Mark Madoff, 46, the son of convicted Ponzi scheme author Bernard Madoff, was found dead Saturday 11 December, hanging from a pipe in his living room in Soho, Manhattan in New York. He was found by his father-in-law at 07:30, after his wife, in Florida with one of their children, received disturbing e-mails. Their two-year-old son was sleeping in a nearby room. His death has been ruled a suicide. He took his life two years to the day after his father was arrested on charges of stealing $50-plus billion from investors and just three days after being sued by court-appointed trustee Irving Picard, along with his younger brother Andrew and others. Picard has been filing lawsuits against a large number of banks and individuals to try to recover assets for victims.
British fashion designer Alexander McQueen took a mix of cocaine, tranquilizers and sleeping pills before he hanged himself 11 February, an inquest in the UK has determined. McQueen suffered from what his psychiatrist called a mixed anxiety and depressive disorder. He had been checking the Internet for ways to commit suicide before his death, which came on the eve of his mother’s funeral.
The body of Alec Collett, kidnapped in 1985 but not heard from since 1986, has been found in eastern Lebanon, the UN announced 23 November, Monday. Collett, age 63 at the time, was working for UNWRA (Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East). He was the first person to be kidnapped in what became a string of abductions in the 1980s in Lebanon. He was traveling in a car near the airport in Beirut, stopped by a group that called itself the Revolutionary Organization of Muslim Socialists. His Austrian driver was also taken, but later released. Collett had worked for several years as a journalist, in Prague, Czechoslovakia and later in New York, especially at the UN. An reported eyewitness account of his hanging, attributed to ruthless Palestinian leader Abu Nidal, was published in 2005, at which point Collett’s American wife, Elaine, also a UN worker, renewed calls to find the body in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon.
Links to other sites: CNN, United Nations press release, Times (May 2005)
David Carradine, US actor who starred in more than 100 films as well as television and theatre, was found dead in a hotel room in Bangkok, Thailand, hanged by a nylon rope which may have been from the hotel room curtains. Police say there was no sign of forced entry and his death is being investigated. Carradine’s most famous recent role may have been as Bill in the “Kill Bill” movies by Quentin Tarantino. In the 1970s he became famous for playing a monk in the television series “Kung Fu.” CNN
