Hit List: An In-Depth Investigation Into the Mysterious Deaths of Witnesses to the JFK Assassination

by Richard Belzer

  If you look at Dorothy’s comments and columns in their totality, she seems to have put together some very important points which were highly pertinent to the JFK assassination. She makes some extremely prescient points:

  • That there was a connection between Jack Ruby, Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit (reportedly shot by Oswald) and a “Texas oil millionaire” (presumably H. L. Hunt, whom many place as playing a role in organizing the assassination);

  • That “Oswald” was in too many places at too many times and by too many differing descriptions to be the movements of one individual;

  1 Robert D. Morningstar, Justice For JFK, 1994: http://robalini.blogspot.com/2010/04/death-of-dorothy-kilgallen.html

  2 Wikipedia, “Dorothy Kilgallen,” accessed 16 Nov 2012, citing: Lee Israel, Kilgallen (Delacorte: 1979), 389, 390, 440.

  Dorothy clearly knew a lot of things about a lot of things:

  • Kilgallen herself had strong links to the anti-Castro community (it was rumored that she was a CIA media asset, which would make sense) and they regularly fed her information for her columns which originated from the same anti-Castro camps that Oswald was immersed in.

  • She expressed foreknowledge in her column that Marilyn had been having affairs with President Kennedy, then with Attorney

  • That Oswald had linkage to U.S. intelligence and U.S. intelligence was nervous about it and covering something up about their relationship with him;

  • That Marina Oswald (herself suspected by the CIA as being a KGB asset) knew “the truth about Oswald,” and if she ever told it then it would dramatically alter public perceptions of the assassination, writing in one of her columns, regarding Marina, that if people knew the “whole story of her life with President Kennedy’s alleged assassin, it would split open the front pages of newspapers all over the world”1—Something was rotten in Denmark, and Dorothy Kilgallen knew it. Get a load of this little gem from one of her columns:

  • “Even if Marina (Oswald’s wife) explained why her late husband looked so different in an official police photo and the widely-printed full-length picture featured on the cover of Life magazine, it would cause a sensation. This story isn’t going to die as long as there’s a real reporter alive—and there are a lot of them.”2

  • She also knew that the “real Oswald” story was being suppressed. . . . Here is a specific excerpt from another column of Dorothy’s:

  • “It appears that Washington knows or suspects something about Lee Harvey Oswald that it does not want Dallas and the rest of the world to know or suspect. . . Lee Harvey Oswald has passed on not only to his shuddery reward, but to the mysterious realm of ‘classified’ persons whose whole story is known only to a few government agents. . . . Why is Oswald being kept in the shadows, as dim a figure as they can make him, while the defense tries to rescue his alleged killer with the help of information from the FBI? Who was Oswald, anyway?”3

  1 Dorothy Kilgallen, September 3, 1965, New York Journal American

  2 Ibid.

  3 Dorothy Kilgallen, February 21,1964, New York Journal American

  • General Robert Kennedy, and realized that it may have been linked to Marilyn’s death;

  • Dorothy told friends whom she trusted that she was very close to discovering who had really killed JFK;1

  • She also explained to friends that the reason that she hadn’t gone public yet on her private interview with Jack Ruby (she had never written or uttered a word about it publicly) was because she was marshalling all her forces into her new book, which she was very excited about and confident would be a bestseller (she was experiencing financial problems and saw the book as the answer to them). So the rumor was that she had a lot of information that she had not yet divulged;

  • Dorothy said that she also knew that she was “under surveillance”2;

  • She gave a copy of her JFK notes to a friend as a backup for protection;

  • She had explained to close friends that she had received death threats and that if certain individuals found out what information she possessed, it may get her killed;

  • Had planned a trip to New Orleans that was very cloak-and-dagger and told friends she would “break the case” within the next five days;

  • She was found dead immediately before that trip to New Orleans.

