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.

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."

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."

Oliver Jay Bright -- None too Bright

The sales manager for 23 years of the Levy-Page Company, a music equipment house in Norfolk, Virginia, Bright abruptly quit just weeks prior to the last day of his life. , June 9, 1936.  At 3:40 P.M. that day, Bright, 55, visited the City Hall Rifle Range in Norfolk, calmly asked for a .22-caliber target pistol, and announced to bystanders, "I want to see if I can shoot a bullseye."  He fired two shots at the target then fired a third into his right temple.  Bright died four hours later at St. Vincent's Hospital.  In a note found afterward, the former sales manager explained that "business worries" had driven him to the act.

Jess Arnold -- He Died with His Boots Off

Arnold, a foreign correspondent during the Spanish Civil War who once operated a two-man news bureau with Walter Cronkite for the International News Service in El Paso, was a well-known and colorful figure in Texas.  A novel based on his war reportage, Reunion in Barcelona, was serialized in Cosmopolitan magazine, and his short story "A Mission to General Houston" served as the basis for the 1950 Paramount film The Eagle and the Hawk, which starred John Payne and Rhonda Fleming.  On January 3, 1964, Arnold's body was found at the Garza Ranch on Brodie Lane near Austin, Texas.  The 46-year-old writer had fully dressed and packed a suitcase before firing a fatal shot into his chest with a British made .38-caliber pistol that he had asked a friend to sight for him a few days earlier.  Several years before when he talked of living to be a hundred, Arnold wrote his own obituary, dated it March 11, 2016, and gave it to a friend for safekeeping.  It read:

"Jess Arnold, the centaur passed away today,  The rootingest, tootingest, non-fightingest, runningest Texan that ever lived died quietly....  The Mighty Arnold died as he lived -- with his boots off.  He never wore a hat.  The Mighty Arnold never wrote anything of note, but did keep on living.  He was always going to write a novel, but never got around to it....  'Hell,' he would say, 'that takes work.'"

Hugh (Bud) Ernst -- The Reporter's Friend

Ernst, a radio producer and husband of Betty Furness, the actress who was then doing the Westinghouse commercials on the CBS television program Studio One (1948-1958), called a newspaper reporter on the afternoon of April 10, 1950, and told him that if he went to his room at New York City's Westbury Hotel at 15 East Sixty-ninth Street he would get a good story.  The newspaper called Furness at her Park Avenue home and she went to the Westbury.  While Furness waited in the lobby, a bellboy entered Ernst's room to find that the 39 year old had apparently placed a 20-gauge shotgun between his knees, closed his mouth over the barrel, and pulled the trigger.  In a note addressed to Furness, Ernst claimed that he was "tired of everything."

Charlotte Livingston -- No Funeral Please

A self-described screenwriter who was being treated for a broken right arm at Harbor Sanitarium, a private hospital in New York City, Livingston jumped to her death from the ninth floor window of her room on May 1, 1934.  Earlier in the evening, Livingston, 35, had asked a nurse for a pencil and some paper.  A note found in her room addressed to "Gertrude and Pete" asked for forgiveness and added:  "No funeral please.  Turn my body over to the medical examiner at Bellevue."  Livingston was later identified as the former wife of Louis Livingston, a member of a prominent New York State family.

Adolph DeBerg -- Meet Judge Conscience

DeBerg, who claimed to be a film director and misrepresented himself as a field man for Universal Film Corporation, was in the lower California town of Calexico to supposedly begin shooting a Spanish talking picture titled Virgin Gold.  When the film fell through, he was subsequently wanted by police for passing two bad checks totaling $100.  On August 4, 1930, the body of the "director" was found beside a shock of hay in a small pasture in Calexico, the victim of a fatal dose of self-administered ant paste.  A note found on his body read:  "I've studied myself all over, and I'm nothing but an unmitigated scoundrel.  I've given myself a final trial and Judge Conscience, who is right always, has decreed the sentence of death.  I'm going to the movies again and then I'll end everything."  In an added postscript to the note, DeBerg concluded:  "The picture is over, and the lights are out for me."

Walter F. Eberhardt -- Here's Looking at You

A veteran exploitation publicist who worked for a number of film studios (Famous Players-Lasky, First National), Everhardt joined Electrical Research Products , Inc. (part of Western Electric) in 1929 as director of publicity and advertising.  In recent years, the executive had turned to mystery writing, producing the novels Dagger in the Dark (1932), The Jig-Saw Puzzle Murder (1933), as well as two film novelizations.  For years Eberhardt had worn a glass eye, but shortly before his death feared that he was losing sight in the other.  On October 26, 1935, the 44-year-old publicist took his life in the garage adjoining his home at 46 Walbrooke Road in Scarsdale, New York.  Eberhardt's body was found slumped down in the front seat of his car with a rubber tube attached to the exhaust running up through the floor boards of the vehicle into his mouth.  Three notes were located on the floor next to the body.  In one, believed to be for his aunt, Eberhardt wrote:  "I am sorry.  I wanted to call you, but it was already too late.  My abiding love.  Walter."

