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.

Juliann Graham -- No Good Deed Unpunished

In early 1934, Graham, 22, left her job at the public library in Sisterville, West Virginia.  Armed with a "professional" resume consisting of parts in amateur theatricals and a position in the local church choir, she went to Hollywood to realize her dream of stardom.  Within days of her arrival Graham swallowed poison in a Hollywood hotel room on March 8, 1934, after failing to crash the gates at a major studio.  When she recovered, Earl Carroll (then producing Murder at the Vanities at Paramount) took pity on Graham and convinced the studio to engage her on a week-to-week basis as a "bit" player.  At the time, Graham warned other young girls to stay away from Tinsel Town until they were financially able to support themselves in town for at least six months.  Despite Carroll's intercession, Graham again tried unsuccessfully to kill herself in September 1934 by ingesting a sleeping potion.  On the morning of July 15, 1935, shortly after returning from a weekend spent on Santa Catalina Island with Ben F. Reynolds, a married motion picture cameraman, Graham went into the bedroom of his apartment at 2879 Sunset Place in Los Angeles while he slept in another room.  Seating herself in front of a mirror, Graham placed a handgun against her left temple and pulled the trigger.  Reynolds found her body slumped on the floor beneath the dressing table.  Her one screen credit (as "Julia Graham") was as a waitress in the 1935 Paramount comedy Love in Bloom starring George Burns and Gracie Allen.

Neil Bondshu -- "It's Best this Way"

Claremont Hotel

On December 20, 1944, shortly before his dance band was to perform at San Francisco's famed St. Francis Hotel, the 28-year-old orchestra leader vanished.  Bondshu's manager described him as "nervous and worried," and fellow band members recalled that their leader had been recently depressed over the break-up of his marriage to his wife, Vicki, and separation from his 7-year-old child, Diane.  Three weeks earlier Bondshu had been arrested fro breaking into his wife's home while she was out, but she dropped the charges.  The focus of an all points bulletin, the missing band leader was found on December 22, 1944, across the Bay in Berkeley in a room in the Claremont Hotel he had reserved earlier for his mother.  Near death from an overdose of sleeping pills, Bondshu was curled up in bed clutching a picture of his estranged wife and daughter.  He died the next day in Berkeley General Hospital.  Two days after Bondshu's discovery, hotel official gave to police a suicide note found at the scene.  Shakily written on hotel stationery with a room key dipped in ink, the note read:  "Sorry, no pen.  Vicki and mother, I'm sorry, but it's best this way."

Charles "Kid" McCoy -- Down for the Count

McCoy ca. 1899

 McCoy, considered one of the greatest prizefighters in history and generally regarded as the inspiration for the term "the real McCoy," was born Norman Selby on a family farm in Moscow, Indiana, a small community 40 miles southeast of Indianapolis, on October 13, 1873.  While much of McCoy's life is bound up in self-created fiction, he did run away from home in his mid-teens to become a hobo.  He began his professional boxing career in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1890.  By 1891, the fighter had dropped the sissy sounding name of Selby in favor of McCoy, the stage name of a ham actor he had once seen perform.  According to legend, "the real McCoy" catch phrase was used both to distinguish him from other like-named pugilists and in recognition of his authentic boxing skills.  Though tall, skinny, and pale, McCoy was a scientific boxer who amassed an incredible 36-2 record from 1891-1895.  Nicknamed the "Corkscrew Kid" for a type of punch he twisted on impact, McCoy won his first world title on March 2, 1896, by knocking out welterweight Tommy Ryan in the 15th round.  On December 17, 1897, he outpunched Don Creedon for the world middleweight title.  McCoy retired in 1911 after 105 recorded bouts, posting a record of 81 wins, six losses, six draws, nine no-decisions, and three no-contests.

Outside the ring, McCoy was a flamboyant character with an eye for the ladies.  He routinely carried up to $40,000 on his person and, though married ten times (including three times to Julia Woodruff Crosselmire), had no children.  Shortly after retiring, the former fighter was arrested in Britain in 1912 on suspicion of stealing jewels from an Austrian princess in Belgium.  Though the charges were eventually dropped, McCoy's reputation was permanently damaged.  His post-fight career was filled with various unsuccessful business ventures.  McCoy briefly opened a bar in New York City (where be befriended future film directors D. W. Griffith and Mack Sennett), entered the diamond business, ran a detective agency, and launched a car dealership.  In 1917, McCoy was cast as a detective investigating a jewelry robbery in The House of Glass, a silent film shot in New York by French film pioneer Emile Chautard.  In 1919, D. W. Griffith picked the retired pugilist for the role of a prizefighter in the director's masterpiece Broken Blossoms.  McCoy also appeared in The Fourteenth Man (1920) directed by Griffith assistant Joseph Henaberry, followed by The Great Diamond Mystery, released in 1924 shortly after McCoy had been arrested for murder.
 

