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Dorothy Kilgallen


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(1) Does Florence Pritchett’s son object to his mother being named as the long-time mistress of JFK or by the suggestion that she might have been one of Kilgallen’s sources?

Yes. He says his mother lay dying of leukemia for months so she couldn't have been Kilgallen's source on anything but side effects of medication that was scarcely available then.

(2) In your book you do not mention that Pritchett was JFK’s mistress. Is that because you did not know or was it a case of you protecting her privacy?

It was totally irrelevant. I didn't drop the name Judith Campbell Exner, either.

(3) You do not mention that Pritchett was married to Earl E. T. Smith, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Cuba (1957-59). Did you know that at the time you wrote the book? Is it not possible that Pritchett passed on information to Kilgallen as a result of her relationship with her husband and JFK?

Yes, I did know that. I also knew that when Kilgallen visited New Orleans and Dallas, the poor ambassador was preoccupied with his dying wife.

(4) In your book you make a lot of Kilgallen’s relationship with the man you call the "Out-of-Towner". In fact, you imply that he was in some way involved in her death. Is it correct that the man’s name is really Ron Pataky?

Yes.

(5) Did you find any evidence that Ron Pataky was working for the CIA?

No. Only that he dropped out of Stanford in 1954 and then enrolled in a training school for assassins in Panama or thereabouts.

(6) Do you believe that Ron Pataky murdered Dorothy Kilgallen?

He had something to do with it.

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(1) Does Florence Pritchett’s son object to his mother being named as the long-time mistress of JFK or by the suggestion that she might have been one of Kilgallen’s sources?

Yes. He says his mother lay dying of leukemia for months so she couldn't have been Kilgallen's source on anything but side effects of medication that was scarcely available then.

(2) In your book you do not mention that Pritchett was JFK’s mistress. Is that because you did not know or was it a case of you protecting her privacy?

It was totally irrelevant. I didn't drop the name Judith Campbell Exner, either.

(3) You do not mention that Pritchett was married to Earl E. T. Smith, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Cuba (1957-59). Did you know that at the time you wrote the book? Is it not possible that Pritchett passed on information to Kilgallen as a result of her relationship with her husband and JFK?

Yes, I did know that. I also knew that when Kilgallen visited New Orleans and Dallas, the poor ambassador was preoccupied with his dying wife.

(4) In your book you make a lot of Kilgallen’s relationship with the man you call the "Out-of-Towner". In fact, you imply that he was in some way involved in her death. Is it correct that the man’s name is really Ron Pataky?

Yes.

(5) Did you find any evidence that Ron Pataky was working for the CIA?

No. Only that he dropped out of Stanford in 1954 and then enrolled in a training school for assassins in Panama or thereabouts.

(6) Do you believe that Ron Pataky murdered Dorothy Kilgallen?

He had something to do with it.

Thank you for this very important information about Ron Pataky. Have you spoken to him lately? He does not answer my emails. He has also taken down his website on his artwork. This is worth looking at:

http://www.scumpa.com/pipermail/cool/1993-...ber/001612.html

Did you know he was a great fan of Gordon MacRae?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-review...6915034-7891368

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  • 2 weeks later...

(1) Does Florence Pritchett’s son object to his mother being named as the long-time mistress of JFK or by the suggestion that she might have been one of Kilgallen’s sources?

Yes. He says his mother lay dying of leukemia for months so she couldn't have been Kilgallen's source on anything but side effects of medication that was scarcely available then.

(2) In your book you do not mention that Pritchett was JFK’s mistress. Is that because you did not know or was it a case of you protecting her privacy?

It was totally irrelevant. I didn't drop the name Judith Campbell Exner, either.

(3) You do not mention that Pritchett was married to Earl E. T. Smith, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Cuba (1957-59). Did you know that at the time you wrote the book? Is it not possible that Pritchett passed on information to Kilgallen as a result of her relationship with her husband and JFK?

Yes, I did know that. I also knew that when Kilgallen visited New Orleans and Dallas, the poor ambassador was preoccupied with his dying wife.

