Archive obit: Karyn Kupcinet (Nov.28, 1963)
deb...@comcast.net
Karyn "Cookie" Kupcinet (March 6, 1941 - November 28, 1963) was a
young actress who was murdered in a case that remains unsolved. It is
often speculated that her death was connected to the JFK assassination,
though there is no proof of this connection.
Kupcinet, the daughter of Chicago Sun-Times columnist Irv Kupcinet,
starred in a handful of minor roles, including a small part in the 1961
Jerry Lewis film The Ladies Man.
She was last seen alive on the night of Wednesday, November 27, the day
before Thanksgiving. Her nude body was found on Saturday November 30 on
her couch in her West Hollywood apartment. The coroner concluded that
she had been dead about three days. Due to a broken hyoid bone in her
throat, the cause of death was officially listed as strangulation.
Writer James Ellroy suggests that Kupcinet committed suicide with an
overdose of pills, but his conclusion is rejected by her family.
Police questioned several of Kupcinet's friends, her neighbor David
Lange, and her boyfriend, actor Andrew Prine, multiple times but no
charges were ever filed.
The connection to JFK's assassination was first made by author Penn
Jones. An Associated Press story reported that an operator overheard a
female caller from the area of Oxnard, California say "The President is
going to be killed" about 20 minutes before the assassination. Jones,
in his book Forgive My Grief II, moved the call 50 miles south to Los
Angeles and the date of Kupcinet's death to November 24 and claimed
that Kupcinet was the caller. Other authors, while often correcting
Jones' errors, have also claimed Kupcinet's death was related to the
JFK assassination, but left unexplained is why she would call from
Oxnard and how she had advance knowledge of the assassination.
After her name appeared on a 1992 Today Show broadcast on a list of
"mysterious deaths" connected to the JFK assassination, her father
wrote in his February 9 column that linking her to JFK's killing was
"an atrocious outrage...Karyn no longer can suffer pain by such an
inexcusable mention, but her parents and her brother Jerry can."