NEWS | Petition demands New York prosecutor investigate media icon’s death

By Toni Tantlinger

More than five decades after media icon Dorothy Kilgallen’s mysterious death, a petition asking New York’s chief prosecutor to reopen the investigation into her untimely demise is gaining signatures and momentum.

“This is about correcting an injustice,” says attorney and investigative reporter Mark Shaw, who uncovered fresh evidence in the case while researching his latest book, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much (www.thereporterwhoknewtoomuch.com).

“The fresh evidence I’ve uncovered strongly suggests Dorothy Kilgallen was the victim of foul play, and the opportunity exists to finally right this wrong more than 50 years later.”

Shaw has written two letters to Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the New York County District Attorney, outlining evidence that indicates Kilgallen was murdered and asking Vance to launch an investigation since none happened when Kilgallen died. Shaw also created a petition on Change.org to solicit public support for his effort to seek justice for one of the most prominent media icons of the mid-20th century.

Beginning in the 1930s, Kilgallen earned acclaim as a daring reporter and columnist for daily newspapers, even drawing praise from Ernest Hemingway, who called her “one of the greatest women writers in the world.” Her journalistic fame landed her gigs as a celebrated radio talk show host and a panelist on CBS’s popular TV show What’s My Line? in the 1950s and 1960s.

“Dorothy was a woman who made it in a man’s world,” Shaw says. “She was a courageous reporter.”

After President John F. Kennedy’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, Kilgallen began her own investigation into what happened in Dallas for a book for Random House. She told someone that if the “wrong people” found out what her research had unearthed “it would cost me my life.”

Before Kilgallen, 52, could finish that book, she was found dead in her New York City townhouse on Nov. 8, 1965, leaving her colleagues and millions of fans across the country in mourning.

Officially, a fatal mixture of sleeping pills and alcohol caused her accidental death, but Shaw says that his research revealed numerous troubling facts: the Medical Examiner’s report intentionally left out key information pointing to a homicide; two toxicologists deliberately withheld evidence; Kilgallen was seen meeting a “mystery man” hours before her death who had motive to harm her; and a potential suspect is still alive.

“Murder is murder, whether it happened five days ago or five years ago,” Shaw says. “Dorothy deserves the justice she was denied like every other victim of a crime.” More about Kilgallen and the case at www.thedorothykilgallenstory.org.