List of unusual deaths in the 20th century

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Lists of unusual deaths
Antiquity
Middle Ages	Renaissance	Early modern period
19th century	20th century	21st century
Animal deaths

This list of unusual deaths includes unique or extremely rare circumstances of death recorded throughout the 20th century, noted as being unusual by multiple sources.

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  Franz Reichelt, known as the "Flying Tailor", prior to his death testing an early wingsuit
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  The 1966 mid-air collision that killed astronaut Joseph A. Walker and test pilot Carl Cross
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  Celestine Pool in Yellowstone National Park, scene of the death of David Alan Kirwan

20th century

1900–1959

Name of person	Image	Date of death	Details
Victims of the 1900 English beer poisoning		1900	In the English Midlands and North West England, over 6,000 were poisoned and 70 people died after drinking beer which used non-purified sulphuric acid laced with arsenic as an ingredient. Most survivors were paralyzed.
Jesse William Lazear		25 September 1900	The 34-year-old American physician was convinced that mosquitoes were carriers for yellow fever. He allowed himself to be bitten by multiple mosquitoes and died days later from the disease.
Victims of the Thanksgiving Day Disaster		29 November 1900	During the 1900 Big Game between the California Golden Bears and the Stanford Cardinal American football teams, a large crowd of people who did not want to pay the $1 (equivalent to $37 in 2023) admission fee gathered upon the roof of a glass blowing factory to watch for free. The roof then collapsed, severing fuel pipes and causing at least 100 people to fall four stories to the factory floor. 60 to 100 more people fell directly on top of a furnace, the surface temperature of which was estimated to be around 500 °F (260 °C). 23 people were killed, and over 100 more were injured. The disaster remains the deadliest accident at a sporting event in U.S. history.
James Doyle Jr.		30 January 1901	The lineworker in Smartsville, California, was killed by an electric shock through a telephone receiver after a broken power line came in contact with the telephone wire.
R. Stanton Walker		25 October 1902	The 20-year-old was watching an amateur baseball game in Morristown, Ohio when a foul ball struck him in the hand, driving a knife he was passing to one of his friends into his chest. His friends asked if he was hurt and he said "not much", but the wound soon began to bleed heavily and he died within minutes.
Ed Delahanty		2 July 1903	The 35-year-old American baseball player for the Phillies died after being removed from a train due to drunken horseplay, falling off International Bridge below Niagara Falls. Sam Kingston, a local night watchman, was the last to see him alive, reportedly scuffling with him. Kingston's account of the incident was spotty and inconsistent; it is unclear whether Delahanty was intentionally pushed, accidentally fell, or decided to jump.
Mary Ellen Rumble		19 December 1905	The daughter of a farmer in Watervale near Murrumburrah in New South Wales was killed when one of a group of horses attempting to escape from a paddock knocked her down, causing her neck to snap.
Archibald Anderson		4 March 1907	The 19-year-old was bathing in the Yarra River when a tooth plate fell out and got lodged in his throat, choking him to death.
Thomas Selfridge		17 September 1908	Thomas Selfridge and Orville Wright were presenting the 1908 Wright Military Flyer to the US Army Signal Corps Division at Fort Myer. The plane made 41⁄2 rounds around the Fort before running into problems and crashing. Selfridge fractured his skull and died three hours later, becoming the first person to die in the crash of a powered aircraft.
Dietrich von Hülsen-Haeseler		14 November 1908	The Chief of the German Imperial Military Cabinet suffered a heart attack and died aged 56 after giving a ballet performance to Kaiser Wilhelm Il and other members of a hunting party staying at Donaueschingen Palace. Shortly after ending his recital with a bow, he collapsed and was pronounced dead at the scene. The circumstances of his death were covered up by military officials so as not to further inflame public outrage over the Eulenburg affair, a government scandal dealing with accusations of homosexual behavior against members of the Kaiser's cabinet and entourage.
George Spencer Millet		15 February 1909	The American teenager who worked as an office boy at an insurance company at the Metropolitan Life Building in New York City, was fleeing six young women stenographers at his workplace intent on giving him kisses for his 15th birthday while carrying a metal ink eraser in his breast pocket. As the women moved in for their kisses, he fell forward, and the eraser's point pierced his heart, killing him.