McCoy at the LA Jail in 1924 (UCLA Library)

By May 1924, McCoy (using the alias "Shields") had lived for three months with Theresa Mors, the 39-year-old divorced wife of art and antiques dealer Albert Mors, at the Nottingham Apartments at 28819 Leeward Avenue in Los Angeles.  The divorced couple were locked in a bitter property settlement which, ironically for McCoy, centered around the disposition of some valuable jewels.  While the events of the evening of August 12, 1924, remain somewhat confused, an argument over the divorce settlement between McCoy and Theresa Mors in their apartment left the woman fatally shot in the head.  The next morning, a drunken and deranged McCoy appeared at the store of Albert Mors and wounded three people with a .32-caliber revolver before driving away from the scene.  Later that day he turned himself in to police without incident.  At his murder trial in December 1924, McCoy maintained that Theresa Mors shot herself in despair after he suggested that a property settlement could be reached if he were temporarily out of the picture.  Deliberations lasted 78 hours before the jury on their 24th ballot found McCoy guilty of manslmanslaughter and attempted murder.  The ex-fighter was sentenced to 48 years in prison.

Hotel Tuller (Burton Historical Collection)

McCoy, a model prisoner at San Quentin, was paroled after eight years due largely to the efforts of car manufacturer Henry Ford.  The multi-millionaire industrialist gave the 60 year old a job supervising 85 security guards charged with overseeing some 12,000 vegetable gardens established by Ford employees in Detroit during the Depression.  The outbreak of armed hostilities in Europe deeply affected the 66-year-old McCoy.  As the war news worsened, he became increasingly depressed, sleepless, and reliant on sleeping pills.  On April 17, 1940, days after Nazi troops invaded Denmark and Norway, McCoy told his tenth wife, Sue Cobb Cowley, that he had to go to Chicago on business.  Instead, late the next day McCoy checked himself into the Hotel Tuller in downtown Detroit and left a request for a 10:00 A.M. wakeup call for the next day.  When McCoy failed to respond to the call on April 19, hotel officials forced entry into the room.  They found him dead near an empty box of sleeping pills.  A suicide note written in pen near the body read:  "For the past eight years I have wanted to help humanity especially the youngsters who do not know Nature's Laws.  That is, the proper carage of the body, or the right way to eat, etc.  Everything in my possession I want to go to my dear wife Sue.  To all my dear friends I wish you the best of luck.  Sorry I could not endure this world's madness.  The best to you all.  Norman Selby.  P.S.  In my pockets you will find $17.78."  In 1957, "Kid" McCoy was elected to The Ring Boxing Hall of Fame.

Recommended Reading

Cantwell, Robert.  The Real McCoy:  The Life and Times of Norman Selby.  Princeton, N.J.:  Auerbach Publishers, 1971.

Isabella Grant -- The Daughter of Kentucky

Grant, known on the German opera stage as "Belle Applegate," reached the pinnacle of her fame in 1909 when she became the mezzo soprano of the Stadt Theatre in Cologne.  Once the toast of European opera houses, the diva's popularity waned throughout the war that claimed her husband.  Returning to her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, Grant continued to perform in "tribute concerts," but longed to return to the world of grand opera.  On September 1, 1928, Grant traveled to the Windy City to audition for a small role with the Chicago Civic Opera.  Becoming ill with high blood pressure in her room at the YWCA, the fiftyish singer was forced to enter the charity ward at St. Luke's Hospital, but pride prevented her from obtaining treatment.

On October 19, 1928, the former opera great was found near death in her room at the Evanston Hotel in that city from an overdose of poison.  She died at the Psychopathic Hospital.  Grant left seven notes.  In one, addressed to the manager of the YWCA, she wrote:  "The fates have played with me as if I were a wornout football and I can stand it no more.  I did so want to sing for Mr. Johnson of the Civic Opera, and I would not have been brought to this extremity if I could have waited until I had the audition, but what difference does it make anyhow?  Even the Lincolns and Bismarcks and Napoleons are forgotten....I can't help my deed -- I am at the end of my rope.  I long for peace -- peace -- you do not realize how I long for it.  A small voice is whispering to me to go ahead and take my sleep.  I am tired.  Bless you dear friends.  The end of an opera star.  My blood be upon America for her treatment of the daughter of Kentucky pathfinders."

