The Mysterious Death of Dorothy Kilgallen w/ Mark Shaw

My guest is former criminal defense attorney Mark Shaw, author of The Reporter Who Knew Too Much: The Mysterious Death of What’s My Line TV Star and Media Icon Dorothy Kilgallen. He talks about the life of Pulitzer nominated reporter and television star Dorothy Kilgallen, who was on the brink of breaking wide open the real story behind John Kennedy’s assassination before her mysterious and suspicious death abruptly ended her investigation.

The author’s website: https://markshawbooks.com/

Erik Rivenes: Welcome, everyone, to the Most Notorious podcast. I’m Erik, glad to be here with you. My guest today is Mark Shaw, a former criminal defense attorney and author of over twenty books, including the one we’re discussing today, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much: The Mysterious Death of What’s My Line? TV Star and Media Icon Dorothy Kilgallen. It’s especially topical, as you’ll soon hear, because of the recent release of some of the John F. Kennedy assassination files. Thank you for your time today.

Mark Shaw: Oh, you’re welcome. Thank you, Erik.

Erik Rivenes: So what is it about the story of Dorothy Kilgallen that led you to write a book about her life and death?

Mark Shaw: Well, as an author yourself, you know you just can’t tell sometimes about books. When we’re in the creative area, we splice something on the pages there. We started with no words, and then we end up with all these words, and you don’t really know what you have exactly, and whether anybody will give a darn. But that’s kind of the case with this one, because I never really intended to write this book, Erik. Like most people, I remember Dorothy Kilgallen as a star panelist on a game show called What’s My Line? It was on CBS for fifteen years. Every Sunday night, twenty million people watched that show. And for those who will recall that show, or the many young people who have found out about Dorothy and then gone to the reruns on the internet and all of that, it was kind of an intellectual game show where they brought on contestants, and Dorothy and three other panelists would try to guess their unusual occupations. And Dorothy was kind of the star. I have quotes about her calling her kind of like a prosecutor. She played to win.

And Dorothy at that time had multiple careers. She had broken the glass ceiling before we even knew about that. She was a college dropout and went through all the wars with gender discrimination and everything, because back then, a woman wasn’t supposed to be in the back seat of the car. She was supposed to be in the car behind, and Dorothy didn’t let that stop her. So she had a column in the New York Journal-American called “Voice of Broadway” that had some gossip, Broadway stuff. And yet she always touched on crime, because she had a real passion for that, and covered some criminal trials in New York City and all that. She was on the radio five days a week with her husband, a show listened to by millions. And she had covered many of the most famous, really infamous, trials of the twentieth century. Dr. Sam Sheppard — people will remember that case became The Fugitive, the film and the television series. Harrison Ford starred in that. She covered the Lindbergh baby kidnapping case, many others. And so she had this other side to her. But I didn’t know anything about that.

Well, in 2007, I published a book called Melvin Belli: King of the Courtroom. Many people will remember he was probably the most famous lawyer of the twentieth century. He represented the Rolling Stones and Tammy Faye Bakker and a lot of celebrities. His main client, though, was Mickey Cohen, who was a Los Angeles gangster. I knew Mr. Belli in the eighties. I practiced law in his building, and he and I got to be friends. And so when he died, I decided to write this biography of him. Well, I learned about Belli’s representation of Ruby and his Mafia affiliations. And so I got some question marks in my mind about that representation of Ruby, whether it was compromised. He used an insanity defense that didn’t make much sense, and Ruby was sentenced to death and all of that.

So I wrote the book about Belli, and then I put that aside, and I decided to write another book called The Poison Patriarch, which chronicled my belief that Joe Kennedy, the patriarch of the Kennedy family, was somehow or another connected more to JFK’s death than many people thought. And so I went back to the 1960 election. And as you remember, Joe thought that JFK was going to lose that election, and he made a deal with the devil, with the mobsters — Sam Giancana, Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante, all these guys — that if they helped him win Chicago and Illinois, then when they got in the White House, they’d leave those guys alone. Well, Bobby Kennedy was appointed attorney general. I had a primary witness who was right there when that happened. And Bobby went after those guys. And as you know, you can’t mess around with those dangerous types.

And so in The Poison Patriarch, I concluded that basically one of those mobsters, Carlos Marcello, had decided that he couldn’t put up with Bobby anymore. Bobby was deporting him. Bobby had charged him with conspiracy in a New Orleans court. And so my theory there was that Marcello decided, look, we can’t kill Bobby Kennedy, because Jack Kennedy will come after us with everything the government has. So instead of killing Bobby, we kill Jack Kennedy, and Bobby Kennedy is powerless. And that’s exactly what happened. They never bothered those guys again.

So that was it for me. I was done. And yet I’m a curious guy, like you are, Erik. During my research for the Melvin Belli book, I interviewed a doctor friend of Belli’s down in San Diego, and we talked about Belli and everything like that. And at some point during that conversation, he said he knew Dorothy Kilgallen. And I said, “You mean she was on What’s My Line?” He said, “Oh, Mark, you don’t know anything about her.” And he spilled out all this information that I just gave you about her multiple careers. And he said, “I have to tell you, when Dorothy died, Mel said to me, ‘They’ve killed Dorothy. Now they’ll go after Jack Ruby.'” And I could never get that quote out of my mind. “They’ve killed Dorothy. Now they’ll go after Jack Ruby.” And that’s what triggered my writing this book.

Erik Rivenes: So I’d love to step back for just a minute and talk more about Dorothy Kilgallen and her early life. She was really an amazing woman, and it’s just a shame that more people don’t know who she is. In your book, you compare her in her day to Oprah Winfrey, now a truly iconic female figure. How did she get started as a reporter?

Mark Shaw: Sure. Well, thank you for saying that about Dorothy, because you may have read in the epilogue that I think Dorothy guided me along all the way with this book. I think she chose me to write it. Some people think I’m crazy, but many times when I was going to give up or wanted more information, I felt like Dorothy was sending me in a certain direction. So I feel like today she’s probably listening to this, and she’ll appreciate your comments.