Doc Powers		26 April 1909	The 38-year-old American Major League Baseball player ran into a wall while chasing a foul ball during a Boston Red Sox-Philadelphia Athletics game at Philadelphia's Shibe Park, on 12 April 1909. He died from internal injuries and gangrene two weeks later.
Ada Gregory		3 June 1910	The 52-year-old widow in Bentleigh, Victoria, who had been suffering from "fits of melancholia", began convulsing after rubbing powder on her teeth and asking her two children to take some medicine, which they did not do. She was believed to have taken strychnine.
Franz Reichelt		4 February 1912	The 33-year-old tailor and inventor leaped from the Eiffel Tower and fell to his death wearing a parachute made from cloth, his own invention. He was asked by friends and authorities to use a dummy for the feat, but declined, saying "I intend to prove the worth of my invention".
Mr. & Mrs. Emile Froment-Meurice		25 April 1913	The famed French goldsmith and his wife were killed when their house, in an aristocratic quarter of Paris, collapsed on them.
Emily Davison		8 June 1913	On 4 June 1913, the 40-year-old suffragette from London was mortally injured at the Epsom Derby when she ran onto the racetrack wearing a suffragette flag and was run over by Anmer, George V's horse, which jockey Herbert Jones was riding. She suffered a fractured skull, a concussion, and internal injuries and died in the Epsom Cottage Hospital 4 days later.
Grigori Rasputin		30 December [O.S. 17 December] 1916	The 47-year-old Russian mystic died of three gunshot wounds, one of which was a close-range shot to his forehead. Little is certain about his death beyond this, and the circumstances of his death have been the subject of considerable speculation. According to his murderer himself, Prince Felix Yusupov, Grigori Rasputin consumed tea, cakes, and wine which had been laced with cyanide but he did not appear to be affected by it. He was then shot once in the chest and believed to be dead but, after a while, he leapt up and attacked Yusupov, who freed himself and fled. Rasputin followed and made it into the courtyard before being shot again, and collapsing into a snowbank. The conspirators then wrapped his body and dropped it into the Malaya Nevka River.
Gustav Kobbé		27 July 1918	The 61-year-old author and music critic was sailing in Great South Bay, New York, when he noticed a low-flying seaplane heading toward him. Kobbé attempted to get into the water, but the plane crashed into the mast of Kobbé's boat, splitting his head open.
Victims of the Great Molasses Flood		15 January 1919	21 people were killed and 150 injured after a large tank of molasses burst in Boston's North End.
Ray Chapman		17 August 1920	On 16 August 1920, while he was up to bat, the 29-year-old Cleveland Indians baseball player was struck in the head by a pitch thrown by the New York Yankees' Carl Mays and died 12 hours later.
Dan Andersson		16 September 1920	The 32-year-old Swedish poet died from hydrogen cyanide left in his Hotel Hellman room by a lice, flea, and bed bug extermination.
Alexander of Greece		25 October 1920	The 27-year-old Greek king died of sepsis after being bitten by a palace steward's pet Barbary macaque in his garden, while trying to break up a fight between his German shepherd and another monkey.
Thomas Lynn Bradford		5 February 1921	In an attempt to ascertain the existence of an afterlife, the 48-year-old spiritualist committed suicide by sealing his Detroit apartment, blowing out the pilot of his heater, and turning on the gas, dying of carbon monoxide poisoning. In the week following his death, two fellow spiritualists claimed to have communicated with his ghost.
Michael F. Farley		8 October 1921	The 58-year-old U.S. Representative and Gore–McLemore resolution supporter died of anthrax he contracted from his shaving brush.
Mrs. W. C. Eckersley		25 November 1922	The woman from Glen Innes, New South Wales, was found drowned in a cask of water. It was surmised that she was leaning over the cask when she suddenly fainted and fell into it.
Frank Hayes		4 June 1923	The 22-year-old jockey from Elmont, New York, died of a heart attack mid-race and collapsed on the horse, which nonetheless crossed the finish line first, still carrying his body.
Martha Mansfield		30 November 1923	While the 24-year-old American film actress was on location in San Antonio, Texas filming the American Civil War drama The Warrens of Virginia, a lit match was carelessly tossed by a crew member, which ignited the hoop skirts and ruffles of her Civil War costume. Co-star Wilfred Lytell and a chauffeur were able to extinguish the flames and rush her to a hospital, where she died the following day from her injuries.
Mr. and Mrs. Earl J. Dunn		13 July 1924	While attempting to turn around at Grand View in Yellowstone National Park, the Dunns somehow backed their car over a cliff, despite a tree barrier that would normally have made this impossible. The vehicle fell 800 feet (240 m) and then rolled another 200 feet (61 m).
Thornton Jones		1 August 1924	The lawyer from Bangor, Gwynedd, Wales, slit his own throat while he was having a nightmare. An inquest at Bangor delivered a verdict of "suicide while temporarily insane".
