About Suicide & Stars
Late one night last winter, I watched the 1987 suicide of former Pennsylvania Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer. I hadn’t set out to watch the startling clip, but I stumbled upon it in my own quiet desperation. I was reeling from my oldest friend’s suicide. I’d met Marla when I was nine years old, jumping rope in front of my house, during the earliest days of summer. Isn’t that how most childhood friendships are born? With adult-defying intimacy and trust forged over a lollipop and a secret, we had entered the perplexing and curious bond of young girls—we are going to be best friends forever because we’ll write it on every passed note and in every yearbook scrawl because we will keep in touch.
I hadn’t stopped thinking about Marla. Not since I’d received the Facebook message in December 2009: Marla passed away. My eyes wanted to skew the words. I’ve always felt that the eyes are the last part of the body to register permanent loss. Eyes are tricky, fooling you into seeing your ex-boyfriend parking his Passat, into seeing your grandmother at Jo-Ann Fabrics, into seeing your black dog in someone else’s backseat. I’d thought about Marla so much, all that grief conjuring her slight frame in the ice cream aisle at Jewel, wedged between Breyer’s chocolate chip mint and Edy’s vanilla bean. Maybe I turned to the Internet in hopes of discovering the transcendental guide to keeping calm when your dead friend pops up in the grocery store, in the freezer section, pressing her slender, blue fingers up to the frosty glass.
Facebook wouldn’t let me forget Marla, either, prompting me to see what my dead friend was up to these days as if we might want to chill later this weekend. (But if you know me, you know I don’t chill, and I couldn’t give a shit about weekends.) I couldn’t help but cower to the request, so I kept checking her wall and reading the newest entries, unable to decide which one was in poorer taste: the quiz to find out her chances of surviving a zombie war, or the message telling Marla to hang in there after she’d already put her head in a slip noose. In this moment, I hated Facebook, the ill-informed Web Beast of social anxiety and popularity contests, that tries to include me, exclude me, poke me, invite me, mock me, unflatteringly photograph me, post up on me, and force me into unwanted seclusion. Facebook, all-knowing monster, how can you not know that Marla is blue in the face with a few strangulation marks from the tight cord she carefully wrapped around her neck—probably the same pattern we’d used to braid our hair—and that she is dressed in a sweet sweater with her hands clasped together and enough makeup to last until the coffin flies set in to do their busywork? You don’t know, Facebook, because no one posted a picture?
I’m a big girl when it comes to dead bodies, having put together a thirteen-year-old’s pelvic bones as if they were my favorite puzzle and even having crawled into a coffin and shut the lid just to see what it’d be like to wake up dead; yet, when I saw her there, just a hundred-pound weight in a stretch of box, I wanted to run to a corner and whisper primary colors and ABCs to ground myself in a safe childhood memory.
For weeks after the funeral, I continued checking her blog and her Facebook page, waiting for her to communicate to me because it was 2010, and we’d entered a different world. Death was now digitized and our web pages were personalized and our grief was now available for everyone to witness through statuses, posts, and YouTube clips. The desire to see Marla one last time was really what brought me to Budd Dwyer’s suicide. I wanted to discover a video of her laughing or dancing. I wanted to see my friend before I went to bed, and maybe, just maybe, if I wrote her a message at 3:28 a.m., when most of the world in our hometown was asleep, her eyes would pop open and she’d touch the top of her coffin and I’d touch my glowing monitor and we’d be kids again. We could go back and save ourselves.
In my desperate search for cyber-Marla, I stumbled into the endless world of the online dead and dying—accidents and videos riddled with sappy songs and flowery fonts and photographs of fathers and children in happier times, before the cancer, before the car crash, before the crib death, abuse, neglect, drowning, mauling, murder, falling, suicide.