She was an amazing woman. Ernest Hemingway called her the greatest female writer in the world. The New York Post said she was the most powerful female voice in America. The honors just go on. She was a Pulitzer Prize–nominated journalist. Well, how did that happen? This young girl was born in Chicago before her father, who was a celebrated journalist himself, moved the family to New York City. And he worked for the Journal-American — it wasn’t called that at the time, but the Journal-American. And Dorothy was in his way all the time. She wanted to go down there to the office and all of that. She tried college and she dropped out. So there’s an inspirational situation — you don’t always need those four years of education. And she just became kind of a newsroom brat.

Well, finally her father talked one of the editors into giving her kind of an internship, we would call it now. And she started in, and at first it didn’t work out. And then she started writing these articles, and everybody in the newsroom was just amazed. And especially, she liked to go to the local courtrooms, and they let her do that. So she covered a few trials there and wrote about them, and she started to get some notoriety. And then all at once they said, “Look, we’d like you to try something else. We need somebody to report on Broadway, on the entertainment business, films, all of that.” And she said, “Well, I don’t know if that’s for me.” And they said, “Well, look, you can also include material about politicians, trials, whatever you want to.” And so that became the column “Voice of Broadway.” The Hearst Corporation was the publisher of the Journal-American, and they syndicated that column to two hundred newspapers across the country.

And Dorothy just became this media icon, a powerful woman. Like the New York Post said, she could make or break a career in that column of hers, Erik. It was something people read every day to get their news. And remember, we’re talking about a time in the fifties and sixties when there was no internet, and television was in its infancy. Where did people get their news? They got it from newspapers — magazines, too, but mostly from the newspaper. So she was this goddess of the media at that time.

And one thing that really stuck out with her, and I think this answers your question: she really got a reputation for integrity. This book has become a bestseller, and I’m so pleased that people around the world have sent me emails — five hundred and some at the last count — talking about Dorothy and the integrity that she had. She was a woman of the truth. She didn’t make up news. There wasn’t any fake news like today, where some newsman comes up with a conclusion, or an author comes up with a conclusion, and then fits the facts to that. For Dorothy it was the other way around. She got her facts, and then she either provided a conclusion or made her readers stop and think. And that was such a big deal. And how many people, Erik, have said to me, “I wish we had reporters like Dorothy Kilgallen today.” So it’s an amazing story in many ways, very inspiring. Many young journalists have told me that.

And then to go just one step further, I don’t know why the national media ignores Dorothy. Even just recently, when the JFK files were released, I couldn’t even watch some of these programs where they had so-called experts about the JFK assassination on. Because there’s one thing that separates Dorothy Kilgallen from everybody else about the JFK assassination. None of these so-called experts, these authors — me included — were there. And as you may know from reading the book and looking at the videos and everything that are up on DorothyKilgallenStory.org, Dorothy was there. She was at the Jack Ruby trial. She was the only reporter to interview Jack Ruby. She released his Warren Commission testimony before it was to be released. She is the expert, and I’m her voice. And yet Dorothy is somehow or another not included in the discussion. And that’s very sad, because I believe her investigation was the most compelling in history.

Erik Rivenes: I’ll admit, for a period in my life, I was a little obsessed with Nellie Bly, the groundbreaking female journalist from the turn of the century. She wrote an incredible exposé after she disguised herself as a mental patient and entered an insane asylum. It’s interesting that one of the things Nellie Bly did as a young journalist was to take a trip around the world and document it for her paper, and Dorothy Kilgallen followed in her footsteps, right?

Mark Shaw: Dorothy did, yes. Both of them did. There’s another situation — and again, you have to recall, there’s a great photo of Dorothy where she looks like she’s about fifteen years old. But they had this race around the world. And Nellie Bly, I think, was a hero of hers. When they said there was going to be a reporter from the New York Times and another reporter, both men, she just scurried right into her editors at the Journal-American and said, “I can do that.” And they said, “Dorothy, come on.” And finally she convinced them. She went out and got a quick wardrobe and got a visa and got everything, and she took this trip around the world. At that time — it doesn’t seem like a big deal today, Erik — but they used commercial aircraft, and she traveled the world, and they had this race. She didn’t win, but she came in second, and she got letters from Eleanor Roosevelt and everyone else praising her gumption in even getting involved in that race, and how well she did. And as you may know, they ended up making a film called Fly-Away Baby based on a book that Dorothy wrote. And I think she was still in her twenties or whatever. It’s just amazing that she was able to accomplish that. But there are some good comparisons there with Nellie Bly.

Erik Rivenes: So for a lot of us, our connection to Dorothy Kilgallen is What’s My Line? Fortunately, there are a lot of episodes of the show available on sites like YouTube, where we can experience her wit and charm for ourselves. And that television show, even if it was the only thing she’d ever done, would still have been a great legacy. For those who aren’t aware of this classic television show, could you explain the premise and what it did for her career?

Mark Shaw: Well, Bob Bach was an assistant producer in the CBS regime, and somehow or another they saw a show that was kind of like this, and he came up with the idea. He became a very good friend of Dorothy’s, and they decided to do this show. Well, she had some fame through her columns and everything else, so she was kind of a natural, and she became one panelist. Arlene Francis was a Broadway actress of some acclaim and very beautiful. Both she and Dorothy were fashion plates, wearing the latest Fifth Avenue fashions and all of that. And then Bennett Cerf was an interesting addition every week, because he was the co-founder of Random House. And that, of course, plays into Dorothy Kilgallen’s story, because at one point, after she had completed a great deal of her JFK assassination investigation, Random House hired her to write a book about what she was finding with the assassination and other matters, called Murder One.

