WHO KILLED DOROTHY KILGALLEN?

Born in Chicago, she became a New York journalist and popular game show panelist.
But her mysterious death still troubles a legion of fans who won't forget this remarkable woman

By Sara Jordan
Midwest Today, July 14, 2007

EXCERPT...

In a column which appeared on July 15, 1959 Kilgallen became the first reporter to imply that the CIA was working with organized crime to knock off Fidel Castro. The FBI had been surveilling Dorothy since the 1930s, and now tried to dig up more dirt on her. An internal memo to director J. Edgar Hoover dated Sept. 15, 1959 cited a confidential informant who "stated that (Dorothy and her husband Richard) have their own private lives," that he "has been dating other women...is interested in both sexes...and has his own private apartment..."

SNIP...

On Aug. 3, 1962, Kilgallen became the first journalist to refer publicly to Marilyn Monroe's relationship with a Kennedy. Within 48 hours, Marilyn was found dead of a drug overdose at her Los Angeles residence. The inquiry into her death was marred by numerous unanswered questions and contradictions in the medical findings.* Dorothy publicly challenged the authorities with tough questions. For instance, she wrote, "If the woman described as Marilyn's 'housekeeper' (Eunice Murray) was really a housekeeper, why was her bedroom such a mess? It was a small house and should have been easy to keep tidy." Kilgallen also wanted to know "why was Marilyn's door locked that night, when she didn't usually lock it? If she were just trying to get to sleep, and took the overdose of pills accidentally, why was the light on? Usually people sleep better in the dark." And she asked, "Why did the first doctor (to arrive on the scene) have to call the second doctor before calling the police? Any doctor, even a psychiatrist, knows a dead person when he sees one, especially when rigor mortis has set in and there are marks of lividity on the surface of the face and body. Why the consultation? Why the big time gap in such a small town? Mrs. Murray gets worried at about 3 a.m., and it's almost 6 a.m. before the police get to the scene."

SNIP...

Then John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. Dorothy was devastated. Ten months before, she had taken her young son Kerry on a tour of the White House one Saturday. To their surprise, President Kennedy invited them into the Oval Office and was extraordinarily kind.

As a formidable crime reporter, Kilgallen immediately started asking tough questions of the authorities. She had a good contact within the Dallas Police Department, who gave her a copy of the original police log that chronicled the minute-by-minute activities of the department on the day of the assassination, as shown in the radio communications. This allowed her to report that the first reaction of Chief Jesse Curry to the shots in Dealey Plaza was: "Get a man on top of the overpass and see what happened up there." Kilgallen noted that he lied when he told reporters the next day that he initially thought the shots were fired from the Texas School Book Depository.

SNIP...

In October, Dorothy confided to "What's My Line?" make-up man Carmen Gebbia that she was "all excited" about going to New Orleans to meet a source whom she did not know, but would recognize. She said it was "very cloak-and-daggerish" and would yield details about the assassination. Gebbia told Lee Israel that Dorothy "said to me several times, 'If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to break this case.' "

CONTINUED...

http://www.midtod.com/new/articles/7_14_07_Dorothy.html

The Debunker Among the Buffs

Fifty years after John F. Kennedy's assassination, another wave of conspiracy theories has arrived. One little-known professor has spent his last 20 years fighting the skeptics.

By Jack Dickey
TIME, Nov. 05, 2013

EXCERPT...


“Tonight they can get us all in one drone strike,” Oliver Stone, who directed JFK, told a gathering of Kennedy assassination buffs one evening last month. “This is like going to a meeting of abolitionists in the 1850s. We know we’re all right. But our passion scares them.”

Everyone here at Duquesne University’s International Symposium on the 50th Anniversary of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy agreed that Kennedy had been murdered, brazenly, brutally. But the old men on the dais and in the audience, with their tweedy getups and rapidly spreading bald spots, could not concur on who had done it and how and why. Maybe Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy. Maybe a second gunman had done it. Maybe he (or they) were acting on Castro’s orders, maybe on Hoover’s, maybe on Johnson’s. A lot of support coalesced around the CIA’s complicity. But who at the CIA would have had the President killed? And how?

Bobbing along like any other tern in this sea of skepticism and paranoia was John McAdams, a 68-year-old associate professor of political science at Marquette. McAdams looked like every anonymous student of the assassination: He, too, had tan pants, a briefcase, and silver hair atop a big head with prominent features. On the last day, before a full house, one speaker praised McAdams for having the guts to turn up. The speaker called for a sarcastic round of applause and then went on with his speech.

“That’s because I’m a debunker,” McAdams said afterward. “I debunk things. I’m in the business of knowing how so much of what is said here is nonsense.”

What an odd business that is for a 1964 graduate of Kennedy High School in Kennedy, Ala., who every so often finds himself attending conventions on Kennedy’s assassination. Though he’s no academic star, McAdams has secured his own kind of prominence by devoting much of his adult life to calling nonsense on the most persistent strain of doubt in U.S. history.

***

A few hundred of McAdams’s usual antagonists had traveled to Pittsburgh to hear the likes of Oliver Stone and Cyril Wecht assail the Warren Commission, the blue-ribbon panel Lyndon Johnson charged immediately after the assassination with uncovering the truth. In September 1964, the panel fingered Oswald as the gunman whose bullets, fired from a 6.5mm Carcano rifle perched on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, had wounded Texas Gov. John Connally and killed Kennedy. No outsider had influenced him; he acted alone. Case closed, as one well-known book would put it later.

CONTINUED...

http://nation.time.com/2013/11/05/the-debunker-among-the-buffs/