(4) In your book you make a lot of Kilgallen’s relationship with the man you call the "Out-of-Towner". In fact, you imply that he was in some way involved in her death. Is it correct that the man’s name is really Ron Pataky?

Yes.

(5) Did you find any evidence that Ron Pataky was working for the CIA?

No. Only that he dropped out of Stanford in 1954 and then enrolled in a training school for assassins in Panama or thereabouts.

(6) Do you believe that Ron Pataky murdered Dorothy Kilgallen?

He had something to do with it.

Thank you for this very important information about Ron Pataky. Have you spoken to him lately?

Not since 1976.

He does not answer my emails. He has also taken down his website on his artwork. This is worth looking at:

http://www.scumpa.com/pipermail/cool/1993-...ber/001612.html

The people at "cool literary digest" got the guy's name wrong. It's David Herschel, not Henschel. Can you fix it on your web link about Pataky? In it you describe Herschel as an "investigative journalist" who interviewed Pataky in 1993. Herschel told me about their encounter a little later in the 1990s.

Did you know he was a great fan of Gordon MacRae?

Yes. He also talked a lot about romancing Gordon's daughter Meredith, best known for the 1960s TV sitcom "Petticoat Junction."

http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-review...6915034-7891368

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The people at "cool literary digest" got the guy's name wrong. It's David Herschel, not Henschel.

The name may be wrong, but I have to question this for a couple of reasons. The email from “David B. Henschel” is archived at the following URL, which would indicate that the sender himself got his own name wrong, and not the folks at Cool List Digest:

http://web.archive.org/web/20041106221932/.../1993/1296.html

Secondly, “David B. Henschel” identifies himself in the email as a journalism student in Virginia in 1993. According to the following Google page, “David Henschel” was a founding editor of the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs in 1997. The same David Henschel who was studying journalism in 1993?

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=david...G=Google+Search

The URL listed for the journal cannot be accessed without a password. However, David Henschel is also listed as a “friend” of the journal at this site:

http://journal.georgetown.edu/donations.cfm

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The people at "cool literary digest" got the guy's name wrong. It's David Herschel, not Henschel.

The name may be wrong, but I have to question this for a couple of reasons. The email from “David B. Henschel” is archived at the following URL, which would indicate that the sender himself got his own name wrong, and not the folks at Cool List Digest:

http://web.archive.org/web/20041106221932/.../1993/1296.html

Right. That e-mail has been on the Internet since its early days in 1993 when it had no graphics and was dominated by the Internet Engineering Task Force. Mr. Herschel evidently e-mailed something to the IETF, which had a way of preserving it for posterity.

Secondly, “David B. Henschel” identifies himself in the email as a journalism student in Virginia in 1993.

You mean Virginia Commonwealth University identified him as such in that era when university - assigned e-mail accounts were a new phenomenon. I can tell you they got his name wrong. It's Herschel, and the middle initial is wrong.

I am Lee Israel, the best authority on Dorothy Kilgallen. I talked by phone and corresponded with Mr. Herschel about the Kilgallen Mystery several times in the mid 1990s. The "Internet" meant nothing to me then, so he didn't bother to describe his adventures with the IETF.

According to the following Google page, “David Henschel” was a founding editor of the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs in 1997. The same David Henschel who was studying journalism in 1993?

No. One is Henschel, other is Herschel. The only time my conversations with David delved into international affairs was when we discussed Dr. Ibne Hassan, an academically recognized expert on the International Court of Justice (based in the Netherlands) who boarded at Dorothy Kilgallen's townhouse toward the end of her life. He is the "exchange student' in the "epilogue" of my book.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=david...G=Google+Search

The URL listed for the journal cannot be accessed without a password. However, David Henschel is also listed as a “friend” of the journal at this site:

See above. If John Simkin is reading this, will you please correct David's name on your "spartacus / schoolnet" essays on Kilgallen and Ron Pataky ? Errors there make me look bad, too.

http://journal.georgetown.edu/donations.cfm

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If John Simkin is reading this, will you please correct David's name on your "spartacus / schoolnet" essays on Kilgallen and Ron Pataky ? Errors there make me look bad, too.