So those were the three staples every week. John Charles Daly was the host, a rather staid type of guy. He didn’t let himself go too much, but every once in a while they could get some good laughter from him. He kind of ran the show. And then they had a celebrity guest panelist every week. That could range from Tony Randall to — oh, there were many people who were on there, Jimmy Durante — all kinds of stars from stage and screen. And those four sat there, and then a man or woman would come out and be introduced by John Charles Daly. In fact, Katharine Stone, who was basically one of the last people to see Dorothy Kilgallen alive on the last night of her life — her occupation, for instance, was that she sold dynamite. So they would bring her out. And back then it was a big deal: if they got a “no” to one of their questions, they would give the contestant five dollars, and they had ten tries, and then fifty dollars. And then they would announce who it was. Every once in a while they would have a mystery celebrity come on, and the panel would be blindfolded and would try to guess who that celebrity was. That was another fun part of the show. And it just clicked with everybody. Dorothy again was kind of the headliner, but all of them contributed to that successful show.

Erik Rivenes: She was so popular. And you give a great example of her popularity in your book. When she went to cover some of these famous trials, it wasn’t the criminal who was the center of attention — it was her, wasn’t it?

Mark Shaw: Well, I love the photograph of her on the cover of the book, where she’s right at a typewriter, because that’s who Dorothy was. People can take a look — you’ll see all the pearls on her wrists and around her neck, and she’s got this hairdo, and she’s serious as can be. But my real favorite photograph — and again, I would tell people to learn more about Dorothy in the book and everything associated with her; all of the quotes about her, her columns, the videotaped interviews with her closest friends and all of that are up on DorothyKilgallenStory.org. That’s where people can go to learn more. But my favorite photograph is up there, and she’s at the Dr. Sam Sheppard case, standing in the middle of a bevy of reporters, and they are all looking at Dorothy. That’s the kind of respect she had.

It was interesting, too, Erik, as you can imagine. She had a gossip column on the one hand, and yet she was this revered investigative reporter on the other. And she could mix those two careers and still have the respect of her colleagues. So if people take a look at that photo, they will see the admiration for her that was there. She’s just a remarkable woman, and I’m pleased that the book has done so well and so many people have learned more about her. I’m writing a follow-up book, and I’m going to be able to provide more information about her all the way across her life, death, all of that. And the paperback just came out this week, too, with a little more information about Dorothy. But I hope that more people will learn about Dorothy — and I’m going to keep trying — because I don’t think there’s anybody who can touch her in being a media icon. She was doing it all, but she loved to be able to cover those trials, that’s for sure.

Erik Rivenes: And judges would actually call her into their chambers for autographs.

Mark Shaw: Oh, yes. Take the judge in the Jack Ruby trial. When she got there, she was hanging around with Melvin Belli and his co-counsel, Joe Tonahill. And of course, on the website there, you can learn about how the interviews with Jack Ruby came about — the only ones he ever gave to a reporter, there at that trial. But the first thing the judge did was call her into his chambers and have her stand there with him for a photograph.

But the most compelling one is at the Sam Sheppard case. As people may remember, he was a noted surgeon, I believe, and his wife died at their home, and he was supposed to have killed her. People may remember the one-armed bandit that was so prominent in the television series and the film. During that trial, Dorothy did not believe that the prosecution had proven Sheppard guilty. Well, the judge called her in before the trial, and she sat there with him, and he said, “Dorothy, what in the world are you doing here at this trial?” And she said, “Well, it’s got all the aspects of a great story. It’s a famous surgeon, there’s a mysterious death here,” and all of that. And he said, “What do you mean? He’s guilty as hell.” And Dorothy just took that comment in, and they had a little more of a discussion.

Well, Dorothy was very secretive with regard to her sources and believed that that conversation was really between the judge and her, so she didn’t say anything about it. She kept files — she later had a thick JFK assassination file — and she made a note about that. Then Sam Sheppard was convicted, and she didn’t say anything through all of that, although at the end of the trial she blasted the verdict in her columns. But then about a year later, I believe it was, Erik — I may be wrong on the time frame — the judge died. And F. Lee Bailey, who was the appellate counsel for Sam Sheppard, and who I happened to know and practiced law with a little bit in the eighties, ran into Dorothy, and Dorothy said, “Hey, I need to talk to you.” And she told him what the judge had said. Well, obviously that’s judicial bias. And Lee Bailey admits, of course, that when they filed the appeal with the Supreme Court and Dorothy’s comments about what the judge said were in there, that was the compelling reason why the conviction was overturned. Later, Sheppard was acquitted of the murder. But you can imagine, then, the power that she had there. Because Dorothy Kilgallen had said this judge was way out of line with that judicial bias, a conviction was overturned by nothing less than the Supreme Court of the United States.

Erik Rivenes: Her column was incredibly powerful — powerful enough to make some enemies, including Frank Sinatra, right?

Mark Shaw: Yeah. The book is set up as a true crime murder mystery. And I’m pleased to say that we’ve been engaged by a production company in L.A. to produce a television series based on the book, and it’ll be set up the same way the book is. You learn about Dorothy Kilgallen, if you didn’t know anything about her. Then you learn that she had a personal interest in investigating the JFK assassination. And then she mysteriously dies. Then we find out what the official reason supposedly was for that, and then the new evidence that I uncovered that points toward murder. And then we have at least five, maybe six, suspects that I lay out like a prosecutor would lay them out to a jury. They range from her husband, Richard, to Carlos Marcello, to J. Edgar Hoover, who hated Dorothy because she was shouting out the fact that his Oswald-alone theory made no sense.

But one of the most interesting to people has been Frank Sinatra. She and Sinatra were good friends at one point, but she wrote a few columns about Sinatra’s girlfriends, calling them bimbos and has-beens and all of this, and how he would take them to bed and then dump them and everything. Well, he didn’t like that, so he started calling her “the chinless wonder.” If you look at a photograph of Dorothy, she has a little bit of a receding chin, and so he picked on that. He also sent a fake tombstone to her office. And of course, what did that trigger? Well, she wrote more unkind columns about Sinatra. So that was one of the main enemies that Dorothy had.

