Kanyva -- Wannabe Rapper, True Killer

Around March 2004, wannabe rapper Kanyva (real name Juston Michael Potts) entered into a loose business relationship with promoter Shani Renee Holloway.  The 31-year-old promoter was starting her own record label, All in 1 Promotions, and wanted the performer to record music designed to garner air play on local Pittsburg, California, radio stations.  Kanyva, however, demanded that his music not be presented in a way that would be considered mainstream.  On June 6, 2004, Holloway, her boyfriend, and the 18-year-old rapper discussed his career in a parked car in the 3300 block of Peppermill Circle in Pittsburg.  Incredulous that he would not want his music widely promoted on the radio, Holloway bluntly told the rapper that his prospects for stardom were not good.  Kanyva got out of the car and walked across the street to talk to the occupants of a parked black SUV.  He returned to Holloway's car, pulled out a handgun, and shot the woman twice in the head at point-blank range, afterwards fleeing the scene in the black SUV.  Holloway died five hours later.  Kanyva was arrested the next day and admitted quarreling with Holloway about his career.  Following a failed insanity defense, the rapper waived a trial by jury and was subsequently sentenced by a judge to a prison term of 50 years to life for first-degree murder.  An appeal in 2008 was denied.  Juston Michael Potts, Inmate #F57586, is currently incarcerated in the California Medical Facility at Vacaville.

Blade Icewood -- Wiped Out

Variously known by several rap names ("Ruler of tha Great Lakes," "Motor City's Finest," "Mayor of tha Mitten"), Icewood (real name Darnell Quincy Lyndsey) grew up on Ten Mile in the Detroit suburb of Southfield.  Rap styles and the concomitant rivalries in the Motor City are generally divided between the East and West sides of the city and are believed to have played a significant role in the murders of two rappers, Wipeout and Blade Icewood, who quarreled over the origins and use of a name claimed by the musical groups of both men.  Icewood (from the West side of Detroit) joined a rap group called the Street Lordz that laid claim to the name Chedda Boyz.  Rival rapper Wipeout (real name Antonio Caddell, Jr.) was a member of the gangsta rap group The East Side Chedda Boyz.  Tensions mounted as both groups claimed the name on the streets and in dueling rap lyrics.  Ironically, in mid-2004 Icewood headlined a "Stop the Violence" rally in front of Platinum Records (the Street Lordz label) in which he urged those young people in attendance to create their own non-violent way out of the ghetto.  On September 18, 2004, Wipeout, 32, an and innocent bystander were shot to death outside the Candy Bar nightclub at Woodward Avenue and John R in downtown Detroit.  Two days later, Icewood was in his apartment in Oak Park when it was invaded by AK-47 wielding gunmen.  The rapper was shot seven times, and although surviving the attack was permanently paralyzed from the chest down.  True to the code of the streets, however, Icewood refused to cooperate with authorities who credited violence to ongoing tensions over the right to use the Chedda Boyz name.

In 2005, the 27-year-old rapper formed Icewood Entertainment and signed Candi Cane, Balee, and Cash Out to his roster.  On April 21, 2005, Icewood was in a wheelchair inside his parked Range Rover at West 7 Mile Road and Faust when another vehicle pulled alongside and a shooter pumped multiple shots into his body.  The rapper was killed instantly.  The fatal attack took place less than half a mile from the site where he had headlined the anti-violence rally seven months earlier,  The week before his murder, Icewood had released a song targeting his murdered rival, Wipeout.  The rapper's CDs include Still Spinnin, Stackmaster, and Blood, Sweat, Tears.  To date, no arrests have been made in the killings of Wipeout or Blade Icewood.

Kevin J. Kennedy -- Who are You?

