Dorothy Kilgallen, RIP
by DCDave

...second installment...

Three days after her death, Bob and Jean Bach invited [Dorothy's dissolute husband] Richard Kollmar to their home for dinner. Bob asked the widower, "Dick, what was all that stuff in the folder Dorothy carried around with her about the assassination.?" Richard replied, "Robert, I'm afraid that will have to go to the grave with me." Mark Lane also pursued. Dorothy was dead on his return to New York. They had never had the opportunity to discuss the last Dallas trip, before which she had told him that she expected "to learn something important" on her visit to New Orleans. Mark waited a respectable month before he queried Kollmar, though she was on his mind every day. When he finally telephoned Richard, he asked if he might see the folder. "I suspect she might have really found out something," he said, "something which could affect all of us in the future." Richard equivocated. Mark insisted that he was talking about "the soul of our country." Richard said, "I'm going to destroy all that. It's done enough damage already." Richard's post mortems were so riddled with lies, it is impossible to know whether he ever really possessed the material or what he decided to do with it. The FBI evinced interest as late as 1975, four years after his death. The G-men sought out [Richard and Dorothy's son] Dickie, who told them that he knew nothing about the disposition of his mother's papers. He suggested that his grandfather might have them. Nothing of what Dorothy gathered, surmised, or wrote during her private interview with Jack Ruby or on her Texas or New Orleans sojourns has ever come to light. A book called "Murder One" was published in 1967. Her name was affixed to the title. The writer assigned to the book, Allan Ullman, worked from the old newspaper clips that she had assembled, and merely edited her reportage. He was under the impression that Dorothy had not put pen to paper (This was a book she had long had in the works. ed.). Her editor would not comment. No one approached at Random House was aware that she intended a chapter about Jack Ruby. She was silent now. ---Lee Israel, KILGALLEN, A BIOGRAPHY OF DOROTHY KILGALLEN (1979) pp, 443-444