-Caveat Lector-
An excerpt from:
Kilgallen
Lee Israel©1979
Delacorte Press
New York, NY
ISBN 0-440-04522-3
--[4]--
What happened to Dorothy?
She might have committed suicide.
When Pearl Bauer and Miss Muller, who had returned from Germany to be with
the family after she heard about Dorothy's death, were instructed to ferret
through Dorothy's effects, Mrs. Bauer came upon some jottings in her late
employer's handwriting. "They were all about the reason for living and if
there was a reason for living," Mrs. Bauer recalled. I had the feeling that
they were connected to a newspaperman she knew somewhere in [she named a
midwestern state]. I had more or less suspected that someone out there had
caught her fancy. I showed the paper to the nurse, and she suggested that we
dispose of it." [42]
If Dorothy was driven to an intentional act of self-destruction, there would
seem to have been only one person in her life whose acts could have provoked
her. And he is the Outof-Towner. If, in fact, he was at the Regency that
night, he might have done it with a few drunken, rejecting words. If he was
not at the Regency, it could have happened over the telephone.
If, indeed, he carries this burden with him, this could explain why he
remains so insistent upon the platonic nature of their relationship, why he
goes so far as to stress Dorothy's acceptance of her role as fifth wheel-an
assertion that anyone who knew her well and understood the depths of her
feelings for him would gainsay.
The press agent from Carrara, "Mitch," recalled that she grew sullen and
despondent when she saw him out with another woman in a New York restaurant,
some months before her death.[43]
When I first interviewed the Out-of-Towner, I was not yet aware of Dorothy's
heady and euphoric talk with Marlin Swing at Delmonico's. I had not yet
spoken to the person who handled room arrangements at the Regency in 1965 and
confirmed to me that Dorothy was in the lounge on the night of her death.
Though that individual had not seen Dorothy, she recalled vividly that the
hotel staff was shocked to hear about Dorothy; that there was a great deal of
talk about the fact that she had been there on the night of her death.
The Out-of-Towner had contended, during our initial talks, that he was not in
New York on Sunday, November 7; that he and Dorothy chatted unextraordinarily
at about 12:30 A.M., just before she died, he in his home and she in hers. It
was, he said, "a vanilla conversation."
'With new awareness and growing dubiety, I questioned him again about the
nature of their relationship. These are excerpts from the conversation:
SUBJECT: There was some indication that it was special on her part. I kept
that in line, if you can understand that. And we remained, literally to the
night of her death, very, very dear friends . . . It certainly was not a
passing fancy, our relationship; on the other hand, it was not a love affair,
either, unless you want to make your terms very loose.
LEE ISRAEL: No, I don't want to make my terms very loose. I want to know what
she was believing and what she was fantasizing.
SUBJECT: . . . We were very close in that we talked long-distance several
times a week at least; and I saw her frequently. And I have every reason to
believe that she liked me a great deal and needed something to love. I don't
think that she was—quote—in love with me. I think there's a possibility that
for a short time she thought it. But we did work that out.
LEE ISRAEL: How did you work it out?
SUBJECT: Just by saying, "This is silly." And I told her, "I'm not in love
with you. I love you. You're my friend." It would frequently come up. It was
not infrequent that she would have been drinking. It would be late at night,
by the nature of both our jobs, and some of the conversations were not as
coherent as I would have liked them to be. I'm having trouble interpreting
the questions.
LEE ISRAEL: She told friends—and their revelations put a new slant on
things—that she was having a relationship; and they took that to mean a
reciprocal relationship.
SUBJECT (laughing): After Salzburg, she-very early in our
relationship-indicated that there was love there. And I tried to direct that
love. Again, I come out smelling like a hero. And that's not the way it was.
It was silly for her, for me, for us, for anyone to indicate a romance in the
truer sense of the word. she did, in fact, go on dates when I had a date with
another person.
LEE ISRAEL: That had been my impression. I remember your telling me that
there were times when she, sadly, was a fifth wheel, and was aware of your
situation.