Kennedy, a rock drummer who patterned his playing after The Who's Keith Moon, played with bands in Phoenix and Denver in the early eighties prior to moving to Omaha, Nebraska.  In 1984, the drummer was in the band Ticket to Mars.  Other local groups featuring Kennedy were On the Fritz, the Man's Band, the Doo-Rags, and T.D.K. Kennedy.  Fascinated by Moon (who died of a drug overdose in London in 1978), Kennedy sent Who founder and guitarist Pete Townshend a letter after the drummer's death requesting an audition.  Townshend reportedly responded with a kind letter saying, "Thanks, but no thanks."  A master's student in psychology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Kennedy was working on a thesis based on a case study of Moon's life and had begun contacting the drummer's family members to set up possible interviews.  Around 10:00 P.M. on January 20, 1998, the 43-year-old musician jumped to his death from the sixth floor of the Doubletree Guest Suites at 7260 Cedar Street in Omaha.

Gene R. Taylor -- Waiting on the Other Side

Educated at Oxford and known on radio for his courtly British vocal mannerisms,  Geneste ("Gene") Taylor, 56, hosted a nightly 8:00 to midnight "middle-class music" show on KIKI-Honolulu.  On September 24, 1957, the disc jockey, complaining of a cold, cut short his show and returned to his apartment at 2533-D Ala Wai Boulevard.  One day earlier, Taylor's 26-year-old wife had followed the advice of her attorney and checked into a luxury hotel on the island following a quarrel with her husband of less than five months.  Unable to reach him by phone, the woman returned to their apartment on September 25 to find Taylor dead from an overdose of sleeping pills slumped against the living room wall near a six foot rack containing hundreds of classical records.  Though police did not release the contents of the disc jockey's suicide note, Mrs. Taylor told The Honolulu Advertiser that it read:  "My own darling Jane:  You said you don't love me, so I'm going to set you free.  Please call my son.  I'll be waiting for you on the other side."

Pat Kennedy -- He Wasn't Clowning

Pat Kennedy, featured vocalist

The Irish tenor got his first big break in the "Roaring Twenties" as a singer with Ben Bernie's band.  During that period, the Pittsburgh orphan credited in press notices as being the person "who lifted Ben Bernie to fame" worked with celebrities like Al Jolson, Will Rogers, and Eddie Cantor.  Kennedy stayed with the band until striking off on his own in the mid-thirties for a radio career in Chicago.  Listeners, however, tired of the tenor's style and by 1939, following an unsuccessful turn with a band in Minneapolis, he was back in Pittsburgh driving a truck for his father-in-law's business, and singing, and playing records in a bar in Crafton.  After years of trying to make a comeback, the 50-year-old singer had had enough.  On September 3, 1952, Kennedy took an overdose of sleeping pills in his room at the Fort Pitt Hotel.  He died shortly afterward in Allegheny General Hospital.

In a note found to his estranged wife found at the scene, Kennedy wrote:  "I am tired of living in a two-by-four room, so maybe you will understand.  You have been a wonderful mother and God bless you but I just couldn't take it any longer.  To all my would-be friends, always try to be at least on the level.  When you are lonely and there is no one to talk to, remember that a friend in need is a friend indeed.  Goodbye and God bless you all, Pat.  P.S.  You all thought I was clowning.  So now you can talk about me seriously."

Thurman and Beulah Varnadore -- A Penny for Their Thoughts

On the afternoon of July 20, 1927, occupants of a rooming house at 3832 West Pine Boulevard in St. Louis, Missouri, notified police after smelling gas seeping from a locked third floor apartment.  Kicking in the door, police discovered the emaciated, shabbily dressed bodies of Thurman Varnadore, 38, and his 37-year-old wife, Beulah, on the floor near a rubber hose attached to an open gas jet on the stove.  The keyhole, windows, and other openings in the sparsely furnished room had been stuffed with rags and paper.  The couple, in the final stages of drug addiction, each weighed less than 100 pounds and, according to their landlady, could not walk without supporting one another.  In the room, authorities found several hypodermic syringes, a quantity of morphine, and an undated Variety clipping announcing that Varnadore, known onstage as "Bud Varn," was presenting a new blackface vaudeville act.  The clipping further identified him as a doctor of divinity and an evangelist, a claim substantiated by Varnadore's landlady.

