Dorothy Kilgallen (1913–1965)

Newspaper columnist, crime reporter, radio host and What's My Line? panelist

Born
3 July 1913, Chicago, Illinois
Died
8 November 1965, New York City (aged 52)
Known for
"The Voice of Broadway" column; What's My Line? (1950–1965); coverage of the Sam Sheppard and Jack Ruby trials
Spouse
Richard Kollmar, actor and producer (m. 1940)

Dorothy Kilgallen was one of the best-known American journalists of the mid-twentieth century. Over three decades at the Hearst newspapers in New York she moved from cub reporter to syndicated Broadway columnist and courtroom correspondent, and for fifteen years millions of television viewers knew her as a sharp-witted panelist on CBS's What's My Line?. Today her name is searched mostly because of her reporting on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the questions that have been raised about her death in 1965.

Early life and first byline

Kilgallen was born in Chicago to Mae Ahern and James Lawrence Kilgallen, a veteran reporter for the International News Service. The family moved with his assignments and settled in Brooklyn, where she graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in 1930. After two semesters at the College of New Rochelle she took a job on Hearst's New York Evening Journal at seventeen, meant as a summer position, and stayed in newspapers for the rest of her life.

The 1936 race around the world

In the autumn of 1936 the Evening Journal entered her in a race against two other reporters, H.R. Ekins of the New York World-Telegram and Leo Kieran of The New York Times, to circle the globe using only transport available to paying passengers. The route included the airship Hindenburg across the Atlantic and Pan American's new transpacific Clipper service. Ekins won in about eighteen and a half days; Kilgallen, the only woman in the race, finished second in roughly 24 days. The stunt made the 23-year-old a celebrity. She wrote up the trip as the book Girl Around the World (1936), and she supplied the story for the Warner Bros. film Fly-Away Baby (1937), starring Glenda Farrell as reporter Torchy Blane.

"The Voice of Broadway"

In 1938 she was given the Broadway beat and began "The Voice of Broadway" in the New York Journal-American (formed when the Evening Journal merged with the American). Distributed by King Features, the column was eventually syndicated to well over a hundred newspapers. It was mainly show-business news and gossip, but Kilgallen also wrote about politics and organized crime, and her reporting was not always welcome: a 1956 multi-part Hearst series, "The Real Frank Sinatra Story", began a long public feud with the singer.

From 1945 to 1963 she and her husband Richard Kollmar also hosted Breakfast with Dorothy and Dick, a morning talk show on New York's WOR radio broadcast from their own home.

What's My Line?

Kilgallen was on the panel of What's My Line? from its first broadcast on 2 February 1950, alongside regulars such as Arlene Francis and Bennett Cerf, with John Charles Daly as host. Panelists questioned mystery guests to guess their occupations, and blindfolded to identify celebrity guests. She remained on the show until her death; her last live appearance was on 7 November 1965, the night before she was found dead.

Trial reporter: the Sam Sheppard case

Kilgallen was a prominent courtroom writer. In 1954 she covered the Cleveland murder trial of osteopath Sam Sheppard, accused of killing his wife, and the Journal-American reported that she was "shocked" by the guilty verdict. Years later, in 1963, she said publicly that the trial judge, Edward Blythin, had told her before the trial that Sheppard was "guilty as hell". Her statement was taken as a deposition for Sheppard's lawyer F. Lee Bailey and is quoted in a footnote of the U.S. Supreme Court's 1966 decision Sheppard v. Maxwell, which overturned the conviction because of prejudicial publicity. The Court expressly did not need to rely on her account to reach that result. Sheppard was acquitted at a retrial later in 1966.

The Kennedy assassination and Jack Ruby

After President Kennedy was killed in Dallas on 22 November 1963, and Jack Ruby shot the accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald two days later, Kilgallen wrote about the case repeatedly and was openly skeptical of the official account. She covered Ruby's murder trial in Dallas in February–March 1964 for the Journal-American. During the trial she was granted a short private meeting with Ruby, arranged through his defence lawyer Joe Tonahill and Judge Joe B. Brown, which angered the other reporters present. Her biographers describe it as the only private interview Ruby gave a journalist; accounts of how long it lasted differ, and no record of what was said has ever been published.

