Dennis Michael Crosby -- Der Bingle's Boy

The second son of megastar Bing Crosby and his first wife, jazz singer Dixie Lee, was born with twin brother Phillip in Los Angeles on July 13, 1934.  The most reserved of the Crosby sons, Dennis was never interested in a show biz career although initially he halfheartedly pursued one.  In the late fifties and early sixties he joined his brothers in a nightclub act billed as the Crosby Boys.  In films, he appeared with his brothers in the 1945 movie Out of This World, played himself in Duffy's Tavern (1945), and had a bit part as "Private Page" in Sergeants Three (1962) starring Frank Sinatra and his fellow "Rat Pack" cronies Peter Lawford, Dean Martin, Joey Bishop, and Sammy Davis, Jr.

After leaving acting, Dennis worked in a production capacity for this father's company, Bing Crosby Productions.  Like brothers Gary and Lindsay, he suffered from manic depression and alcoholism although he periodically achieved stints of sobriety through Alcoholics Anonymous.  Unlike his brothers, however, Dennis downplayed the allegations of physical and emotional abuse made against their father by Gary Crosby in his 1983 tell-all book Going My Own Way.  While admitting that older brother Gary was the prime target for their father's harsh discipline, Dennis added:  "I was happy to be who I was even if I had the hell kicked out of me."

Professional and personal problems continued unchecked throughout Dennis' life.  Shortly after his father's death in 1977, Dennis and his brothers learned that they would not immediately benefit from the crooner's demise.  Instead, Crosby had set up a blind trust that was untouchable until his sons reached the age of 65.  In December 1989, the brothers were informed by attorneys that the monthly four figure check each of them had received for years from a trust fund established by their late mother, Dixie Lee, was gone, wiped out by falling oil prices on the world market.

Eleven days after learning that there would be no more monthly checks, Dennis' favorite brother, Lindsay, fatally shot himself in the head on December 11, 1989.  On May 4, 1991, two weeks after officially ending his 27 year second marriage, the 56 year old followed suit.  Late that night, a roommate discovered Crosby's body lying on a couch in the living room of their modest home on Murphy Lane in the Black Point area of Novato, California.  Depressed over finances, Lindsay's death, recurrent bouts of alcoholism, the divorce, and a recent breakup with a girlfriend, Crosby had shot himself in the head with a 12-gauge shotgun.  The weapon was found lying at his feet beside the couch.  Dennis Crosby was cremated and his ashes spread in the Novato area.

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.

Fernando Ramos da Silva -- Death of Pixote

 One of a family of ten children raised by his widowed mother in the slums of Sao Paulo, Brazil, Silva (born November 29, 1967) was 11 when director Hector Babenco selected him from more than 1,300 boys to play the title role in Pixote in a 1980 a film about Brazilian street children.  The motion picture was an international critical success and focused much needed attention on the plight of that country's downtrodden, and largely forgotten urban youth.  Overnight, Silva (who was paid less than $1,000 for the role) was made into an international star while in his home country he became the poster child for a class of disenfranchised slum children more likely to die at the hands of police than live to become adults.  The youngster appeared on Brazilian television promoting Christmas cards for the United Nations Children's Fund.  TV Globo, Brazil's major television network, gave Silva a one year contract to appear as a juvenile delinquent on a soap opera, but unable to read his lines, he quit showing up for work and was fired after six months.  Similarly, the mayor of Duque de Caxias, an impoverished suburb of Sao Paulo, awarded the young star a scholarship to acting school, but Silva quit after two days preferring instead to hang out at neighborhood theatres to watch Pixote.  After appearing briefly in the role of an errand boy in Gabriela, Cravo e Canela, a 1983 film by Bruno Barreto, Silva returned to the slums of Sao Paulo and logged a series of arrests for theft.


In May 1984, Silva, 16, was arrested for the fifth time since Pixote for what police inspector Joao Paulo de Quieroz called, "doing in real life what he was portrayed as doing in the film."  Arrested in Sao Paulo where he lived with his mother and nine brothers and sisters, the former child star admitted stealing a television set, stereo equipment, and clothes from the home of a luncheonette owner.  Silva escaped from jail three months later.  It all ended on August 25, 1987, in Diadema, an industrial suburb of Sao Paulo.  Silva, 19, and two others were shot to death while fleeing a botched robbery attempt.  Police maintained the one-time actor was armed with a .32-caliber Smith & Wesson and was gunned down resisting arrest.  Silva's family disputed the official version of his death maintaining he was murdered by a police force well-known throughout the world for its roaming death squads who kept peace by eliminating suspected petty criminals.  According to family reports, Silva had become more settled after the birth of his daughter two years earlier.  He even returned to acting having recently returned home from northeastern Brazil where he appeared as a hired assassin in a play called Atalipa My Love.  Silva, who felt trapped by his association with Pixote, was targeted and harassed by police who thought he was the role that he had played.  The family's contention was bolstered one day after the shooting when an unidentified woman appeared on TV Globo and gave a radically different account of Silva's last moments than the official police version.  She was in her home when Silva rushed in and tried to hide under a bed.  When confronted by police, Silva shouted, "Don't kill me, I have a family!"  "Pixote" was shot eight times even though the woman insisted he was unarmed.  A forensic report confirmed the man was prone on the floor and shot from above when he died.  In September 1987, three state troopers were arrested and dismissed from the force after they allegedly attempted to falsify reports and tamper with evidence in the case.

William Ogden -- His Man Godfrey

Fearful that he had failed an audition for Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts television program, the 36-year-old guitarist phoned his ex-wife on September 7, 1953, and drunkenly told her that he wanted to "kill himself."  Early the next morning, Ogden's body was found in his car at the rear of his rooming house at 85 E. First Avenue in Columbus, Ohio.  The guitarist had taped a length of garden hose to the car's exhaust, placed the other end through a rear window, and laid down in the front seat with the engine running.  Ironically, a spokesman for CBS-TV in New York reported that Ogden had not been rejected as a result of the audition and was eligible for an appearance on an upcoming Godfrey talent show.