She Knew Who Killed JFK. One Week Before She Could Prove It, Dorothy Kilgallen Was Dead.

The only journalist granted a private interview with Jack Ruby was found deceased sitting upright in a bed she never slept in, fully made up. Her JFK file was gone. It has never been found.

Her column filed on time, hours before she died.

It ran the next morning in 146 newspapers, syndicated by the King Features desk of the Hearst Corporation to a combined readership of approximately 20 million people, most of whom read her before they read anything else in the paper. It was a piece about Broadway.

She’d filed it before going on the air at CBS Studio 52 at 10:30 p.m. on Sunday, November 7, 1965, for the live broadcast of What’s My Line?, the panel show she had appeared on every Sunday night since 1950, without missing a single broadcast, for 15 years.

She was Dorothy Kilgallen, 52 years old on the night of her final broadcast. Her voice reached more Americans, six days a week, than any other female journalist alive.

Ernest Hemingway had called her one of the greatest women writers in the world.

And, of every reporter in the country, she was the only one who had ever been granted a private interview with Jack Ruby.

For 18 months she’d been carrying a file she called her insurance policy. Her hairdresser had seen her open it once, on the morning of what would turn out to be the last week of her life, and had watched her put it back in the leather case she never let out of her sight.

By ten o’clock the next morning she was dead, the file that she believed would blow the JFK case wide open was gone, and the file has never been found.