BY DAVE PRICE
Daily Post Editor
New York City officials on Saturday will rename a portion of East 68th Street near Park Avenue after Dorothy Kilgallen, a pioneering journalist who was investigating the assassination of President Kennedy when she mysteriously died at her townhouse nearby.
Kilgallen’s career and the investigation into Kennedy’s death were highlighted in bestselling books by local author Mark Shaw.
Kilgallen, who died at age 52, was known to most Americans as a sharp questioner in the game show “What’s My Line?” But her main job was that of a newspaper columnist who was one of America’s first investigative reporters.
In the days before Kilgallen died, many witnesses saw that she was carrying a satchel full of papers believed to be associated with JFK’s death. Those papers disappeared when her body was found. Shaw’s investigation suggests strongly that the FBI got to her townhouse before police and removed those papers and other evidence that would have linked the bureau to Kennedy’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963 in Dallas. The official cause of Kilgallen’s death was ruled acute ethanol and barbiturate intoxication.
But Shaw, in his earlier book “The Reporter Who Knew Too Much,” raised questions about the strange state of the scene where she was found — she was in a different bedroom than usual, fully dressed, and her friends noted the room appeared staged. These facts suggested her death was not accidental and might be connected to her investigation into the assassination. Shaw’s investigation showed that Kilgallen died when her drink was spiked with three lethal drugs by a man with whom she was having an affair.
Kilgallen wasn’t only a columnist for the Hearst newspaper syndicate, but she had been a regular panelist for years on CBS-TV’s “What’s My Line,” a high-brow game show. A guest would appear and the four-member panel would get to ask questions to determine what line of work they did. She also had a morning radio show on ABC radio that was aired on stations across the country.
Research into Kilgallen’s death led Shaw down a number of paths. One concerned the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, the attorney general and presidential candidate. Shaw’s latest is book is “Abuse of Power,” which refutes the theory that Sirhan Sirhan killed RFK at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968. The book also disputes the theory held by Robert Kennedy Jr. that his father was killed by the CIA. Shaw, an attorney, uses “Abuse of Power” to blame New Orleans mafia don Carlos Marcello as the man behind the killing. Shaw also believes Marcello, who died in 1993, was behind the assassination of JFK.
One jaw-dropping revelation in “Abuse of Power” is that Marcello told a fellow federal prison inmate, “Yeah, I had theh son of a bitch killed. I’m glad I did it. I’m sorry I couldn’t do it myself.”
Shaw contends the evidence he has gathered is enough to give Sirhan Sirhan a new trial.
J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director at the time, shut off any further investigation into RFK’s assassination by proclaiming that “Sirhan alone” was responsible, just as Hoover had declared that “Oswald alone” was behind JFK’s death.