Her biggest scoop came in August 1964. Kilgallen obtained the transcript of the testimony Ruby had given the Warren Commission in a closed session on 7 June 1964, and the Journal-American and other papers printed it in instalments weeks before the Commission's report was released. The Commission criticised the "premature publication", and a federal inquiry into how she had obtained it was announced. She never revealed her source. She went on to criticise the Commission's final report. According to the author Mark Shaw (see below), she told her lawyer she intended to break "the biggest scoop of the century" about the assassination.

Death, 8 November 1965

On the morning of 8 November 1965 Kilgallen was found dead in her bedroom at her townhouse, 45 East 68th Street in Manhattan. She was 52.

The official finding

The New York City medical examiner's office, through Dr. James Luke, gave the cause of death as acute ethanol and barbiturate intoxication, "circumstances undetermined". Neither the alcohol nor the barbiturates alone were at a level expected to be fatal, but the effects combine. Luke said publicly that the overdose may well have been accidental. No criminal case was opened, and her family regarded the death as accidental.

In 2017 the Manhattan District Attorney's office reviewed the case after new requests; after about eight months it said it could not conclude that her death was a homicide.

What remains disputed

Because she died while known to be writing about the assassination, her death has long been included in lists of "mysterious deaths" tied to the Kennedy case. The most substantial versions come from two authors:

  • Lee Israel, in her 1979 biography Kilgallen, reported inconsistencies at the scene and a later laboratory claim about sedatives found in her body and on a glass. Israel's investigation raised questions but, as reference works note, did not produce proof of murder.
  • Mark Shaw, a former lawyer, argues in The Reporter Who Knew Too Much (2016) and later books that she was murdered to stop her JFK reporting. His work prompted the 2017 DA review; he said that review was not thorough and has kept pressing prosecutors to reopen the case. Reviewers have questioned how far his evidence supports the individual he names as a suspect. No one has ever been charged.

Claims that her JFK notes vanished from her home are likewise reported by these authors, not established by any official record.

In short: the official record says she died from a combination of alcohol and barbiturates, with the circumstances left formally undetermined, and a 2017 prosecutorial review found no basis to call it a homicide. The theory that she was killed over her Kennedy reporting is an argument made by specific writers; it has not been proven.

Legacy

Kilgallen was among the first people given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960. Her papers and scrapbooks are held by the New York Public Library. In November 2025, sixty years after her death, the corner of East 68th Street and Park Avenue was co-named "Dorothy Kilgallen Way", an initiative led by New York City Council member Robert Holden.

Sources

  1. Dorothy Kilgallen, Wikipedia (overview; cites Israel 1979, Bailey, Jordan-Heintz 2023).
  2. Kilgallen, Dorothy (1913–1965), Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia, via Encyclopedia.com.
  3. Dorothy Kilgallen papers and scrapbooks, 1936–1965, New York Public Library Archives & Manuscripts.
  4. Dorothy Kilgallen Newspaper Articles (1936 race), Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Archives.
  5. Sheppard v. Maxwell, 384 U.S. 333 (1966), see footnote 11. Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School.
  6. Did Journalist Dorothy Kilgallen's Probe of JFK's Assassination Lead to Her Death?, HowStuffWorks (medical examiner's finding).
  7. Local author pushes for justice in death of columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, Palo Alto Daily Post, 6 September 2017 (Manhattan DA review).
  8. Girl Around the World by Dorothy Kilgallen (1936), Open Library.
  9. Kilgallen by Lee Israel (Delacorte, 1979).
  10. The Dorothy Kilgallen Story, Mark Shaw's site (the murder argument, in its proponent's own words).
  11. Review: The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, The Sound of One Hand Typing, 2016 (a critical reading of Shaw's case).
  12. A Legendary Journalist Gets Her Own UES Street, Patch, November 2025.

Compiled 14 September 2026.