23. The Amazing Life and Curious Death of Dorothy Kilgallen
Done & Dunne
Hemlock Creatives
4.7 • 630 Ratings
🗓️ 15 November 2021
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this edition of A New York State of Crime, Alicia illuminates a Dominick-adjacent story, that of the mysterious 1965 death of crime reporter Dorothy Kilgallen. Was her death an accident, a suicide, or the result of her investigation into the events surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy?
Sources:
The Reporter Who Knew Too Much: The Mysterious Death of What’s My Line TV Star and Media Icon Dorothy Kilgallen, by Mark Shaw (amazon.com)
Denial of Justice: Dorothy Kilgallen, Abuse of Power, and the Most Compelling JFK Assassination Investigation in History, by Mark Shaw (amazon.com)
Kilgallen: A Biography of Dorothy Kilgallen, by Lee Israel (amazon.com)
Dorothy Kilgallen (spartacus-educational.com)
Local author says columnist cracked the JFK case in 1965, just… (padailypost.com)
What Did Dorothy Know? (washingtonpost.com)
Spilling Secrets | Vanity Fair | April 2006 (archive.vanityfair.com)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Your first great love story is free when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.co. |
| 0:05.5 | That's audible.co.uk slash Wondery. |
| 0:11.5 | Welcome to Dun & Dunn. I'm Alicia, your hostess on this journey, All Things Dominic Dunn. |
| 0:18.2 | Thank you, investigators for joining me for today's episode in our |
| 0:21.7 | continuing New York State of Crime season. Today's case is one of the most compelling to me |
| 0:30.4 | out of the whole state. It is the curious death of Dorothy Kilgallan. We mentioned her in last |
| 0:37.4 | week's episode. She was a crack reporter |
| 0:40.9 | and got really close to solving some crimes. I think that people really didn't want to be solved. |
| 0:48.7 | I do have a little glorious bit of writing coming from Dominic on Dorothy Kilgallan, but two fantastic references that I can |
| 0:56.9 | provide to you. The first is a biography written by Lee Israel in 1979 called Kilgallin. |
| 1:04.2 | The next is a whole arc of work from another author Mark Shaw, who has recently come out |
| 1:09.6 | with some fantastic writing and trying to investigate |
| 1:12.8 | again, Dorothy Kilgallan's curious death. What makes it so curious? I do want to begin our intro here |
| 1:21.2 | with just this amazing write-up from the Washington Post. It's a book review about Lee Israel's |
| 1:27.1 | book, Kilgallin, but the write-up is by |
| 1:29.1 | no less than Rita May Brown. This is from November 18, 1979, and Rita May really does a |
| 1:36.5 | very good job of setting the stage here. Dorothy Kilgallon's death on November 8th, |
| 1:41.6 | 1965, was treated by many as just another high-strung female |
| 1:46.6 | checking out of Hotel Earth. Since she was a person many loved to hate, her sins being, |
| 1:53.7 | intelligence, perseverance, and right-wing political affections, her supposed suicide gratified her detractors. However, Lee Israel's carefully researched |
| 2:04.6 | book indicates the chances of Dorothy Kilgallan, a devout Catholic, having committed suicide, |
| 2:11.6 | are about the same as you're being struck by a meteorite, wanting to break the story of the century regarding John F. Kennedy's |
... |
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