Victoria Howden -- The Unhappy Brit

In pursuit of the dream of a career in acting, the attractive 26-year-old blonde left the British seaside resort of Torquay for Hollywood in 1990.  In Tinseltown, the Devon native landed a single appearance on a November 1990 episode of the NBC sitcom Dear John, but found steadier employment as a part-time stripper at private parties.  Desperate to remain in America, Howden secured a Green Card by marrying Charles House in a Las Vegas ceremony in December 1990.  House, a 40-year-old former cop from Kentucky, was in training to become a police officer with the Los Angeles Unified School District.  On May 8, 1991, California Highway Patrol Officer Ronald Webb, 34, shot himself alongside a freeway in the San Fernando Valley after Howden refused to marry him.  The next day, Howden went to the home of Webb's estranged wife and threatened to commit suicide.  She was subsequently held for 72 hours on a psychiatric evaluation and released.

At 2:00 A.M. on June 10, 1991, neighbors heard a gunshot from the apartment Charles House and Howden shared in the 4600 block of Willis Avenue in Sherman Oaks.  Howden called a friend to report House had shot himself, and when paramedics arrived they found the man dead in the dining room from a gunshot wound.  In the bedroom lay the body of the actress.  The .357-Magnum she used to shoot herself in the chest was recovered near a note in which she apologized for her death and asked to be buried next to her lover Ronald Webb.  While police initially believed the event was a double suicide, the coroner's report and forensic evidence proved that Howden shot House in the head while he slept at the kitchen table, placed a phone call to her friend, and took her own life.  Immigration authorities noted that Howden had been granted permanent resident status five days prior to the murder-suicide.

Larry Stromberg -- Washed in the Blood

For the past five years the 30-year-old struggling actor worked as a fitness trainer at the Riverside Racquet and Fitness Club in the Philadelphia suburb of Bala Cynwyd.  Stromberg appeared the 1989 horror-comedy Blades, and in minuscule parts in two films partially shot in Philly (12 Monkeys, 1995; Up Close & Personal, 1996).  The actor was writing a script about a serial killer when his troubled three year marriage to Stefan Stromberg, 30, finally disintegrated amid his wife's alleged infidelity and subsequent abortion.  In mid-April 1996, the woman obtained a protection-from-abuse order against her husband citing his threats and violence.  On April 28, 1996, eleven days after the decree was filed, Paula Rathgeb, Stefan Stromberg's mother, was helping her daughter move out of the married couples' apartment in the Germantown section of Philadelphia.  Larry Stromberg slashed and stabbed both women to death and fled into the woods in suburban Montgomery County.  He surrendered to police a few days later and was charged with one count of first-degree murder (his wife) and one count of second-degree murder (his mother-in-law).  At trial in May 1997, Stromberg pleaded "not guilty" by reason of insanity.  Arguing his client was psychotic on the day of the killing, defense attorney Nino V. Tinari maintained Stromberg was the product of a mentally ill mother and a domineering father who had been molested as a child by babysitters and his mother's boyfriends.  "He couldn't interact with women," Tinari said.  "At age 30, he still played with dolls given to him at age 10."  When Stromberg learned of his wife's alleged affair, pregnancy, and abortion, he became irrational and fatally inflicted a total of 34 wounds on his two victims.  Prosecutors presented a simpler theory of the case -- the actor killed his wife and mother-in-law out of rage.  Stromberg was found guilty on both murder counts on June 6, 1997, and sentenced to two consecutive life sentences (plus 10 and 20 years) after a jury deadlocked over imposing the death sentence on the double killer.  While doing his stretch, Stromberg formed The Redeemed Theater Ministry and, according to the group's website, "has written and directed over 25 original plays for the prison population and the glory of God."  As of February 2014, Inmate #DG6379 was incarcerated at the Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution in Coal Township.

Sampih -- Gotta Dance, Gotta Die

Photo:  Auke Sonnega

The most famous traditional dancer of his day, Sampih was a boy living in the small village of Sayan in southeast Bali when Canadian composer Colin McPhee, residing in the area to study its music, adopted him.  Under McPhee's tutelage, the youngster trained under the finest Balinese dancers and within a year was a nationally recognized prodigy.  Later, British impresario John Coast showcased Sampih in a "Dancers from Bali" troupe that performed to sold out venues across the United States from September 1952 through January 1953.  The ambitious undertaking marked the first time in a generation the outside world was permitted to see Balinese performers dancing to a traditional Gamelang orchestra using xylophones, gongs, drums, and cymbals.  Although Sampih served as the chief artistic adviser to Coast and was paid the same $75 a week salary as the other dancers, he was the acknowledged star of the troupe.  The dancer's popularity and financial success, however, led some in the company and his home country to feel he had somehow changed and now considered himself to be better than others.  In Bali's rigid social system, Sampih belonged to the lowest caste and his purchase of a modest motorbike, and the fact that prominent people in higher castes now recognized him, made many of his fellow-countrymen angry and jealous.  Evidently oblivious to the undercurrent of hostility around him, Sampih continued to ride his motorbike around his home village of Sayan where he lived with his wife and small child.

