there eyes with disdain about Dorothy Kilgallen's
>untimely demise thru an overdose of barbiturates, but have no answer for
>the following.
>
>Kilgallen was the only journalist allowed access to Jack Ruby in his
>jail cell in late 1965, and obtained an exclusive interview,
Could you cite your source for this alleged jail cell interview, Vern?
Thanks in advance,
Dave
Vern Pascal
You were right to question me re: my statement that Dorothy Kilgallen
visited Jack Ruby in his cell. My only source for this, at the moment,
and I have checked the indexes in dozens of my books for confirmation,
is the 1998 Robert Groden booklet, TKOAP, DP Memorial Edition, p.29,
where he states in part:
"The most famous of the deaths was New York Journal-American reporter,
Dorothy Kilgallen. She was the only member of the press allowed to have
an exclusive interview with Jack Ruby in jail. After the thirty minute
interview she had stated that she was going to New Orleans to, 'break
the assassination mystery wide open.'
Within days, on November 8, 1965, she was found dead of a massive
barbiturate overdose. The medical examiner, Dr. James Luke stated that
he could not determine if her death was the result of murder. Her
massive files on the assassination have never been released to the
public, and had reportedly disappeared."
Incidentally, the above info. is not included in any of Groden's books.
I thought I had heard this story before, and from another source, but so
far have not located it. So make of it what you will. Groden claims she
had a thirty minute exclusive interview with Ruby in his jail cell, and
that her massive files on the assassination disappeared upon her death,
but unfortunately cites no source.---------------------------------Vern
Dave Reitzes
>From: lazu...@webtv.net (Vern Pascal)
>Date: Sat, 26 June 1999 01:17 PM EDT
>Message-id: <378-377...@newsd-152.iap.bryant.webtv.net>
Groden's doing something he does fairly often -- repeating rumor as though it
were fact. The truth of the matter is closer to the account by Gary Wills and
Ovid Demaris, (Jack Ruby, page 72):
(quote) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Conspiratorialists of the wilder variety believe that Dorothy Kilgallen had a
private interview [with Jack Ruby], one that caused her death. This tete-a-tete
never took place: she leaned over the rail and talked to Jack in the open
courtroom during a break in the proceedings. Lawyer Joe Tonahill, who hoped to
collaborate with Miss Kilgallen on a book, arranged the brief exchange, and was
present at it.
(end quote) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
And J. Leyden has pointed out that Kilgallen died *20 months later.* It's hard
to imagine her sitting on any important story that long.
Dave
Info courtesy of the Kennedy Assassination Home Page, aka "that disinfo site."
JLeyden900
>From: lazu...@webtv.net (Vern Pascal)
>Date: Fri, 25 June 1999 04:41 PM EDT
>Message-id: <21504-37...@newsd-151.iap.bryant.webtv.net>
>
>Those who believe there are no mysterious deaths associated with the JFK
>assassination can roll there eyes with disdain about Dorothy Kilgallen's
>untimely demise thru an overdose of barbiturates, but have no answer for
>the following.
>
>Kilgallen was the only journalist allowed access to Jack Ruby in his
>in a bug-free setting. Anyway, shortly afterwards she announced that she
>was "gong to bust the cae wide open". This doesn't sound like the usual
>hyperbole from overzealous reporters. Ruby must have told her something
>sensational, whether it was true or not. She had plenty of experience in
>interviewing famous people, and would not fall for a tansparent wild
>goose chase. She said she was going to New Orleans. Remember, this is a
>couple years before Garrison, and hardly anyone had delved into that
>area in any depth, certainly not the WC. So she had at least one good
>lead which Ruby had provided her, and it lay in N.O. of all places.
>
>But then her trip was suddenly interrupted by her death, either by
>suicide or murder. So what I'd like to know is what happened to her
>notes from the interview with Jack Ruby? She must have written something
>down. A good writer like her would not trust her memory to recall all
>the salient details. Apparently, after her death disappeared all
>evidence of her visit with Ruby, and what he may have communicated to
>her. If these notes were innocuous and non-conspiratorial, wouldn't they
>have been preserved? The fact that nothing in the way of notes or rough
>draft of a column or manuscript of any kind have come down to us, is
>very suspicious in itself. As suspicious as the circumstances of Dorothy
>Kilgallen's tragic death.--------------------------------------Vern
>
>
Get real here! Kilgallen died in November 1965, some 20 months after her brief
interview with Ruby in March 1964. Heck of a long time to sit on a hot scoop.
