Dead Celebrity Alert

Deborah Jeane Palfrey, convicted last month of running a high-end prostitution service in Washington, hanged herself today in a shed outside her mother’s mobile home in Florida, officials said. …Palfrey, 52, was free while awaiting sentencing June 25 on federal racketeering charges. A federal jury convicted her April 15 of running a Washington area call-girl ring in the guise of “a high-end erotic fantasy service”…

Read full story

See also:

D.C. Madam Update: Vitter, Tobias, Ullman spared long-anticipated (and well-deserved) humiliation
Conservative Babylon, April 15, 2008

Convicted sex offender, and accused cannibal, Nathaniel Bar Jonah, was sentenced 130 years after he was convicted of kidnapping, sexually assaulting and choking a teenage boy. He was also charge din 200 for the 1996 disappearance of 10 year old Zach Ramsey. Authorities believed that Bar Jonah had killed the boy and served his body in meals served to neighbors. … Read full story

John E. List, who escaped his drab existence as a failed New Jersey accountant by killing his family in 1971, disappearing and building a new life far away until a true-crime show on television led to his capture almost 18 years later, died on Friday. He was 82.

Mr. List died at St. Francis Medical Center in Trenton four days after being taken there from the New Jersey State Prison, officials told The Associated Press. The cause was complications of pneumonia. … Read full obituary

Also:
John List at Conservative Babylon

America’s Most Wanted on John List

Richard Jewell, the Centennial Olympic Park security guard once suspected — but later cleared — in the bombing of the park during the 1996 Summer Games, was found dead Wednesday in his home in Meriwether County. He was 44. …

…Jewell had been diagnosed with diabetes in February and had a couple of toes amputated. … Read full story

NEW YORK — Leona Helmsley, the cutthroat hotel magnate whose title as the “queen of mean” was sealed during a tax evasion case in which she was quoted as snarling “only little people pay taxes,” died Monday at age 87.

Helmsley died of heart failure at her summer home in Greenwich, Conn., said her publicist, Howard Rubenstein. … Read full obituary

SANTA ROSA — Jim Mitchell, the porn czar who co-founded the Mitchell Brothers O’Farrell Theatre and who later shot his brother to death, died Thursday night at his Sonoma County home. He was 63. … Read full obituary

DENVER — Actor Woody Harrelson’s father, Charles Harrelson, died of a heart attack in the Supermax federal prison where he was serving two life sentences for the murder of a federal judge, officials said Wednesday. … Read full obituary

Went to prison murdering wife’s lover.

Jovan Zebic, who held top government posts during the rule of Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s, died late Thursday, said Ivica Dacic, the leader of the late president’s Socialist Party.

The cause of death was not revealed. … Read full story

Related:
Slobodan Milosevic found dead in prison cell

JACKSON, Miss. — Ellie Dahmer found little comfort in the death of the Ku Klux Klan leader who ordered the assassination of her husband, saying Samuel H. Bowers lived a much longer life than the man she married.

Bowers, who was serving a life sentence for the 1966 bombing death of Vernon Dahmer Sr., died Sunday in a state penitentiary, officials said. He was 82. … Read full obituary

Deputy district attorney who prosecuted parent-murdering brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez.

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Kenneth Lay, the former chairman of Enron as well as a founder of the company, is dead, according to a report on CNBC. Lay was convicted of fraud and conspiracy charges by a federal jury in Houston on May 25 for his part in the high-profile collapse of Enron. CNBC said Lay died at his home in Aspen, Colo., of a heart attack. Jeffery Skilling, the ex-CEO of Enron, was also convicted in late May. The pair had yet to be sentenced for the charges, and each man was facing at least 20 years in prison. … Read full obituary

Related:

Ex-Enron exec J. Clifford Baxter suicides out

El Paso Corp. exec Charles Dana Rice, apparent suicide

DENVER — Patsy Ramsey, the mother of slain 6-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey, died Saturday morning after a recurrence of ovarian cancer, her lawyer L. Lin Wood told MSNBC. She was 49. … Read full obituary

John M. Falotico, the detective who arrested David R. Berkowitz, the notorious “Son of Sam” killer, died on Saturday at his home in North Brunswick, N.J. He was 82. … Read full obituary

Vincent Gigante, who died yesterday in federal prison at 77, was the Genovese crime family boss who for three decades feigned lunacy to evade prosecution for crimes ranging from loan sharking to murder to bribing the entire police force of Old Tappan, N.J. … Read full obituary

MELBOURNE, Aug. 12 (UPI) — An Australian man suspected of putting his wife in a vegetative state hanged himself the day of her funeral.

The Melbourne Herald Sun reported Joe Korp’s parents and brother found his body hanging in a shed outside his Melbourne home. … Read full story

Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., the dynamic, eminently quotable attorney whose televised murder defense of O.J. Simpson made him a legal superstar died Tuesday. He was 67. … Read full obituary

MIAMI (AP) — Richard Hirschfeld, a colorful confidant of boxing champ Muhammad Ali who spent most of the last eight years as a fugitive from the federal government, killed himself Tuesday in jail. … Read full story

MAITLAND, Fla. (AP) — A former Darmouth basketball player suspected of drowning his toddler daughter and attempting to drown his 4-year-old son killed himself Monday by swerving into the path of a tractor trailer, authorities said. His two other children were injured in the crash. … Read full story

Mike Echols, author of the book chronicling the kidnapping of Steven Stayner, and a child crime victims’ advocate, died in the Monterey County jail early Saturday morning of an apparent heart attack. He had been serving time since last month for violating his probation for two 1999 misdemeanor convictions of making criminal threats. … Read full obituary

Moors murderer Myra Hindley has been cremated.

A private funeral service held for the child killer was attended by only a handful of mourners… Read full story

Related:
U.K. child killer Myra Hindley, 60

UK ‘Moors Murderer’ Myra Hindley dies

Serial killer Myra Hindley, one of Britain’s infamous “Moors Murderers” who with her lover Ian Brady tortured and killed at least four children in the 1960s, died Friday after 36 years in prison as one of the nation’s most hated criminals. … Read full obituary

Aileen Carol Wuornos, called the “Damsel of Death,” was executed voluntarily and peacefully by lethal injection Wednesday morning, dying much more gently than any of the seven men she shot to death a dozen years ago. …

Wuornos, one of the nation’s rare female serial killers, was only the second woman to be executed in Florida and the second inmate to be put to death in a week. … Read full obituary

Angelo Buono Jr., whose gruesome killing of young Los Angeles women in the 1970s earned him the nickname “Hillside Strangler,” died Saturday in his prison cell, corrections officials said. … Read full obituary

A suspect in the kidnapping of 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart died Friday at a hospital three days after suffering from a brain hemorrhage and collapsing in his jail cell, doctors said. …

Salt Lake City Police Chief Rick Dinse this week reaffirmed that Ricci remained at the top of the list of potential suspects in Elizabeth’s abduction. However, investigators were no closer to finding the missing 14-year-old than they were June 5, when a gunman took her from the bedroom she was sharing with her younger sister. … Read full obituary