While on an official trip to Bali on February 28, 1954, President Sukarno of the Indonesian Republic requested that Sampih dance for him later that evening at a festival near the town of Sayan.  When the 28-year-old dancer failed to appear, messengers were dispatched to his home and were informed by Sampih's wife that he left on his motorbike earlier that afternoon.  Either that afternoon or three days later (accounts vary), the dancer's body was found floating in the Lauh River that flows past Sayan.  Sampih had been strangled and his face beaten almost beyond the point of recognition.  His motorbike, the apparent symbol of the dancer's sin against Balinese society, was smashed and buried nearby.  Sampih's murder remains unsolved.

Recommended Reading

Bowers, Faubion.  "Letter from Bali," New Yorker, 31(7):  114, 116-26, Oct. 29, 1955.

McPhee, Colin.  A House in Bali.  Singapore; New York:  Oxford University Press, 1979.
New Yorker

Dawn Hope Noel -- Like Mother, Like Daughter

Married to dance band leader Herbert James Noel, the 19-year-old stage actress was best known as the daughter of stage and film actress Adele Blood Hope who committed suicide on September 13, 1936, after suffering business reversals.  On the afternoon of Saturday, July 16, 1939, Herbert James Noel, 36, and his teen-aged wife checked into a nudist camp on Rancho Glassey, in Tunas Canyon above Roscoe, California.  From that day through Monday, the couple drank with others at the camp, returning periodically to their home at 13050 Riverside in North Hollywood to feed and walk their dogs.  At 6:00 P.M. on Monday, July 18, the young actress left the camp to again feed the animals, and did not return for four hours.  Noel and Dawn returned to their home later that night where he learned that two men and a woman who had been at the drinking party had been at their home with his wife during her extended absence from the camp.  Noel refused to accept Dawn's explanation of her absence, and was angrily speaking with one of the men on the phone when he heard a sound "like the snap of a cap pistol" from the bedroom.  The band leader dropped the phone, and ran to the bedroom where he found his dying wife splayed on the floor, bleeding from the right temple, with a .22-caliber rifle beside her.

Robin Ross -- "Mummy, We're Poor Now..."

The 33-year-old actress (also known as Wendy Ross) who once dated Burt Reynolds and John Wayne's son, Patrick, did guest shots on the hit television shows Dallas, St. Elsewhere, and Charlie's Angels.  Ross was living in Canada when she lost $185,000, her entire life savings earned during a 15 year acting career, in the U.S. stock market crash in October 1987.  Concerned over her daughter's mental health, Virginia Kent convinced the actress to come live with her in Westgate-on-Sea, England.  Although Ross was under a doctor's care and taking prescription sleeping pills and anti-depressants, she was still deeply troubled.  According to Kent, her daughter kept repeating, "Mummy, we're poor now, we're poor."  Kent later told a coroner's inquest, "I moved our beds together so I could reach out to her when she wept in the night."

 On the morning of April 11, 1988, Ross told her mother that she was going shopping.  Instead, the disturbed actress went to Westgate Bay, near Margate, Kent.  Witnesses saw the fully-clothed woman wade into the sea then swim out about a quarter of a mile into a section of water known for its treacherous tide.  Ignoring the shouts of terrified onlookers, Ross calmly stretched out face-first in the water and let herself be taken under by the tow.  Her lifeless body kept resurfacing every few moments until it was retrieved by a helicopter rescue crew.

Charlotte Vidot -- Fiddle Dee Dead

Photo:  J. Willis Sayre

The actress-wife of comedian Clarence C. Kolb (star with Max Dill of the vaudeville show A Peck o' Pickles) inexplicably swallowed a glass of cyanide of potassium in her room at the St. Dominic Apartments, 980 Bush Street, in San Francisco, California, on March 5, 1915.  While Vidot, 37, had been under a doctor's care for nervousness and depression, she never intimated that she was suicidal.  Kolb, who cut short his performance at L.A.'s Morosco Theatre, maintained that she had inadvertently taken a fatal dose of the sedative to make her sleep.  The pair married in 1902 while playing together in the Fiddle Dee Dee company.