  1 Simkin, “Dorothy Kilgallen: Biography”

  2 Israel, Kilgallen, 393.

  Dorothy had pieced together some of the main players whom she believed played key roles in the JFK assassination, including David Ferrie and Texas billionaire, H. L. Hunt. She realized that Jack Ruby had also been involved and she was investigating Ruby’s connections to the Texas Mafia, run by Carlos Marcello, and Dallas police officers, including J. D. Tippit. She obviously had noted that it was far too coincidental that Ruby, prior to the assassination, had known Oswald, Ferrie, and Tippit.

  On November 8, 1965, Dorothy Kilgallen was found dead in her apartment shortly after returning from Dallas where she had interviewed Jack Ruby and had conducted her own investigation of the JFK murder during several trips to cover the Ruby trial.

  She had revealed secret transcripts of Ruby’s testimony in her column. Kilgallen had met with Ruby. She had learned of a meeting three weeks before the assassination at Ruby’s “Carousel”, the Dallas underworld’s merry-go-round where the “Big D” mobsters wheeled around.

  Present at the meeting were Ruby, Officer J. D. Tippit, Bernard Weissman and, she would later learn, a fourth party.1

  “It is a fact that when Dorothy returned to New York, she told friends that she had discovered that Ruby and the slain Officer J. D. Tippit had been friends. They had been seen together in Ruby’s Carousel Club at a meeting two weeks before the assassination in the company of Bernard Weissman, who had placed the “JFK-Wanted for Treason” newspaper ad in Dallas newspapers on November 22, 1963. Studying the Warren Commission Report, Killgallen deduced that the meeting had also been reported to Chief Justice Warren AND that the identity of “the fourth man,” which she had been unable to ascertain, had been reported to Warren as “a rich Texas oil man”, as Earl Warren described him in the official transcript. She told Israel that she had discovered something that was going to break the whole JFK assassination mystery wide open. She told the same story to her next door neighbor, her hairdresser, her agent, her publisher, and the producer and host of ‘Nightlife’.”2

  Many researchers have suggested that a suspicious individual named Ron Pataky, a young, debonair man who had become very close with Dorothy, may have been involved in her death. Mr. Pataky has been accused of having links to the CIA and of attending assassination training; the implication being that his sudden friendship with Dorothy was insincere and actually just a means to gain means to “suicide” her.

  Well, that’s all very interesting and leads to some explosive connections. Now we’d like to suggest that you do your darnedest to at least temporarily ignore that. Contrary to the common currents of human nature, which tend to tackle a crime by finding the killer and “marrying” them to the act, that’s not really the way to actually solve a crime. As we note in our previous book, it is first necessary and proper to correctly identify the crime—and that’s why we believe that this book is important, because so many of these deaths have apparently been intentionally misinterpreted. So let’s get back to the crime scene and answer that question. Was Dorothy Kilgallen murdered? It certainly seems so, and we will lay out the case.

  The official version is that Dorothy accidentally mixed too much booze with her barbiturates, which killed her. In most of the cases in this book, we simply explore the facts of each death and carefully take you to where that logically leads. As a reviewer of a book on Dorothy’s death once noted, these cases are important, but each one needs to be looked at closely and fairly. Here’s that important statement—it’s important because it sums up simply how to look at these cases correctly:

  So posterity needs to evaluate each mysterious death according
to how plausible the murder theory is.3

  But this case is so blatant that we will come right out and tell you up front and early that the official version is simply a bunch of hogwash. Not only was Dorothy Kilgallen too

  1 Robert D. Morningstar, Justice For JFK ,1994: http://robalini.blogspot.com/2010/04/death-of-dorothy-kilgallen.html

  2 Ibid, emphasis in original.

  3 Donald Nolen, “Review of Killgallen, by Lee Israel,” 14 Jan 2004, Amazon.com

  intelligent and too cautious to be as recklessly silly as the official version implies, there are huge problems with the official story. Here’s a pertinent question for purveyors of that ludicrously logic-lacking official version: If Dorothy accidentally mixed too much booze with too many barbiturates, then please explain to us who spent the hours after she died carefully staging the crime scene and making some very amateurish mistakes? How ’bout that one, huh? Hell-O? Sorry. We digress. Back to the facts.