Shortly before the double suicide, Varnadore told the woman that his promising career as an ordained Baptist minister had been devastated when chronic asthma ruined his voice.  Turning to morphine to ease the pain, he quickly became addicted as had his wife.  Before becoming too weak to walk, Varnadore had tried to make a living selling books door-to-door.  At the morgue, a search of Varnadore's pockets uncovered a one cent piece and a wedding ring.

Jay G. Hull -- The Troubled Guitarist

Described as "intense," "confrontational," "mean," "eccentric," and "psychologically troubled" by acquaintances, Hull, 39, was an accomplished classical guitarist utterly devoted to his music and environmental-wildlife concerns in Lake County, California.  Over the years, Hull became well-known in the area's tight knit arts community performing at numerous local concerts, chamber of commerce functions, and political rallies.  However, he was equally well-known as a volatile, verbally abusive troublemaker not averse to threatening anyone he felt was thwarting his will.  Hull once threatened to sue the Lake County Parks Department over payment for a performance, and nearly dumped a bag of trash on the desk of the director of the county's Solid Waste Office to protest rising landfill rates.  Perhaps frustrated over the area's limited artistic opportunities, Hull immediately clashed with Patricia M. Wiley, executive director of the nonprofit Lake County Arts Council, when she assumed the post in 1990.  Over the next five years, the troubled guitarist maintained a nonstop professional dispute with the popular and respected Wiley who, by 1995, confessed to friends that she was terrified of the man.

On March 20, 1995, Hull showed up unannounced at the Arts Council office demanding an audiotape of an interview he had given for the group's publication.  Hull, though adamant that he wanted the tape and agitated when it could not be quickly located, was reportedly civil to Wiley's assistant.  Early the next morning, Hull phoned Wiley, 56, insisting that they meet at her office.  According to the musician, he secured a donation of $35,000 to the Arts Council from a retired guitar player who wanted to fund Hull's program to teach kids to play the instrument at the Lake County Juvenile Hall.  The donor wished to deliver the check to the director that morning before her Lakeport office opened at 10:00 A.M.  Wiley reluctantly agreed to meet with Hull and the anonymous donor then phoned several friends to express her trepidation over the meeting.  She asked a couple of friends to "check up" on her shortly after the 8:00 A.M. meeting was set to commence.  At least three people phoned and Wiley assured them that the meeting with Hull (the donor, if one ever existed, had yet to show) was cordial.  After repeated calls went unanswered, however, a friend entered Wiley's office around 10:00 A.M. to find the arts director slumped behind her desk dead from a single bullet wound in her right eye.  Meanwhile, around 7:50 A.M., Hull's wife had frantically phoned authorities to report her husband had just left their house packing a .380-caliber pistol and threatening suicide.  A sheriff's deputy posted outside their Upper Lake home on Witter Springs Road saw the guitarist rush into the residence after 9:00 A.M., then heard a single gunshot.  Ambulanced to a nearby hospital, Hull died hours later from a self-inflicted pistol wound to the head.  Commenting on Patricia Wiley's death, a co-worker said, "It's just so incredible to have someone snatched away like that, just taken, because someone couldn't cope with life....There are no words for that kind of pain."

Patricia Styles -- The Self-Improvement Suicide

On May 28, 1947, the pretty 23-year-old actress, radio singer, and daughter of West Coast radio producer-entertainer Hal Styles swallowed a handful of sleeping pills in Hollywood after Nate N. Sugarman, 44, terminated their stormy four year romance.  Styles survived and continued to see the wealthy investment broker, but was shattered when Sugarman announced at a party in early December 1948 that he planned to marry a San Francisco radio singer.  On December 13, 1948, Styles phoned Sugarman and asked him to drive her to a girlfriend's house in the San Fernando Valley.

