The Reporter Who Knew Too Much Summary

Mark Shaw’s book ‘The reporter who knew too much” was an extremely interesting read and it involves the story of one of the biggest female influence of her time, Dorothy Kilgallen. In his book, Mark attempts to draw a connection between Dorothy Kilgallen’s mysterious death and her work in the research of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. It is an attempt on Mark’s part to help provide justice to Dorothy, a woman who had worked really hard to become a ‘somebody’ in a man’s world and accomplished commendable feats like flying around the world, visiting Nazi Germany and coming back unscathed and wooing millions with her newspaper reports and her T.V. show What’s My Line. In this critical book report, we will also be exploring various aspects of

victimization that Dorothy faced because of her being a woman at a time when it was hard for women to have as much success as she did and how she was, possibly, not given justice by the forensics department and the criminal justice system after her supposed suicide.
The book starts out by giving us an introduction of what Shaw wants to put across in his book followed by a historical look into Dorothy’s life. Shaw tells us how Dorothy was the daughter of a big-time news reporter, James Lawrence Kilgallen, born in Chicago and was an ambitious girl from a young age. Dorothy had an interesting early life and wanted to be a reporter from a young age, she started working as a reporter for New York Evening Journal after she dropped out of The College of New Rochelle. The book tells us that Dorothy travelled around the world on commercial air becoming the first women to do so, broke into the news world with her column called the Voice of Broadway which had millions of readers. She also a lot of success with various media shows, her first being on radio during World War II with her husband Richard Kollmar and five years after that she co hosted a radio show with him called Breakfast with Dorothy and Dick. Dorothy even broke into the television world by becoming a panelist on What’s My Line around 1950 and, as the book reports, was a part of that show till the day she died. She was notably called the “most powerful female voice in America” (New York Times). She was involved with some big names and case investigations of her time like Sam Sheppard’s murder trial, Frank Sinatra and his mafia connections and John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
Dorothy was a huge fam of John F. Kennedy, she also got a chance to meet him, and when JFK was assassinated on 22nd November 1963, she was extremely involved into it and could not accept that Oswald, the killer, acted alone. After Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby, Dorothy got involved in his life and case, investigating and trying to uncover who Ruby was involved with and who was responsible for the hit on the president. She was never able to publish her findings, she was found dead on November 8th, 1965 and the cause of death was ruled accidental. Shaw spends the rest of the book pursuing facts that are a little repetitive but are aiming to show how Dorothy’s death required a lot more of an investigation than it got, and so did her findings relating to Kennedy’s assassination, the file of research that Dorothy talked about relating to it was never recovered after her death. Her death was ruled a suicide, a drug and alcohol overdose.
The book touches on multiple aspects of victimization that Dorothy had to face in her life, being a successful woman in an age of men. The primary purpose of the book was to be a tribute to Dorothy’s successful life story and an attempt to shed light on her work with the JFK killing and also to provide justice for her death by putting forward the notion that her death was not a suicide, but a murder to stop her from revealing her findings which she had told her lawyer would be ‘the scoop of the century.’
This book relates to the course in aspects of negligence that underwent Dorothy’s forensic examination, as we learned that there is a process and a lot of ethics involved in forensic nursing practices.

A lot of them were not followed while conducting the forensic diagnostic of Dorothy. Even the investigation was quickly shut down not super long after her death and the ruling of suicide was pretty quick as well. We can see the routine activity theory come into play, as Dorothy, having notable lifestyle factors by being as successful as she was as a reporter and a TV panelist, put herself in a position which increases the exposure and vulnerability of a victim to harm. Her involvement with an alarming amount of cases, makes sense as she wrote about a lot of crime and criminology, and her peeking interest in dangerous people/incidents like Frank Sinatra and JFK’s assassin’s assassin put her in a place of high exposure to becoming a victim even though all she wanted was justice for the

deceased.
The two research articles I chose are by Speriglio and Hamblett who talk about the mysterious death of Marilyn Monroe.

The main book by Shaw made us aware of the connection between Marilyn and Dorothy, Dorothy had once bashed Marilyn hinting at her affair with JFK and once Marilyn was found dead a few days later she had published her shock and tried to spur a debate about the fact that her death seemed to have too many off factors which point away from an accidental overdose and more towards a staged murder. It is a sad irony that both women died in somewhat a similar manner and the debate behind the deaths of these female super-giants of their time is extremely controversial in a similar manner. In their research, Speriglio and Hamblett divulge into multiple possibilities of Marilyn’s death being more than accidental, even touching on suicide, but one thing that stands out in both of their research is a possibility of an assassination setup of Marilyn by JFK’s brother Bobby to silence her before she can make her affair with the president public. Hamblett’s research is more focused on her life and Speriglio’s research is more focused on her ‘supposed murder.’

The likely effect of this kind of victimization is difficult to divulge into, as the way media has blown up these deaths as accidents doesn’t help the case that the research and the main book are trying to put forward, that being an assassination of ‘someone who did something that did not please someone else.’ The only recommendation

I can provide for future research in this type of victimization scenario is that policy’s need to be enforced a lot more if there is evidence of foul play involved in someone’s death, it doesn’t matter if it is a big-time celebrity or a normal member of the society.
The research on this book and the articles on the death of these amazing women was fun and gave me an interesting perspective on the way victimization occurs for someone who is indulging in the notable aspects of routine theory. It gives us an opportunity to dive more into the aspects of Cohen and Felson’s theory which is based on the understanding that ‘victimization is a consequence of opportunities’ (Turvey). We can look at how these women indulged in routine activities, more Dorothy then Marilyn, that resulted in them being victims of ‘alleged’ assassination. The concept from our text of Differential Association can be see here, ‘People who associate regularly with others engaged in unlawful behavior are more likely to be victimized, because of their increased exposure to high-risk situations and environments’ (Turvey). All in all, this was a very interesting book.