John Marshall Alexander Jr (singer) – suicided by playing Russian roulette in 1954
Clara Blandick (actress) – suicided using sleeping pills, and a plastic bag tied over her head, in 1962
Ray Combs (talk show host) – hanged himself on the night of June 2, 1996, with bed sheets in his hospital room at Glendale Adventist Hospital while on a 72-hour “suicide watch”
Hart Crane (poet) – bid his fellow passengers farewell on a steamship and jumped overboard, 1932
Thich Quang Duc (Buddhist monk) – set himself on fire on the streets of Saigon to protest government persecution of Buddhists, 1963
Lillian Millicent Entwistle (actress) – suicided by jumping from the “H” of the ‘HOLLYWOOD(LAND)’ sign in 1932
Joseph Goebbels (Nazi politician) – with his wife, poisoned their five children, then committed suicide at Hitler’s Berlin bunker in 1945
Rudolf Hess (Nazi politician) – last member of Adolf Hitler’s inner circle, strangled himself with an electrical cord at age 93, in Spandau Prison.
Chris Chubbuck (newscaster) – shot herself in the head during a prime time news broadcast on Florida TV station WXLT-TV. She died 14 hours later.
Eugene Izzi (writer) – hanged himself from an 11th-floor window on Michigan Ave., Chicago. Perhaps by accident while researching a scene for a book (1997)
Kiyoko Matsumoto (19 year old student) – suicided by jumping into the thousand foot crater of a volcano on the island of Oshima, Japan. This act started a bizarre fashion in Japan and in the ensuing months three hundred children did the same thing. (1933)
Sylvia Plath (poet) – suicided by inhaling gas from her oven in 1963
Margaret Mary Ray (celebrity stalker) – suicided by kneeling in front of an oncoming train in 1998
Lupe Velez (actress) – suicided by overdose with sleeping pills; she was 4 months pregnant. [There is a much-circulated, but undocumented story that she had dressed in her best outfit for the suicide and took her pills, washing them down with alcohol. Getting sick to her stomach, she rushed to the bathroom, but tripped and fell; drowning in the toilet]
Horace Wells (pioneered the use of anesthesia in the 1840s) – arrested for spraying two women with sulfuric acid; he anaesthetized himself with chloroform and slashed open his thigh with a razor, in 1848
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