And as you may recall, when Sinatra found out that Dorothy had died, he was standing there, and he told his agent, “Well, gosh, I guess I’ll have to change my act.” Because every night when he appeared in New York City, he would make fun of Dorothy. He would use a key to show what her figure looked like. He would ask people to give him money so that they could buy Dorothy a new chin. So the two of them were really on either side of a strong, hateful relationship at the time. And of course Sinatra had enough contacts in the underworld and otherwise that he could obviously have silenced Dorothy if he wanted to.

Erik Rivenes: Wow. So I’d love to talk more about the Kennedy assassination with you. But before we do that, I want to ask you about her experience with President Kennedy. She brings her son to the Oval Office and is actually able to spend some time with him, right?

Mark Shaw: Yeah. It’s interesting what happens in people’s lives. I’m sure you’re the same way as I am — there are these defining moments. Dorothy knew JFK personally. He had been to her home; they played charades there. She saw him at the Stork Club, which was a very famous nightclub in New York City. But at one point she took her youngest son, Kerry, who was in third grade at the time, to the White House, and Pierre Salinger set up a tour for them. They were in the presidential library, and all at once JFK came in, and he embraced Dorothy, and then he just made the biggest fuss over Kerry. He gave him a PT-109 pin for his lapel. He looked at some letters the little boy had brought from his third-grade class, especially one that Kerry had written. And it just overwhelmed Dorothy. She never forgot that.

And that was a real defining moment, because when JFK was killed — Dorothy was a person who really questioned everything; she was a very curious person — she was very dubious right away about what happened. She didn’t buy the Oswald thing. It just seemed too convenient. So she sat there and watched all that, and she knew right away that she was going to look into her friend’s death, JFK’s death. And then, of course, when Ruby shot Oswald, that made no sense to her whatsoever. So that moment at the White House was a defining moment, and that’s what launched this eighteen-month investigation of hers. She had the best sources in the country, because she had that bully pulpit with the column and her articles and all of that. So right away, she went to her sources at the Dallas Police Department, and in Dallas and New Orleans, where Marcello was, and all of this. And then, of course, she ended up at the Jack Ruby trial.

Erik Rivenes: What’s so incredible about this whole thing — and it’s hard to imagine now, especially with the vast number of books about the assassination available, loads of different conspiracy theories, et cetera — is that at the time, there was no one really questioning the Warren Commission’s results except for her, right? She was the lone public voice.

Mark Shaw: Well, no question about it. She just didn’t buy all that. Hoover was out there shouting “Oswald alone, Oswald alone.” And people have asked me why. Well, here’s why: he was a smart man. He was trying to protect himself. If it’s a nut like Oswald, then nobody could have prevented it. But if it’s anybody in the government or in the Mafia or anything else, then he can have responsibility.

And I’ll just switch gears for a second, because in these JFK files that were released — at least part of them — a week or so ago, there is a very compelling November 24, 1963, FBI document. It basically says that Hoover has ordered that the American public should be convinced that Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin, the only assassin. That was his program. That was what Hoover was shouting out.

Well, here comes Dorothy Kilgallen. Seven days after JFK died, she writes this column — you can read it on DorothyKilgallenStory.org — “The Oswald File Must Not Close.” And she goes through all of this about how little sense any of it makes. And then she continues writing all these scathing articles questioning everything that’s going on. She has the best information of anybody out there, and nobody else is going in the direction that Dorothy is, because Hoover has sent all of the journalists, the American public, everybody in the world, on the Oswald-alone trail — which Dorothy believed was a dead end, as I do, because Oswald’s too confusing. There are too many speculative possibilities out there and everything else.

So she didn’t focus on Oswald. She focused on Jack Ruby, and that’s why she got those two interviews with him. Then she used her sources to get his testimony before the Warren Commission, Erik. And you have to imagine what a big deal that was when she published it. It was like publishing the Pentagon Papers or the NSA documents or the Nixon tapes, anything like that. That was a huge deal at that particular time. And of course that infuriated J. Edgar Hoover as well, because he was in charge of all the goings-on with the Warren Commission. So yeah, she was the lone voice. And today she still is the lone voice. And yet that voice isn’t heard as much as it should be.

Erik Rivenes: She was there when Jack Ruby murdered Lee Harvey Oswald, wasn’t she?

Mark Shaw: No, she wasn’t there in Dallas on that particular day. But she was there shortly thereafter, because that made no sense to her whatsoever. That was too convenient. And she started learning about Ruby and his connections with the police department, and all of the other aspects of his relationships with mobsters. In fact, I don’t think there’s any question in my mind — and I think it’s been proven by the new evidence that I’ve put together — that Dorothy had connected Ruby with Oswald and with Carlos Marcello, the one Mafia boss who had the most reason to kill JFK so Bobby would be powerless.

And you have to remember, after she interviewed Ruby, where did she go? She didn’t go back to Dallas. She didn’t stay there to look into JFK and LBJ or any of that. She didn’t go to Washington, D.C., to look into the CIA. She went to New Orleans — a trip that she talked about to her two hairdressers, her closest friends, whose videotaped interviews are on DorothyKilgallenStory.org. She told one of them, “I’m afraid for my life and my family.” She told the other one, “If the wrong people knew what I know about the JFK assassination, it would cost me my life.” And this was shortly after she was in New Orleans.

So Dorothy, I believe, really felt like the JFK assassination was a Mafia hit, start to finish. The motive was there for Marcello to do this. His empire stretched from New Orleans to Dallas. I mean, she had it all figured out. There was no real conspiracy in her mind. It was just, “Hey, here’s a commonsense Mafia hit.” You get to a point where you’ve got to get rid of somebody who’s persecuting you — or at least you think he is. So you kill JFK so Bobby is powerless. And that’s what Dorothy was going to write in her book for Random House. She was completing that book when she was found dead in her Manhattan townhouse on November 8, 1965.