I have corrected it to David Herschel. Did you ever find out anything about Herschel? Was he a student journalist as he claimed?

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If John Simkin is reading this, will you please correct David's name on your "spartacus / schoolnet" essays on Kilgallen and Ron Pataky ? Errors there make me look bad, too.

I have corrected it to David Herschel. Did you ever find out anything about Herschel? Was he a student journalist as he claimed?

Yes, he sent me Xeroxes from his campus newspaper with his byline. He had an aunt who was a stenographer at the CIA in the early to mid 1950s. But he felt he did NOT have an opening with the aunt to ask her about it. In the early 1950s the aunt was under strict instructions NOT to discuss anything with her family.

In later years she and her sister -- David's mother -- never even said the letters CIA to each other. They did discuss the National Institutes of Health where the aunt worked in the 1970s and early 1980s, again as a stenographer. David learned of the CIA connection from a personnel file of a grandfather who proofread the Congressional Record in the early 1950s. The grandfather had to state in writing if he had any children who worked for the U.S. government. If so, where ? Grandfather died before David could know him. The grandchildren, aunts and uncles are scattered across the United States now. They never see each other anymore. Many extended families in the United States fragment as people get graduate degrees and better job offers 3,000 miles away. They barely have enough free time to update parents and siblings on what's new.

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That e-mail has been on the Internet since its early days in 1993 when it had no graphics and was dominated by the Internet Engineering Task Force. Mr. Herschel evidently e-mailed something to the IETF, which had a way of preserving it for posterity.

That doesn't answer the question of why his name is David B. Henschel in the e-mail, since the e-mail appears to have been archived by the IETF exactly as received, i.e. from "David B. Henschel."

Secondly, “David B. Henschel” identifies himself in the email as a journalism student in Virginia in 1993.

You mean Virginia Commonwealth University identified him as such in that era when university - assigned e-mail accounts were a new phenomenon. I can tell you they got his name wrong. It's Herschel, and the middle initial is wrong.

If you mean that VCU identified him as "David B. Henschel" by getting his name wrong and assigning him an e-mail account under that name, I guess that would explain the wrong name in the e-mail. In such a case, one might expect him to point out this mistake and give his real name in the text of the message, but perhaps he didn't feel that was important or he did not wish to do so. In any case that seems like a plausible explanation of the mistaken name. Thanks.

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That e-mail has been on the Internet since its early days in 1993 when it had no graphics and was dominated by the Internet Engineering Task Force. Mr. Herschel evidently e-mailed something to the IETF, which had a way of preserving it for posterity.

That doesn't answer the question of why his name is David B. Henschel in the e-mail, since the e-mail appears to have been archived by the IETF exactly as received, i.e. from "David B. Henschel."

Secondly, “David B. Henschel” identifies himself in the email as a journalism student in Virginia in 1993.

You mean Virginia Commonwealth University identified him as such in that era when university - assigned e-mail accounts were a new phenomenon. I can tell you they got his name wrong. It's Herschel, and the middle initial is wrong.

If you mean that VCU identified him as "David B. Henschel" by getting his name wrong and assigning him an e-mail account under that name, I guess that would explain the wrong name in the e-mail. In such a case, one might expect him to point out this mistake and give his real name in the text of the message, but perhaps he didn't feel that was important or he did not wish to do so. In any case that seems like a plausible explanation of the mistaken name. Thanks.

I had trouble at Hunter College in 1997 when I took evening classes. My tuition included an e-mail account on the campus network. I had no computer at home, nor did yahoo e-mail exist in 1997. Hunter gave me the address of lee_anne_israel @ ... etcetera. My middle name doesn't even begin with "A." This happened in mid - town Manhattan, less than a mile from the United Nations and Rockefeller Center.

And it happened four years after Virginia Commonwealth University struggled to get the students' names right when they created e-mail accounts. David told me the campus had no fiberoptic links for the computers until spring 1994. He sent the e-mail in November of 1993.