Phillip McClean		April 1926	The 16-year-old and his brother were clubbing a cassowary on the family property in Mossman, Queensland, when it knocked him down, kicked him in the neck, and opened a large cut, leading to death from loss of blood.
Bobby Leach		26 April 1926	The American stunt performer died after a botched amputation of the infected leg which he had broken after slipping on an orange peel. He had gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel 15 years earlier.
Harry Houdini		31 October 1926	The 52-year-old Hungarian-American escape artist, illusionist, and stunt performer reportedly died from a punch from college student J. Gordon Whitehead, which gave him "peritonitis, caused by a ruptured appendix." However, other stories claim he was murdered. Who or what killed Houdini is still under speculation.
Dr. J. S. F. Barnet		29 August 1927	The 32-year-old physician in Armidale, Australia, was shocked to death in his bed by an excessive quantity of electrical power from a medical device. Barnet had picked up a telephone beside his bed to answer a call at the moment the device's current came on.
Isadora Duncan		14 September 1927	The 50-year-old American dancer broke her neck in Nice, France, when her long scarf became entangled in the open-spoked wheel and rear axle of the Amilcar CGSS automobile in which she was riding.
Alfred Loewenstein		4 July 1928	The 51-year-old financier and third-richest man in the world at the time died whilst flying from England to Belgium on his private Fokker F.VII airplane. It is believed he fell out of the aircraft and into the water where he died.
William Kogut		20 October 1930	The 26-year-old convicted murderer, a death row inmate at San Quentin in California, reportedly committed suicide using a pipe bomb he made with playing cards and a hollow steel leg from his cot.
Arnold Bennett		27 March 1931	The 63-year-old British novelist was dining in Paris with his partner, Dorothy Cheston Bennett. He drank two glasses of tap water during the meal, scoffing at Dorothy's claims that the water in Paris was not properly treated to be safe to drink. Within two days, he contracted typhoid fever and died two months later.
James Leo McDermott		26 August 1931	After the 40-year-old deputy sheriff stepped out of his car at an oil station, the vehicle began to roll forwards, and he attempted to hop onto the car's running board to stop it. It carried him forward and slammed him into a hook used to hold air and water hoses, which impaled him just below the heart.
Eben Byers		31 March 1932	The 51-year-old American socialite and industrialist died after drinking excessive quantities of Radithor, a patent medicine that contained 2 microcuries of radium. He drank a total of around 1400 doses, which concentrated in his bones, continually irradiating him. By 1931, his bones were reportedly disintegrating and his jaw had been removed; he died the next year.
Michael Malloy		22 February 1933	Five people, called the "Murder Trust," planned to kill Malloy for life insurance. Over the course of two months, they added antifreeze, turpentine, horse liniment, and finally rat poison in his alcohol, but Malloy drank it with no problems whatsoever. They then tried feeding him wood alcohol, expired oysters, and then a sandwich made of expired sardines and shrapnel, none of which had the desired effect. The group then tried to freeze him to death, and when that failed they ran him over twice with a taxi, from which Malloy recovered. Finally, they connected a hose to a coal gas jet and placed it in his mouth, which caused his death from carbon monoxide poisoning. Malloy was given nicknames such as "Mike the Durable", "Iron Mike", and "The Irish Rasputin".
Susan Grace Kelly		16 January 1935	The 80-year-old woman in Armidale, New South Wales, was sitting with her daughter when she fell back dead after hearing a loud clap of thunder. Her last words were, "That was very close."
Catherine Steyer		20 January 1937	The 33-year-old hatcheck girl was accidentally electrocuted by a homemade booby trap, consisting of powered wires hidden within drapes, that her fiance had installed after her apartment was broken into a few months prior. Falling onto one wire, with another dangling above her arm, she completed the circuit each time the dangling wire touched her; she died slowly from the repeating doses of electricity.
Fred Clapp		28 May 1937	A 77-year-old farmer from Clark County, South Dakota, died after being dragged by a bundle of horses while being tied to the harness.
Benjamin Taylor		2 June 1937	During a carbuncle removal operation, an electric cautery ignited gases from the patient's lungs. This caused an explosion which killed Taylor and injured two nurses.
Nicholas Comper		17 June 1939	The 42-year-old aviator and aircraft designer was attempting to light a firework in Hythe, Kent, when a passerby enquired what he was doing; he replied that he was an IRA man planning to blow up the town hall. The passerby knocked down Comper, who hit his head on the curb.
