Johnny Ace (John Marshall Alexander, Jr.) - singer
1954 --- suicide playing Russian roulette.

Janet Elaine Adkins
1990 --- 1st suicide assisted by Jack Kevorkian.

Clara Blandick - actress (Auntie Em in The Wizard of Oz)
1962 --- sleeping pills, with a plastic bag tied over her head. She was 81-years-old and suffering from crippling arthritis.

Ray Combs - talk show host (Family Feud)
1996 --- 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
1932 --- suicide by drowning. On a steamship, he bid his fellow passengers farewell and jumped overboard

Thich Quang Duc - Buddhist monk
1963 --- set himself on fire on the streets of Saigon to protest government persecution of Buddhists.

R. Budd Dwyer - politician (Pennsylvania)
1987 --- Convicted of bribery and conspiracy in federal court and about to be sentenced, he called a press conference; there, in front of spectators and TV cameras, he shot himself in the mouth.

Lillian Millicent Entwistle - actress
1932 --- suicide by jumping from the 'H' of the 'HOLLYWOOD(LAND)' sign.

Joseph Goebbels - Nazi politician
1945 --- with his wife, poisoned their five children, then committed suicide at Hitler's Berlin bunker.

Hermann Goering - Nazi politician
1946 --- poisoned himself hours before he was to have been executed.

Donny Hathaway - singer
1979 --- suicide by jumping from his room on the 15th floor of New York's Essex House Hotel.

Rudolf Hess - Nazi politician
1987 --- last member of Adolf Hitler's inner circle, strangled himself with an electrical cord at age 93, in Spandau Prison.

Chris Hubbock - newscaster
1970 --- shot herself in the head during a prime time news broadcast on Florida TV station WXLT-TV. She died 14 hours later.

Michael Hutchence - rock musician (Inxs)
1997 --- hanged himself with a belt in his room in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, in Sydney, Australia. (Perhaps auto-erotic asphyxiation.)

Eugene Izzi - writer
1997 --- hanged himself from an 11th-floor window on Michigan Ave., Chicago. Perhaps by accident while researching a scene for a book.

Jim Jones - leader of a religious cult known as the Peoples Temple
1978 --- killed himself after watching more than 900 of his followers die from the ingestion of Kool-Ade laced with cyanide.

Terry Kath - rock musician (Chicago)
1978 --- suicide playing Russian roulette

Jesse William Lazear - US physician
1900 --- voluntarily infected with & died of yellow fever as part of Walter Reed's research.

Vachel Lindsay - poet
1931 --- suicide by drinking a bottle of lye (Lysol).

Kiyoko Matsumoto - 19 year old student
1933 --- suicide 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.

Yukio Mishima (Kimitake Hiraoka) - Japanese writer
1970 --- suicide by disembowelment and decapitation (a ritual called seppuku or hara-kiri) as a protest of the Westernization of Japan. He killed himself in front of an assembly (which he himself called) of all of his students that he was teaching at a university at that time.

Francois Maurice Marie Mitterrand
1996 --- suicide by intentionally terminating treatment for prostate cancer.

Claudius Drusus Germanicus Nero - Roman emperor
68 AD --- suicide by stabbing himself with a sword.

Sylvia Plath - poet
1963 --- suicide by inhaling gas from her oven.

Margaret Mary Ray - celebrity stalker
1998 --- suicide by kneeling in front of an oncoming train.

Bobby Sands - IRA activists
1981 --- starved on the 66th day of his hunger strike.

Socrates - philosopher
399 BC --- required to drink hemlock to end his life after being found guilty of corrupting the youth of Athens.

Vincent Willem van Gogh - painter
1890 --- shot himself; he died two days later.

Horace Wells - pioneered the use of anesthesia in the 1840s
1848 --- arrested for spraying two women with sulfuric acid; he anaesthetized himself with chloroform and slashed open his thigh with a razor.

Virginia Woolf (Adeline Virginia Stephens Woolf) - writer
1941 -- committed suicide by drowning.