Earl Cavanaugh -- Home Again!

Formerly of the vaudeville team "Cavanaugh and McBride," the 33-year-old comedian had been out of work for four months when, on September 16, 1926, he sent his wife and their 6-year-old daughter to a birthday supper at a local restaurant in the girl's honor.  Alone in their apartment at the Hotel Alpine in New York City, Cavanaugh brooded over the fact that he did not have enough money to buy his daughter a present or to visit his dying mother in Chicago.  When wife and child returned hours later, they found his pajama-clad body face down in bed.  Cavanaugh had strangled himself by tying a valise strap around his neck and fastening the other end to the bedpost.  Cavanaugh's wife denied that he had killed himself, insisting instead that the unemployed vaudevillian had died accidentally while rehearsing a new comedy skit called "Home Again!" in which an estranged husband tries unsuccessfully to hang himself with his belt.

Kadamba Simmons -- Ending Up with a Loser

Born in London in May 1974, Kadmaba (Hindi for "flower of enlightenment") Simmons was better known for her non-stop partying lifestyle than her career as a model and film actress.  Dropping out of school and leaving home, the 16-year-old rented a flat in Notting Hill, West London, and soon became a reqular on the club scene.  Strikingly beautiful, the sultry wannabe attracted the attention of a string of celebrity lovers including Bros singer Matt Goss, record producer Nellee Hooper, rock star Liam Gallagher of Oasis, and by age 21, champion boxer Prince Naseem Hamed.  Although some reports stated Simmons converted to Islam to be "spiritually closer" to the boxer, Hamed broke off the relationship seemingly alarmed by her flamboyant lifestyle characterized by heavy drinking and drug abuse.  Professionally, Simmons modeled in ads for Martini, Pantene shampoo, and appeared in small roles in the films Grim (1995), Mary Reilly (1996), Cash in Hand (1998), Breeders (1998), and The Wonderland Experience (2000).

By 1997, however, Simmons had become increasingly disenchanted with the endless cycle of work and all-night parties.  According to family members, she stopped being the "London party girl," began reading D. H. Lawrence, watched classic films, and gradually transformed into a "daytime girl."  Seeking spiritual fulfillment, Simmons traveled with her sister, Kumari, to India for a six-week holiday in the spring of 1998.  While vacationing in Goa, a former Portuguese colony on the country's west coast, the 24-year-old actress was approached by Yaniv Malka, a 22-year-old former Israeli soldier.  Living in a rented shack, the near penniless Malka was barely surviving on a small
pension from the Israeli army.  Infatuated with Malka, Simmons moved in with him the day after they met.  Obsessed by his lover's beauty, Malka picked fresh flowers for her every morning, and placed them with candlewax formed into the shapes of hears around her pillow before she woke.  When sister Kumari returned to London, Simmons and Malka left India for Berlin where they eked out a living working in a fruit juice stall.  According to Kumari, one month in Germany alone with Malka convince the actress she had made a terrible mistake.  Malka was too reliant on her, she said, and things had deteriorated to the point where they stayed in different rooms all day and did not speak.

In June 1998, Simmons managed to disengage herself from her lover and returned alone to London.  After receiving several hysterical call from Malka in which he threatened to kill himself, Simmons agreed to see him.  The night before their fateful meeting, she told her father, "He is a loser.  I don't want to end up with a loser."  On June 13, 1998, Malka arrived in London and, after spending the day with Simmons, went with her to a friend's borrowed flat in Islington, North London.  The next day, Simmons' naked body was found in the blood-smeared apartment hanging in the shower from a leather strap.  Later that morning, police spent ninety minutes coaxing a sobbing Malka off the
fifth-floor ledge of a residential block at University College, Central London.  In custody, the former soldier denied strangling his lover to death in anger over her desire to end their relationship.  Instead, he claimed her death was the culmination of a suicide pact they had forged in Germany.  After making love in the apartment, she asked him to strangle her.  Unable to do so with his hands, Malka used a ligature fashioned from a luggage strap to hang her in the shower.  Afterwards, he repeatedly slashed his wrists, arms, and neck with a knife in an unsuccessful attempt to complete the pact.  None of the injuries were remotely life-threatening.  He was still allegedly trying to keep his side of the bargain when police foiled his suicide attempt.  At trial in London's Old Bailey in March 1999, the prosecution discounted the suicide pact theory maintaining Simmons was manually strangled to death by a jealous lover then placed in the shower with a noose around her neck.  The subsequent "faked" suicide attempt was made to bolster Malka's claim of a mutual death pact.  Displaying no emotion, Malka was sentenced to life imprisonment on March 29, 1999.  In February, 2000, an Appeals Court upheld the killer's conviction.