Italo Balbo		28 June 1940	The 44-year-old governor of Italian Libya was flying his personal Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 when the Libyan airfield at Tobruk was attacked by a squad of British planes. He was killed by friendly fire from Italian anti-aircraft batteries on the ground.
Leon Trotsky		21 August 1940	The 60-year-old Russian socialist and revolutionary was murdered in his villa in Mexico by Spanish-born NKVD agent Ramón Mercader with an ice axe.
Sherwood Anderson		8 March 1941	The 64-year-old American writer died of peritonitis after accidentally swallowing a toothpick.
Jack Budlong		5 August 1941	The friend of Errol Flynn was working as an extra on the film They Died with Their Boots On, starring Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. Budlong insisted on using a real saber rather than a prop one. While filming a cavalry charge, Budlong's horse was frightened by the sounds of simulated explosions and threw Budlong, causing him to impale himself with the sword.
Rolf Mützelburg		11 September 1942	The 29-year-old commander of German submarine U-203 died during a World War II patrol southwest of the Azores when he dove from the sub's conning tower to swim in the ocean. The boat lurched suddenly, and Mützelburg's head and shoulder struck the sub.
Maj. Kenneth D. McCullar		12 April 1943	The 27-year-old member of the 64th Bombardment Squadron was taking off for a night mission in New Guinea when he struck something with his bomber, referred to in reports as a "brush kangaroo" or "baby kangaroo" and later found to be a wallaby. The bomber crashed on takeoff, which detonated its load of bombs, killing McCullar and the rest of the bomber's crew.
Clarence Stagemyer		29 September 1943	The 32-year-old was watching a Cleveland Indians-Washington Senators doubleheader in Griffith Stadium when an errant throw by Senators' third baseman Sherry Robertson struck him in the forehead. Despite appearing uninjured afterwards, he heeded the Senators' team physician's entreaties to go to the hospital, where he died the next day of a fractured skull. Stagemyer was the first fan in Major League Baseball history killed by a ball leaving the field, and the only such fatality to date to have been struck by a thrown ball.
Victims of the Balvano train disaster		3 March 1944	On the evening of 2 March 1944, a freight train departed from Naples to Potenza, Italy. On board were hundreds of stowaway passengers who travelled to trade for commodities with Allied servicemen due to shortages caused by World War II and the Italian Civil War. At around midnight on 3 March, the heavy train came to a stop inside the Armi tunnel in the town of Balvano due to its inability to climb over an incline. Due to a combination of carbon monoxide produced by poor-quality coal used on the locomotives and the lack of ventilation inside the tunnel, at least 517 people (most of whom were stowaway passengers) died as a result of carbon monoxide poisoning. The disaster remains the deadliest train accident in Italian history.
Thomas Midgley Jr.		2 November 1944	In 1940, the 51-year-old contracted polio, which left him severely disabled, leading him to devise an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys to lift himself out of bed. In 1944, he became entangled in the device and died of strangulation.
Louis Slotin		30 May 1946	The 35-year-old Canadian physicist and Manhattan Project scientist died as the result of an accident while performing an experiment called "tickling the dragon's tail" with a plutonium core which came to be known as the "demon core". His screwdriver slipped, exposing him to a fatal dose of radiation. Slotin died 9 days later; the other people in the room observing the experiment survived.
Thomas Mantell		7 January 1948	The 25-year-old P-51 Mustang fighter pilot crashed while in pursuit of an unidentified flying object near Franklin, Kentucky, thus becoming the first person known to have died as a result of a UFO sighting. Officially, the object remains unidentified, though the most likely explanation is that it was a U.S. Navy Skyhook balloon.
Mary Reeser		2 July 1951	The 67-year-old woman was found by the police in her St. Petersburg, Florida, home almost totally cremated where she sat, while her apartment was relatively damage-free. Some speculate that she spontaneously combusted.
Margaret Wise Brown		13 November 1952	The 42-year-old author of Goodnight Moon was hospitalized for an ovarian cyst. To prove how healthy she was after treatment, she kicked her foot in the air, dislodging a blood clot in her leg. The blood clot quickly travelled to her brain, and she died in emergency surgery.
Gareth Jones		30 November 1958	The 33-year-old British actor died of a heart attack between scenes of a live television play, Underground on the ITV network. Other members of the cast improvised lines, such as, "I'm sure if So‑and‑so were here he would say...", to compensate for his absence. Coincidentally, his character was scripted to die of a heart attack in a later scene of the play.

