This is an accepted version of this page Dorothy Mae Kilgallen (July 3, 1913 – November 8, 1965) was an American columnist, journalist, and television game show panelist.

After spending two semesters at the College of New Rochelle, she started her career shortly before her 18th birthday as a reporter for the Hearst Corporation's New York Evening Journal.

She wrote front-page articles for multiple newspapers on the Sam Sheppard trial[3] and, years later, events related to the John F. Kennedy assassination, such as testimony by Jack Ruby.

The family moved to various regions of the United States until 1920, when the International News Service hired James Kilgallen as a roving correspondent based in New York City.

She described the race in her book Girl Around The World, which is credited as the story idea for the 1937 movie Fly-Away Baby starring Glenda Farrell as a character partly inspired by Kilgallen.

[2] In November 1938, Kilgallen began writing a daily column, the "Voice of Broadway," for Hearst's New York Journal-American, after the corporation merged the Evening Journal with the American.

The column, which she wrote until her death in 1965, featured mostly New York show business news and gossip, but also ventured into other topics such as politics and organized crime.

Kilgallen's program Voice of Broadway was broadcast on CBS during World War II,[12] and Kollmar starred as the titular character in the nationally syndicated crime drama Boston Blackie that ran from 1941 to 1945.

Kilgallen and singer Frank Sinatra were fairly good friends for several years and were photographed rehearsing in a radio studio for a 1948 broadcast.

The New York Journal-American carried the banner front-page headline that Kilgallen was "shocked" by the guilty verdict because of what she argued were serious flaws in the prosecution's case.

[24][25] Attorney F. Lee Bailey, who was working on a habeas corpus petition for his client Sheppard, attended the Overseas Press Club event, heard what Kilgallen told the crowd, and then asked her privately if she would help him.

[26] In July 1964, four months after the Overseas Press Club event where Kilgallen broke her silence about the deceased Judge Blythin, Judge Weinman of the federal court granted Bailey's habeas corpus petition, Sam Sheppard was released from prison amid much newspaper publicity, and Sheppard met Kilgallen at a "late-night champagne party" (as described by Bailey in The Defense Never Rests) in Cleveland.

[23][26] Kilgallen was publicly skeptical of the conclusions of the Warren Commission's report about the assassination of President Kennedy and Jack Ruby's shooting of Lee Oswald, and she wrote several newspaper articles on the subject.

Kilgallen published it in August 1964 in three installments[32] on the front pages of the New York Journal-American,[33] The Philadelphia Inquirer,[34] the Seattle Post-Intelligencer,[35] and other newspapers.

[36] In 1961, producers were able to stockpile enough videotaped episodes so that Kilgallen and fellow panelists Arlene Francis and Bennett Cerf, along with host John Charles Daly, could take their summer vacations.

"[43] Flo Kilgore, a character based on Kilgallen, appears in novels by Max Allan Collins in his series featuring private detective Nathan Heller.