By Alex Constantine
Who killed the famed columnist and television personality?
A chemist reporting to Dr. Charles Umberger at the New York City Medical Examiner's office discovered that reporter Dorothy Kilgallen had been murdered - and was ordered to keep the chemical analysis under wraps - in 1978.
The chemist ran an analysis of the glass Kilgallen had been drinking from when she died. The tests turned up traces of Nembutol on the glass. But Nembutol was not found in her blood. The blood tests turned up a lethal cocktail of drugs, three from the fastest-acting groups of barbituates: secobarbitol, amobarbital and pentobarbital.
She was among the very few major reporters in the country to question the Warren Commission's cooked findings:
"'Twenty-four hours after the assassination ... Chief Curry assured reporters that the sound of the shots told him at once they had come from the Texas School Depository and that 'right away' he radioed an order to surround and search the building. But actually, as we see from the Police Department's official version of events. Chief Curry's immediate concern was not the Depository, but the triple-tiered overpass towards which the Presidential car was moving at about eight miles an hour when the fatal shots were fired."
Biographer Lee Israel found that J. Edgar Hoover was following the dispatches of the "flighty and irresponsible" Dorothy Kilgallen with extraordinary and painstaking attention ...
More on Dorothy Kilgallen:
The facts about Kilgallen's death have been widely distorted.
She threatened to expose the players in the John Kennedy assassination, also mind control experimentation, and was murdered. A coroner determined this in the mid-'70s, after discovering that the chemicals found
on her drinking glass were not the same as the barbituate combination in her blood, which were highly lethal, and so ruled out suicide or accidental overdose.
Who was responsible for her death?
One possibility: G. Gordon Liddy's deposition in the Hunt suit exposed a domestic death squad: "We had perhaps a dozen men who were willing to come on board in this connection. And Mr. Hunt, to impress upon me the high caliber of these individuals, stated that they had accounted among them for a substantial number of deaths, including two who had hanged someone from a beam in a garage.
Were these the same "high caliber individuals" who killed gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, the only reporter to interview Jack Ruby, and the author of a public memorandum to Lyndon Johnson, published on December 21, 1964:
MEMORANDUM TO PRESIDENT JOHNSON:
"Please check with the State Department.... the leaders of our Armed Forces or our chief scientists, to discover what, if anything, we are doing to explore the ramifications of [electromagnetic] thought control ... could change the history of the world."
Kilgallen told friends in the entertainment industry that she was going to "bust the Kennedy assassination wide open." But she never had the chance, because she died of acute barbituate and alcohol poisoning - the New York medical examiner could not at the time say whether Kilgallen died accidentally or was murdered - on November 8, 1965. Mary Branum, one of Kilgallen's editors, received a telephone call several hours prior to the discovery of Ms. Kilgallen's body. The anonymous caller informed Branum that the columnist had been murdered."
[cf. Lee Israel, Kilgallen, New York: Delacourte, 1979, p. pp. 390 and 441 for the updated chemical forensic report.]