Via NY Post:
On the night before her shocking death, Dorothy Kilgallen, a star panelist on the hit TV game show “What’s My Line?” correctly guessed the occupation of a mystery guest: a woman who sold dynamite.
The glamorous, razor-sharp Kilgallen delighted viewers, but behind the scenes, the dogged and courageous reporter was hot on the trail of the biggest story of her life: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
The morning after that show, on Nov. 8, 1965, the 52-year-old newspaper columnist hailed by The Post as “the most powerful female voice in America” was dead in her Manhattan town house. Her body was found sitting up in a bed, naked under a blue bathrobe, with the makeup, false eyelashes and a floral hair accessory she had worn on TV still on.
After an autopsy, the city’s chief medical examiner, James Luke, put on Kilgallen’s death certificate: “Acute Ethanol and Barbiturate Intoxication, Circumstances Undetermined.” Luke ruled her death accidental, caused by a combination of sleeping pills and booze.
Quickly closing the case, the city left a tarnished image of Kilgallen as a possible drug abuser and alcoholic.
The truth is far more complex and ominous, contends lawyer and veteran author Mark Shaw, whose exhaustively researched, true-life whodunnit, “The Reporter Who Knew Too Much” (Post Hill Press/Simon & Schuster), comes out Tuesday.
Shaw makes a compelling argument that Kilgallen was the victim of foul play, likely orchestrated by New Orleans Mafia don Carlos Marcello, who feared the results of her 18-month investigation for a tell-all book that would accuse Marcello of masterminding the JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald assassinations.