Does anyone remember her? This is really creepy. I've linked a documentary found on Youtube. The day she died, she had just taped an episode of "What's My Line". The episode still aired that night. This is from Wikipedia:
Kilgallen claimed she conducted an interview with Jack Ruby inside the Dallas courthouse where he was tried for the shooting death of Lee Harvey Oswald, although she never revealed the subject of their purported conversation.[38] Four or five months later, she obtained a copy of Ruby's testimony to the Warren Commission, which was published on the front pages of the Journal American,[39] the Philadelphia Inquirer,[40] the Seattle Post Intelligencer,[41] and other newspapers. Most of that testimony did not become officially available to the public until the commission released its 26 volumes of hearings and exhibits in November 1964, around the time of the first anniversary of the assassination.[42] The first of three installments of the Ruby testimony under Kilgallen's byline appeared in the Journal American on August 18.[43]
Kilgallen had a history of government criticism, suggesting in 1959 that the CIA recruited members of the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro, which many years later was proven to be the case.[44] By the time of the assassination, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had been keeping a file on the "flighty and irresponsible" columnist (his words about her were preserved in his own handwriting)[45] for 25 years.[46]
The FBI tried to determine who had given the columnist a transcript of Jack Ruby's testimony to the Warren Commission.[47] The agency abandoned, in September 1964, all attempts to identify this source.[47] The attempts had included sending two FBI agents to Kilgallen's house, where she told them she would not identify the source under any circumstances.[47]
The Voice of Broadway as it was published in the Journal American on September 30, 1964, included the following about the release of the single book containing the Warren Commission report, which was about two months before the 26 volumes were released:
...from what I have read, I would be inclined to believe that the Federal Bureau of Investigation might have been more profitably employed in probing the facts of the case rather than how I got them – which does seem a waste of time to me.
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, and subsequently is murdered under extraordinary circumstances.
The Warren Report made a great effort to note that the FBI and the Secret Service were delinquent in their duty, and that the press media – TV, radio and newspaper – also were responsible for the confusion that made Oswald's murder possible.
Baloney.
Oswald was not killed by a newspaperman. He was killed by a nightclub owner well-known to the police – Jack Ruby.
How can the Warren Commission pretend to forget that?[48]
In her column that the Journal American published on June 9, 1965, Kilgallen called The Manchurian Candidate (1962 film) "a routine melodrama with the plot telegraphed as neatly as if it had been sent by Western Union."[49] She said this at a time when many people who had seen the film before the assassination looked back on it with anxiety and with concern about whether Oswald had watched it or drawn inspiration from it.[50] According to Kilgallen's statement published on June 9, she was prompted to recall her impression of the old film (a few months before an American television network revived it for the first time)[51] because some Hollywood insiders were saying the screenplay for Seconds (film), scheduled to start filming in the New York area later in 1965, was "as off-beat as The Manchurian Candidate." Kilgallen did not live to see the completion of Seconds, which starred Rock Hudson. She made her point that The Manchurian Candidate was hardly off-beat.
In September 1965, more than a year after her scoop of Jack Ruby's testimony to the Warren Commission, Kilgallen said, referring to the murders of JFK, police officer J. D. Tippit and Oswald, "That story isn't going to die as long as there's a real reporter alive, and there are a lot of them alive."[52] That was the last sentence in her column item about Marina Oswald Porter's possible knowledge of the possible doctoring of an incriminating snapshot she had taken of Lee holding a rifle and The Militant socialist newspaper that Life featured on its cover in 1964.[52]
DEATH:
On November 8, 1965, Kilgallen was found dead on the third floor of her five-story brownstone, just 12 hours after she had appeared live on What's My Line?. Her hairdresser, Marc Sinclaire, found her body when he arrived that morning to style her hair.[7] He said decades later that she always slept on the fifth floor, adding that on November 8 he used his key to the brownstone and went directly to the third floor where he always did her hair near her large wardrobe closet.[7] She had apparently succumbed to a fatal combination of alcohol and barbiturates, possibly concurrent with a heart attack. It is not known whether the death was a suicide or an accidental overdose, although the amount of barbiturate in her system "could well have been accidental," said medical examiner James Luke.[61] Dorothy Kilgallen was interred in a modest grave at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York.
Kilgallen and Arlene Francis appeared as Joan Crawford impostors on an episode of the daytime version of To Tell The Truth that was videotaped on November 2, 1965, and broadcast six days later while United Press International broke the news about Kilgallen's death.[62] CBS News immediately noticed the report on its UPI machine from the Teletype Corporation.[63] Anchor Douglas Edwards announced it during the five-minute live newscast he regularly did promptly after the closing credits of To Tell The Truth.[63] He clarified for viewers that the preceding broadcast on which they had seen Kilgallen had been "prerecorded."[63] Kilgallen's appearance on this game show episode has been lost because of wiping.[64] The CBS Afternoon News with Douglas Edwards was not preserved, either.
Because of her open criticism of the Warren Commission and other US government entities, and her association with Jack Ruby and a 1964 private interview with him, Ramparts speculated that she was murdered by members of the same alleged conspiracy against JFK.[65] The February 1967 edition of Cosmopolitan, then edited by Helen Gurley Brown, reprinted the Ramparts article. Kilgallen's claims that she was under surveillance [66] led to a theory that she might have been murdered. She reportedly had told a few friends after her Ruby interview that she was "about to blow the JFK case sky high."[67] Throughout her career she consistently refused to identify any of her sources whenever a government agency questioned her, and that might have posed a threat to the alleged JFK conspirators.[68]
Kilgallen's autopsy did not suggest evidence of homicide.[4] On the death certificate, however, medical examiner James Luke typed "circumstances undetermined" underneath his notation "acute ethanol and barbiturate intoxication."[69] According to Kilgallen's Washington Post obituary, Dr. Luke spent 45 minutes at the death scene.[70] The medical examiner's office documented, however, that he had spent an hour and five minutes there.[71] Another medical examiner named Dominick DiMaio signed the death certificate, typing below his signature that he was doing this "for James Luke."[69]
Referring to Kilgallen's death certificate, Dr. DiMaio said in a 1995 interview quoted in Midwest Today magazine, "I wasn't stationed in Manhattan [where Kilgallen died]. I was in Brooklyn. Are you sure I signed it? I don't see how the hell I could have signed it in the first place. You got me."[7] He added that the only reason why Dr. Luke would not have signed the document was if he had not visited the death scene or performed the autopsy.[7] But evidence indicates Dr. Luke did both.[69][70]