SUBJECT: There are several nights that stand out. And one was when she really
had to go to bed. First, she told me she had to get up in the morning very
early. And I was out with a lady. And we dropped her off at home. She had a
few drinks, but wasn't drunk. And she said, "Why can't I go with you?" Not
meaning me, but us. It was a group. And I said, "Now, Dorothy, no. You have
to get up." just like dropping off a little girl. And the rest of us went to
P. J. Clarke's.
LEE ISRAEL: it has been said to me that she said you had written love poetry
to her and for her. And I thought: "That doesn't sound like_____."
SUBJECT: . . . No, I've never written a poem for Dorothy.
LEE ISRAEL: You haven't been able to come up with any recollection of that
last telephone conversation you had with her? Which we discussed at great
length and I'm nagging you again about it.
SUBJECT: No. There was nothing outstanding. Nothing outstanding. It was like
"I'll talk to you the first of the week."
LEE ISRAEL: There are three people I talked to who thought that after P. J.
Clarke's, she was going to meet you.
SUBJECT: After . . .
LEE ISRAEL: That's where she stopped ritualistically. SUBJECT: That night?
LEE ISRAEL: That night of her death in November of 1965, that she was going
to meet you.
SUBJECT: No. I was in no way there. It's simple. I was here. My own mother
told me about her death. There was no plan, to my knowledge, unless she was
at that point fantasizing. There certainly was no plan for me to be in New
York. As a matter of fact, I probably wouldn't have been in New York for two
or three weeks after that.
LEE ISRAEL: But the telephone conversation was like 12:30, you said?
SUBJECT: Now I don't remember. It was late. LEE ISRAEL: She called you?
SUBJECT: Yeah.
LEE ISRAEL: Well, it's strange. She must have been fantasizing at that point.
SUBJECT: It had happened before. And I was unaware of the heaviness of her
drinking. And I'm gathering this from hearsay after the fact.
LEE ISRAEL: But you found that bottle of vodka in Rome, didn't you?
SUBJECT: Yes. Well, I'm not sure it was vodka. I found a bottle that she had
bought that night that I knew about. . . . That was at the Grand Hotel and
the bottle was empty. I was really kind of the first one in her room. What
I'm trying to say is that the maid didn't go in and empty it. And that
bothered me in a kind of intangible way, because I had never seen her drink.
To the day of her death, I had never seen her really drink.[44]
I submitted the taped conversation with the Out-ofTowner to an analysis by a
psychological stress evaluator (PSE). The machine, invented by three retired
army intelligence officers less than ten years ago, measures anxiety by
involuntary shifts in the human voice. There exists a good deal of
controversy about the PSE, but it is currently used by over a hundred
law-enforcement agencies as an aid to detecting deception in a subject. The
Out-of-Towner's tape was PSE'd by a former CIA intelligence analyst, author
of The Assassination Tapes, George O'Toole.
In psychological stress evaluation, stress designations run from A through G.
The lower level designations show an absence of stress and are conclusive
evidence of truthfulness. F levels shows "good to hard stress," G "hard
stress." O'Toole emphasizes that "Stress is a necessary, but not sufficient
condition of deception ."[45]
I received the following comments from O'Toole about what the PSE indicated
with regard to the truthfulness of the Out-of-Towner. There was some internal
contradiction with regard to the alleged last telephone conversation with
Dorothy. The Out-of-Towner showed: "only B-level stress" when he denied any
recollection of his last telephone conversation with Dorothy. But this
"rapidly escalates to E and F levels when he says there was 'nothing
outstanding' about it."
O'Toole wrote,
"He goes to F and G levels when he denies he was in New York and claims he
was in [subject's home town] at the time of K's death; F level on stating
"You know how I found out" about K's death. F level on saying there was no
plan for him to be in New York. . . . PSE analysis of [subject's] statements
does not confirm his truthfulness regarding not being in New York on the date
in question. The analysis is consistent with the hypothesis that he is lying
about this. [Subject's] stress might be caused by his own grief and trauma.
However, the high level of stress associated with an apparently uncharged
statement—that there were no plans to be in New York—suggests the stress on
this question is the result of something else. There is also F level stress
in his statement that he was "unaware of the heaviness of her drinking." I
hope you can figure a way to bold this guy's feet in the fire, because I
believe he has a lot more to tell you.[46]
In November, 1976, five months after the stressful conversation with the
Out-of-Towner, I tuned into "The Long John Nebel Show," an all-night radio
program broadcast over WMCA in New York. Nebel had been a friend to both
Dorothy and Richard. The subject of his radio show this particular night was
the JFK assassination.