1960s

Name of person	Image	Date of death	Details
Alan Stacey		19 June 1960	The 26-year-old British racing driver died in a crash during the 1960 Belgian Grand Prix when a bird struck him in the face. 22-year-old British driver Chris Bristow was killed during the same race.
John A. Byrnes, Richard Leroy McKinley, and Richard C. Legg		3 January 1961	During the testing of an experimental nuclear reactor design, in Arco, Idaho, two soldiers and a sailor were killed, but their deaths were not due to radiation poisoning. While trying to bring the reactor online, Byrnes, an army specialist, was supposed to pull a control rod partway out by hand, but he pulled the rod further than intended. The reactor instantly went prompt critical, which flash-boiled the water around the reactor. The force of the steam expanding lifted the entire reactor into the air about 2.77 metres (9 ft 1 in), in what has been described as a water hammer-like effect. Many components were thrown out of the top, one of which impaled Legg, a navy electrician's mate, lifted him from a catwalk, and penetrated the ceiling, leaving him dangling. While the reactor was airborne the radioactive steam escaped, spraying the room. The steam was so hot that Byrnes instantly died of severe thermal burns. McKinley suffered a head wound, from which he died later that day. The steam left the bodies of all three men radioactive, so they were buried in lead-lined coffins. The three remain the only human beings killed by a reactor explosion in the United States.
Victor Prather		4 May 1961	The 34-year-old U.S. Navy flight surgeon drowned at the end of the record-setting Strato-Lab V balloon flight when he slipped from the rescue sling during recovery operations in the Gulf of Mexico and his pressure suit filled with water.
Joseph A. Walker and Carl Cross		8 June 1966	Astronaut and NASA test pilot Walker, flying a Lockheed F-104N Starfighter, and North American Aviation test pilot Cross, co-piloting a North American XB-70 Valkyrie bomber, were killed in a mid-air collision during a publicity photo shoot of multiple aircraft with General Electric engines flying in formation near Edwards Air Force Base. With the Valkyrie in a spin, pilot Alvin S. White ejected and survived, but centrifugal force prevented Cross' ejection seat from retracting into the escape capsule.
Nick Piantanida		29 August 1966	The 34-year-old skydiver died four months after an attempt to break the record for the highest parachute jump near Joe Foss Field, Sioux Falls, South Dakota; his suit had depressurized, causing brain damage from lack of oxygen.
Jayne Mansfield		29 June 1967	The 34-year-old American actress and Playboy model died when the driver of her 1966 Buick Electra 225 crashed into a tractor which had abruptly stopped. Her lover and the driver also died, but her children, including Mariska Hargitay, who was 3 years old at the time, survived. Many people speculated that the accident was the result of a Satanic curse.
Harold Holt		17 December 1967	The 59-year-old Prime Minister of Australia disappeared, presumed drowned, while swimming at Cheviot Beach near Portsea, Victoria. He was "simply one of the number of ordinary Australians who drown each year through poor judgment or bad luck"; his drowning has been described as "not unusual", and as "an ordinary death, a shockingly banal one that still befalls dozens every summer." Holt's disappearance gave rise to a variety of unfounded conspiracy theories.
Albert Dekker		5 May 1968	The 62-year-old American actor and politician was found dead kneeling naked in his bathtub with a noose wrapped around his neck, a dirty hypodermic needle in each arm, a scarf over his eyes, a ball in his mouth secured to his head with wire, his wrists in handcuffs, and leather belts and thongs around his torso, one of them tied to a rope around Dekker's ankles. There were vulgar phrases and drawings in lipstick all over his body. His death was ruled an accidental case of erotic asphyxiation.

