Lindsay Crosby -- Poof, it's Gone

The youngest of crooner Bing Crosby's four sons by his marriage to jazz singer Dixie Lee (real name Wilma Wyatt) was born in Los Angeles on January 5, 1938.  Lindsay first appeared on film with brothers Gary, Dennis, and Phillip as audience members in the 1945 movie Out of This World featuring his famous father.  In 1957, he made his television debut on The Edsel Show with his father and Frank Sinatra.  A nightclub act with his three brothers called the Crosby Boys ran until 1959.  Never steadily employed, Lindsay read scripts for his father while trying to carve out a place for himself in films.  However, he only managed to land bit parts in low-budget biker, exploitation, and horror films like The Girls from Thunder Strip (1966), The Glory Stompers (1967), Scream Free! a.k.a. Free Grass (1969), and Bigfoot (1970).  He also briefly appeared in two seventies films (The Mechanic; Live a Little, Steal a Lot,1972) before making his final film, Code Name:  Zebra in 1984.

Lindsay was 14 when his mother died in 1952.  A trust fund set up by Dixie Lee based on then booming oil investments yielded each of the boys a monthly four figure check.  Big Crosby married actress Kathryn Grant in 1957 and the 73 year old was happily raising a second family when he died of a heart attack on October 14, 1977, on a golf course in Madrid, Spain.  If Der Bingle's sons were expecting to immediately inherit chunks of their father's considerable fortune they were soon disappointed.  Perhaps he knew them too well.  Lindsay, like older brother Gary, was an alcoholic and manic depressive who had suffered a nervous breakdown in 1962.  In addition to several arrests for drunken driving and battery, Lindsay had also logged an arrest for indecent exposure in Durango, Colorado, in 1977 for running naked around a motel pool.  The boys were shocked when they learned their father had left them money in a blind trust that could not be touched until they reached age 65.

In 1983, Gary Crosby published a memoir, Going My Own Way, in which he described in excruciating detail their father's physical and psychological abuse.  Lindsay corroborated his brother's portrait of Bing Crosby as an emotionally distant father who wreaked emotional violence on his sons.  On December 1, 1989, attorneys managing Dixie Lee's trust fund informed the brothers that the recent glut in the world's oil markets had wiped out their investments.  Eleven days after learning that there would be no more monthly checks forthcoming, Lindsay Crosby took his life on December 11, 1989.

The 51 year old was staying in an apartment in Las Virgenes in the 26300 block of Bravo Lane while undergoing treatment for alcoholism at a center in nearby Calabasas, California.  Crosby was set to return home for the weekend to his second wife and family in Sherman Oaks when a friend found him on the floor of his den dead from a single gunshot wound to the head.  A small caliber rifle lay close by.  Marilyn Riess, spokeswoman for Lindsay's older brother, Gary, offered this explanation for the act:  "You're dealing with a 51-year-old man who finds himself with a wife and four kids living in a fairly expensive home.  He's under treatment for alcoholism, he's a manic depressive and then you throw a bomb at him.  The one thing he could depend on was his mother, even when she wasn't alive.  Then it (the inheritance) was gone....Poof, it's gone."  Older brother Dennis Crosby took his life in an eerily similar fashion on May 4, 1991.

Recommended Reading

Crosby, Gary, and Firestone, Ross.  Going My Own Way.  1st ed.  Garden City, N.Y.:  Doubleday, 1983.

Anna Daly -- Olive is Dead

Daly and friend and fellow-suicide Olive Thoma originally came together from hometowns in Pennsylvania to New York City via Pittsburgh in 1913 with the shared dream of taking Broadway by storm.  Both young women modeled, but only Thomas landed a job with the Ziegfeld Follies and achieved international fame before dying a suspected suicide in Paris in 1920.  Daly's theatrical aspirations never materialized and at the time of her death she was employed as a cloak model who occasionally posed for artists.  On September 16, 1920, Daly's roommate, Ziegfeld Follies girl Betty Martin, found a note from the woman in their apartment at the Hotel Monterey.  It read:  "He doesn't love me anymore.  I can't stand it any longer, and Olive is dead."  The investigating detective noted that the physical description of the missing woman supplied by Martin matched that of a young woman who earlier in the evening had checked into a room at the Hotel Seville at Thirty-first Street and Fourth Avenue under the name of "Mrs. Elizabeth Anderson."  The woman was found unconscious in the room after drinking a bottle of veronal and had died without regaining consciousness in Bellevue Hospital.  A relative confirmed that the dead woman was Anna Daly.

Sadie Snyder -- The Good, Straight Girl

The daughter of Sarah Snyder, once known on the vaudeville stage as "Sara Sedalia," the 17-year-old vocalist assumed the name of "Sid Sedalia" when she began singing at Chicago's Delavan Cafe on North Clark Street in 1916.  Snyder, described by her mother as a "good, straight girl," was concerned that "people might say bad things" about her because she was a cabaret singer.  These feelings, amplified by a local newspaper expose of the "sins" of cabaret life, further preyed on the young woman's mind.  On the evening of February 16, 1916, Snyder locked herself in the bedroom of her home at 2125 North Clark Street, plugged the crack between two window sashes with a towel, then turned on the gas.  Snyder's mother, with the aid of a boarder, later forced the door and found her daughter's lifeless body on the bed.  Near at hand lay a newspaper folded to a story about the conduct of patrons in a Windy City cafe.  On the wall beside the bed Snyder had scribbled, "Mama, I love you."

Russell Fillmore -- Surf's Up

The former New York stage director of plays that featured ZaSu Pitts and Billie Burke was in Los Angeles to read Until December, a play written by Mae West's sister, when he suddenly disappeared.  According to West, she last saw Fillmore on August 11, 1950, when he seemed to be elated at the prospect of producing the show on Broadway.  Days later, his friends and associates filed a missing persons report after he failed to keep an important business appointment.  On August 18, 1950, the 55-year-old director's body was found floating beneath a pier in Ocean Park, California.  An autopsy revealed that Fillmore had slashed his wrists before hurling himself into the surf.