Obviously nettled by the conspiratorial thrust of the broadcast, Nebel
trotted out Dorothy as a way to rebut the so-called domino theory, which
ascribes sundry Kennedyrelated deaths—Dorothy's among them—to a widespread
plot to silence the knowledgeable. He designated all of the speculation about
foul play and Dorothy "a crock." She was in love, he said, with a young man
at the time of her death. He described the object of her affection, naming no
name. The description fit the Out-of-Towner. Nebel then asserted that she had
been out with the young man that night and returned home happily,, at which
point she "did a dummy thing . . . combining liquor with a fair amount of
Seconal." [47]
There was a great deal wrong with Nebel's logic. Women in love have been
known to take their own lives, usually when they fall into a depression about
that love. Some women in love have also been murdered.
The story had been told to him, Nebel claimed on the air, right after
Dorothy's death, by a close friend who was functioning, vis-a-vis the couple,
as a "beard," a third party whose presence militates against romantic
inferences by spectators. Neither did he name the beard. He referred to him
as a "rock music promoter."
I wrote to Nebel and asked him to name names. He did not respond to the
letter. I wrote a subsequent letter to "Long John Nebel and Candy Jones."
Candy was Nebel's wife and co-host. She was in the studio during the
November, 1976, broadcast.
Candy Jones telephoned me on June 3, 1977, only a few days after receiving
the second letter. She had asked John Nebel, off-mike, who the men were. He
told her. She now named both men to me. One was the Out-of-Towner; the
"beard" had been part of the publishing company that Dorothy had helped set
up.
I could not conceive that Nebel's source, the man functioning as the beard,
had made the story up, or that Nebel manufactured it. This was no exotic
assemblage of details, but a knowledgeable rendering that substantiated much
of what I was coming to believe about Dorothy's activities on the night of
her death. It placed her with the Out-of-Towner and their business associate
at the meeting-cum-tryst to which she had referred in her letter on lavender
paper, when she had suggested that the Out-of-Towner try to make his New York
trip in late October or early November so that there would be time "for
conferences and all that jazz."
I was no longer on amiable terms with the Out-of-Towner. But I did arrange to
interview Nebel's purported informant, who will be called the Music Man. He
talked about his close friendship with Dorothy and admitted attending her
funeral with John Nebel. He denied completely, however, that he was with the
couple that night or that he had ever told Nebel the story. Though he held
shares in the publishing company, whose sole purpose was to showcase the
music written by the Out-of-Towner, and though the Out-of-Towner, during our
less fractious talks, claimed friendship with him, the Music Man contended
that he barely remembered the company or the man: I met him once or twice
when he came to New York. I don't remember getting any stock."
The Music Man, too, had been "out of town" that Sunday night. He did not
remember where he was, but his present wife would vouch for his absence.
Dorothy, he said, had sent to him, by hand delivery, on the Friday before her
death, an invitation that read: "You stinker. I haven't seen you in ages.
Let's have lunch on Monday." He telephoned her Monday morning to accept. The
response at the house was strange and evasive. He was pondering the situation
when Long John Nebel called him, around noon, to tell him that their friend
was dead.
"I'd like to find out what John did mean," he said.[48] I suggested that he
telephone and find out. This he apparently never did. Nebel died of cancer in
April, 1978. According to Candy Jones, the Music Man was not sufficiently
interested to broach the subject to Nebel, though he had become involved in a
rather bizarre situation.[49] I am not aware that he ever found Dorothy's
note.
Monday the columnist slept late. It would have been quite a day for her, with
the early-morning photography session, the appointment with Marc Sinclaire, a
column to write, a deal to negotiate, a meeting at Kerry's school, the airing
of "To Tell the Truth," lunch with Joan Crawford, lunch with the movie mogul,
lunch with the Music Man. . . .
What happened to Dorothy?
The suicide theory presents one nettlesome problem. If she was stood
up by, spurned, or in any way emotionally ravaged by the Out-of-Towner, and
thereby driven to suici-dal rage, she did not take the kind of massive dose
consistent with that rage. Had she returned home resolute and seeth-ing, she
could have availed herself of a virtual pharmacopoeia. Kerry Kollmar recalled
that his father had vats of pills around, containers of Tuinal large enough
to pickle mice.
