Things said to a reporter in confidence should be kept in confidence.


Americans remember Dorothy Kilgallen as the glamorous and perceptive panelist on the Sunday night television show What's My Line. However she was much more than a television personality. Kilgallen was a syndicated columnist and serious news woman. She was the only reporter to have a private interview with Jack Ruby.

She was a friend and admirer of John Kennedy who visited here townhouse in New York City when he was a Senator. She was impressed the way he treated her son when she visited him in the White House so his death was a particular blow to her.  Because of this admiration, she tended not to report on the indiscretions of the President.  However this rule was broken after actress, Marilyn Monroe, blew up at the Cal-Neva resort.  The report was subtle but obvious that there was a relationship between Monroe and Kennedy.  A day later, Monroe was dead.

Dorothy Kilgallen called the Warren Commission report laughable. After reporting on the Ruby trial she sent her hair dresser, Marc Sinclaire, back to New York and flew to New Orleans to follow up on what she had learned. Soon she began telling friends that she had enough material to bust the assassination case wide open.

Apparently she learned too much as one Sunday night, one of the contestants on What's My Line saw Dorothy and a man at the hotel bar where she was staying. The description of the man matched that of Ron Pataky, a younger sometimes boy friend, with whom she shared some of her suspicions and findings. She occasionally thought he was with the CIA, but appeared to be unaware of his organized crime connections.

The next morning Kilgallen was found sitting up in a bedroom she never used supposedly reading a book had already finished having died from a mixture of several barbiturates... and all of her research materials were gone – about the Kennedy killing and the death of Marilyn Monroe. Something there caught her attention as well.

She had given a copy of her notes and other material to her friend Florence Smith as a backup should something happen to hers.  Smith died the day after Dorothy.

The Reporter Who Knew Too Much: The Mysterious Death of What's My Line TV Star and Media Icon Dorothy Kilgallen
by Mark Shaw

Was What’s My Line TV Star, media icon, and crack investigative reporter and journalist Dorothy Kilgallen murdered for writing a tell-all book about the JFK assassination? If so, is the main suspect in her death still at large?

These questions and more are answered in former CNN, ESPN, and USA Today legal analyst Mark Shaw’s 25th book, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much.Through discovery of never-before-seen videotaped eyewitness interviews with those closest to Kilgallen and secret government documents, Shaw unfolds a “whodunit” murder mystery featuring suspects including Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover, Mafia Don Carlos Marcello and a "Mystery Man" who may have silenced Kilgallen. All while by presenting through Kilgallen's eyes the most compelling evidence about the JFK assassinations since the House Select Committee on Assassination’s investigation in the 1970s.

You can find several more books by Mark Shaw here.