Why didn't the students organize themselves and do something about it ? You have to know the VCU campus. It's in a high - crime neighborhood. David told me the journalism school sucks, very few students work in journalism ten years later and the only stable career path is health sciences. It doesn't have a law school. Of course, it has a few computer science people, but they don't socialize with the journalism people or the pre - med people. Yet another clique is the one of students who just stepped off a plane from South Korea or Ethiopia. Try assigning an e-mail account to Quong Ping Xian in 1993 when your local area network doesn't reach the registration office where Xian registered yesterday minutes after giving all her cash to an airport cab driver who told her Woodrow Wilson is on the one dollar bill.

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  • 2 months later...
I have been doing some research on Dorothy Kilgallen. She was a journalist who was investigating the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Kilgallen managed to obtain the Dallas Police Department radio logs for the day of the assassination. This revealed that as soon as the shots were fired in the Dealey Plaza, the Chief of Police, Jesse Curry, issued an order to search the Grassy Knoll. However, up until that time, Curry had insisted that as soon as he heard the sound of the shots he told his men to search the Texas School Book Depository.

In September 1964 Kilgallen reported in the New York Journal American that Jack Ruby, J. D. Tippet and Bernard Weismann had a two hour meeting at the Carousel Club on 14th November, 1963. Later, Kilgallen managed to obtain a private interview with Jack Ruby. She told friends that she had information that would "break the case wide open". Aware of what had happened to Bill Hunter and Jim Koethe (two reporters who had both been killed after making such a claim), Kilgallen handed her interview notes to her friend Margaret Smith. She told friends that she had obtained information that Ruby and Tippet were friends and that David Ferrie was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

On 8th November, 1965, Kilgallen, was found dead in her New York apartment. She was fully dressed and sitting upright in her bed. The police reported that she had died from taking a cocktail of alcohol and barbiturates. The notes of her interview with Ruby and the article she was writing on the case had disappeared. Her friend, Margaret Smith, who had been given the notes on the case, died two days later. The notes were never found.

I carried out a search on Kilgallen on the web. The first batch of pages contained information that I already knew about Kilgallen and were just recycled details that have appeared in various books about the assassination of Kennedy. However, I eventually came across an anti-Castro website. It included newspaper accounts revealing details of what Castro had been up to over the last fifty years. One account was a newspaper article written by Kilgallen for New York Journal American on 15th July, 1959. Like the other articles on the site it was highly critical of Castro. It also contained something else that surprised me a great deal. Kilgallen claimed that the CIA and the Mafia were involved in a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. We now know this was true but it only became public knowledge during the Frank Church’s Select Committee on Intelligence Activities in 1975. This article was written in July, 1959. Kilgallen was obviously well-informed about what was going on in the CIA at that time.

I continued my search and I eventually came across something that was even more interesting. It was the notes of a CIA report on Marilyn Monroe. Dated 3rd August, 1962, the actual report had been withheld but the notes themselves were very revealing. The report was based on the wire-tap of certain people’s telephone calls. This included those of Kilgallen, Marilyn Monroe, Robert Kennedy and Howard Rothberg, a lawyer working for Monroe. The CIA document claims that Monroe was threatening to tell secrets that she had obtained from her relationship with John F. Kennedy. This included the claim that Monroe "knew of the President's plan to kill Castro". It appears Rothberg was passing on information from Monroe to Kilgallen. The notes of course do not say what the CIA planned to do about this. That would have been in the report that is still being withheld. What we do know is that Marilyn Monroe was found dead two days after this report was written.

This raises a new question about the death of Kilgallen (she died in similar circumstances to Monroe). Was she killed because of what she knew about the Kennedy assassination or was it more to do with what she knew about the death of Marilyn Monroe?

Dominick Dunne, the famed author and court reporter, begins his monthly Diary, which is titled “Spilling Secrets” this time, in the April 2006 issue of Vanity Fair with these words: “It amazes me how many people remember the mysterious death in 1965 of Dorothy Kilgallen, the controversial gossip columnist and television personality, which was reported in headlines nationwide as an accidental overdose of sleeping pills and liquor....”