During the drive through North Hollywood, they discussed Sugarman's upcoming wedding, and Styles told her former lover that she was engaged to marry a doctor.  At her request, Sugarman stopped the car in front of a house at 11816 Riverside Drive.  Styles produced a .32-caliber revolver, shot the businessman in the thigh and skimmed his head with a second shot.  In the struggle for the gun, the pair fell into the street where Sugarman disentangled himself, and fled as the scorned woman continue to fire at him.  According to one witness, the actress then placed the pistol in her mouth, pulled the trigger, and fell dead in the street next to the car.

A cryptic penciled note found by authorities in the dead woman's purse read:  "I'm going to lose any and all deep-rooted inhibitions and completely lose any self-consciousness that I might have....And that I'm going to become rightfully self-confident so that I fear nothing or no one so that competition doesn't phase [sic] me in the least."  Refusing to believe that his daughter committed suicide, Hal Styles demanded a "full investigation."  Despite conflicting eyewitness testimony, a coroner's jury ruled that Patricia Styles had taken her life after attempting to kill the man who had jilted her.

Dolly Theobald -- Little Lady, Big Death

Dubbed the "smallest soubrette on the American Stage," the 36-year-old entertainer used a two-barreled derringer to shoot herself through the heart in her room at the Star Hotel in Columbus, Ohio, on December 18, 1906.  A player in McFadden's Flats, Theobald had quarreled earlier in the evening with her husband, Howard Powers, over his attentions to other women.  Powers' attempt to placate his wife with promises of a pony, a cart, and a diamond ring only made the tearful woman more despondent.  Prostrated by the suicide, Powers was kept overnight in a sanitarium and released to friends the next day.

Cecil Gold -- The Show Doesn't Go On

On the afternoon of October 24, 1927, the management at the Brown Hotel in Des Moines, Iowa, forced entry into the 19-year-old chorus girl's room after a maid reported she could not gain entrance.  Inside, they found Gold (real name Helen Smith) dressed in pajamas lying dead on the bathroom floor.  Her head rested on a pillow and an empty glass was still pressed tightly to her lips.  Two empty bottles that had contained chloroform were found in the room.  A note addressed "To Whom It May Concern" read in part:  "There is no one at fault.  I just grew tired of it all.  I am not a coward.  If you grew tired of a show, would you not leave it?  I am tired of life!  I am not afraid.  My conscience is clear."

A packet of love letters exchanged between Gold and Jack D. Mead, an actor in the Princess Stock Company, partially explained the young woman's actions.

A chorus girl in the Canadian Capers company, Gold had played at the Capitol Theatre in Des Moines two weeks before her death.  After the company disbanded following a brief run in Kansas City, Missouri, Gold returned to Iowa to be near Mead.  In a letter written to Mead while she was still in Kansas City, Gold expressed her own insecurity at being only a minor player in the company:  "I don't want you to think, 'Oh, I can't take her there because she just a chorus girl and won't know how to conduct herself.'  I can be nice and refined when I have to be."  According to Gold's father, who claimed the body, he felt his daughter's suicide was prompted by her unsuccessful attempt to climb the social ladder and to realize her ambition to be a Broadway star.

Chet R. Allen -- Meet Me at the Morgue

Allen was a 12-year-old soprano with the Columbus Boychoir when Gian Carlo Menotti chose him to sing the title role in the opera "Amahl and the Night Visitors" broadcast by NBC-TV in December 1951.  On the strength of that performance, Allen was signed by Universal-International to co-star with Dan Dailey in the 1952 Douglas Sirk-directed musical Meet Me at the Fair.  Unfortunately for Allen, when his voice changed to a baritone immediately after the film, it dealt a duel death blow to his singing and motion picture career.  Depressed, the former child star returned to Columbus, Ohio, and held a variety of jobs including a decade long stint as a stock boy at a Lazarus department store.  Through his own treatment for depression, Allen became involved with volunteer work at Town House, a "drop-in" center operated by a local community health center.  On June 7, 1984, Allen took five times the lethal dose of an anti-depressant medication he had been secretly hoarding.  The 44 year old died ten days later in Riverside Hospital.  A family member summed up Allen' life, "He had a better singing voice than most of the people you see on television, but he wouldn't sing....  He couldn't reconcile himself to the use of his talent."