As for her notes, Ruby's lawyer, Melvin Belli, said his client was talking
mostly "gibberish" at the time so maybe she couldn't read what she wrote
afterwards.
By the way, did you know that D.K.'s husband committed suicide via a drug
overdose in the same house in January 1971. Maybe he got the notes after
D.k.'s death and sat on them for another 5+ years until the CIA got him too.
(See Lee Israel's "Kilgallen.")
JGL
L. C. Sheppard
Kilgallen was the only journalist allowed access to Jack Ruby in his
jail cell in late 1965, and obtained an exclusive interview, presumably
This may be an unwarranted assumption. In many police departments
smaller than Dallas it was routine procedure to tape conversations in
conference rooms and even phone calls during the 1960's era.
/s/ L. C. Sheppard
Vern Pascal
all the info we've gotten from Belli, Tonahill, et al, gospel?
I know when the Ruby trial ended, and I know the time differential is
substantial. However, the interview may not have coincided with the
trial. I don't know that D.K's private interview with Ruby may have
occurred during the interim, perhaps closer to her death. Does anyone
know when she proclaimed "I,m going to break the case wide open"? And in
what forum? Or are you saying she never uttered these words in the first
place either in print or in public? If it can be shown a. that she made
this announcement months ahead of her death and accumulated no massive
files, or b. that she never said such a thing, nor indeed never voiced
her disbelief in the WC, then I will give this one up as a wild goose
chase.--Always getting real-------Vern
Dave Reitzes
>From: lazu...@webtv.net (Vern Pascal)
>
>Okay guys, maybe I jumped the gun on some bad information, but OTOH, is
>all the info we've gotten from Belli, Tonahill, et al, gospel?
>I know when the Ruby trial ended, and I know the time differential is
>substantial. However, the interview may not have coincided with the
>trial. I don't know that D.K's private interview with Ruby may have
>occurred during the interim, perhaps closer to her death. Does anyone
>know when she proclaimed "I,m going to break the case wide open"? And in
>what forum? Or are you saying she never uttered these words in the first
>place either in print or in public?
She did not make this statement in print or in public; she apparently said this
to a friend of hers in 1964.
If it can be shown a. that she made
>this announcement months ahead of her death and accumulated no massive
>files, or b. that she never said such a thing, nor indeed never voiced
>her disbelief in the WC, then I will give this one up as a wild goose
>chase.--Always getting real-------Vern
>
She was very interested in the assassination in 1963-64 (particularly during
the time of Jack Ruby's trial) and spoke frequently with Mark Lane about it
(which is why he, more than anyone else, speaks highly of her as a journalist).
She seems to have told at least one friend of hers that she considered the
Warren Report "laughable" and would demonstrate so, but her interest seems to
have waned almost immediately once the Report was issued. By November 1964, she
was no longer writing about the assassination. She died a year later.
Eric Paddon's article on Kilgallen's death seems to be the definitive essay on
her connection to the assassination inquiry. I repost it here in full.
DOROTHY KILGALLEN AND THE JFK ASSASSINATION
by Eric Paddon
Among the many candidates for the "mystery death" list first
popularized by Penn Jones in 1967 is Dorothy Kilgallen on November 8,
1965. The well-known gossip columnist for the New York Journal-American,
and regular panelist on the popular CBS game show "What's My Line?" had
died in her sleep of an apparent overdose of drugs just hours after she
had appeared on the regular Sunday night broadcast of "Line."
Because Kilgallen had long made a career of covering famous criminal
trials (including those of Bruno Hauptmann and Dr. Sam Sheppard), and
because she had attended the trial of Jack Ruby and was conducting her own
skeptical investigation of the JFK assassination, rumors were immediately
spread by conspiracy authors Jones and Mark Lane that her death was
somehow connected to the assassination. That she had allegedly been
preparing a major scoop that would blow the lid off the Warren Report, and
was therefore "silenced" by the forces behind the conspiracy. Her
biographer Lee Israel repeated these charges virtually unchallenged in her
1979 book (i) Kilgallen (i), and even used the supposed assassination
connection as the book's primary selling point.