  Crime Scene Staging

  The many incongruities present at the death scene immediately bring to mind the words of the Chief of the Investigative Support Unit at the FBI Academy whose excellent work we cited in our chapter of Marilyn Monroe in Dead Wrong:

  Red Flags: Offenders who stage crime scenes usually make mistakes because they arrange the scene to resemble what they believe it should look like. In so doing, offenders experience a great deal of stress and do not have the time to fit all the pieces together logically.

  As a result, inconsistencies in forensic findings and in the overall “big picture” of the crime scene will begin to appear. These inconsistencies can serve as the “red flags” of staging . . .1

  Now, in answer to the question: Were there many of the above-referenced red flags present at the Dorothy Kilgallen crime scene? Answer: Yes, there were tons of them.

  Even if one ignores the fact that a famous reporter working on the biggest story of their career is very unlikely to commit suicide or otherwise overdose, there are some extremely bizarre oddities in the death of Dorothy Kilgallen:

  • Her body was found in a bed that friends and family knew she never slept in. Lest one underestimate the gravity of that point, consider this: Dorothy’s hairdresser, who discovered her body, explained it this way to his friend: “When I tell you the bed she was found in, and how I found her, you’re going to know she was murdered.”2

  • She was found wearing what has alternately been described as a “peignoir” or a “bolero-type blouse over a nightgown,” a thing which those who knew her best stated with certainty that “she would never wear to go to bed.”3 So if you don’t know what a peignoir is, here’s the answer—it’s a thing that ­Dorothy Kilgallen would never ever wear to bed. Actually, it’s a blue bed jacket, in this case. But apparently something horrid and not even imaginably “Dorothy.” And that’s straight from her hairdresser and, as the saying goes, you can bet that her hairdresser knows for sure.

  1 John E. Douglas, Ed.D., Special Agent & Chief, Investigative Support Unit, FBI Academy, & Corinne Munn, Honors Intern, FBI Academy, Violent Crime Scene Analysis: Modus Operandi, Signature, and Staging, February 1992, FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin.

  2 Sara Jordan, “Who Killed Dorothy Kilgallen?,” October 21, 2007, Midwest Today: http://www.midtod.com/new/articles/7_14_07_Dorothy.html

  3 Simkin, “Dorothy Kilgallen: Biography”

  • She was in bed with makeup and her false eyelashes, which friends and family knew that she would never go to sleep wearing;

  • There was a book placed on her bed, as though she were reading it before she passed out. But it was a book which, as she had told friends, she’d already read;

  • She used a set of reading glasses to read books, and there were no reading glasses near her;

  • Laboratory testing on the glass found near her revealed traces of one barbiturate. But the autopsy revealed that she was killed by a “cocktail” of small doses of three different barbiturates forming a lethal combination with alcohol.1 It was made to look as though she had simply taken some pills and gone to bed and quietly passed away. So how, when and where did the other two barbiturates enter her?

  • The air conditioning had been left on, which she never did at night, because the home got unbearably cold (and was when her hairdresser arrived).

  • A casual investigation, if any at all, was done on her death; it was a “soft-pedal,” rather than the serious investigation one would rightfully expect from the sudden death of a nationally-respected news personality.

  Lividity

  There is not nearly as much forensic information on Dorothy’s death as there should be, for even a typical “non-celebrity” death; and what does exist is often vague or self-contradictory.2

  However, we did obtain some information on the recording of the lividity markings present in Dorothy’s body and they also indicate that the body was moved post-mortem.

