Dorothy Mae Kilgallen was an American columnist, journalist, and television game show panelist.
24 Facts About Dorothy Kilgallen
2.
Dorothy Kilgallen wrote front-page articles for multiple newspapers on the Sam Sheppard trial and, years later, events related to the John F Kennedy assassination, such as testimony by Jack Ruby.
3.
Dorothy Kilgallen was born in Chicago, the daughter of newspaper reporter James Lawrence Dorothy Kilgallen and his wife, Mae Ahern.
4.
Dorothy Kilgallen was of Irish descent, and was a Catholic.
5.
Dorothy Kilgallen had a sister, Eleanor, who was six years her junior.
6.
Dorothy Kilgallen was a student at Erasmus Hall High School.
7.
In 1936 Dorothy Kilgallen competed with two other New York newspaper reporters in a race around the world using only means of transportation available to the general public.
8.
Dorothy Kilgallen was the only woman to compete in the contest and came in second.
9.
Dorothy Kilgallen described the event in her book Girl Around The World, which is credited as the story idea for the 1937 movie Fly-Away Baby starring Glenda Farrell as a character partly inspired by Kilgallen.
10.
In November 1938, Dorothy Kilgallen began writing a daily column, the "Voice of Broadway," for Hearst's New York Journal-American, which the corporation created by merging the Evening Journal with the American.
11.
Dorothy Kilgallen and noted singer and actor Frank Sinatra were fairly good friends for several years and were photographed rehearsing in a radio studio for a 1948 broadcast.
12.
Dorothy Kilgallen was a doctor convicted of killing his wife at their home in the Cleveland suburb of Bay Village.
13.
The New York Journal-American carried the banner front-page headline that Dorothy Kilgallen was "astounded" by the guilty verdict because of what she argued were serious flaws in the prosecution's case.
14.
Attorney F Lee Bailey, who was working on a habeas corpus petition for his client Sheppard, attended the Overseas Press Club event, heard what Kilgallen told the crowd, and then asked her privately if she would help him.
15.
In July 1964, four months after the Overseas Press Club event where Dorothy Kilgallen broke her silence about the deceased Judge Blythin, Judge Weinman of the federal court granted Bailey's habeas corpus petition, Sam Sheppard was released from prison amid much newspaper publicity, and Sheppard met Dorothy Kilgallen at a "late-night champagne party" in Cleveland.
16.
Dorothy Kilgallen was publicly skeptical of the conclusions of the Warren Commission's report about the assassination of President Kennedy and Jack Ruby's shooting of Lee Oswald, and she wrote several newspaper articles on the subject.
17.
Dorothy Kilgallen obtained a copy of Ruby's June 7,1964, testimony to the Warren Commission, which she published in August 1964 in three installments on the front pages of the New York Journal-American, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and other newspapers.
18.
Dorothy Kilgallen was seen almost every Sunday evening on the show for 15 years.
19.
On November 8,1965, Dorothy Kilgallen was found dead in her Manhattan townhouse located at 45 East 68th Street.
20.
Dorothy Kilgallen's death was determined to have been caused by a combination of alcohol and barbiturates.
21.
Dorothy Kilgallen was interred at the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, Westchester County, New York.
22.
In 1960, Dorothy Kilgallen was one of the initial 500 persons chosen to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
23.
Dorothy Kilgallen couldn't do that, mostly because people wouldn't let her.
24.
Flo Kilgore, a character based on Dorothy Kilgallen, appears in novels by Max Allan Collins in his series featuring private detective Nathan Heller.