Erik Rivenes: I’d appreciate it if you could talk about the last hours of her life — what happened and how she was eventually found.

Mark Shaw: Well, you have to think: after she was in New Orleans, she was going again. She had found some information there. She’d found a source. And so she was getting ready to go back there. And Dorothy was scared, as I said, through the two statements I mentioned. She had bought a gun. She was going to change her will. And she was a blabbermouth — Dorothy thought she was invincible. She was telling everybody she was going to crack this case wide open. It’s the trial, the case of a lifetime. She basically told one hairdresser, “I’m going to prove who killed the president and why.” So she set herself up as a target. And all these enemies were circling, all of them having motive to get rid of her.

So she comes back to New York City, and she’s working on her book, and she’s getting ready to go back to New Orleans. And on the last night of her life, she gets a telephone call at her apartment. It’s from this guy that she’s been dating, so to speak. Dorothy was married, but she’d had an affair or two. This guy, who was a journalist in Columbus, Ohio, had become a friend of hers and a lover. And we believe that she got a phone call from him asking whether they could meet later that night, because Dorothy suspected that this journalist, Ron Pataky, was leaking her JFK assassination information to the wrong people, out of this file that she carried with her all the time.

So she goes to What’s My Line? and she performs there. She guesses the occupation of the woman who sold dynamite. She then goes to a bar called P.J. Clarke’s in New York City, which is still there today — I’ve sat right next to the table where Dorothy sat that night. And then she goes to the Regency Hotel, to a bar there where there’s a party going on with the contestants of What’s My Line?, including this Katharine Stone, the dynamite woman. And Katharine sees Dorothy in the corner with this man, who we believe is Ron Pataky, and they’re talking very seriously about things. And then at some point Dorothy disappears from the hotel. We don’t know exactly how she got home, but at some particular point she does.

I think the proof in the book — especially the forensic evidence — well, I’ll get to that in a minute. The forensic evidence, we believe, shows that at some point her drink, there at the Regency Hotel or at home, was spiked with barbiturates. Somehow or another, that happens. And then at nine o’clock the next morning, on the eighth, her hairdresser, Marc Sinclaire, comes over to fix her hair for a meeting she has at Kerry’s school. He goes into a bedroom on the third floor that she never sleeps in, and finds her in a bed she never slept in. And Dorothy has on her false eyelashes, a hairpiece, and makeup that she never wore to bed. There’s a book lying — or laying, whichever it is — on her lap, upside down, that she’d already read. Her reading glasses aren’t around. And common sense would say this is a staged death scene.

Well, they finally call the authorities — and I have some new evidence about that we can talk about in a minute. But the authorities come, and a medical examiner is called, not from the Manhattan branch but from the Brooklyn branch, which is known to have had Mafia control; there are eyewitnesses in the book who were right there and talk about how much that was going on. And right away, this medical examiner sees an empty bottle of Seconal, which is sleeping pills, on a bedside table, and one thing leads to another. He does this autopsy, and he decides that she died of a combination of barbiturates and alcohol intake. Unfortunately, that verdict is just accepted by everybody, despite the fact that Dorothy didn’t have any drug problems and wasn’t an alcoholic of any kind. There is absolutely no investigation of any kind, Erik. The case is basically closed, until there was some information in a book written in the 1970s, and then what I have uncovered and produced in this book, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much. Dorothy Kilgallen was basically buried. The killers won, in my opinion, because she was absolutely silenced and never heard of for fifty-some years, basically.

Erik Rivenes: It’s similar in some ways to the death of Marilyn Monroe, isn’t it?

Mark Shaw: There are those similarities. There are some differences, but there are similarities. And I don’t believe there’s any connection between the two that I have discovered. The problem with the investigations into Marilyn Monroe’s death — I’m a big primary source guy, like you are. I want to get the truth right from the person, not from five people who say somebody said something. And that’s kind of what happens with Marilyn’s case. The investigators came there, and they botched the crime scene. Plus, there isn’t a lot of primary source evidence about her movements during the last days of her life. There is some new information in the JFK files about her romance with Bobby Kennedy, but again, that’s kind of speculation. With Dorothy, you’ve got people who were there: the two hairdressers, the woman who last saw her. And then — God love them — readers of this book from all over the place have contacted me, and all of this new evidence has come to me. Some of it is in the paperback that just came out, and some will be in the new book that comes out next year. Really firsthand information about more things that happened with Dorothy during those last days of her life.

Erik Rivenes: Interesting. So you write in your book that there are three possibilities for the cause of her death. She might have died of an accidental drug overdose, she might have committed suicide, or she might have been murdered. You’ve already mentioned she didn’t abuse alcohol and she didn’t take drugs. What was her mental state? Is it a possibility that suicide was something she was contemplating?

Mark Shaw: Well, Dorothy was Catholic, and most people have said that wouldn’t have happened because of the religious ban on that kind of thing. But she had everything going for her. It made no sense whatsoever. She had a movie they were going to make based on the book she was writing. She was at the top of her performing life. What’s My Line? was still a huge hit. The radio show. She just had everything going for her. She loved her children so much. It’s just absurd that anything like that would have happened.

Accidental death: there are toxicologists, including Dr. Michael Baden, who looked at the fresh tests of Dorothy’s bodily fluids from 1968 and said, “Wait a minute, this makes no sense.” There were three barbiturates found in her system, not just Seconal — very dangerous barbiturates. And they would never have been taken accidentally. Some was in powdered form, which meant that somebody had opened up the capsules, so the powder form was there. So there’s all sorts of evidence showing that accidental death doesn’t make any sense.

And then you get to murder, of course. I don’t think there’s any question, with the suspects that I’ve presented and the motives involved, that Dorothy Kilgallen had to be silenced — the worst form of censorship. Marcello and Hoover and those kinds of people couldn’t let her write that book. She was going to name names, and I believe there would have been a grand jury investigation.