Initially, I didn’t recognize the name—Budd Dwyer. I was vaguely aware of his connection with the 1995 song “Hey Man, Nice Shot,” wherein the lead singer of Filter wishes he could’ve met the man. And even when the name Dwyer popped up in my search it was tagged alongside “Reaction to Budd Dwyer’s Suicide,” clips showing people’s faces contorting as they watched the footage of Dwyer’s shot to the head. His death was an afterthought, a plausible result of a Kardashian world typified by all eyes on me, me, me—Kim, Khloe and Kourtney.
When people post to the Internet they attempt to pull the spotlight back upon themselves, crying out: pay attention; don’t forget about me. I think it’s because most of us are so profoundly lonely. Back in 1987, we weren’t as advanced and didn’t have the Internet to give us a million instant friends or overnight stardom as in the case of Antoine Dodson “The Bed Intruder” or Rebecca Black of “Friday” fame or Paul “Bear” Vasquez’s “Double Rainbow,” or Keenan Cahill’s creepy cover of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream,” or Leeroy Jenkins, or Lightning Bolt, or “Peanut Butter Jelly Time,” or worse yet—ultimate hell—the evil Rick Roll . . . the list goes on. In 1987, people’s stories and antics still came via the newspaper and newscasts and neighborly chats. The fact that Budd Dwyer’s suicide aired live on television, rather than as a formal statement or a sound bite, is what makes his public act so remarkable and horrific. The world was yet to call up grizzly death scenes with a few keystrokes in Google, and some might even go as far as saying that society was not as sophisticated or desensitized.
Prior to Dwyer, only one other suicide had taken place live on air, and because of the Sarasota police and the Chubbuck family’s forethought—their prescience—the footage does not exist online. On the morning of July 15, 1974, newscaster Christine Chubbuck pulled a .38 revolver from the bag of puppets she’d stored beneath her desk. Having grown tired of the station’s sensationalistic coverage, Christine followed up the news report of a shooting at the local Beef and Bottle Restaurant with a story of her own, the now famous words: “In keeping with Channel 40′s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts, and in living color, you are going to see another first: an attempted suicide.” She shot herself behind the right ear as the cameras rolled. Everyone thought it was a joke until her body slumped down and twitched, and the news desk flooded with blood (Quinn 124).
Budd Dwyer’s public performance occurred thirteen years later in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. There was a heavy winter storm brewing on the morning of January 22. Children stayed home enjoying the ever-elusive, often-wished-for snow day. Commuters battled miserable traffic to get to work (Bronner 41). Reporters, cameramen, and photographers made their way to the state capitol building because the treasurer, R. Budd Dwyer, had called for a morning press conference in his office. He’d been found guilty for accepting a bribe, a kickback of approximately $300,000 for awarding a government contract to John Torquato, Jr., without sending the contract out for bid (United States v Dwyer).
That snowy morning was one day before Dwyer was to receive his possible fifty-five-year sentence from Judge John Muir, known as a hangman judge. This is germane to the subsequent events of that morning. For one, as long as Dwyer was still the treasurer (under Pennsylvania law, he was able to stay in office until his sentencing), his family was entitled to his 1.3 million dollar pension. Secondly, Dwyer vehemently denied any wrongdoing and knew that he was going to be used as an example. During the press conference Dwyer stated:
Judge Muir has already told the press that he, quote, "felt invigorated" when we were found guilty, and that he plans to imprison me as a deterrent to other public officials. But it wouldn't be a deterrent because every public official who knows me knows that I am innocent; it wouldn't be a legitimate punishment because I've done nothing wrong (budd-dwyer.com).
Dwyer saw no way out and made his final decision. He wanted to make sure his death occurred while he was still in office so his wife and his two children would receive his pension and not suffer financially. Beyond taking care of his family, he wanted to send a message to the world, to show how far a man would go to prove his innocence.
What we don’t see the minutes before the 10:30 a.m. press conference is how Dwyer carefully orchestrated the event (Bronner 42). He arrived early, wearing a dark suit, a pale dress shirt, and a silver tie with diagonal, blood-red stripes, and proceeded to dress the room. He rearranged the furniture and created a physical barrier between him and the reporters. He placed a long mahogany table to separate himself from the crowd, and he positioned a smaller desk behind him, protecting his back.
