139,752 People
Unusual Deaths in 1981
A 25-year-old dutch woman studying in paris, ren�e hartevelt, was killed and eaten by a classmate, issei sagawa, when he invited her to dinner for a literary conversation. the killer was declared unfit to stand trial and extradited back to japan, where he was released from custody within fifteen months.
Carl mccunn, in march 1981, paid a bush pilot to drop him at a remote lake near the coleen river in alaska to photograph wildlife, but had not arranged for the pilot to pick him up again in august. rather than starve, mccunn shot himself in the head. his body was found in february 1982.
Boris sagal, a motion picture-director, died while shooting the tv miniseries world war iii when he walked into the tail-rotor blade of a helicopter and was decapitated.
I looked me up and my cool synchronicity death was Bruce Lee - I have a strong sense he might've been reincarnated in me.
ReplyDeleteBut the real shocker was just learning that Robert Palmer died on my birthday in 2003. Holy crap, Robert Palmer's dead?!
*sniff*
He sucked, but he was part of my youth and I had a dumb friend who was obsessed with him. And he was only 54 when he died.
I'm so downloading his first hit, 1974's legitimately good "Sneakin' Sally Through the Alley" (which I used to think was a Clapton song). Store iPod, prepare to pay homage!
Mr. Wizard died on my birthday in 2007....that's sad :(
ReplyDelete8-12-66, 127,689. Notables dead on this day include:
ReplyDelete2007 - Mike Wieringo
2007 - Merv Griffin
1996 - Mark Gruenwald
1992 - John Cage
1990 - B. Kliban
1988 - Jean-Michel Basquiat
1982 - Henry Fonda
1964 - Ian Fleming
1861 - Eliphalet Remington (as in rifles)
1827 - William Blake
a couple popes, a roman emperor and...
30 BC - Cleopatra
1966 also saw an earthquake in Varto (I don't know where that is either), a Blizzard, and Tornados in Candlestick Park and Topeka.
ReplyDeleteUnusual deaths in that year:
Cheri Jo Bates --- 1st victim of the Zodiac killer. Murdered at Riverside Community College in California, her jugular and larynx were severed. Auspicous!
Eric Fleming, actor --- drowned when his canoe capsized during the filming of a movie near the headwaters of the Amazon in the Haullaga River, Peru. The director said, "Hey we didn't get that. Let's do another take."
Bobby Fuller, musician --- his badly beaten body was discovered in a parked car in Los Angeles. His death was attributed to asphyxia through the forced inhalation of gasoline. yeesh!
Francis Russell O'Hara - US art critic --- died from being hit by taxicab (probably driven by an angry artist).
Chairman Mao launched his "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" in '66, and apparently that summer there was a rash of attacks on Chinese teachers by their students.
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/ywang/Revolution1966.html