And that brings me to something important here, Erik. I think the course of history would have been changed if Dorothy Kilgallen had lived. She was the most credible reporter at the time; she had that respect. And here she is, writing this book, and I believe that would have triggered a grand jury investigation. Let’s think about that. We really would have gotten an awful lot of answers about what happened. Now, everybody wouldn’t have had to believe her. But just think how that would have changed things. And what bothers me now is that some of the national media still won’t focus on Dorothy Kilgallen. So we have the continuing distortion of history that happened back in 1965.

Erik Rivenes: So again, in your book, you ably document the various suspects who might have killed her, and you’ve talked a bit about each one of them. I’d like to ask you about Ron Pataky again. He’s kind of a special suspect, in the sense that you were actually able to interview him, right? Can you talk about what that experience was like, meeting him face to face? It’s a fascinating story.

Mark Shaw: Well, anytime you’re an author and you’re going to expose the fact that there’s a main suspect in a case — in the 1970s, when there was a book written, they called him “the out-of-towner.” They didn’t want to print his name. But I found interviews with him by a couple of other journalists that were very confusing and very conflicting, and I wanted to see for myself if Ron would talk to me. He very conveniently came into Dorothy’s life just about the time that she was involved in the JFK assassination investigation, and they did become lovers. Despite what he says, she loved him very much. She had a bad marriage with her husband, who’d become an alcoholic, and so she trusted him. And a few times I wondered about all that.

So I basically contacted Ron through his website and said I’d like to talk to him. Well, he not only talked to me once, but twice — and I think a third time. One of those interviews I audiotaped with his permission. And basically Ron was all over the board with regard to the things he told me: where he was on the day she died, conflicting accounts of how he found out about her death, whether she really shared JFK assassination information with him, what she had in her file. One time he would say, “I didn’t have it,” and the next time he’d say, “Yes, she trusted me with that. I helped her with a column headline having to do with Jack Ruby.” So there are all these question marks.

And it was interesting talking to him, because as a former criminal defense lawyer, if I had been advising Ron, I would have said, “Ron, keep your mouth shut.” But I think he wanted to tell me these things. I felt like Ron kind of wanted to get a lot of this off his chest, and so he provided me with all that information. I told him it was going to be in the book. When the book was released, I sent him a copy, and I never heard from him. People asked me whether he was going to sue me, and I said, “I very much doubt it,” because I don’t think Ron Pataky would want to get himself into a courtroom.

Just as the paperback was coming out last week, I emailed him again and said, “Ron, you’ve probably read the book, and you know what I’ve written. If you want to talk to me again, I’d like to interview you.” I sent a backup email just to make sure he got it. And I said, “I know you know what happened to Dorothy Kilgallen. Whether you were directly involved or not, I don’t know, but I know you know what happened. Come on. For Dorothy’s sake, talk to me about this.” And I have not received any response to those two emails — because I want to give everybody a fair shake. But at some point, I believe, through a continuing investigation, Ron is going to have to answer for his conduct back in 1965. He’s eighty-two years old, lives in Ohio now, and he’s still around. And I’m going to keep after him.

Erik Rivenes: And there was a point where Pataky fancied himself a bit of a poet, right? Yeah, he wrote a couple of really bizarre and incriminating poems.

Mark Shaw: Well, what I’ve said to people is, I want my books, like you do, to make people stop and think. So I don’t tell them what to do. I just present all the facts, and then they can make up their minds. And this book has really touched people’s emotions. For whatever reason, they are concerned about what happened to Dorothy and that she was denied justice back in 1965 and all of that. And when they ask me about Ron Pataky in all these emails and everything, I say, just go look at the two poems he wrote.

One of them had to do with basically silencing someone at a typewriter — keeping her mouth shut, making her shut her mouth. That was strong evidence that it had to be about Dorothy. What else could it be about? The other one, though, was even more compelling — or more incriminating, I suppose you could say. He’s got a little cartoon with it of a bartender behind a bar; it looks like it could be at a nightclub or something. And it’s all about poisoning a drink. I don’t think it’s any stretch of the imagination to believe — since three barbiturates, not one, were found in Dorothy’s stomach — that somebody put those barbiturates into her favorite drink, a gin and tonic, where the tonic would cover up the taste of the barbiturates. I don’t have any question in my own mind — and most readers don’t — in believing that those two poems relate to Dorothy.

Now, he told me they were supposed to be humorous. And I said, “Come on, Ron, nobody’s going to believe that.” And he said, “Well, I just wrote them for fun.” And I said, “Oh, come on.” So that’s a really compelling reason why I think he’s the chief suspect in Dorothy’s death. And like I say, one of these days he’s going to have to answer for what happened back then.

Erik Rivenes: Yeah. I’d like to ask you about the current investigation by the New York District Attorney’s Office. The catalyst for reopening this case was your book, right?

Mark Shaw: Well, that’s an interesting story. I’ll bring you right up to date. My literary agent said, “Hey, Mark, you’re crazy,” when I said I was going to write a letter to the New York District Attorney’s Office asking them to investigate Dorothy Kilgallen’s death fifty-two years later. Because there was no investigation in 1965. People were scared to come forward in ’65 — that’s what I’ve learned. People have even been scared to talk to me now, fifty-two years later, for whatever reason, including family members. But they were scared because here’s what they thought: we know Dorothy was working on the JFK assassination. Logically, that’s why they killed her. And if those same people killed JFK and then killed Dorothy, well, we’re not about to come forward. So none of her family, none of her What’s My Line? colleagues, none of the newspaper people — nobody came forward. They just let it go, which is a real stain on their reputations.

Well, I sent this letter to Cyrus Vance Jr., and lo and behold, the New York Post in January published an article saying that they were going to look into and investigate Dorothy Kilgallen’s death. And I’ll tell you how her name is still magic: the reporter, Sue Edelman, told me that online article got two hundred and thirty-five thousand hits, and that didn’t even count the print edition. So many people were interested in Dorothy.