But Dr. Michael Baden estimated she had taken fifteen to twenty pills and
had, in a casual conversation prior to our more official interview, wiggled
his hand iffily when I asked him whether she had intended to kill
herself.[50] Luke contended that the dose was not in the range that one
expects in cases that are suicide. The 50 cubic centimeters of pink fluid
remained unanalyzed; had it proven to be Seconal, the estimated
quantifications would have increased: However, in really massive doses, such
as the one Richard Kollmar went out with, the barbiturates leave a message in
the stomach, whose mucosa become tellingly irritated. Dorothy's stomach
showed only mild irritation.[51]
The statement that I had heard from so many pathologists—"Well, they were
enough to kill her"—I had always construed as a maddening tautology. Perhaps
not. The pills were in a perplexingly moderate range. Too many of them for
accident, too few for suicide. But enough to kill her.
What happened to Dorothy?
She might have been murdered. God knows, it would have been easy enough in
that house of lies, and pills, and darkness, where power could buy cover and
get more than it paid for, where an overdose was an assumed eventuality.
"I was only there once," the Out-of-Towner said, "but the feeling was one of
emptiness. Even the entrance, where I would leave her, was depressing and
dark."[52]
The method would have been pills slipped into liquor. just enough to make the
central nervous system flutter and take a tiny quantum jump. The fewer the
better, just in case you get an honest cop who opts to investigate and would,
perhaps, find out that she was happy. The beauty of it is that it isn't even
necessary, given habitual ingestion, to succeed the first time. And Dorothy
made it ideal for a killer. There is some question about whether a
sufficiently inebriated victim would taste the bitter barbiturate powder. But
the beverage most likely to succeed in masking the taste would have been her
mixer of choice, which she was using on the night of her death: quinine.
For motive and opportunity, Richard Kollmar must be considered. By the terms
of a will drawn up in 1941 and never changed, he stood to inherit virtually
everything.[53] The children had not been considered at all. They had a
little more than three thousand dollars in one checking account. But he got
the jointly owned town house and sold it, in 1966, for $290,000. Dorothy's
various insurance policies, of which he was sole beneficiary, totaled almost
$90,000. There were several pension funds. Only the Goodson-Todman
profit-sharing dividend of $82,000 was shared among the three children, and
there was $576 in government savings bonds that Dorothy had squirreled away
for Kerry.
Richard eventually shipped Kerry off to a foster home.[54]
The problem with Richard as killer is primarily psychological, and was
expressed in identical language by many who knew him for years: He did not
appear to have the "balls" to do a crime of such magnitude. In addition, he
told Detective Mike Ward in one of his hurly-burly of contradictory stories
that he had a drink at home with Dorothy on the night of her death, hardly a
thing to tell a police officer if he had, in fact, dissolved several
barbiturates in the drink.[55] And finally, an official cover-up of any
magnitude at all would not have been effected on behalf of a mere uxoricide.
It must be considered possible that, if she was murdered, the crime was done
to silence her, by a kiss-and-kill representative of whatever faction it is
that does not want the facts about the assassination of JFK to emerge.
She would not have been its only victim. In recent history, four witnesses
who testified or were scheduled to do so at various inquiries into the
assassination have been killed or committed suicide: George de Mohrenschildt,
friend to Oswald; Sam Giancana and John Rosselli, mobsters linked to CIA
efforts to eliminate Fidel Castro; and William Sullivan, senior FBI official.
The list of other violent or suspicious deaths closer to the assassination
has been widely publicized. There were several news people among them.
Eighteen witnesses died within a little over three years of the
assassination, thirteen as victims of suicide, accident, or murder. The
London Sunday Times requested an actuary to compute the likelihood of such a
cluster of deaths related to an event; the odds were one hundred thousand
trillion to one against.[56]
On March 3, 1978, on a snowbound New York night, I met a man in a congenial
pub in the East Twenties. He was accompanied by his wife, and I by a
go-between who verified the man's identity, his occupation as a chemist, his
past status, and the general accuracy of the political factionalism that he
described.
>From 1967 until 1972, the chemist was "confidant and right-hand man" to Dr.