  Cassie Parnau is the author of The Kilgallen Files, an online educational site dedicated to learning more about Dorothy’s life and sudden death. Cassie also has a special investigator’s zeal and dedication that lends well to years of specific research focused on one topic. Also having a forensic background—having “seen a lot of bodies come across the table”3—made her very keen to learn about the lividity markings in the case, and she unearthed whatever information was discernible. Here’s what she concluded about the lividity markings on Dorothy’s body:

  The scene was staged. The autopsy findings: “lividity posterior involving the left neck and face” versus how she was discovered: propped up in bed, her head tilted, prove that she died in a different position than she was “found” in—a position that promoted an accidental death.4

  The medical implications of the lividity markings on the back of “the left neck and face” imply that the body of the victim was actually not in a propped up position at the time

  1 Parnau, The Kilgallen Files

  2 Ibid.

  3 Cassie Parnau, email to author, 16 November 2012.

  4 Cassie Parnau, email to author, 16 November 2012.

  of death and is highly indicative that the body of the victim was moved after they were already dead.

  Knowing that she was moved/propped brings into question everything that was found at the scene.1

  Autopsy & Drug Levels

  Dorothy’s blood alcohol concentration (BAC) was 0.15, which—although legally intoxicated—by contextual standards was pretty much just a normal late night after work in 1965 for a very sociable celebrity who was known to be a regular drinker. She was not, by any means, excessively inebriated, as was attested by the witnesses who saw and heard her in the time period close to her final moments.

  Much more noteworthy was the exotic combination of drugs that killed her. Three distinctly different barbiturates were found in relation to Dorothy’s death.

  Amobarbital: Commonly known as “Tuinal”

  Pentobarbital: Commonly known as “Nembutal”

  Secobarbital: Commonly known as “Seconal”2

  An overdose of any of those drugs will cause unconsciousness in 5–15 minutes and death anywhere between 20–50 minutes.3

  But in combination, they are particularly lethal . . . and quite interestingly, it was the exact right amount and combination to kill her. There was a level of only about five pills of each of the three drugs. As Kilgallen researcher Cassie Parnau notes:

  It is interesting to see that the approximation of the amount of pills in Dorothy’s system at the time she died is in line with the relatively precise amount needed to cause death. The amount of pills estimated in her system do not lean toward incredibly more pills than the MLD (Minimum Lethal Dose), as most suicides by pills do. (For instance her husband Richard—when he killed himself, he practically swallowed everything in reach.)4

  In other words, the fact that the exact amount of drugs found in Dorothy—the equivalent to 15–20 pills, although bear in mind that they may not have necessarily been in pill form—barely were enough to k
ill her; only the fact that they had been combined with some alcohol made them a fatal dose.

  That presents a huge problem: If she was trying to commit suicide, then she didn’t take nearly enough pills. Several doctors who studied the case agreed that the dosage was not in the range medically expected for suicide:

  1 Ibid, emphasis in original.

  2 Parnau, The Kilgallen Files

  3 Ibid.

  4 Ibid.

  The suicide theory presents one nettlesome problem. If she was stood up by, spurned, or in any way emotionally ravaged by the out-of-towner (Ron Pataky, the man she had been seeing), and thereby driven to suicidal rage, she did not take the kind of massive dose consistent with that rage.1

  She knew that there were plenty of pills at the house.

  Had she returned home resolute and seething, she could have availed ­herself of a virtual pharmacopoeia. Kerry Kolmar recalled that his ­father had vats of pills around, containers of Tuinal large enough to pickle mice.2

  So she didn’t take pills to commit suicide; but it isn’t possible that she took that many pills accidentally either.

  Also, it appears as if it would be more difficult to ingest 15 to 20 pills accidentally. Since Dorothy was seen in the 1:00 a.m. hour—and appeared to be in control of herself but “a little high”—and her time of death was estimated at around 2:00 a.m., it would not seem feasible for her to have been so stoned out of her gourd to have accidentally taken five pills three times.3