So the director of communications there set me up with an email trail that we could use. They’d already told me that the book had been read, and that they’d looked at some video I’d sent them, some audiotapes, the Pataky information, all of that. So they knew all about that. Well, all this new evidence started coming in to me, Erik, and I would send it on to Joan, the director of communications, and she was going to filter it to the chief investigator in the DA’s office. That went on through January, February, all the way until June, when I was making a trip to New York City, because I had located Dorothy Kilgallen’s butler James Clement’s daughter, Brenda. I could never find her before I wrote the book. So I said, “I want to talk to the assistant district attorney involved in Dorothy’s case and the chief investigator.” And Joan finally set up a meeting.

On June 2 of this year, I sat with the detective, Richard Ramos, a former homicide detective assigned to Dorothy’s case. And he was just overflowing with how pleased he was to be involved in the case, and he called Dorothy a victim. He’d already sent out subpoenas, he’d read my book, and he’d looked at all the videos on DorothyKilgallenStory.org. He was convinced she was the reporter who knew too much. He was so excited. And I gave him a twenty-two-page evidence report with twenty-five witnesses in there who needed to be interviewed, and all of these documents that I now knew existed through some research I had done. He was just ecstatic.

And everything went forward through June, July, and August. He and I became email buddies, and he was so appreciative of all the work I was doing and all these other things that were going on. So we get to August, and he tells me that he wants to have a telephone conversation with me and the assistant district attorney, Gene Hurley, to update the investigation. So we have this telephone call, and I’m expecting — I’m hoping — that they’re going to say, “Look, we’ve really looked into this thoroughly. We’ve really gone forward, and we believe that yes, Dorothy Kilgallen was killed. We maybe can’t tell who did it, but at least we know that.” So I’m expecting that news.

And then I hear this Gene Hurley say, “Listen, Mark, we find no evidence that Dorothy was harmed by the actions of another.” And I said, “What?” And he said yes. And I said, “Well, listen, who have you interviewed?” “I can’t tell you that.” “Well, did you talk to Ron Pataky?” “I can’t tell you that.” Four or five or six times: “I can’t tell you that.” At one point he finally said to me, “You know, Mr. Shaw, I can’t argue with this. We’re going to stop the investigation, and we’re not going any further with it. And in fact, we can’t tell who did it.” And I said, “What? You just told me that she wasn’t harmed by anybody, and now you’re telling me you can’t tell who did it? Those two comments don’t make any sense.” He said, “Listen, we’re going to close the investigation.” And then, abruptly, the conversation was over.

So I heard that news. And again, I’m a curious person, like you are, and suspicious, too. He had said it was a really thorough investigation, and I thought, I wonder if they talked to any of these witnesses. So I sent out four or five emails to very critical witnesses. One, Erik, had been at a 1970s dinner where Dorothy’s daughter, Jill, was, and said that Jill had told the people there, “My mother was murdered.” I had confirmation of that from Kilgallen’s butler’s daughter. There were other witnesses in there — a toxicologist at the medical examiner’s office, for one. Well, they wrote me right back and said, “We’ve never been contacted.” I looked at all of the witnesses I had given them, and I can only find one that they interviewed.

So I decided to write another letter to Cyrus Vance Jr., and say, “Look, this was not in any way a thorough investigation. It has denied Dorothy justice again. Do something about this. You know that this was a false statement that was made regarding this investigation” — because they had told the New York Post, which published a short article about it. This is all denying Dorothy the justice she deserves, again. And I didn’t get any answer to that.

So I did the only thing I could do, and that was file a Freedom of Information request asking for all the witness statements and documents — knowing that, in my belief, they don’t really have any witness statements, but trying to pin them down as to what happened. Well, that was denied. So the next step — and I won’t give up, Erik, just like you wouldn’t — I’m filing an appeal. It’s a twelve-page letter to the hearing officer, who unfortunately, of course, works for the DA’s office. But it sets out everything, start to finish, and it will be filed Monday. And there is an organization in New York called the Committee for Good Government, and they’ve gotten involved in this, because they see the absurdity of the DA killing this investigation when it wasn’t in any way, shape, or form thorough.

So I’ll file that. I don’t know whether we’ll have any good fortune with it, but the next step then will be the courtroom. And I’m just going to keep after this. The people who have heard that they closed the investigation are furious — all of her supporters. So I’m going to keep after it. But once again, we seem to have a cover-up, like we had in 1965 and then again in 1968. For whatever reason, people are scared to death of Dorothy Kilgallen and her JFK assassination investigation and anything about her death. And maybe that’s why some of the national media won’t focus on Dorothy. There’s just something there that I can’t figure out, because we’re fifty-two years later, and Dorothy Kilgallen should get the justice she deserves. And I’m going to keep fighting for that to happen.

Erik Rivenes: I’m sure it’s pure speculation, but what do you think are the real reasons why this thing isn’t moving forward?

Mark Shaw: I don’t know that it’s pure speculation, based on one of my theories. It could have been too expensive. It could have been taking too long. They wanted to use Detective Ramos on something else. It could be something like that. But one of the things that Dorothy Kilgallen’s butler’s daughter told me — that her father related to her — was that between the time the body was found in the morning and when the police came, government agents, FBI agents, were in that townhouse carrying Dorothy Kilgallen’s documents and papers away in several boxes. This thick JFK assassination file that she had disappeared and was never found. People believed that her husband had it, but I think my new evidence shows that wasn’t the case.

