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Beware chapters on Pitzer, Kupcinet and Kilgallen. Otherwise the book is OK.

ByMargaret Grace Beerson April 17, 2013

Format: Hardcover

I'm giving it four stars. Each mysteriously dead person's chapter is well-balanced, well-written and logical except for:

-- Lt. Cdr. William Pitzer of the United States Navy. It would have been nice if authors Belzer and Wayne had revealed that his body had been found dead from a gunshot wound inside the television studio at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. The year was 1966. Everyone who is interested in the JFK assassination should savor that detail of the television studio inside a building that supposedly treated sick and injured U. S. Navy veterans and had hosted JFK for his autopsy. The detail is creepy.

If Pitzer were going to shoot himself, he would have done it in the woods somewhere in Bethesda. He could have killed himself inside his garage at home. Every house that was within commuting distance of the National Naval Medical Center in 1966 had a garage. You could walk from each house to the woods.

-- actress Karyn Kupcinet, daughter of Irving and Essee. ("Irv," also nicknamed "Kup," was a legendary newspaper columnist and TV talk show host in Chicago.) It's very nice of authors Belzer and Wayne to disprove, for the first time since the 1960s, the Kupcinet-related theory that was launched by sloppy 1960s conspiracy theorist Penn Jones. Jones claimed, in a 1967 book that he paid to publish with a vanity press, that Ms. Kupcinet was a woman in Oxnard, California who told her local telephone operator and the operator's supervisor on November 22, 1963 that the president would get shot moments later.

The Associated Press indeed reported that day that an Oxnard woman had done such a thing. Newspapers in the United States and Canada ran the story, which competed for readers' attention with thousands of other print stories and television reports from Dallas and Washington, DC. Many people either never read about the mysterious Oxnard, California woman or else they did read the brief story then forgot it. The Associated Press reporter had interviewed two employees of the old GTE company that provided telephone service for many parts of California. The two employees, one of whom was Oxnard division manager Ray Sheehan, had heard the woman's creepy warning, but they didn't know her name. Telephone companies needed several minutes to trace the origins of phone calls back then. The anonymous woman hung up before the trace could have worked. About fifteen minutes after she hung up her phone, the president was shot. Four years later, the sloppy Penn Jones claimed Karyn Kupcinet was that woman. Wrong.

So it's nice of Belzer and Wayne to clear that up. Meanwhile, they claim that even though Karyn Kupcinet had no inside knowledge of Lee Oswald or Jack Ruby, her murder was connected to the assassination nonetheless. I don't buy their explanation. It has to do with diverting the attention of millions of Chicago residents so that none of them would ask questions about their native son Jack Ruby's connections to Sam Giancana and other Italian-American criminals. They would be focusing their attention on the murder of an innocent pretty young lady that happened in West Hollywood, California, and that was the easiest way to keep those Chicago criminals away from prying reporters and law enforcement officials?!?

And if Karyn's father Irv Kupcinet were going to investigate Jack Ruby's possible accomplices, he had six days to start doing it between Ruby's televised shooting of Oswald and the discovery of Karyn's body. He didn't start doing it. Read "Kup's Column" on November 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 and 30, 1963 in the Chicago Sun-Times. They were about entertainers and colorful residents of Chicago. On Saturday night, November 30, Irv and his wife Essee attended a party at the new Consolidated Foods factory in Deerfield, Illinois. (Construction had been completed a very short time earlier. Operation of the factory wouldn't begin until 1964.) Mr. Kupcinet wasn't going to learn anything about Jack Ruby's accomplices at that food factory. He didn't write full-length articles that were totally devoted to one topic. He wouldn't have focused on the topic of a Dallas criminal who threw temper tantrums. So what if Mr. Kupcinet and Mr. Ruby had known each other as kids? A lot of Chicago Jewish kids knew each other in the 1920s.

At least Belzer and Wayne are smarter than Penn Jones, who made a loose association between Karyn Kupcinet and an Associated Press news story that mentioned one of the millions of women who lived in California on November 22, 1963.

