Intrepid reporter and TV star Dorothy Kilgallen, who investigated the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, will get a Manhattan street co-named in her honor Saturday on the 60th anniversary of her mysterious death.<\/p>\n
Before media icons like Barbara Walters, Kilgallen smashed the glass ceiling in male-dominated NYC newspapers, the New York Evening Journal and New York Journal American. She wrote a syndicated Voice of Broadway column and covered major criminal trials, including the Lindbergh baby kidnapping case and the murder trial of Jack Ruby, who killed JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. <\/p>\n
In her heyday, the New York Post called Kilgallen \u201cthe most powerful female voice in America.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cShe never got her due. So many people don\u2019t know who she was,\u201d said City Councilman Robert Holden (D-Queens), who won City Council approval for the street-naming after learning about Kilgallen in books by Mark Shaw, \u201cThe Reporter Who Knew Too Much<\/a>\u201d and \u201cDenial of Justice.\u201d <\/a><\/p>\n The corner of Park Avenue and East 68th Street \u2013 near a townhouse where the glamorous journalist, mother-of-three and panelist on TV\u2019s What\u2019s My Line? once lived \u2013 will be christened \u201cDorothy Kilgallen Way.\u201d<\/p>\n Journalist Dorothy Kilgallen at her typewriter in 1954 while covering the Sam Sheppard murder trial. She later delved into the 1963 assassinations of JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald. Bettmann Archive<\/p>\n Speakers at the ceremony include Shaw and Gianni Russo, 81, who played Don Corleone\u2019s wife-beating son-in-law Carlo Rizzi <\/a>in \u201cThe Godfather.\u201d As a teen, Russo worked for Frank Costello<\/a>, and met Kilgallen among VIPs who gathered at the mobster\u2019s Copacabana nightclub.<\/p>\n \u201cI thought she was the smartest woman in the world,\u201d Russo recalled.<\/p>\n A celebrity in her time, Kilgallen has largely fallen from public memory since her shocking death on Nov. 8,1965.<\/p>\n Witty and charming, she appeared on \u201cWhat\u2019s My Line?\u201d the night before<\/a>,\u00a0guessing the occupation of a mystery guest \u2014 a dynamite saleswoman.<\/p>\n President John F. Kennedy was fatally shot while riding with first lady Jacqueline Kennedy in a Dallas motorcade on Nov. 22, 1963. Journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, who challenged the government\u2019s lone gunman conclusion, suspected a possible Mafia mastermind of the assassination. AP<\/p>\n In the morning, Kilgallen was found dead in her townhouse \u2013\u00a0 sitting up in a bed, naked beneath a blue bathrobe, with the same makeup and hair accessory she had worn on TV.\u00a0 <\/p>\n The city Medical Examiner\u2019s office quickly ruled it accidental \u2013 an overdose of sleeping pills and booze. The NYPD shut the case without even taking fingerprints to probe possible foul play, Shaw learned.<\/p>\n But raising questions, Kilgallen\u2019s 18-months of research on the JFK killing \u2013 including two exclusive interviews with Jack Ruby<\/a> \u2013\u00a0 completely vanished that day, possibly seized by law-enforcement agents.\u00a0<\/p>\n East 68th St. and Park Ave. on the Upper East Side will be co-renamed \u201cDorothy Kilgallen Way\u201d for the famed newspaper reporter, Broadway columnist, and TV star found dead at age 52 in her nearby townhouse while investigating the 1963 JFK assassination 60 years ago. Helayne Seidman<\/p>\n Kilgallen, who openly challenged the official \u201cOswald alone\u201d conclusion, was under surveillance by the FBI.\u00a0<\/p>\n Shaw argues that Kilgallen was murdered to stop her efforts to implicate New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello as mastermind of the JFK and Oswald killings. She told confidants that she would soon break \u201cthe biggest story in American history,\u201d and feared for her life.\u00a0<\/p>\n