Although not all conspiracy authors have bought into the Kilgallen
story (even Ramparts magazine was quick to dismiss the idea at a time when
they were promoting other conspiracy authors), there has not been an
adequate rebuttal to it from Warren Commission defenders. Gerald Posner,
in his dissection of the "mystery deaths" in (i) Case Closed (i), is much
too dismissive in his treatment of Kilgallen. He does note that an
oft-told story about Kilgallen's JFK investigation, that she had a
"private interview" with Jack Ruby during his trial, is not supported by
Hugh Aynesworth who also covered the trial, and who recalled her
"interview" as being no more than several minutes during a recess while
surrounded by other reporters. Beyond that, he offers nothing else that
would satisfy those who's impressions of Kilgallen were formed by the
Israel biography.
To this author, the surest way of demonstrating the absurdity of the
Kilgallen story, is not to focus too strongly on her long-bout with
alcoholism and barbituate addiction (which was at its worst in the
immediate years prior to her death and is graphically visible in the
reruns of "What's My Line?", where her speech is slurry and thick on
numerous programs throughout 1965) that likely caused her death. Rather,
when one focuses on exactly what Kilgallen had supposedly uncovered about
the assassination and who her sources were, it becomes clear that she
could not possibly have been "silenced" for what she knew. The sum total
of what she knew was a cacophony of erroneous assumptions and
misinformation fed to her by dishonest sources, which she then proceeded
to act on in a haphazard manner.
After covering the Jack Ruby trial, Kilgallen first became interested
in investigating the assassination when somone leaked a copy of Ruby's
Warren Commission testimony to her two months before the Report was
published. This leak from someone she would only describe as being
"inside the Commission and a friend of long standing" caused Warren
Commission counsel Lee Rankin to order the FBI to find out who was behind
this indiscretion. Accordingly, the FBI spent several days in September
1964 interviewing staff members who would have had access to the
transcript as well as Ruby's attorney Joseph Tonahill, all of whom denied
being the source.
When Kilgallen charged in her Spetember 30, 1964 column that the FBI
"might have been more profitably employed in probing the facts of the case
rather than how I got them", and thus implied that she had been
unnecessarily harassed, there was an angry reaction from inside the
Bureau. New York Officer Supervisor Jack Danahy phoned the Washington
office and emphasized that in two previous interviews, Kilgallen had been
well aware that the FBI investigation of the leak had been in response to
a direct request from the Warren Commission and that her implication was
false. Another memo from that same night, noted that days before the
column appeared, Kilgallen had promised to provide the FBI with a
photostat of the last page of the Ruby transcript for examiniation, but
that "she had given all sorts of excuses for not furnishing [it]."
Believing that Kilgallen had unjustly maligned the Bureau, the decision
was made to drop the investigation of the leak altogether and initiate no
further contact with Kilgallen. By this point, their impression of
Kilgallen was that of a devious reporter who had furnished them with
useless leads before (in December 1963, they had reluctantly decided to
investigate an assertion in her column that a prominent TV star who had
been friends with Ruby was worried about his connections with the man
coming to light. Their interview with Kilgallen on this matter is not
available, obviously because it would harm the reputation of a man who was
totally innocent), and that she would evidently cause more trouble for the
Bureau's image if they kept paying attention to her too much. And so,
more than a year before her death, the FBI dropped all further interest in
Kilgallen. There is no evidence to indicate that they took seriously any
of the things she would write in September 1964 that became the
cornerstone for her "investigation" into the Kennedy Assassination.
That "investigation" began in late August 1964 when she travelled to
Dallas and obtained the transcript of the Police Department radio logs for
the day of the assassination, and used them as the basis for an August 23,
piece in the Journal-American. The story was written to play-up what she
considered to be a "startling revelation" that as soon as the shots had
been fired, Chief Jesse Curry had issued an order to "get a man on top of
the overpass and see what happened up there." But Kilgallen noted that
"twenty four hour after the assassination, however, Chief Curry assured
reporters that the sound of the shots told him at once they had come from
the Texas School Book Depository and that 'right away' he radioed an order
to surround and search the building."