Allen McPhail - Life is a Joke

"I have worked hard to make good for eight years, but I have failed.  Life is a joke," read the suicide note-cum-epitah penned by the 28-year-old musician on October 22, 1909.  A violinist at the Orpheum Theatre in Butte, Montana, McPhail played scores of theatres in the East prior to heading West to try to win a soloist position.  Failing, the frustrated musician cut the arteries of one wrist and hanged himself from the bedpost in his room at the Hotel Fair in Butte.

Dudley Ayres -- It was Done

Ayres (born in Iowa in 1890) acted in stock theatre and silent films (The Uphill Path, 1918), and was leading man at the Castle Square Theatre in Boston, the Majestic in Los Angeles, and for three years at the Alcazar Theatre in San Francisco.  In June 1930, he became the director of speaking broadcasting at radio station KYA in San Francisco.  Ayres, 40, specialized in delivering inspirational messages to the downtrodden, discouraged, and shut-in in daily 15 minute "chatalogues" in the morning and on Friday evenings in a segment of dramatic sketches titled "The Voice and the Harp."

On the morning of September 5, 1930, Ayres arrived at KYA to prepare his morning message prophetically titled "It Can Be Done."  After concluding his 15 minute show with a reading of Edgar A. Guest's inspirational poem "How do You Tackle Your Work," Ayres drove to the garage of his home at 655 Powell Street and shot himself in the head.  His Chinese houseboy, hearing the car's engine running and noticing exhaust fumes issuing from the closed garage, investigated and found his employer dead on the car's front seat.  Near the hand that still clasped a .38-caliber revolver was found a note to his third wife:  "Marjorie, my dear -- I'm afraid I's losing my mind -- and haven't the courage to go on.  And I don't want to spoil your life, so am taking the coward's way out.  Dudley."  Scores of persons who had been touched by Ayres' daily inspirational messages filed past his bier in a Market Street funeral chapel before the body was sent to Los Angeles for burial.

Winifred Greene -- Let's Not Meet Again

The 21-year-old soubrette of the Ginger Girls Company had just completed singing an encore of "The Skeleton Rag" at Kansas City's Gayety Theater on February 24, 1912, when she rushed offstage to her dressing room and downed a bottle of carbolic acid.  She died half an hour later at Emergency Hospital.  A note to her husband, electrician for the company, was brief, but to the point:  "Bert, if you go to heaven, I trust I may go to hell.--W.G."  Moments before fainting at the hospital, the hysterical husband screamed, "I scolded her this afternoon for sending money home, but I wasn't harsh with her.  I never would have thought she'd take it so to heart."  In a separate note to her mother posted the night before, Greene apologized for killing herself.

George A. Davidson, Jr. -- Georgie, the Very Bad Boy

Davidson, a 28-year-old film test director for Fox studio, knew Constance Smith, a married mother of four children, for eight years before becoming hopelessly obsessed with her.  Separated from actress-wife Thelma Roberts and struggling to pay a court judgment for her support, Davidson lived alone in a modest apartment at 7279 Fountain Avenue in Hollywood.  On October 11, 1932, Davidson's repeated threats to kill Smith and then himself if she refused to marry him reached the flash point.  That morning, the film man phoned the 30-year-old woman at her home and threatened to come there and kill her if she refused his marriage demand.  Fearful for her children's safety and with her husband out of town, Smith agreed to meet Davidson later that night at his apartment.  When she arrived at 7:00 P.M., Davidson locked and nailed shut the front door, and for three hours brandished a .38-caliber revolver in her face all the while threatening to kill them both unless she relented.  According to Smith, she had convinced Davidson to let her go when he suddenly fired two shots into his head.

At the scene, police found a note written by the woman to the dead man that read, "Georgie Darling:  You are a very bad boy and I'm not going to love you anymore -- love you enough now.  How about a date tonight?"  Smith maintained that Davidson had forced her to write the incriminating document during the three-hour ordeal.  Davidson left two suicide notes.  In one addressed to his boss at Fox studio, he wrote:  "I have done this because it seems the odds are too much against me."  To his mother, Davidson explained:  "My mind has gone back on me.  Thelma's ... lawyer attached my salary and that, of course, broke me up, not having enough to take care of you....  I am perfectly sane and have planned this whole thing....  I love you and will always love you all.  George."