1970s

Name of person	Image	Date of death	Details
Alan Fish		20 May 1970	The 14-year-old was struck in the head by a Manny Mota foul ball on 16 May while watching the Los Angeles Dodgers play against the San Francisco Giants at Dodger Stadium, and was knocked unconscious for a minute. He appeared to recover and the Dodger Stadium infirmary gave him an ice pack, two aspirin and released him to watch the rest of the game, during which he behaved normally. The Giants ended up winning the game 5–4. Afterwards, he began shaking and crying uncontrollably during the bus ride to his nearby home; when he arrived, his parents sought medical attention but had to go to three hospitals, despite his worsening condition, before they found one that would accept him early the next morning. His condition required neurosurgery, but continued to worsen, and after a seizure led to apparent brain death, he was taken off life support two days later; the autopsy showed that part of his fractured skull had become lodged in his brain, causing an intracerebral hemorrhage. He was the first fan in Major League Baseball history to die of injuries caused by a foul ball.
Jimi Hendrix		18 September 1970	The 27-year-old American musician died after choking on his own vomit while intoxicated with barbiturates. Hendrix's September 21 autopsy, citing "insufficient evidence of the circumstances", declared an open verdict. Hendrix's partner, Monika Dannemann, later revealed that Hendrix had taken nine of her prescribed Vesparax sleeping tablets, 18 times the recommended dosage.
Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev		29 June 1971	The Soviet cosmonauts died when their Soyuz 11 spacecraft depressurized during preparations for re-entry. They are the only reported human deaths outside the Earth's atmosphere.
John Dimmer		5 July 1974	While working in saturation aboard oil platform Sedco 135F in the British Sector of the North Sea, the 27-year-old British commercial diver suffered a pneumothorax during decompression. The diving supervisor recognized Dimmer's condition, but the onshore physician consulted by the platform incorrectly diagnosed Dimmer as suffering from pneumonia. As a result, decompression continued, and Dimmer's pneumothorax proved fatal.
Deborah Gail Stone		8 July 1974	The 18-year-old hostess for the America Sings attraction at Disneyland died after being crushed between two walls around 11:00 p.m. It is speculated that she either fell backwards or tried to jump from one stage to another.
Christine Chubbuck		15 July 1974	The 29-year-old American news anchor from Hudson, Ohio, killed herself on live television at the start of Suncoast Digest, a local newscast for WXLT-TV in Sarasota, Florida, after reading some of the area's breaking news headlines. Chubbuck was the first person to commit suicide on live television.
Alex Mitchell		24 March 1975	After watching the "Kung Fu Kapers" episode of The Goodies, the resident of King's Lynn, Norfolk, England, laughed continuously for 25 minutes and then fell dead on his sofa from heart failure due to what doctors discovered years later, via his granddaughter, was a genetic condition called Long QT syndrome.
Roger Baldwin and Peter Holmes		9 September 1975	After a bell dive while working in saturation aboard the semi-submersible drill rig Waage Drill II in the North Sea, British commercial divers Baldwin, 24, and Holmes, 29, died of hyperthermia due to a large amount of helium being pumped into the diving chamber complex in response to an apparent pressure leak. The supervisor had mistakenly been monitoring the pressure in the diving bell rather than in the chamber complex.
Mark Frechette		27 September 1975	The 27-year-old American-Canadian film actor, known for playing the lead role in the 1970 film Zabriskie Point, died while in prison for bank robbery when a barbell fell on his neck while he was weightlifting.
Luciano Re Cecconi		18 January 1977	The 28-year-old professional footballer for S.S. Lazio and the Italy national football team, was shot while pretending to rob a jeweller as a practical joke.
Tom Pryce and Frederick Jansen van Vuuren		5 March 1977	Pryce, a driver in the 1977 South African Grand Prix, struck and killed Van Vuuren at 170 miles per hour (270 km/h) as Van Vuuren ran across the Kyalami racetrack to extinguish a burning car. The fire extinguisher which Van Vuuren was carrying struck Pryce's head and killed him. Renzo Zorzi, the driver of the burning car, was uninjured.
Kurt Gödel		14 January 1978	The 71-year-old logician and mathematician developed an obsessive fear of being poisoned and refused to eat food prepared by anyone but his wife. When she became ill and was hospitalized, he starved to death. At the time of his death, he only weighed around 65 pounds (29 kg).
Georgi Markov		11 September 1978	The Bulgarian dissident writer was poisoned on a London street via a micro-engineered pellet containing ricin, fired into his leg from an umbrella wielded by an assassin associated with the Bulgarian Secret Service. Markov died four days later in hospital. No one was ever charged with the assassination.
Robert Williams		25 January 1979	The Ford plant worker became the first person known to be killed by a robot when a factory robot's arm struck him in the head.