Biographer Israel chooses to treat this "revelation" with the
importance one would treat the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, and notes
that the Warren Commission never mentioned the nature of Chief Curry's
initial order at 12:30. But what was the real value of this "revelation"
to the actual case? In substantive terms, absolutely nothing. The only
thing it did prove was that 24 hours after the shooting, Chief Curry
decided to be a blowhard and inflate his own powers of perception in what
was no doubt, an effort to salvage some credibility for himself and the
Dallas Police Department. What Kilgallen, and later Israel, never stopped
to think about was the possibility that Chief Curry, who had been riding
ahead of the president's car, was simply confused in the haste of the
moment. Considering that no evidence was ever found to suggest a shot
from the overpass, the worthlessness of Kilgallen's "revelation" is even
more obvious.
What Kilgallen did next to fuel her skepticism, bordered on the comic,
even though Israel wrote about it with dead seriousness. Learning that
the Dallas Police had relied on Howard Brennan's description of a gunman
from his vantage point in Dealey Plaza, Kilgallen decided to conduct her
own idea of a scientific reenactment, for which she enlisted the help of
her alcoholic and abusive husband Richard Kollmar. The reenactment would
not take place in Dallas at the actual location under the sunny, noontime
conditions identical to those of November 22nd (as the Warren Commission's
own reenactment was), but would instead take place at night outside
Kilgallen's Manhattan apartment.
"Late one night, with the lights on in the house, Richard positioned
himself, broomstick in hand, leaning out of one of their fifth-floor
corner windows. Dorothy went outside to East 68th Street. Standing at
the approximate distance that Brennan had been situated [Kilgallen
evidently forgot that Brennan had been seated on a ledge with a better
vantage point than those standing at street level], she craned up at her
play-acting husband, hoping, doubtlessly, that they were unobserved by
neighbors. Dorothy concluded that there was no way in the world that such
a description could have been accurately determined by Brennan."
In other words, Lee Israel believes we should be impressed by a
conclusion drawn from a re-enactment under conditions that did not even
remotely resemble those of Howard Brennan's vantage point in Dealey Plaza
on November 22, 1963, and which was also arrived at without the benefit of
talking to Brennan himself. One can only marvel at how Kilgallen, who had
covered enough criminal trials in her career to know better, could have
made such a bold judgment based on a clear perversion of the scientific
process.
After this breathless description of Kilgallen's supposedly brilliant
detective work, Israel claims she was eventually vindicated by the
Zapruder film, because the infamous movie of the JFK assassination
revealed that Brennan "was not even looking up at the time the shots were
fired."
This declaration though, is totally false. Brennan's testimony before
the Warren Commission was that he looked up at the Depository and saw the
gunman firing his final shot, which was the head shot of frame 313 of the
Zapruder film. Brennan is not visible in the film at that point. He can
only be seen from frames 134 to 212 (nearly six seconds before the head
shot), which is a point encompassing the first shot, and when by his own
testimony he was not looking up at the Depository.
Just how valuable Israel's scholarly attentiveness is, becomes clear
when she admits that she herself did not view the Zapruder film to make
this assertion. Rather, she simply took the word of one man who had seen
the film and made his assertion about Brennan that she repeated verbatim.
That man was Mark Lane, author of the bestselling 1966 conspiracy-book (i)
Rush To Judgment (i).
But as one reads on, one learns that Mark Lane, who's twisted
deceptions in (i) Rush To Judgment (i) have been ably documented
elsewhere, was not simply a source for Lee Israel. As it turns out,
nearly all of Dorothy Kilgallen's "leads" on the JFK assassination that
supposedly had her on the verge of "breaking open the case" at the time of
her death, originated entirely with Mark Lane and no one else.
Ecstatic by the results of her "investigation", Kilgallen had contacted
Lane at his Citizens Committee Inquiry office to tell him her desire to
"break the case." From that point forward, Kilgallen was entirely in Mark
Lane's hands as far as assassination information went. Because of the
controversy surrounding the unauthorized leak of Jack Ruby's WC testimony,
Kilgallen had developed the suspicion that she was being watched by the
intelligence community, and given Lane's determination to prove somehow
that the assassination had been planned by American intelligence agencies,
he wasn't about to do anything to discourage that suspicion. Whenever
they contacted each other to discuss the assassination, they resorted to
tricks reminiscent of bad spy movies. At Kilgallen's suggestion they
would use separate telephone booths and use codenames for each other,
while on another occasion they "exchanged information under a lamppost."