What we see of the conference, the only portion that seems relevant to viewers today, are the most sensationalistic moments (Documenting Reality, Anonymous). Once the press arrives, Dwyer checks the doorknob to make sure the office door is firmly shut. He places his black briefcase on the table and clicks open the top to reveal a scattered stack of papers and envelopes. He shuffles through, pulls out a select few, and circulates copies of his nineteen-page statement. Men with ties and rolled up sleeves crowd closer in a semicircle, waiting to hear Dwyer announce his resignation. Dwyer, however, does not make the announcement they’ve been anticipating. Instead, he reads through his prepared speech, choking through tears, his cherubic face flushed with anger.
The cameras keep rolling as he speaks. Six news crews. Four photographers. Paul Vathis is among the gathered men. He’s photographing the story for the AP Wire. Twenty-one minutes into Dwyer’s speech, Vathis wonders if Dwyer’s dramatic resignation will ever come. He’s not the only one. Cameramen begin to move around the cherry-paneled room, gathering wires and packing up their gear. Because Dwyer is certain he will go through with his planned act, he warns them, “Those of you who are putting your cameras away, I think you ought to stay because we’re not finished yet.”
Dwyer senses the crowd’s apprehension and his calm is shaken. The sweat on his brow glistens, and he wipes it away with his right hand; the camera shutters click hard and fast, catching his nervous gesture. His eyes scan the room, and he leans back on his heels. There is a man directly on Dwyer’s left who is wearing a black suit and tie and taking furtive puffs of his cigarette. This man is standing too close, and Dwyer eyes him momentarily. He skips parts of his speech, moves forward to the end, and looks around for his aides.
“Is Bob Holstey here? Bob?” Dwyer says, looking around for the Treasury Department assistant.
“And where’s Greg . . . can you come up here?” Dwyer says, looking for Greg Penny, the Treasury Department’s deputy press secretary.
“And where’s Don Johnson . . . can you come up, Don?” he says, looking for the deputy treasurer.
One by one, the men elbow their way through the tight crowd. Dwyer leans over the table and hands each of them a white envelope. Bob accepts his first, then Greg approaches, and Don makes it to the front last. Dwyer hurriedly says that the documents are for later and that there’s one for Joanne, his wife. He looks around again, with increased anxiety; the smoking man, who is already standing too close, takes Dwyer’s attention. Dwyer watches him out of the corner of his left eye. The man is jumpy and leans forward, getting dangerously close to the manila envelope in the briefcase (Bjelić 164). Budd makes a fast move and reaches forward, but the smoking man ignores Budd’s hand and proceeds to snuff out his cigarette in an ashtray that is awkwardly near the briefcase. The man gives Budd a curious look. The situation grows worse.
Budd snatches the manila envelope, holding it in his right hand. Eyebrows raise and heads tilt in wonderment. The cameramen zoom in on the envelope and Budd repositions it in his left hand, holding it by the corner, and reaches in with his right hand. In one quick move, he pulls out a shiny, black .357 Magnum revolver. He clasps the gun in his right hand and the hammer instantly cocks. He points the six-and-a-half-inch barrel up to the ceiling, lining it up with the four silver buttons on the cuff of his suit jacket.
The gun is close to his neck. He licks his lips and starts to speak: “When I—and I . . . ”
The crowd cries out in horror, pleading with Budd. Voices cry out: “No, no, Budd, don’t.” He motions for everyone to stay back. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone. He puts out his left hand, signaling a strong STOP. He doesn’t want anyone to approach him; he also gestures for people to leave, giving them permission and motioning towards the exit.