Dunne goes on to recount a telephone call that he received while a guest on the Larry King Live TV show from a woman in Oklahoma who asked if he had any opinion of Kilgallen’s death.

He writes in his Diary that “What I recalled for the woman from Tulsa was a persistent rumor at the time that the sleeping pills in Kilgallen’s stomach had not dissolved, which meant that they were undigested. Liz Smith, another famous gossip columnist, told me recently that the late Arlene Francis, who was also on the panel of What’s My Line? [with Kilgallen], had been with Kilgallen the evening she had died, and she always maintained that Dorothy was not drunk that night. I forgot to tell the woman who called in that no notes or tapes from the Ruby interview [that Kilgallen had with Jack Ruby] have ever been found. Kilgallen told people that she was going to break the case, so Ruby must have told her something that someone important didn’t want her to print. At least that’s my interpretation. She once wrote in her column that if Lee Harvey Oswald’s widow ever told the whole story of her life with Oswald it would “split open the front pages of the newspapers all over the world,” according to Lee Israel in her biography of Kilgallen."

There is more in Dunne’s Diary about Kilgallen in the April issue of Vanity Fair. His writings are always worth reading.

Edited by Douglas Caddy
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Dominick Dunne, the famed author and court reporter, begins his monthly Diary, which is titled “Spilling Secrets” this time, in the April 2006 issue of Vanity Fair with these words: “It amazes me how many people remember the mysterious death in 1965 of Dorothy Kilgallen, the controversial gossip columnist and television personality, which was reported in headlines nationwide as an accidental overdose of sleeping pills and liquor....”

The lack of basic editing/fact checking in bigtime publications always surprises me. In the case of Dominick Dunne's Vanity Fair article, I was surprised by the misstatement that Jack Ruby's Carousel Club was located in Houston.

To his credit, Dunne didn't water down his take on Kilgallen's death. He wrote, "Kilgallen told people that she was going to break the case, so Ruby must have told her something that someone important didn't want her to print. At least that's my interpretation."

Tim

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The lack of basic editing/fact checking in bigtime publications always surprises me. In the case of Dominick Dunne's Vanity Fair article, I was surprised by the misstatement that Jack Ruby's Carousel Club was located in Houston.

I have written for more periodicals than I can recall, including several massive daily papers. [That might say more about my memory than anything else....] In my experience, the most scrupulous and methodical fact checking department was at TV GUIDE, who insisted upon citations and verification for EVERYTHING. Go figger.... FWIW.

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Doug:

Thanks for the tip re. this article. Dunne is very popular at Court TV, and Court TV's Catherine Crier was one of the very few brave enough not to cancel her show with Barr McClellan to promote his book in 03. Perhaps she will have Dunne on as well and give this subject some badly-needed media light again.

Mockingbird has a lot of the press under wraps but we need to locate the ones who aren't and light a fire under them.

Tim G: If you still read this forum: question: Do you think Castor had Kilgallen killed too and took her Ruby notes? :lol:

Dawn

ps John: Barr told me yesterday that he will be posting at the forum very soon and asked mt to let you know.

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Dominick Dunne, the famed author and court reporter, begins his monthly Diary, which is titled “Spilling Secrets” this time, in the April 2006 issue of Vanity Fair with these words: “It amazes me how many people remember the mysterious death in 1965 of Dorothy Kilgallen, the controversial gossip columnist and television personality, which was reported in headlines nationwide as an accidental overdose of sleeping pills and liquor....”

Dunne goes on to recount a telephone call that he received while a guest on the Larry King Live TV show from a woman in Oklahoma who asked if he had any opinion of Kilgallen’s death.