At this particular point in time, late 1964, Mark Lane was in desperate
need of an audience. His efforts at "representing" Lee Harvey Oswald
before the Warren Commission had gone badly for him, with Chief Justice
Warren and all those who had heard his dishonest attempts to impeach
Tippit murder-eyewitness Helen Markham, essentially dismissing him as a
kook. Believing that he was being blackballed from getting his
"information" out into the mainstream media, the chance to use a popular
mainstream columnist like Kilgallen could only have been manna from heaven
for Lane. And with Kilgallen already convinced of a conspiracy based on
her shoddy research, she proceeded to accept uncritically everything Mark
Lane and his staff gave to her.
September 1964 saw Kilgallen use her nationally syndicated "Voice Of
Broadway" column several times to promote Lane's "evidence." It was
Kilgallen, who on September 3, gave the first account of the story Lane
had told the Warren Commission about the alleged "meeting" at the Carousel
Club between Jack Ruby, J.D. Tippit, and Bernard Weissmann (the author of
the anti-Kennedy ad that had upset Ruby on the day of the assassination),
and to her it seemed interesting that Jack Ruby had never flat-out denied
that such a meeting had occurred when he'd been asked about it by the
Warren Commission. Kilgallen also seized on a bizarre triviality in which
the purloined Ruby testimony indicated that a mysterious "oil man" had
also been linked to the meeting with Tippit and Weissman, but that Lane
had never mentioned such an oil man in his WC testimony, and that
therefore the original story of a Carousel Club meeting had to have been
confirmed by at least one other, unknown source.
It was a case of looking at a tree in what was a non-existent forest.
Had Kilgallen waited only another month for the entire Warren Report to be
released, she would have found that the story was completely absurd. Ruby
had not known J.D. Tippit, but rather G.M. Tippit of the special services
bureau. Weisssman, a 26 year old carpet salesman who had only been in
Dallas for three weeks, had never been to the Carousel Club, and as it
turned out, witnesses who had claimed they thought they had seen Weissman
in the club at one time (Larry Crafard and Karen Carlin), both admitted to
the FBI in their original statements that they were probably thinking of
another person entirely.
Kilgallen already knew what the Warren Commission didn't, the original
source of the story, who was Fort Worth reporter Thayer Waldo. It is also
reasonable that she knew who had furnished the story to Waldo. When the
full details of that came out in 1966 with the publication of (i) Rush To
Judgment (i), it was up to another reporter, Charles Roberts of Newsweek,
to ask the salient questions that had managed to escape Kilgallen's
attention in the year prior to her death.
"Waldo's informant in turn, was a customer of Ruby's who dated a
stripper and who 'understandably did not wish his visits to the Carousel
to attract attention because he was a married man and his girlfriend had
become pregnant.' Thus, Lane asks us to believe that he and Waldo knew of
a witness to a meeting that might literally have involved thenational
security, but refused to name that witness to a Presidential fact-finding
commission. In so doing, I submit he is either admitting the story was a
hoax and he knew it, or he is asking us to believe that he places the
family security of a Carousel customer over the security of his country.
I am inclined to accept the former."
The fact that Kilgallen did not see fit to contact Bernard Weissman or
the family of Officer J.D. Tippit before running Lane's story goes
unmentioned by Lee Israel.
The next Kilgallen exclusive from Lane was another story he would
eagerly promote in later years, the question of whether a Mauser rifle had
been found on the sixth floor and been switched with Oswald's
Mannlicher-Carcano, which Lane based solely on the initial mistaken
recollections of deputy Seymour Weitzman. As was the case of Kilgallen's
refusal to accept Chief Curry's initial recollection of the location of
the shots as a simple mistake, so too was she unwilling to accept the fact
that Weitzman, in the panic of the shooting's aftermath, had made an
honest mistake as well. Since newsfilm was taken of the rifle being
removed and confirms it to be a Mannlicher, this was another Kilgallen
exclusive that had no substantive value.
The same story highlighting the "Mauser" theory, contained another
exclusive courtesy of Mark Lane, his discovery of alleged Tippit murder
eyewitness Acquilla Clemmons who claimed that there had been two gunmen
and that Dallas policemen had threatened her not to talk. But since
Kilgallen had not consulted the Warren Report in full, she evidently did
not realize that over ten witnesses had unequivocally identified Oswald as
the sole killer of Tippit or saw him immediately fleeing the murder scene,
and that the accounts of those ten far outweighed anything Acquilla
Clemmons could have credibly claimed to see.