Thurston Theodore Lewis -- Rubeville

One day after slashing both wrists in the bathroom of his home at 310 South Massey Street in Watertown, New York, the 56-year-old cornetist died at Mercy Hospital on April 17, 1941.  A musical prodigy, Lewis became a member of B. A. Rolfe's orchestra and in 1916 joined the Barnum & Bailey circus as assistant leader of the tent show's band.  For 15 seasons, until 1931, Lewis served as musical director and manager of C. B. Maddock's musical acts on the B. F. Keith vaudeville circuit.  While on the circuit, the musician scored a hit in the musical act, "Rubeville," later recreating his role on film in a Pathe Studios short.  Returning to his hometown of Watertown, New York, in 1931, Lewis became the director of both the high and junior high school bands.  According to his surviving wife, Lewis had long been ill with a liver ailment.

Joseph La Franie -- "It is of No Use..."

The 26-year-old stage actor had been drafted and was awaiting a call to go to camp when he traveled to Brooklyn, New York, to visit his aunt.  On November 25, 1917, tormented by paranoid delusions, La Franie covered his head with towels and blankets in his second floor room and turned on the gas.  A letter addressed to his relatives read:  "I have been followed day after day by Secret Service men and police detectives, and I am in deadly fear of arrest as they think I am a German spy.  Yesterday and today were something terrible, and I can stand it no longer.  Good-bye and God bless you for all that you have done for me.  It is of no use while these fellow are after me."

Spencer D. Bettelheim -- Not Having a Wonderful Time

Lyceum Theatre

"Spence," as he was widely known among theatre folk, was the treasurer of Sam H. Harris Productions, the lessee of the Lyceum Theatre, and president of the Lyco Realty Corporation, whose offices were located on the second floor above the Lyceum at 149 W. Forty-fifth Street in New York City.  The Lyceum's production of Having a Wonderful Time had concluded on November 5, 1937, when Bettelheim's nephew found his uncle's body on the floor of the theatre man's office.  A .38-caliber revolver still clutched in his right hand, Bettelheim, 43, had evidently fired two practice rounds into the floor before firing a bullet into his right temple.  A decorated veteran of World War I, Bettelheim was gassed during the conflict and still suffered from a pulmonary infection.  Weeks prior to his death, he intimated to friends that the agonizing pains around his heart had become nearly unbearable.  In the absence of a suicide note, death was attributed to ill health combined with a heavy tax penalty levied against him by the IRS for accepting gratuities from ticket agencies.  Accorded a military funeral with full honors, the Bettelheim burial cortege was routed past the Lyceum Theatre out of respect for his memory.

Benita Breen -- Pills or Heart?

The 25-year-old vocalist (real name Mary Louise Breen) had been a featured singer with various "name" bands like Ted Weems, Henry King, and Bob Strong.  On November 13, 1945, Breen's body was found in bed by her mother in their home at 915 Margate Terrace in Chicago.  Police located an empty bottle of sleeping pills in the bathroom.  While a coroner's jury was unable to determine whether the death was accidental or suicide, Breen had been treated for a nervous disorder five month prior to her death.  Her father insisted that Breen had instead suffered from a heart condition.

Abraham M. Fabian -- The Artful Diversion

The son of Jacob Fabian, vice-president and principal stockholder of the Stanley-Fabian Amusement Corporation and First National Pictures, Fabian, 31, had been the assistant treasurer of his father's corporation and an executive board member of First National before resigning due to ill health.  Shortly after his marriage in September 1926, Fabian suffered a nervous breakdown on his honeymoon from which he never fully recovered.  Fabian's wife obtained an annulment (no grounds cited) one month prior to his death.  The elder Fabian purchased a country home on Norwood Avenue in Elberon, New Jersey, and there installed his son and a full-time nurse to look after him.  In the early morning of June 1, 1927, Fabian stopped up the bathroom toilet with paper and called his nurse to unclog it.  The 15 minutes she labored on the plumbing gave the deranged man more than enough time to enter the kitchen, lie on top of the stove, and asphyxiate himself with gas.

