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Johnny Ace (John Marshall Alexander, Jr.) - singer
 1954 --- suicide playing
Russian roulette.
Janet Elaine Adkins
1990 --- 1st suicide
assisted by Jack Kevorkian.
Clara Blandick - actress (Auntie Em in The Wizard of Oz)
1962 --- sleeping pills,
with a plastic bag tied over her head. She was 81-years-old and
suffering from crippling arthritis.
Ray Combs - talk show host (Family Feud)
1996 --- hanged himself
on the night of June 2, 1996, with bed sheets in his hospital room
at Glendale Adventist Hospital while on a 72-hour "suicide
watch."
Hart Crane - poet
1932 --- suicide by
drowning. On a steamship, he bid his fellow passengers farewell
and jumped overboard. Last words.
Thich Quang Duc - Buddhist monk
1963 --- set himself
on fire on the streets of Saigon to protest government persecution
of Buddhists.
R. Budd Dwyer - politician (Pennsylvania)
1987 --- Convicted of
bribery and conspiracy in federal court and about to be sentenced,
he called a press conference; there, in front of spectators and
TV cameras, he shot himself in the mouth.
Lillian Millicent Entwistle - actress
1932 --- suicide by
jumping from the 'H' of the 'HOLLYWOOD(LAND)' sign.
Joseph Goebbels - Nazi politician
1945 --- with his wife,
poisoned their five children, then committed suicide at Hitler's
Berlin bunker.
Hermann Goering - Nazi politician
1946 --- poisoned himself
hours before he was to have been executed.
Donny Hathaway - singer
1979 --- suicide by
jumping from his room on the 15th floor of New York's Essex House
Hotel.
Rudolf Hess - Nazi politician
1987 --- last member
of Adolf Hitler's inner circle, strangled himself with an electrical
cord at age 93, in Spandau Prison.
Chris Chubbuck - newscaster
1974 --- shot herself
in the head during a prime time news broadcast on Florida TV station
WXLT-TV. She died 14 hours later. Last words.
Michael Hutchence - rock musician (Inxs)
1997 --- hanged himself
with a belt in his room in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, in Sydney, Australia.
(Perhaps auto-erotic asphyxiation.)
Eugene Izzi - writer
1997 --- hanged himself
from an 11th-floor window on Michigan Ave., Chicago. Perhaps by
accident while researching a scene for a book.
Jim Jones - leader of a religious cult known as the Peoples
Temple
1978 --- killed himself
after watching more than 900 of his followers die from the ingestion
of Kool-Ade laced with cyanide.
Terry Kath - rock musician (Chicago)
1978 --- suicide playing
Russian roulette. Last words.
Jesse William Lazear - US physician
1900 --- voluntarily
infected with & died of yellow fever as part of Walter Reed's
research.
Vachel Lindsay - poet
1931 --- suicide by
drinking a bottle of lye (Lysol). Last words.
Kiyoko Matsumoto - 19 year old student
1933 --- suicide by
jumping into the thousand foot crater of a volcano on the island
of Oshima, Japan. This act started a bizarre fashion in Japan and
in the ensuing months three hundred children did the same thing.
Yukio Mishima (Kimitake Hiraoka) - Japanese writer
1970 --- suicide by
disembowelment and decapitation (a ritual called seppuku or hara-kiri)
as a protest of the Westernization of Japan. He killed himself in
front of an assembly (which he himself called) of all of his students
that he was teaching at a university at that time.
Francois Maurice Marie Mitterrand
1996 --- suicide by
intentionally terminating treatment for prostate cancer.
Claudius Drusus Germanicus Nero - Roman emperor
68 AD --- suicide by
stabbing himself with a sword.
Sylvia Plath - poet
1963 --- suicide by
inhaling gas from her oven.
Margaret Mary Ray - celebrity stalker
1998 --- suicide by
kneeling in front of an oncoming train.
Bobby Sands - IRA activists
1981 --- starved on
the 66th day of his hunger strike.
Socrates - philosopher
399 BC --- required
to drink hemlock to end his life after being found guilty of corrupting
the youth of Athens.
Vincent Willem van Gogh - painter
1890 --- shot himself;
he died two days later.
Lupe Velez - actress
1944 --- overdose with
sleeping pills; she was 4 months pregnant.
{There is a much-circulated, but undocumented story that she
had dressed in her best outfit for the suicide and took her pills,
washing them down with alcohol. Getting sick to her stomach, she
rushed to the bathroom, but tripped and fell; drowning in the toilet.}
Last words.
Horace Wells - pioneered the use of anesthesia in the 1840s
1848 --- arrested for
spraying two women with sulfuric acid; he anaesthetized himself
with chloroform and slashed open his thigh with a razor.
Virginia Woolf (Adeline Virginia Stephens Woolf) - writer
1941 -- committed suicide
by drowning.
Gig Young (Byron Elsworth Barr) - actor
1978 --- shot and killed
his wife of 3 weeks, Kim Schmidt, then shot himself.
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