Geraldine Soles Espe -- Three's Company

One day after a loan company repossessed the furniture in Espe's home in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles, the 35-year-old secretary in the office of the Association of Motion Picture Producers loaded her toy fox terrier, "Junior Officer," and her ailing 60-year-old mother into her car and drove off.  The next day, October 22, 1940, a private patrolman in the exclusive Hidden Valley area on the outskirts of the city near the ranch of Will Hays, head of the national producers' group, found the dead trio in a small coupe on the side of the road.  A rubber hose connected to the exhaust pipe led into the car.  A note found in the glove box read, "Insurance policy at office; receipts in hat box in closet.  Will take care of burial."  In Espe's purse was a notice of judgment directing that the furniture be removed from their home.

Adrienne LaChamp Keim -- The Suicide Scribe

Keim, a 33-year-old Hungarian actress-singer-dancer, was one of the century's most prolific writer of suicide notes.  On December 12, 1933, she leaped from a 15 floor window of the Hotel Lincoln in New York City, narrowly missing several pedestrians walking below on Forty-fourth Street.  One of the two notes pinned to her dress read:  "Please notify my mother, Mrs. A LaChamp in Shanghai, China.  Please it is my wish to be buried untouched.  I am sorry for the poor English."  In the other, addressed to police, Keim wrote:  "Please keep this out of the papers.  This is just another funeral.  Don't experiment on me and don't try to keep me alive."  Six sealed notes, four addressed to the director of the St. James Theatre and the others to friends, were found in her rooms.

Aziz Ghazal -- The Not So Brave

Ghazal (born in Israel in 1955) emigrated to California where in 1983 he became the stock room chief at the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television.  While working there in 1990, Ghazal produced the low-budget alternative film The Natural History of Parking Lots, which won critical raves.  By 1993, the 38 year old was becoming noticed by industry power players hot to film a book property he had optioned, Gregory McDonald's The Brave, a novel about an unemployed father who agrees to let himself be killed for money in a "snuff" movie so that his family could reap the profits.  However, unknown to Jodie Foster's Egg Prods. and Touchstone Pictures, Ghazal had signed concurrent legally binding deal memos with both companies for the same property.  As the scheme unraveled, Ghazal was fired from USC in October 1993 following a dispute over a missing camera.  Almost simultaneously, Ghazal's wife of 16 years, Rebecca, sued him for divorce, citing years of family and spousal abuse.  In one documented incident, Ghazal arrived at 13-year-old daughter Khadijah's school and administered a brutal beating to her in front of dumbfounded classmates.
 

 Armed with a restraining order against her volatile husband, Rebecca Ghazal and her three children were living in the couple's get-away home in the small California mountain town of Pine Cove, near Idyllwild in central Riverside County.  On December 1, 1993, Ghazal arrived at the two-story cabin, bludgeoned his wife and daughter Khadijah to death and, after torching the cabin with Molotov cocktails, fled the scene.  His two sons were out of the house at the time of the slayings.  Authorities discovered Ghazal's blood-spattered car stuck in mud some 300 yards from the house, but the aspiring producer's decomposed body was not found until January 9, 1994, when two hikers in a secluded area south of Mt. San Jacinto stumbled across the scene.  A .380-caliber pistol was found near the body.  Forensics suggested that Ghazal had probably shot himself within hours of killing his estranged wife and teenage daughter.  In notes penned three days before the tragedy found in Ghazal's Los Angeles residence, the producer had written, "I can't subject my kids to anymore of this," and "Please forgive me for what I'm about to do."

William David Powell, Jr. -- A Better Place

Born in 1925, the son of actor William Powell and first wife, actress Eileen Wilson, was an associate producer for both Warner Bros. and Universal and, for three years, an executive of the National Broadcasting Company before turning to writing for television series.  Powell wrote scripts for Death Valley Days, Rawhide, 77 Sunset Strip, and Bonanza.  Despondent over a chronic kidney condition and hepatitis, Powell used a razor and a steak knife to slash his throat and wrists while in the shower of his garage apartment at 2542 Rinconia Drive in Hollywood.  Powell's landlord found the body on March 13, 1968, after the 43-year-old scriptwriter had not picked up his mail for a week.  The only part of a four page suicide note released to the press said, "Things aren't so good here.  I'm going where it's better."

Eva Mottley -- St. Valentine's Day Massacre

The Barbados-born beauty turned to acting after serving 15 months in a British jail for possession of LSD.  A former girlfriend of rock star David Bowie, Mottley's film credits included Scrubbers (1982) and a small role in Superman III (1983), although she was best known for her starring role as "Bella" in the British television series Widows. Upset over losing her job on the series in August 1984, the 31-year-old actress' allegations of sexual and racial prejudice among the show's production crew were lost amidst a swirl of alcohol and cocaine abuse that left her 25,000 quid in debt.  On February 14, 1985, St. Valentine's Day, Mottley was found slumped on her knees by the telephone in her flat in Shirland Road, Maida Vale, West London.  In her depression, Mottley had downed a deadly cocktail of barbiturates and alcohol.  Two notes, one addressed to her parents and tucked in her bedclothes, and the other on a writing pad begun normally in blue ink and ending illegibly in red, were found at the scene.