He writes in his Diary that “What I recalled for the woman from Tulsa was a persistent rumor at the time that the sleeping pills in Kilgallen’s stomach had not dissolved, which meant that they were undigested. Liz Smith, another famous gossip columnist, told me recently that the late Arlene Francis, who was also on the panel of What’s My Line? [with Kilgallen], had been with Kilgallen the evening she had died, and she always maintained that Dorothy was not drunk that night. I forgot to tell the woman who called in that no notes or tapes from the Ruby interview [that Kilgallen had with Jack Ruby] have ever been found. Kilgallen told people that she was going to break the case, so Ruby must have told her something that someone important didn’t want her to print. At least that’s my interpretation. She once wrote in her column that if Lee Harvey Oswald’s widow ever told the whole story of her life with Oswald it would “split open the front pages of the newspapers all over the world,” according to Lee Israel in her biography of Kilgallen."

The real story (maybe should tell Dunne) was the person Kilgallen met after Arlene Francis that night. In her book, Kilgallen, Lee Israel gave him the name of the “Out-of-Towner”. According to Israel she met him in Carrara in June, 1964, during a press junket for journalists working in the film industry. The trip was paid for by Twentieth Century-Fox who used it to publicize three of its films: The Sound of Music, The Agony and the Ecstasy and Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. Israel claims that the "Out-of-Towner" went up to Kilgallen and asked her if she was Clare Booth Luce. This is in itself an interesting introduction. Kilgallen and Luce did not look like each other. Luce and her husband (Henry Luce) however were to play an important role in the events surrounding the assassination. Luce owned Life Magazine and arranged to buy up the Zapruder Film . Clare Booth Luce had also funded covert operations against Fidel Castro (1961-63).

I believe that Kilgallen suspected that "Out-of-Towner" was working for the CIA. She therefore told her friends this is what he said so that if anything happened to her, a future investigator would realize that he was a CIA agent with links to Clare Booth Luce.

Lee Israel has always refused to identify the "Out-of-Towner". However, I discovered via a man called David Herschel that his real name was Ron Pataky. In 1965 he had been a journalist working for the Columbus Citizen-Journal who had published articles about the assassination of JFK.

Here is a conversation that took place between Lee Israel and myself on the Forum on 20th December, 2005.

John Simkin: In your book you make a lot of Kilgallen’s relationship with the man you call the "Out-of-Towner". In fact, you imply that he was in some way involved in her death. Is it correct that the man’s name is really Ron Pataky?

Lee Israel: Yes.

John Simkin: Did you find any evidence that Ron Pataky was working for the CIA?

Lee Israel: No. Only that he dropped out of Stanford in 1954 and then enrolled in a training school for assassins in Panama or thereabouts.

John Simkin: Do you believe that Ron Pataky murdered Dorothy Kilgallen?

Lee Israel: He had something to do with it.

post-7-1143530780_thumb.jpg

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[Dominick Dunne wrote:] " I forgot to tell the woman who called in that no notes or tapes from the Ruby interview [that Kilgallen had with Jack Ruby] have ever been found. Kilgallen told people that she was going to break the case, so Ruby must have told her something that someone important didn’t want her to print. At least that’s my interpretation.

I'm not so sure that Kilgallen's determination to "break the case" means that Ruby had given her any real information. It may only mean that, like many researchers, she was determined to get to the bottom of the mystery. With her background in crime reporting, no doubt she felt qualified for the task.

[DD wrote:] "She once wrote in her column that if Lee Harvey Oswald’s widow ever told the whole story of her life with Oswald it would “split open the front pages of the newspapers all over the world,” according to Lee Israel in her biography of Kilgallen."

To my mind this passage suggests that, at least at the time she wrote this, Kilgallen was not really clued in to the forces behind the assassination. After more than 40 years of research, I doubt if anyone (besides Norman Mailer) believes that Lee Oswald's relationship with Marina can tell us anything about who killed JFK.

If I have followed this thread correctly, it is not established that Kilgallen gave her notes to Florence Pritchett Smith. It seems implausible that she would impose in this manner on a friend who was literally on her death-bed.

If Kilgallen was murdered, it may not be because of what she knew, but rather because of what she was determined to find out. Kilgallen was by far the most high-profile person to raise doubts about the Warren Commission, and that alone could have made her a target.

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