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Sylvia Meagher’s life changed the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

Until then, the New Yorker had what she considered her dream job. An editor and researcher at the United Nations, working for the World Health Organization, Meagher spent her days immersed in world affairs, happily navigating the corridors of international power.

Intelligent, meticulous and fiercely political, Meagher, then 42, seemed destined for a long career in diplomacy and global policy. But, after the tragedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, she couldn’t return to her daily life and carry on.

The more she read about the assassination, the more questions she had.

And when the government finally released its findings, she became obsessed with finding the truth.

In “The Housewives Underground: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the JFK Assassination Our Most Enduring Mystery” (Crown), author Kaitlyn Tiffany tells the remarkable story of Meagher and two other unlikely investigators — Oklahoma housewife Shirley Martin and Maggie Field, the wealthy wife of a Californian stockbroker — who devoted years of their lives to challenging the official account of what happened in Dallas.

Together, the trio became pioneers of a movement that would ultimately help transform JFK’s murder from a national tragedy into America’s longest-running mystery.

“They were disillusioned and bitter, yet they still believed in some possible future in which the country they lived in could be more like the one they’d been promised,” Tiffany writes. “Somehow they never questioned their obligation to participate in its creation.”

When the Warren Commission released its report in September 1964, the verdict seemed straightforward: Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone.

But it wasn’t.

Buried beneath the report’s conclusions were 26 volumes of supporting evidence containing nearly 18,000 pages of testimony, exhibits and documents. The Government Printing Office made the mountain of material available to the public, but few Americans bothered to buy it.

Fewer actually read it.

Buried beneath the report’s conclusions were 26 volumes of supporting evidence containing nearly 18,000 pages of testimony, exhibits and documents. The Government Printing Office made the mountain of material available to the public, but few Americans bothered to buy it.

But Sylvia Meagher not only read it — she practically memorized it.

Working from her one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan’s West Village, she transformed her home into a research center complete with filing cabinets and stacks of documents. Frustrated that the Warren Commission had failed to create a usable index, she started building one herself.

“When discussing her task with friends and acquaintances, she explained by asking what they would think if the Encyclopaedia Britannica were issued with all its contents untitled, unalphabetized, and in random order,” Tiffany writes.

The resulting index became an indispensable tool for assassination researchers.

Meagher also began writing letters to newspapers challenging their coverage of the case and publishing essays highlighting contradictions and unanswered questions within the Warren Report.

She soon discovered she wasn’t alone.

Across the country, other amateur investigators were arriving at similar conclusions.