Yoshiaki Yasuda -- Big Hit in "Little Nippon"

Yasuda, president of the Japanese Theatre Association and owner of the Fuji Theatre in what the Los Angeles Times called the city's "Little Nippon" district, was gunned down in front of his palatial home at 241 North Dittman Street at 1:30 A.M. on June 9, 1930.  The theatre owner, accompanied by his wife and their two chauffeurs, had just returned to the residence when a pair of gunmen stepped from the shadows and pumped five shots into his chest and abdomen.  One assailant pitched his .38-caliber handgun in an alley about 150 feet from the site as he fled the scene.  Yasuda, also the head of the Japanese Wrestling Association, recently brought a troupe of Asian actors to the city to promote a series of bouts featuring Japanese wrestlers.  Police theorized the unsolved crime was the result of a long-standing feud between Yasuda and others in the L.A. Japanese community.

Herbert Heckler -- The Sour Note

Throughout their two year engagement, Pearl Palmer, a 23-year-old prima donna best known for her role in Victor Herbert's opera Princess Pat, had delayed marrying Heckler, a 27-year-old opera singer from Chicago, in order to pursue a career.  On September 26, 1915, Palmer was in her studio at the Conservatory Building at No. 240 West Seventy-second Street in New York City when a depressed Heckler arrived for a visit.  Palmer complained of being ill and dispatched her beau to a pharmacy for medication.  A friend who accompanied Heckler later told authorities that the singer had burst into tears when discussing his belief that Palmer no longer loved him.  Returning to her studio, Heckler entered the room alone.  Moments later, the sounds of a violent argument were heard followed by four gunshots in quick succession.  When police forced the door they discovered Palmer unconscious, a bullet lodged in her head and two in her body.  She died shortly afterward in the Polyclinic Hospital.  Heckler, the spurned suitor, lay dead in the center of the room, a gaping gunshot wound in his forehead.

Timothy Colwell -- Crime Watch Gone Wrong

A respected jazz saxophonist who played with the British musical institution Kenny Ball & His Jazzmen in the 1960s, the 65-year-old musician continued to receive regular BBC airplay with his group, Timothy Colwell's Jazzfriends.  On the evening of September 19, 2003, Colwell was at home in his ground-floor flat in Lymington, Hants when someone outside began shouting and banging on his windows.  The musician had been a target of verbal taunts, graffiti abuse, and violent threats for months since phoning police to report truants congregating in a park near his home.  His practice of sometimes photographing the neighborhood toughs led the youths to falsely brand him as a pedophile.  Two weeks earlier, someone (later identified as Richard Harris) crashed a tractor tire through his living room window.  When Colwell left his apartment on what proved to be the final night of his life and walked to the nearby playground to investigate the disturbance, Richard Harris, 20, and Daniel Newham, 17, knocked the elderly man to the ground, and repeatedly punched and kicked him.  Neighbors intervened, but Colwell collapsed as he walked back to his flat.  Shortly afterwards, he died in hospital without regaining consciousness.  While Colwell had a previous heart condition, it was ruled that the assault was so brutal that it could have caused a heart attack in a healthy 65-year-old while the kicks to his head were sufficient to have killed a 25-year-old.

Harris, who boasted of liking to hurt animals and acting like a vigilante, was on parole for two earlier violent assaults at the time of his attack on Colwell.  Conversely, Newham had no previous convictions and apparently came from a decent, supportive family.  At trial in February 2005, both men were cleared of murder charges, but found guilty of manslaughter.  At a hearing in London in April 2005, Mrs. Justice Harlett sentenced Richard Harris to life imprisonment with a recommendation that he serve a minimum of three years before being considered for parole.  "It is clear that, whether or not you are mentally disordered," the judge told Harris, "your personality is such that you are likely to remain a danger for many years to come, possibly forever."  Daniel Newham was sentenced to five years youth custody."

Charles H. Falke -- Heads Up

The 55-year-old burlesque manager-producer suffered a mental collapse after attending his mother's funeral four days earlier and, devastated by depression, walked off The Sporting Duchess, a burlesque show he was managing in Union City, New Jersey.  Falke traveled to New York City and checked into a third floor room at the Forrest Hotel at 224 West Forty-ninth Street.  On the afternoon of March 20, 1928, as a friend was knocking on his door to inquire about his health, the veteran burlesque manager leaped to his death.  Falke barely missed actresses Miriam Hopkins and Frances Goodrich as they approached the stage door of the Ritz Theatre where they were appearing in the John McGowan comedy Excess Baggage.  The hysterical women required medical attention.  Falke died later that day at Bellevue Hospital from a compound fracture of the skull and other injuries.