When the Commission Report finally came out shortly after the last of
her exclusives had run, Kilgallen refused to take note of any of the
obvious holes in what Mark Lane had given her. In the same column that
aroused the FBI's ire for her false implication that they had harassed her
over the leak of the Ruby transcript, she also added this.
"At any rate the whole thing smells a bit fishy. It's a mite too
simple that a chap kills the President of the United States, escapes from
that bother, kills a policeman, eventually is apprehended in a movie
theater under circumstances that defy every law of police procedure
[Kilgallen evidently did not choose to consult the testimony of Johnny
Brewer], and subsequently is murdered under extraordinary circumstances."
To her close friends, such as "What's My Line's?" production manager
Bob Bach, she was more blunt. She considered the Warren Commission Report
"laughable" and vowed that she would "break the real story and have the
biggest scoop of the century." (One can only wonder with amusement what
the moderator of WML?, John Charles Daly, thought of all this, since he
was married to Chief Justice Warren's daughter)
Determined as she said she was, a careful reading of Lee Israel's
biography indicates that after she ran these "exclusives" fed to her by
Mark Lane in September 1964, her active investigation of the JFK
assassination virtually ceased. The rest of 1964 and 1965 was largely
devoted to the writing of her book "Murder One", which was to describe all
the famous trials she had covered throughout her thirty year career.
Rumors were later circulated after her death that "Murder One" was to be
the forum where she would reveal the allegedly shocking details of her
"exclusive" interview with Jack Ruby during his trial.
But even putting aside the fact that the question of her ever having an
"exclusive" with Ruby has been disputed by Hugh Aynesworth, Earl Ruby and
his attorney Elmer Gertz (Joseph Tonahill, who would talk at length about
an "exclusive" to Lee Israel in the 1970s, told an entirely different
story to the FBI in 1964 while Kilgallen was still alive, saying only that
she was just one of many reporters who had requested permission for an
interview), one has to wonder what could Ruby possibly have told her that
would have had any meaningful impact? Considering that Ruby would live
another two years in an advanced state of mental deterioration where he
would tell outlandish stories of Jews being murdered in tbe basement of
the Dallas Police Department, it doesn't seem likely that anything he
could have told Kilgallen at one time would have changed the nature of the
facts about the JFK assassination.
She did remain in touch with Mark Lane on several occasions, one of
which was to concur with his assertions that the LIFE magazine photos of
Oswald holding the rifle had to have been faked. At this point, Lee
Israel again displays the value of her scholarship by telling the reader
that "photoanalysis in 1964 indicated that the real Oswald's head was
superimposed on another body" and then tells the reader that such analysis
was later vindicated by first quoting from Robert Sam Anson's ridiculous
1974 book (i) They've Killed The President! (i), and then telling us with
fanfare that "photographic expert Robert Groden told the House
Assassinations Committee in September 1978 that there was a 'paste-line
through the chin' of Marina's purported portrait of an assassin."
The reader is never told that Robert Groden was a lone wolf among nine
photographic experts on the HSCA panel, the rest of whom unequivocally
confirmed the authenticity of the backyard photographs. In light of
Groden's recent performance at the O.J. Simpson civil trial, one can only
wonder what Lee Israel thinks of him now.
Kilgallen ran one last column on the JFK assassination on September 3,
1965. It was little more than a rehash of questions surrounding the
photos, and an assertion that if Marina Oswald could explain the "real
story" it would undoubtedly cause a "senastion." She closed by vowing,
"This story isn't going to die as long as there's a real reporter
alive---and there are a lot of them."
She evidently found time to investigate one lead on her own in New
Orleans. Her make-up artist for "What's My Line?" recalled Kilgallen
telling him in October that she had planned to go to New Orleans to meet
someone who would give her "information on the case." The appendix to
Israel's book indicates that the contact was either Jim Garrison or one of
his associates. This would make a great deal of sense. Mark Lane, in
addition to providing Kilgallen with information, would also become a
prime source of assistance to Garrison once his "investigation" kicked
into high gear, and it may be possible that he or one of the other
conspiracy authors he associated himself with, had referred Garrison to
Kilgallen. It is worth noting that the connections of Lane and his
associates to Garrison is never mentioned in Israel's book.