1980s

Name of person	Image	Date of death	Details
Lourdes Maria da Silva		3 August 1980	The resident of Caxias do Sul, Brazil, was walking upstairs carrying a Pyrex glass when she tripped, broke it, and fell on the shards, cutting an artery in her neck. She died on her way to the hospital.
Azaria Chamberlain		17 August 1980	The 9-week-old from Australia was dragged off and killed by a wild dingo during a family camping trip to Uluru in the Northern Territory. This was the first recorded instance of a dingo killing a human. Azaria's parents, Lindy and Michael Chamberlain, received intense media speculation due to the perceived implausibility of a dingo attack; in a highly-publicized trial, Lindy was convicted of murder and Michael named as an accessory. Their convictions were later overturned after Azaria's matinee jacket was discovered in an area with many dingo lairs nearby.
John Bjornstad, Forrest Cole, and Nick Mullon		19 March 1981, 1 April 1981, and 11 April 1995	At Kennedy Space Center in Florida, five workers suffered anoxia due to pure nitrogen atmosphere in the aft engine compartment of Space Shuttle Columbia during a countdown demonstration test for the STS-1 mission. 51-year-old John Bjornstad died at the scene; 50-year-old Forrest Cole went into a coma and died two weeks later, and Nick Mullon died 14 years later from complications of injuries sustained.
Boris Sagal		22 May 1981	The 57-year-old Ukrainian-American film director died while shooting the TV miniseries World War III in Portland, Oregon, after he walked into the tail rotor blades of a helicopter and was partially decapitated.
David Alan Kirwan		21 July 1981	The 24-year-old tourist from La Cañada Flintridge, California, jumped into the alkaline (pH 9) and scalding (202 °F (94 °C)) Celestine Pool at Yellowstone National Park to save his friend's dog. The dog died within moments and its body dissolved in the hot spring. Kirwan, blinded and burned over his entire body, was airlifted to Salt Lake City and died the next day.
William Holden		12 November 1981	The 63-year-old American actor slipped on a rug in his apartment while intoxicated, gashed his head open on a bedside table and bled to death without calling for help. His body was discovered four days later.
Vic Morrow, Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen		23 July 1982	During the filming of Twilight Zone: The Movie, the 53-year-old Morrow, seven-year-old Le, and six-year-old Chen were performing a scene in which their characters are pursued by a helicopter. Heat from special-effects explosions caused the helicopter to fall on them. Morrow and Le were decapitated and Chen was crushed.
Dick Wertheim		15 September 1983	The 61-year-old tennis linesman died after a ball served by player Stefan Edberg at the US Open struck him in the groin and he fell out of his chair, striking his head on the hardcourt surface.
Truls Hellevik		5 November 1983	The 34-year-old Norwegian diver was explosively dismembered in a diving bell accident on the North Sea Byford Dolphin drilling rig. Three other divers, 35-year-old Edwin Arthur Coward, 38-year-old Roy P. Lucas and 29-year-old Bjørn Giæver Bergersen, and 32-year-old dive tender William Crammond, were also killed. Crammond opened the clamp before Hellevik could close the chamber door. The nine-atmosphere air pressure explosively decompressed, instantly forcing Hellevik's body through a 60-centimetre-diameter (24 in) opening, fragmenting it into numerous pieces. The other tender, Martin Saunders, was severely injured.
Jimmy Ferrozzo		23 November 1983	The bouncer at the Condor Club in San Francisco died while engaging in sexual intercourse with his girlfriend, Theresa Hill, on a grand piano that was lowered from the ceiling by a hydraulic motor. He accidentally activated the lifting mechanism which pinned him against the ceiling leading to his suffocation. Hill survived the accident.
Reginald Tucker		4 July 1984	The 29-year-old lawyer, who raced along a Chicago skyscraper corridor without wearing his glasses, crashed through a window and plunged 39 stories to his death during an early Fourth of July party. Police said portions of the man's body were scattered around the street near the 41-story Prudential Building in the city's downtown area. Several horrified onlookers attending holiday celebrations heard the glass shatter and saw him fall to his death.
Jon-Erik Hexum		18 October 1984	The 26-year-old American actor died after playing a simulated Russian roulette with a .44 Magnum pistol loaded with blanks. They contained paper wadding and when he pulled the trigger against his temple, the wadding was propelled with a force that broke his skull, causing massive brain bleeding.
Jason Findley		21 May 1985	The 17-year-old, from Piscataway, New Jersey, was electrocuted during a thunderstorm when a lightning strike caused an electrical surge to shoot through the wire of a telephone the boy was holding and enter his left ear, causing his heart to stop beating.
Victims of the Lake Nyos disaster		21 August 1986	At Lake Nyos, northwestern Cameroon, a limnic eruption of unknown cause released about 100,000–300,000 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the lake's bed. The gas cloud initially rose at nearly 100 kilometres per hour (62 mph; 28 m/s) and then, being heavier than air, descended onto nearby villages, suffocating people and livestock within 25 kilometres (16 mi) of the lake, resulting in the death of 1,746 people and 3,500 livestock.
Marc Aaronson		30 April 1987	The 36-year-old astronomer was crushed to death by a hatch and a revolving telescope dome at Kitt Peak National Observatory.
Franco Brun		9 June 1987	The 22-year-old inmate at the Metro Toronto East Detention Centre in Canada died trying to swallow a pocket-size Bible.
Ivan Lester McGuire		2 April 1988	The 35-year-old veteran skydiver was recording a jump by an instructor and student from the Franklin County Sports Parachute Center when he jumped from a plane without a parachute. Focused on the recording process, he apparently forgot to put one on, and his camera equipment may have been mistaken by others in the plane for one. The tape from his helmet camera was partially recovered.
Clarabelle Lansing		28 April 1988	On Aloha Airlines Flight 243 from Hilo to Honolulu, Hawaii, the 58-year-old flight attendant was blown out of the Boeing 737-209 30,000 feet (9,100 m) above the Pacific Ocean when the plane experienced explosive decompression due to metal fatigue.
3 people and Cachy the poodle		21 October 1988	A poodle named Cachy, in Caballito, Buenos Aires, fell 13 floors and hit 75-year-old Marta Espina, killing both instantly. In the course of events, 46-year-old Edith Solá came to see the incident and was fatally hit by a bus. An unidentified man who witnessed her death had a heart attack and also died on his way to the hospital.

