Call for Trump JFK Task Force to Investigate the Suspicious Death of Journalist Close to Revealing the Truth

President Donald Trump’s assassination task force is now facing calls to investigate the mysterious death of a renowned journalist who was on the cusp of shattering the official line about President John F Kennedy’s death, DailyMail.com can reveal.

The National Archives this week released a stunning 63,000 pages of declassified records related to JFK’s assassination in Dallas in 1963.

So far, few bombshells have surfaced from the files.

They appear to make no reference to investigative journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, her exclusive reporting and two-year probe into the shooting, or her own sudden death in 1965.

There also appears to be no mention of Carlos Marcello – the Mafia boss she believed plotted the assassination and then orchestrated the murder of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald at the hands of nightclub owner Jack Ruby. 

And also missing is the stash of evidence and notes Kilgallen had compiled about the president’s murder – a dossier that mysteriously vanished without a trace on the night of her apparent suicide.

‘It was disappointing but not surprising,’ lawyer and author Mark Shaw, who has investigated Kilgallen’s death for 15 years, tells DailyMail.com about the lacklustre files.

For years, Shaw has been calling on the NYPD and Manhattan DA’s Office to launch an independent investigation into Kilgallen’s death – an investigation he believes would reveal that she was murdered to silence her about the president’s assassination.

Now, Shaw is urging the House of Representatives Task Force on Declassification and Transparency to use Kilgallen’s line of investigation as a springboard to finally get to the truth about both JFK’s assassination and her own death two years later.

Back on March 11, Shaw sent Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, the head of the task force, and several other task force members letters, detailing his findings into Kilgallen’s death and urging the congressional group to open a new, independent investigation into the case.

‘One hope of mine is that by exposing the injustice done to Kilgallen when she died, a fresh, independent investigation of her death may be possible sooner than later based on compelling evidence that she was murdered,’ he wrote in the letter shared with DailyMail.com.

‘It appears certain that if there had been a thorough, independent investigation of the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, Robert F. Kennedy’s death five years later and the poisoning of heralded journalist and media icon Dorothy Kilgallen, the course of history would have been changed forever.

‘Your Task Force now has the chance to provide that thorough, independent investigation so the world at large finally learns of the most credible analysis of what really happened to these three 20th century icons. Such will prove that there should have never been three true crime murder mysteries at all since based on logic and the homicide detectives favorite tools to solve such mysteries, motive and benefit from the crime, there were not mysteries, only coverups of the truth from start to finish.’

Shaw tells DailyMail.com he has received confirmation that the letters reached the lawmakers’ offices but had received no response from any members of the task force as of Friday.

DailyMail.com did not receive a response from Luna’s office by the time of publication.

Kilgallen had been about to spill the bombshell details of her two-year investigation into JFK’s assassination when she was suddenly found dead in her luxury Manhattan home on November 8, 1965.

The night before, the acclaimed investigative journalist and celebrity had appeared on the quiz show ‘What’s My Line?’

She had also shared an excerpt from the manuscript of her explosive tell-all book about her investigation with her fellow panelist Bennett Cerf, the publisher of Random House.

In the book, she would reveal evidence showing that infamous mobster Marcello had actually orchestrated both JFK’s murder and the fatal shooting of Oswald, Shaw says.

‘I’m going to break the real story and have the biggest scoop of the century,’ Kilgallen is quoted as telling friends.

Her investigation had taken her to the scene of the shooting in Dallas and to the government’s closed-door Warren Commission hearings in Washington DC.

She had also reported from the trial of Jack Ruby, the nightclub owner who shot and killed Oswald in the basement of the Dallas Police Headquarters two days after the president’s murder.

She was the only journalist to ever interview Ruby – interviews that then led her to travel to Marcello’s stomping ground in New Orleans.

According to Shaw’s investigation, Kilgallen learned Marcello had orchestrated JFK’s assassination because the Kennedys broke a quid quo-pro deal to leave the Mafia alone after they helped him win the election.