What she learned, if anything, was never written up. In the early
morning hours of November 8, 1965, just four hours after doing the live
broadcast of "What's My Line?" and not long after she had left her
next-day's column under the door of her apartment, Dorothy Kilgallen died
under circumstances that remain puzzling to this day. The official
expalantion of complications from barbituates and alcohol remains dubious
to some people because they felt that Kilgallen was largely over her
addictions by 1965, especially since she had recently begun a happy affair
with a gentleman Israel describes as "The Out-Of-Towner". The tape of the
"What's My Line?" broadcast however, clearly shows her slurring her speech
at various points (not "crisply perfect" as Israel falsely claims). None
of this affected her game-playing abilities, which were always superior to
any other member of the panel, but it is clear that she was not in the
best of health that particular night. In 1978, HSCA counsel Robert Blakey
asked for a review of Kilgallen's autopsy (a copy of which is in the JFK
Assassination files in the National Archives), but he and his staff
evidently found nothing worth pursuing since no mention of Kilgallen ever
made it into the final report.
Someone might be able to prove someday that there was more to Dorothy
Kilgallen's death than met the eye that night. But if someone succeeds in
doing that, he will still not be able to show that it could have had any
remote connection with the JFK assassination. If one encompasses
everything she knew at the time of her death, it is clear that she did not
have a clue as to what the truth really was. Her entire investigation had
consisted of shoddy detective work on her part, coupled with false and
misleading information from a dishonest gentleman named Mark Lane. Had
she been able to tell the world everything she knew on the night of her
death, they would have been given another sneak preview of some of the
stories Mark Lane would trumpet in his book (i) Rush To Judgment (i), as
well as a possible preview of some of Jim Garrison's outlandish assertions
that culminated in his witchhunt against Clay Shaw. In both instances,
Kilgallen had been nothing more than a courier, not an investigator.
Considering that no ill-fortune befell either Lane or Garrison when their
respective work appeared in full bloom by 1966 and 1967, the likelihood of
Kilgallen's death being assassination-related becomes even more remote.
Indeed, the FBI files available to us, indicate that at no time were they
ever concerned about the nature of any of her 1964 assertions about the
case that were fed to her by Lane. The only thing about Dorothy Kilgallen
that ever worried the FBI was the prospect of more columns unjustly
maligning their image if they continued their investigation of who leaked
the Ruby transcript to her.
Dorothy Kilgallen was without question a bright, intelligent woman who
had solid credentials as a reporter, and who was the key to much of the
success of "What's My Line?". It is unfortunate that at a time when she
was not up to her best standards of health and deductive reasoning, she
became a willing target for the deceptions of Mark Lane and company. She
would not have been the first intelligent person to fall victim to Lane's
chicanery. The distinguished historian Hugh Trevor-Roper also would be
suckered by Lane, when he agreed to write the introduction to (i) Rush To
Judgment (i) and made assertions about the case that only repeated
unchallenged what Lane had told him. So too, did Dorothy Kilgallen have a
bizarre willingness to accept everything Lane had given to her without
utilizing any of her usual skills of reporter's skepticism and
investigative prowess. The end result caused her tragic death to be
surrounded in pointless sensationalism and disinformation that ultimately
did her memory a tragic disservice.
Reposted from:
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/kilgallen.txt
L A Morris
and DK in 'Kilgallen' by Lee Israel, pg. 368:
(she)"had probably a closer relationship with Jack Ruby than many of
the other writers who attended the trial...To my knowledge, she may
have been the first newspaper person to see Jack Ruby alone. At
least, from the moment I got into the case until I left, I think she
was."
Also a paragraph later, the author writes:
"Joe B. Brown(judge), awestruck by Dorothy, acceded readily to
Tonahill's request. The meeting room in the jailhouse was bugged, and
Tonahill chose a small office off the courtroom behind the judge's
bench. They asked Ruby's ubiquitous flank of four sheriff's guards to
consent to remain outside the room.
Dorothy was standing by the room during a noon recess. Ruby appeared
with Tonahill. The three entered the room and closed the door. The
defendant and Dorothy stood facing each other, spoke of the mutual
friend, and indicated that they wanted to be left alone. Tonahill
withdrew. They were together privately for about eight minutes, in
what may have been the only safe house Ruby had occupied since his
arrest.
"Dorothy would mention the fact of the interview to close friends, but
never the substance. Not once, in her prolific published writings,
did she so much as refer to the private interview. Whatever notes she
took during her time alone with Jack Ruby in the small office off the
judge's bench were included in a file she began to assemble on the
assassination of John F. Kennedy."