1990s

Name of person	Image	Date of death	Details
Daniel John O'Brien		14 January 1990	The 31-year-old tourist committed suicide by jumping into one of the engines of a British Airways Boeing 747 at Piarco International Airport, Trinidad. He is said to have scaled an airport wall in the nude, stolen a vehicle from four security guards, and smeared himself with grease before hurling himself into one of the plane's engines.
Bo Díaz		23 November 1990	The 37-year-old Venezuelan professional baseball catcher was crushed to death by a satellite dish he was attempting to adjust on the roof of his home in Baruta, Caracas.
Greg Austin Gingrich		28 November 1992	While the 38-year-old was vacationing at the Grand Canyon in Coconino County, Arizona, with his teenaged daughter, he began to play-act losing his balance to frighten her. His daughter, unimpressed with his antics, walked on. Gingrich, however, missed his footing and fell approximately 400 feet (120 m) into the canyon to his death.
Brandon Lee		31 March 1993	The 28-year-old film actor, martial artist, and son of Bruce Lee was killed by a squib loaded prop gun while filming The Crow.
Garry Hoy		9 July 1993	The 38-year-old lawyer from Toronto fell from the 24th floor of the Toronto-Dominion Centre while demonstrating that its windows were "unbreakable". He threw himself against one, which, true to his assertion, did not break, but instead popped out of its frame.
Gloria Ramirez		19 February 1994	The 31-year-old died from kidney failure related to her cervical cancer at the emergency room of Riverside General Hospital in Riverside, California. While treating her, several of the hospital staff became ill, suffering from loss of consciousness, shortness of breath, and muscle spasms. Shortly before dying, she was allegedly covered with an oily sheen, which smelled of fruit and garlic.
Jeremy T. Brenno		9 July 1994	The 16-year-old from Gloversville, New York, was playing golf when he hit a bench out of frustration with his club. This caused the club's shaft to break and pierce Brenno's heart, killing him.
Jack Nance		30 December 1996	The 53-year-old American actor was punched in the head during an altercation with two men outside a Winchell's Donuts store in South Pasadena, California. A friend found Nance on the bathroom floor of his apartment the following morning, having died from a subdural hematoma.
Karen Wetterhahn		8 June 1997	The 48-year-old chemistry professor at Dartmouth College died ten months after a few drops of dimethylmercury (an organomercury compound and one of the strongest-known neurotoxins) landed on her protective gloves. Although she had been following the required procedures, it permeated the gloves and her skin within seconds.
Jonathan Capewell		29 July 1998	The 16-year-old from Oldham, England, died from a heart attack brought on by the buildup of butane and propane in his blood after excessive use of deodorant sprays. He was reported to have been obsessed with personal hygiene.
John Lewis		12 April 1999	The 64-year-old businessman from Minsterworth, England, attempted to light a bonfire with gasoline, but inadvertently set his clothes on fire. He then ran to the River Severn, jumped in, and eventually drowned. His body was not found until 30 April 1999.
Valerie Olusanya		25 April 1999	The 35-year-old electronic musician, better known as Kemistry, was a front-seat passenger in a car travelling on the M3 motorway in Hampshire, behind a van which dislodged a cat's eye in the road. The metal body flew through the windscreen hitting Olusanya in the face, killing her instantly.
Owen Hart		23 May 1999	The 34-year-old professional wrestler fell to his death during the Over the Edge pay-per-view event. He was supposed to be lowered into the ring from the rafters as part of his Blue Blazer persona's entrance, but the equipment lowering him into the ring malfunctioned, causing him to fall 78 feet (24 m) and land chest-first on the top rope. The impact severed his aorta, causing death within minutes.
Jon Desborough		10 June 1999	The 41-year-old geography and physical education teacher died due to a chest infection a month after being impaled in the eye with the blunt end of a javelin during an athletics session at the Liverpool College in Mossley Hill, Liverpool. It is believed that he had lost his footing while retrieving the javelin. He remained in a coma until his death.

Works cited

• Weeks, David; Gorman, Robert (2015). "15: Fans". Death at the Ballpark: More Than 2,000 Game-Related Fatalities of Players, Other Personnel and Spectators in Amateur and Professional Baseball, 1862–2014 (2nd ed.). McFarland. ISBN 9780786479320. Retrieved 30 September 2022.