Charles J. Umberger, director of toxicology at the New York City Medical
Examiner's Office. He left because of the pervasive factionalism at the
office. The chemist now claimed to me that Umberger believed that Dorothy had
been murdered; and that he somehow came into possession of inculpatory
forensic evidence whose true nature he withheld from the Department of
Pathology. In 1968 Umberger shared his information with his young colleague.
Umberger was known for retaining, in his laboratory, hundreds of
toxicological specimens. He practiced a kind of forensic cryonics, keeping
the beakers pending development of an advanced technology to better
understand the cause of death. He was known, also, for the fierce medical
politics he practiced. In Dorothy's case, he hoped to use the conclusion he
had reached privately as something to "hold over" Milton Helpern and James
Luke, who had certified the death.
Umberger gave the chemist, for confirmative toxicological analysis, a basic
beaker with an extract from Dorothy's brain, and another beaker labeled
"drink." He told the younger man that two glasses, which had contained
alcoholic beverages, had been found at Dorothy's bedside, and that the
"drink," from which the alcohol had evaporated, was hers.
When Dorothy died, the medical examiner's office of the City of New York was
not yet routinely employing tests that could specify which drug or
combination of drugs from the three groups of fast-acting
barbiturates—secobarbital (trademark Seconal); amobarbital (whose trademark
Tuinal is a combination of amobarbital and secobarbital); and pentobarbital
(trademark Nembutal)—had been involved in a death. Therefore the results of
the original toxicological studies conducted on Dorothy were consistent with
several interpretations. Her body could have reposited only Seconal or
various combinations of Seconal-Tuinal-Nembutal. Qualitative extrapolations
were impossible using the more primitive technology.
At the time Umberger beckoned the younger chemist, it had become possible,
using more sophisticated technology, to learn more, to particularize the drug
or drugs involved. He tested the basic beaker. "I found all three "I he told
me. "Amo, pento, and secobarbitol." And in the specimen taken from the glass,
he said, "I found Nembutal."
He reported his findings to Dr. Umberger. According to his account, "Umberger
grinned and said, 'Keep it under your hat. It was big.'"
Besides the word of the chemist, there is one finding that tends to confirm.
The Department of Toxicology routinely reports to Pathology a list of basic
drugs found in the body. The chemist who ran the tests originally on Dorothy
noted that quinine, which might have covered the bitterness of the secreted
barbiturates, was found in "brain, bile, and liver." But the quinine, a basic
drug, was not reported in the official laboratory findings presented to the
Department of Pathology. It should have been, as a matter of procedure.
My present informant had no more knowledge. Nothing about the orchestration
of the cabal, nothing about how the semisecret physical evidence made its way
from the town house to the Department of Toxology.
Given the mentality of the sentinels and their access to official favor, it
is within reason to postulate the following scenario-one which accounts for
the disinformation process at the ME's office and the breakdown in
communications between Doyle and Luke:
Dorothy was found dead in a scene that bespoke the presence of a lover.
Medical Examiner One was called to the house unofficially, because some
influential sentinels either wanted the scene expertly sanitized or
entertained the possibility of foul play. The sentinel wanted to eliminate
unnecessary scandal if she had simply overdosed following a tryst. Medical
Examiner One took the glasses to the laboratory and sent them to toxicology
for analysis, also off the record. Toxicology's Dr. Umberger now held sway,
aware of the vulnerability of his colleague. He found the Nembutal in her
glass and surmised foul play. But to have forthrightly reported this would
have simply added another feather to the cap of Medical Examiner One. He
disinformed, holding his knowledge in abeyance for a time at which he would
need it as leverage. He never used the leverage, because he became aware of
the political nature of the murder, an awareness that even further increased
his political leverage vis-a-vis certain government agencies. He did
everything in his power to minimize the possibility of meaningful police
investigation. The sentinel was told that the glass contained no evidence of
foul play. He remained as confused about Dorothy's death as the general
public. The other householders, depending on the extent of their knowledge,
endeavored to cover up either a perceived suicide or a perceived accident
under scandalous circumstances.
What happened to Dorothy?
Three days after her death, Bob and jean Bach invited 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."[57]
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."[58]
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 Dickie, who told them that he knew nothing about the
disposition of his mother's papers. He suggested that his grandfather might
have them.[59]
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 named 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.[60] 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.
Pps.410-444
--fini--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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