Mark Shaw - Fighting for Justice: The Improbable Journey to Exposing Cover-Ups about the JFK Assassination and the Deaths of Marilyn Monroe and Dorothy Kilgallen

Also by Mark Shaw

The Reporter Who Knew Too Much: The Mysterious Death of Whats My Line TV Star and Media Icon Dorothy Kilgallen

Denial of Justice: Dorothy Kilgallen, Abuse of Power, and the Most Compelling JFK Assassination Investigation in History

Collateral Damage: The Mysterious Deaths of Marilyn Monroe and Dorothy Kilgallen, and the Ties that Bind Them to Robert Kennedy and the JFK Assassination

A POST HILL PRESS BOOK

Fighting for Justice:

The Improbable Journey to Exposing Cover-Ups about the JFK Assassination and the Deaths of Marilyn Monroe and Dorothy Kilgallen

2022 by Mark Shaw

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978-1-63758-644-0

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-63758-645-7

Cover design by Cody Corcoran

Interior design and composition by Greg Johnson, Textbook Perfect

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Post Hill Press

New York Nashville

posthillpress.com

Published in the United States of America

Contents

Justice is a big rug. When you pull it out from under one man, a lot of others fall too.

Dorothy Kilgallen

The dead cannot cry out for justice. It is a duty of the living to do so for them.

Lois M c Master Bujold

Dedicated to my parents, Vera and Marvin Shaw and to my loving wife, Wen-ying Lu

N o praise was ever more deserved than when the New York Post , during the early 1960s, called Pulitzer Prizenominated journalist and media icon Dorothy Kilgallen the most powerful female voice in America. To that article was another adding, Wherever Dorothy Kilgallen goes fame precedes her, envy follows her and a crowd looks on. She is one of the communication marvels of the age.

As good fortune would have it, this remarkable woman inspired me to write not only a book specifically about the JFK assassination entitled The Poison Patriarch but three books touching on Dorothys life and times and her mysterious death including the bestselling The Reporter Who Knew Too Much , as well as Denial of Justice and Collateral Damage . Doing so, along with additional books I had published and other matters of interest including fifteen years worth of research materials, caused my alma mater, Purdue University, to decide to archive my body of work. A portion of the October 2020 announcement read:

Purdue University Acquires Alumnus and Bestselling Author Mark Shaws Body of Work Complementing the Existing Archives of Amelia Earhart and Neil Armstrong

We are delighted that Mark Shaw has chosen Purdue Archives and Special Collections as the home for this impressive collection, said Beth McNeil, Dean of Libraries. Shaws work touches on some of the most interesting and impactful events and individuals of the 20th century. In this respect, the collection beautifully complements others at Purdue, like the Amelia Earhart and Neil Armstrong papers. All provide a rich, primary account of 20th-century American history.

Such recognition for a small-town Indiana, near college dropout with, at best, average intelligence who did not publish a book until age forty-seven has been exhilarating as well as humbling. In many of the thirty-plus books Ive written with very little, if any, training to do so, there is a common theme: taking up the fight for justice banner in the spirit of acclaimed novelist Lois McMaster Bujolds words of wisdom: The dead cannot cry out for justice. It is a duty of the living to do so for them.

Accepting this responsibility in my books, one I could have never imagined, in some ways defending those denied justice as I had done during my years as a noted criminal defense attorney in the Midwest, became the bedrock of my body of work. During the journey, I learned about Dorothy Kilgallen and used her as a role model so as to aspire to be a man of the truth as Dorothy was a woman of the truth, challenging distortions of history at every turn.

As thousands of readers of my books and those who have known me since childhood have asked: How did you become what may be termed a voice for justice, and most especially a voice for three twentieth-century luminaries who tragically died at an early ageMarilyn in 1962 at age thirty-six, JFK in 1963 at age forty-six, and Dorothy in 1965 at age fifty-two?

The answer necessitates several chapters in the beginning of this book touching on life experiences before I became an author in an autobiographical sense so as to better understand how I would later substantiate credentials as a bona fide historian to anyone who doubted the accuracy of my writings. These life experiences, as will be explained, combined to mold and then strengthen my character so that I could challenge through my words the disdain for the rule of law. The transformation has permitted my holding accountable one of the most powerful families in history, the Kennedys, specifically Joseph, the patriarch, and son Robert.

As you will learn, I now take on two more powerful men, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and President Lyndon Baines Johnson, both of whom were responsible for the granddaddy of all distortions of history, the bogus Warren Commission conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone during the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. How I landed on the motherload of all assassination breakthroughs by exposing for the first time the corrupt inner-workings of that commission through the account of a whistleblower of sorts provides the crowning jewel during my many years of research, ones that have exposed government corruption at the highest levels.

As will be explained, my contributions to history in these arenas of interest only became possible when I began to learn more about Dorothy, a woman of great integrity who, in effect, became my copilot for the research journey I conducted on a daily basis. Before my discovery of the revered journalist, the media icon, my early years of defending womens rights, first in the courtroom and then with my early books, initiated me into dogged research methods resembling her own. Becoming something one might call a protg of hers opened a window leading to the truth about what happened to JFK in 1963 and eventually to the discovery of the suspicious nature of Dorothys death in 1965 and then Marilyns in 1962. Investigating them in that order, even though Marilyn died first, has resulted in resolving three true-crime murder mysteries that were not, in fact, mysteries at all if they would have been properly investigated at the time.

As new evidence appeared on the horizon, much of it from highly credible sources, I would ask, during my improbable journey, Well, what would Dorothy do with this evidence? Other times, I wondered how she would follow up, how I could use information provided from a reader tip, missed or ignored government documents, or a new, credible source that landed on my doorstep. Being smart enough to realize Dorothy was smarter than me, I began utilizing what I called The Dorothy Method, akin to how a prosecutor gathers evidence for a trial so as to examine witnesses and present both opening statements and final arguments to uncover important historical data based on solid, primary-source evidence.

Dorothy thus became a central part of my life even though she had died decades earlier, and as time passed, I began to realize that by following her path to the truth about matters of historical significance I could become a budding historian and compile a worthy list of my own contributions to history. This involved combining Dorothys research with my own and adding to the equation what I had learned through many valuable life experiences that I came to realize were indeed defining moments in my life. As you will read, connecting what I had learned during those moments in time to my own research methods became quite relevant to my discovery of new evidence. As an example, shortly after Collateral Damage was published in 2021, a slew of that new evidence came floating into my life and I felt the need to share it with you, the reader.