Marguerite Calvert -- Zing Went the Strings of Her Heart

Calvert, a popular 24-year-old vaudeville dancer and violinist, was married for less than a year to W.D. Harris, a New York-based automobile tire dealer, when she took her life in San Francisco's Palace Hotel on October 22, 1922.  Days before arriving at the hotel following an exhausting cross-country car trip, the pair had visited the grave of Calvert's brother in Portland, Oregon.  At the hotel, Calvert's depression and fatigue were exacerbated by a quarrel with her husband over his attentions to other women.  Good-naturedly teased by another couple in attendance, Calvert burst into hysterics, and locked herself in the bathroom.  When a night clerk opened the door, the alarmed spectators found the violinist lying on the bathroom floor with the muzzle of a gun pressed against her heart.  Ignoring their pleas not to harm herself, Calvert pulled the trigger.

George Fitzalan Bronson Howard -- God's Man

Howard (born in Howard County, Maryland, on January 7, 1884) was already a successful playwright (The Snobs, 1911) and novelist (God's Man, 1915) when he volunteered for service in the British Army in 1915.  Commissioned as a lieutenant in the Intelligence division, he was on active duty in France in 1916 when a mustard gas shell exploded near him.  The writer spent five hours in the field before a stretcher could reach him.  For the next 18 months Howard recuperated from the effects of mustard gas poisoning in a British hospital.  Though released, Howard's health was shattered and he was addicted to the drugs the doctors had prescribed for his condition.

 In Hollywood, Howard wrote the screenplays for The Power of Evil (1916) and The Spy (1917) while several of his stories were made into films (Come Through, 1917; Queen of the Sea, 1918; Sheltered Daughters, 1921; Don't Shoot, 1922; Borrowed Finery, 1925).  In 1922, Howard, 37, was working in Hollywood developing film stories for Universal when his estranged second wife and young child were living in Baltimore, Maryland.  In the early morning hours of November 20, 1922, Howard and his secretary, J.C. Dubois, were working on a film treatment for Universal in the writer's apartment at 2500 Highland Avenue in Los Angeles.  According to Dubois, Howard repeatedly questioned him about the effects of gas on the human body and how long it would take to die of gas poisoning.  Dubois left the writer in apparent good spirits around 2:00 A.M.

 Around 8:30 A.M. other tenants, alarmed by the smell of gas, entered Howard's fume-filled apartment through an outside window.  Howard's body, dressed in pajamas and a bathrobe, was found in a small closet adjoining his bedroom.  A long length of rubber tube clutched in his hand ran from under the closet door across the floor of the bedroom to an open gas outlet.  Howard had sealed the window crevices with paper.  A letter written in pencil to his wife, Jean Bronson, was found on a bedside table next to a copy of his novel, God's Man.  In it, Howard cryptically referred to his drug addiction and his inability to send her money.  It read (in part):

"Jean:

I got your unsteady and insulting letter.  Now there is no use in writing me in such a crazy strain.  I am going to send the baby $10 a week until I manage to get on my feet.  Whenever I can I will send you some but after what has happened I think you have a nerve to expect me to send you anything...Do you realize that the money I was sending you is being eaten up altogether by what I have to pay for what you know about?  If you worry me too much, I will probably give up in disgust."

Florence Reynolds -- Through with Mankind Forever

Reynolds (real name Walsh) fell in love with fellow vaudevillian Bruce Healy while acting with him in the Reynolds Trio.  Despite learning that Healy was married, she pawned $500 worth of her jewelry and borrowed money against a life insurance policy to post his bail on a bigamy charge.  Healy repaid the kindness by leaving her.  On May 25, 1928, a housekeeper found the young actress' body in her fourth-floor room at 148 West Seventy-eighth Street in New York City.  Reynolds, clad in a nightgown, lay on the floor with her mouth pressed over an open floor board gas jet.  Two notes found on a dresser in the sparsely furnished room asked that her family be notified and gave instructions for disposing of certain personal effects.  Also lying on the dresser was a five page letter neatly written in green ink addressed "Dear Uncle Charlie."  In it, Reynolds wrote:  "I wish God would take me for I don't see how I can go on and on.  My faith in mankind is gone.  I am through with mankind forever."