She believed the Warren Commission was wrong – Oswald and Ruby had not acted alone. Instead, they were both connected to and following Marcello’s orders, Shaw asserts.

In her columns for the New York Journal-American, Kilgallen publicly raised her doubts that Oswald had acted alone and exclusively published Ruby’s commission testimony, trumping the government’s official report.

This all left the woman described by the New York Post in 1960 as ‘the most powerful female voice in America’ attracting unwanted attention.

The FBI, headed up by J. Edgar Hoover, had her placed under surveillance, according to an FBI file obtained by Shaw under the Freedom of Information Act.

The 52-year-old mom-of-three was also receiving death threats and told friends she feared for her life.

Soon, she was dead.

Kilgallen’s sudden death was quickly ruled as ‘circumstances undetermined’ – meaning either an accident or suicide – caused by a deadly combination of sleeping pills and alcohol, according to an autopsy by Manhattan’s Chief Medical Examiner Dr James Luke.

But it has long been shrouded in suspicion.

A friend who found her body felt the scene was staged. Her body was perched upright in bed in a room she never slept in and she was still wearing her make-up, fake eyelashes and a hair accessory from the night before.

And her huge dossier into JFK’s assassination had also mysteriously disappeared that same night – never to be seen again.

Shaw believes there is no doubt Kilgallen’s death was no accident and was not suicide. He believes she was poisoned at the orders of Marcello because she was about to expose the truth about JFK’s assassination.

He and New York Council Member Bob Holden have been urging the NYPD and Manhattan DA’s office to investigate Kilgallen’s death for years.

Both previously told DailyMail.com that they were separately promised by the agencies that they would look into it – before it was swiftly dropped without any investigation or interviews with surviving witnesses. 

An NYPD spokesperson told Daily Mail: ‘The NYPD, along with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, declined to reopen the investigation.’

Holden previously told DailyMail.com that he believes ‘larger forces’ may have warned authorities to back off.

‘I suspect there’s way more to this,’ he says. ‘Personally I believe there was a government cover-up back then as it did not make any sense.

‘For a detective unit like the NYPD to not even investigate the death of Dorothy Kilgallen means they were probably told not to by higher ups, meaning the federal government.’

Now, with the newly-created assassinations task force in Congress, Shaw says he is hopeful that the truth will finally come out about both JFK’s assassination and Kilgallen’s death. 

Luna has already broken from the government’s 50-year claim that Oswald acted alone.

At a press conference in February, she said she believes there were actually ‘two shooters’ in Dallas and has slammed the Warren Commission hearings as ‘faulty.’

‘In order to put to bed some of the theories that have been out there on John F. Kennedy, we have to know the full truth,’ she said.

As part of its new probe, the task force has vowed to interview surviving witnesses and Warren Commission members and is set to hold its first hearing into JFK’s assassination on March 26.

But Shaw fears the task force runs the risk of making the ‘same mistakes’ that the government made five decades ago.

He warns that focusing only on Oswald, the Warren Commission and the files kept by the government back in the 1960s will limit the task force to information from potentially ‘corrupt’ investigations.  

‘If they just focus on these records and interviewing people who were involved in the Warren Commission, this investigation of theirs will be a complete failure and it will really deny the American people of any possibility of getting to the truth of what happened to JFK,’ he says.

‘I think the task force has good intentions and wants to find out the truth but if it continues to focus on the “Oswald did this alone” stuff and leaves Dorothy Kilgallen out of the equation, they are going to end up with the same situation.’

Instead, he says the task force needs to look into JFK’s assassination ‘through the lens of Dorothy Kilgallen.’

‘They have got to investigate Dorothy Kilgallen’s investigation of JFK’s assassination,’ he says.

‘Then I hope they will investigate Dorothy Kilgallen’s mysterious death as she deserves justice.’