So my belief is this: whether or not J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were directly involved in Dorothy Kilgallen’s death, when Hoover found out she was dead, he sent his agents in there looking for one thing. What was that? The JFK file. My hope has always been that her investigation file is in the FBI files. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI. I’ve never gotten it, but I’ve always felt it was there. So whether it was corruption in the New York Police Department or the medical examiner’s office, or the fact that the FBI could somehow put pressure on the DA’s office not to release any of those documents — I have a feeling that’s what’s behind this. And it’s not speculation, because they were aware of all this evidence, including the butler’s daughter telling me about the FBI being there.

So the mystery just continues. It’s the mysterious death of Dorothy Kilgallen, and it just continues on, because now this has happened. We’ll see what happens with the appeal. But I guarantee you, every single thing that I put in this appeal letter — all the emails from Detective Ramos and from the director of communications at the DA’s office — all of that will be in the new book, along with all of the new evidence that I found. And then people can make up their own minds. But I’m hoping — maybe I’m too optimistic, Erik — that when this appeals officer sees this letter, and when the Committee for Good Government sees it, something’s going to happen there, and they’re going to decide, “Look, this wasn’t a thorough investigation,” and they’ll reopen it. That’s my greatest hope right now.

Erik Rivenes: Well, what do you think Hoover’s motivation was for covering this all up?

Mark Shaw: Well, what would have scared J. Edgar Hoover and Carlos Marcello and the other mobsters who may have been involved is a grand jury investigation. And Dorothy had it all. That quote is coming back to me, because that’s what one of the hairdressers says in one of those videotaped interviews on DorothyKilgallenStory.org: “She had it all.” They knew she had it all. She was telling everybody she had it all. And here are Marcello and Hoover watching from afar, and here’s the one thorn in their side.

Conveniently, Oswald is arrested right after, and Hoover says “Oswald alone, Oswald alone.” Now you have Ruby conveniently killing Oswald. And I can tell you as well, a reader, a lawyer down in Fresno, California, was kind enough to get in touch with me, and he has given me permission to use the two-thousand-page Jack Ruby trial testimony, which has never been published before. I went through it — it took me about eight days — and I found information in there about Ruby that made no sense whatsoever in terms of his just accidentally being in the Dallas Police Department basement that morning when he killed Oswald. It makes no sense at all.

But Oswald is now dead. Now you have Ruby, and you bring in Melvin Belli, the Mafia-affiliated lawyer, and he comes up with this ludicrous defense that makes Ruby look like he’s crazy, and he won’t let Ruby testify. So now Ruby is basically a lost cause. There’s only one person out there who’s shouting, “Hey, this doesn’t make sense,” and that’s Dorothy Kilgallen. And so, in my opinion, there’s no question whatsoever that they could not let her write that book. They could not let her write that book. And so, one way or another, she had to be silenced.

Erik Rivenes: Well, this has been excellent. And your book, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, is available pretty much everywhere, right?

Mark Shaw: It is. And again, it’s not about selling books for me. I’m pleased that it’s become a bestseller — at last count, some twenty-some thousand books had been sold, and it’s in libraries, it’s on Amazon, and the paperback is in bookstores everywhere. But it’s about all of these people finally learning about Dorothy Kilgallen. And I’m going to keep shouting. I think at last count I’d done more than one hundred media interviews about Dorothy since the book came out, and I continue to do those. And people like you, who are people of the truth — I appreciate so much your having me on the program.

And I do want to say, Erik — and as you know, I’m an admirer of yours now, with what you’ve been able to do and your being an author yourself and all of that — if there’s anybody who listens to your popular podcast who knows something… There are many people who are still alive, and you never know what they might know about Dorothy Kilgallen’s case. For instance, I had a librarian in Illinois who told me about a woman who was at a meeting there, and they were talking about the JFK assassination, and Dorothy Kilgallen’s name came up, and she said, “You know, I waited on her the last night at P.J. Clarke’s, and she was talking about the JFK assassination.” So if somebody knows anything, I hope they’ll let me know, because I continue to try to build a case with new evidence — whatever will compel this investigation to be reopened.

Erik Rivenes: And the case is still recent enough, as you’ve mentioned, that there might very well be people out there who have some real firsthand knowledge of what really happened.

Mark Shaw: Well, I think there are. And again, I’m looking for primary witnesses, not “somebody told somebody told somebody.” I’m looking for people who have eyewitness testimony and can provide facts that are credible. Because that’s what Dorothy would do. That’s what I’ve tried to do with this book: to be her voice and to act the way Dorothy would act. If Dorothy Kilgallen had gone after this particular death, let me tell you, things would have changed, because she would have gotten to the bottom of it, whether she was scared or not. She was fearless. She basically put a target on her back, believing that she was invincible. But unfortunately, obviously, she wasn’t.

Erik Rivenes: One more question. What do you think it is about Dorothy Kilgallen that’s struck such a chord with your readers? Because people have become obsessed with her life and death, in large part because of your book.

Mark Shaw: People have called her a patriot. They’ve called her a hero. There’s a woman who went to the cemetery where she’s buried, brushed away the leaves, and put flowers there. What is it? I’m kind of getting a chill here. I just think it’s what Dorothy stood for. Integrity, of course. But also a woman of the truth, fighting so hard. We can’t even imagine her overcoming the barriers she had to overcome to get to the position of power that she had. And yet she was fair-minded. With somebody like Sinatra, she was tough on him, but there are some later columns where she praised his abilities, his skill, his gifts as a singer. She was fair-minded. And the other thing I would say: Dorothy would never have been interested in any fake news. She would have abhorred that. Unfortunately, today that happens so much, Erik, and Dorothy wasn’t like that. So I would sum it all up in one word: respect.

Erik Rivenes: Well, this has been great. Thank you so much for your time.

Mark Shaw: Thank you. I appreciate it very much.

Erik Rivenes: My guest again has been Mark Shaw, author of The Reporter Who Knew Too Much: The Mysterious Death of What’s My Line? TV Star and Media Icon Dorothy Kilgallen. This has been another episode of the Most Notorious podcast, broadcasting to every dark and cobwebbed corner of the world. I’m Erik, and have a safe tomorrow.