Dorothy Kilgallen - Death

Death

On November 8, 1965, Kilgallen was found dead on the third floor of her five-story brownstone, just 12 hours after she had appeared, live, on What's My Line?. Her hairdresser, Marc Sinclaire, found her body when he arrived that morning to style her hair. He said decades later that she always slept on the fifth floor, adding that on November 8 he used his key to the brownstone and went directly to the third floor where he always did her hair near her large wardrobe closet. She had apparently succumbed to a fatal combination of alcohol and barbiturates, possibly concurrent with a heart attack. It is not known whether the death was a suicide or an accidental overdose, although the amount of barbiturate in her system "could well have been accidental," said medical examiner James Luke. It is unknown by many, but the combination of barbiturates with alcohol can be lethal because both are depressants. Dorothy Kilgallen was interred in a modest grave at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York.

Kilgallen and Arlene Francis appeared as Joan Crawford impostors on an episode of the daytime version of To Tell The Truth that was videotaped on November 2, 1965 and broadcast six days later while United Press International broke the news about Kilgallen's death. CBS News immediately noticed the report on its UPI machine from the Teletype Corporation. Anchor Douglas Edwards announced it during the five-minute live newscast he regularly did promptly after the closing credits of To Tell The Truth. He clarified for viewers that the preceding broadcast on which they had seen Kilgallen had been "prerecorded." Kilgallen's appearance on this game show episode has been lost because of wiping. The CBS Afternoon News with Douglas Edwards was not preserved, either.

Because of her open criticism of the Warren Commission and other US government entities, and her association with Jack Ruby and a 1964 private interview with him, Ramparts speculated that she was murdered by members of the same alleged conspiracy against JFK. The February 1967 edition of Cosmopolitan, then edited by Helen Gurley Brown, reprinted the Ramparts article. Kilgallen's claims that she was under surveillance led to a theory that she might have been murdered. She reportedly had told a few friends after her Ruby interview that she was "about to blow the JFK case sky high." Throughout her career she consistently refused to identify any of her sources whenever a government agency questioned her, and that might have posed a threat to the alleged JFK conspirators.

Kilgallen's autopsy did not suggest evidence of homicide. On the death certificate, however, medical examiner Luke, typed "circumstances undetermined" underneath his notation "acute ethanol and barbiturate intoxication." According to Kilgallen's Washington Post obituary, Luke spent 45 minutes at the death scene. The medical examiner's office documented, however, that he had spent an hour and five minutes there. Another medical examiner named Dominick DiMaio signed the death certificate, typing below his signature that he was doing this "for James Luke." Referring to Kilgallen's death certificate, DiMaio said in a 1995 interview quoted in Midwest Today magazine, "I wasn't stationed in Manhattan . I was in Brooklyn. Are you sure I signed it? I don't see how the hell I could have signed it in the first place. You got me."