Still, Belzer and Wayne should let Irv Kupcinet do some of the talking. Here is what he wrote for his column as it appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times on February 9, 1992. This was at the height of the controversy surrounding Oliver Stone's "JFK" film when it was showing in multiplex cinemas.

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The NBC Today Show on Friday [February 7] carried a list of people who died violently in 1963 [and the years that followed] shortly after the death of President John F. Kennedy and may have had some link to the assassination. The first name on the list was Karyn Kupcinet, my daughter. That is an atrocious outrage. She did die violently in a Hollywood murder case still unsolved. That same list was published in a book years ago with no justification or verification. The book left the impression that some on the list may have been killed to silence them because of knowledge of the assassination. Nothing could be further from the truth in my daughter's case. The list apparently has developed a life of its own and for Today to repeat the calumny is reprehensible. Karyn no longer can suffer pain by such an inexcusable mention, but her parents and her brother Jerry can.

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Belzer and Wayne ignore that statement entirely. They don't quote anyone in Karyn Kupcinet's family even though her younger brother Jerry can be contacted easily. He is a television director and producer who has worked on "Judge Judy."

-- Dorothy Kilgallen. *She* sometimes wrote an article devoted to one topic, such as a criminal suspect. She did that in addition to her gossip column. She was a Roman Catholic female who was trapped in an unhappy marriage. She has been called a gossip columnist. Irv Kupcinet hasn't been. Should a heterosexual Jewish father of two children in Chicago be called a gossip columnist? Maybe that's unfair. You can call Irv Kupcinet a reporter, but that doesn't mean he was secretly working on a long article about Jack Ruby while dropping other names in his daily column and while partying at a factory that was going to start making Sara Lee cheesecake several weeks later.

Regarding Kilgallen, it's nice that Belzer and Wayne are the first book authors to mention an eyewitness sighting of Kilgallen by Katherine Williams Stone. She admits to seeing Kilgallen alive later than anyone else. She was a Kentucky resident who was a tourist in New York City where Kilgallen lived. Two friends accompanied Katherine on her trip: a very successful manufacturer of agricultural ploughs and his wife. The story of Katherine (who can be seen entering and signing in as "Katherine W. Stone" on that night's live telecast of "What's My Line?") appears at the very end of the Kilgallen chapter. Belzer and Wayne cite statements that Katherine made in 1999. She was videotaped talking at a public-access TV studio in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. Immediately after Katherine and her friends returned from New York to Kentucky in 1965, she told her story to several people, but her story never left Kentucky until thirty years later.

After "What's My Line?" ended, Katherine saw Dorothy Kilgallen more than a mile away from the CBS television studio. Her two friends saw Kilgallen inside the studio and minutes later on the sidewalk getting into her limousine, but not at the place a mile away. They confirm Katherine Stone (who became Katherine Stone Stevens when she married her second husband in the 1970s) is an honest person who never was shy about telling people her story that made Kilgallen's death seem suspicious. But Lee Israel, allegedly the number-one expert on Kilgallen, missed Katherine's story.

Before you get to the last page of the Kilgallen chapter about the "tourist from Kentucky," you have to put up with or skip over several pages that repeat the same details of Kilgallen's barbiturates and autopsy over and over. This chapter could have benefited from better editing as the Pitzer chapter could have. The problem with the Kupcinet chapter is not the editing so much as the two authors' wacky theory that "solves" both her murder and JFK's. I shall repeat their theory, which they got from an online commentator who has never published anything on paper: Even though Karyn Kupcinet was an actress working in Los Angeles television studios, a professional criminal named Paul Dorfman, who didn't know her, killed her so that the entire population of Chicago, where she hadn't lived for two-and-a-half years, would focus on grieving for her instead of finding the Chicago criminals who had instructed Jack Ruby to do certain things in Dallas. Just reading a summary of that theory gives me jet lag.

Overall, this book is worth buying. A lot of other books on the JFK assassination are so idiosyncratic that the best book editor in New York couldn't have fixed them.

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