--She carried a BIG file on her JFK assassination research with her.
Many have said that she stopped researching much before her death, but
I am of the opinion that she was always working on it, along with her
other responsibilites.
In my opinion, Eric Paddon has an agenda in his article against the
Kilgallen story, Lee Israel, Dorothy Kilgallen herself, and Mark Lane,
and oh, I almost forgot, Robert Groden.. He lost my trust when he
said:
" To this author, the surest way of demonstrating the absurdity of the
Kilgallen story,.........."--great way to attract readers!!
I don't believe DK was being paranoid or overreacting when she stated
that her phones were tapped and had been since the publication of the
Ruby transcript. With what we know now about the intelligence
agencies, they did a lot more to people who knew a lot less than she
did. Here's some good reasons for the FBI and others to be concerned:
"She began to produce headline stories based upon statements and
affidavits that Mark Lane supplied to her at these clandestine
meetings, material gathered from personal interviews he and his small
staff gathered in Dallas. ...Dorothy had a wider audience, access to
print- a more suitable medium for the complex stories that wanted
telling- and new insights. "
..."She printed story after story of witnesses who had been threatened
by the Dallas police or the FBI."
About her book, 'Murder One, Joe Tonahill said:
"You asked why she never published an account of the episode (her
private interview with Ruby). I think she was in the process of doing
a book called Murder 1 (sic)when she died. At least, she and I talked
many times over the phone about the book and I was doing a piece for
it for her which had to do with "Irresponsible Murder" as opposed by
"Murder 1"...She may have the material that I sent her in her notes."
In the months preceeding her death, she went to Europe until June '65.
She was to appear on a TV show called Nightlife and assumed she would
talk about the assassination. The producer begged her not to talk
about this as it was too contoversial. She had brought her large JFK
folder with her, but she agreed not to discuss it.
Her last published piece was her column dated 9/3/65 which included
the statement:
"This story isn't going to die as long as there's a real reporter
alive-- and there are a lot of them."
In October she was very excited about a meeting she was going to in
New Orleans where someone was going to give her some information about
the case. She was found dead November 8, 1965.
The circumatances of her death are confusing. The time of death is in
question, who discovered the body is in question, the witness accounts
do not match, the Medical Examiner's records and investigation
incomplete.
And lastly, about the folder:
"Three days after her death, Bob and Jean Bach invited Richard Kollmar
(her husband) to their home for dinner. Bob asked the widower, "Dick,
what was all that stuff in the folder Dorothy carried around with her
about the assassination? Richard replied, "Robert, I'm afraind that
will have to go to the grave with me."
--And Richard was found dead in the same home as Dorothy a year later,
in much of the same circumstances as Dorothy was found.
(All excerpts from 'Kilgallen')
--Laurel
Leo Sgouros
L A Morris <JFKW...@mindcushion.com> wrote in message
news:3777c5c5...@news.supernews.com...
This is correct.
Here's some good reasons for the FBI and others to be concerned:
>
> "She began to produce headline stories based upon statements and
> affidavits that Mark Lane supplied to her at these clandestine
> meetings, material gathered from personal interviews he and his small
> staff gathered in Dallas. ...Dorothy had a wider audience, access to
> print- a more suitable medium for the complex stories that wanted
> telling- and new insights. "
>
She was producing headlines that Mark Lane was feeding her?Sounds like Mark
Lane is the one to be afraid of in this story-if it is Lane's stories she
passed and they were somehow the *truth* wouldnt the minions arrange for
Lane to have an accident?
Why her?
And why was Lane acting like a press agent?
I already know Mark Lane tried to invent something about Bernard Weissman
and Jack Ruby and JD Tippit.
Weissman was not involved in the assassination, Ruby only involved in
killing Oswald, and Tippit seems to have been at the wrong place at the
wrong time.
Maybe Mr Piper has talked to lane by now.
_L_
Vern Pascal
"Kilgallen". I feel vindicated, even though I'm sure it won't convince
those who will persist in their beliefs her death was not suspicious,
and that there is no evidence of a private meeting between DK and Ruby.
Regards, Vern
Leo Sgouros
I am not turning my back on anything.
If there was a private meeting like that why wouldnt I want to know.
I havent heard anything, but I miss alot ~```,(8^0