The New York Celebrity Death Map

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November 1, 2006. A rising actress and director, Shelly was murdered by a construction worker who she caught trying to rob her apartment. Initially, her death was thought … to be a suicide because she was found strung up by a sheet in her bathroom. Just this week, her killer pled guilty and told the full story -- that he was working in her building, saw Shelly walk into her apartment, and "decided to rob her." Shelly caught the man going through her purse and went to call police; he restrained her, then choked her with the sheet and hung her to try and fake the suicide. [link]

October 11, 2006. Only recently traded to the New York Yankees from the Phillies, relief pitcher Cory Lidle also had a passion for flying small aircraft. Unfortunately, … he apparently wildly misjudged a turn off the East River over Manhattan, crashing his plane into the Belaire apartment high-rise. Both Lidle and his flight instructor were killed. [link]

January 10, 2004. Enormously talented actor, writer, playwright, and monologueist Spalding Gray was seriously injured in a car wreck. After that, he struggled with … depression and a 2002 suicide attempt. Finding no relief, it's presumed he finally did the deed in 2004. His body was fished out of the East River, and it's presumed he jumped off the Staten Island Ferry. [link]

October 30, 2002. Founder and DJ of Run-DMC, Jam Master Jay (a.k.a. Jason Mizell) was regarded as an unusually upstanding and community-oriented member of the hip-hop … world, devoted to his old neighborhood in Queens and its residents. In 2002, someone broke into Jay's recording studio and shot him and another man to death; authorities have speculated it had something to do with an overlapping drug racket/hip-hop blacklist of 50 Cent that Jay had recently defied. [link]

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October 3, 1991. Perhaps best known for the minor role of "Robbie Gould" in Dirty Dancing, Max Cantor had a second career as a journalist, writing about the weird cult … of believers who sanctioned ibogaine as a cure for heroin addiction in the Village Voice. That gig led him to embrace a heroin habit of his own, as well as a fascination for East Village cannibal killer Daniel Rakowitz. While spiraling into increasing paranoia and delusions as he "researched" heroin culture, Cantor finally OD'd in his apartment -- noted only as "a clean, neat and compact studio apartment not far from the Chelsea ." [link]

August 12, 1988. Outsider artist turned ultimate insider, Basquiat rose from virtual hobo to international sensation in a few short years. Befriending Andy Warhol in … 1982, he eventually moved into Warhol's building on Great Jones Street. As Basquiat's art star rose, his prodigious drug habit led to greater and greater intakes of coke and heroin speedballs. He finally overdosed in his loft. [link]

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May 15, 1985. Jackie Curtis, a.k.a. John Holder Jr., was a famous gender-bending performer and Andy Warhol confederate. Perhaps Curtis' most famous appearance in pop … culture is the lines from Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side," to wit: "Jackie is just speeding away / Thought she was James Dean for a day / Then I guess she had to crash / Valium would have helped that bash." He eventually succumbed to heroin addiction, ODing in his Lower East Side apartment. [link]

December 8, 1980. The former Beatle had been living at the Dakota apartments for seven years, after moving there in 1973 following a robbery at the East Village apartment … he shared with Yoko Ono. On the night of December 8, Lennon was shot to death while leaving the Dakota by a highly disturbed fan Mark David Chapman, who was obsessed with the Beatles and J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye in roughly equal parts. The nearby "Imagine" mosaic at the memorially named Strawberry Fields just inside Central Park is one of the most reliably mobbed tourist attractions in New York. [link]

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October 12, 1978. The girlfriend of punk rocker Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, Spungen was notoriously vile, abusive, and a burgeoning junkie by the time she was found … stabbed to death in a Hotel Chelsea bathroom. Sid was arrested after the murder weapon was traced to him; various authorities claim the murderer might really have been a drug dealer or the East Village ne'er-do-well known as Rockets Redglare. [link]

May 16, 1977. Michael Findlay and his wife Roberta had infamously created a series of violent and/or pornographic sexploitation and snuff films from the mid-1960s. He … died in a particularly gruesome manner all too appropriate to his art; when boarding a helicopter on the roof of the Pan Am Building (now the MetLife building), one of the copter's landing gear struts crumpled, turning it into a literal chopper. The whirling rotor blades decapitated Findlay and killed four others, including three other passengers and a pedestrian on the street below. [link]

August 8, 1972. One of Andy Warhol's circle, Andrea Feldman defied her rich parents to act in Warhol's movies and stage productions. Something of an eccentric and heavily … into drugs -- supposedly, her parents would occasionally commit her to Bellvue -- Feldman invited a circle of friends and ex-lovers to her parents' ritzy apartment near Union Square. After making pronouncements about her final, greatest performance, she turned and jumped off the balcony, plunging 14 stories to her death. [link]

February 21, 1965. The dissident leader from the Nation of Islam was giving a speech at the Audobon Ballroom in Washington Heights when a pair (at least) of assassins … gunned him down -- he took a shotgun blast to the chest and 16 pistol rounds. Malcolm X had famously fallen out with rivals within the NOI, especially the leader Elijah Muhammad. Conspiracy theories abound. Three men were eventually convicted of the murder, though no conspiracy beyond the trio was ever proven. [link]

November 9, 1953. Famous poet, playwright, and drunkologist Dylan Thomas did in fact drink himself to death, and his last booze session was indeed at the White Horse … Tavern. But contrary to popular folklore, he didn't die at the Hotel Chelsea; rather, he collapsed there and probably slipped into a coma. He was definitely comatose by the time he was ambulanced to St. Vincent's, where he died four days later. [link]

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