Budd says, “Please leave the room if this will—” A woman cries out, “Please don’t do this.” Budd finishes his sentence, “ . . . if this will affect you.” The crowd’s anxiety encroaches, pressing in and around, full of pleas and frantic movements. Dwyer puts the gun closer to his head, on the left side of his face. A person moves towards Dwyer’s right side. “No, Budd, No, No.” Dwyer warns the man, saying, “Don’t.” He doesn’t want anyone to come any closer. He looks around, left to right, surveying the crowd. He holds the gun with both hands and quickly puts it into his mouth. No one dares approach him. Everyone stays behind the table, uncertain what Dwyer will ultimately do with the gun, fearful that there’s still a chance he will turn on them. The second aide, Greg Penny, whom Dwyer had summoned just seconds before, frantically peeks inside his envelope and finds Dwyer’s organ donor card. He has a split second to comprehend the meaning before he hears the gunshot.
Pop. One bullet rips through R. Budd Dwyer’s skull and exits through the back of his head. The brain is destroyed, but the heart continues to beat for four healthy seconds, pumping a deluge of blood out of his nose and mouth. A small trickle drips out of the top of his head, but the curtain of red running from his nostrils, the waterfall of blood, keeps pouring and pouring down Dwyer’s pressed shirt. The streaming flow is steady, drowning his chest. His tie disappears, no longer visible beneath what looks like a thick wash of spilled red paint.
Budd Dwyer’s body crumples into the corner created by the wall and the smaller desk behind him. His body slumps slowly, drooping down into his suit as all of his muscles relax and the last of his blood gushes from his gaping wound. He’s blown off the top of his peach head and scattered skull fragments and brain matter on the cream and gold tapestry draped on the wall behind him. The cameras keep rolling and moving in for tight close-ups. AP photographer Paul Vathis keeps furiously clicking away, getting far more drama than he had expected.
Duke Horschock, Dwyer’s press secretary, runs to Dwyer’s side, begging the cameramen to wrap up their gear, insisting they’ve gotten as much as they are going to get. He looks at Vathis and says, “Paul, please, enough.” He stands in front of his friend’s body, blocking the cameras, and asks everyone to settle down, begs everyone, for the love of God, for a little decorum.
The audience assumed the press conference would be regular, almost boring. They had no idea they were about to witness a live suicide. The local newscasters interrupted scheduled programs and many of those at-home, snowbound children watched the footage of Dwyer putting the gun barrel into his mouth and pulling the trigger.
Dwyer shocked the world, but he never got in his last words. What he left the world with was his savage cry of innocence. He had every intention of reading his entire suicide script but did not take into account his audience’s horrified reaction and how they might try to stop him from completing his final act. The last page of Dwyer’s statement contains his last wish:
I am going to die in office in an effort to see if the shameful facts, spread out in all their shame, will not burn through our civic shamelessness and set fire to American pride. Please tell my story on every radio and television station and in every newspaper and magazine in the U.S. (budd-dwyer.com).
His public suicide posed a difficult problem for newspaper editors. The use of the graphic photos presented a dilemma: taste versus news value. The newsroom cliché, “if it bleeds, it leads,” was about to be put to the test (Kochersberger 2). Because Paul Vathis kept shooting, about which he said, “From professional experience, I just kept taking pictures,” a variety of photographs, frame by frame, were immediately available for the media (Vathis 2A). Vathis’s photos landed on the desks of photo editors within an hour after the shooting.
Although AP photographers carried color negative film in their bags, its use was cost prohibitive, so it was only used on the most important assignments. This, after all, was supposed to be a routine press conference. Until Dwyer put the gun in his mouth, his statements that morning did not qualify as a worthy event. For this reason, all of the photographs are in black and white. Dwyer’s suicide changed the AP’s rules for shooting in black and white. The reason, beyond capturing the truly vivid and gruesome details, was a matter of profit. Color photographs had higher resale value overseas (Gardiner, “Color or BW?”).
Dwyer could’ve taken his life quietly at home or privately in his office but he used the press conference for his grand exit and made it a completely public spectacle. Perhaps, in absolute despair and anger, he wanted to affect not only those in his immediate world, but those well beyond. Of the twenty stations that have regular newscasts in Pennsylvania, only three showed the actual suicide. Most stations ran a sound bite from the news conference followed by the moments of the suicide, stopping the tape as Dwyer pointed the gun upward (Parsons 88). Really, what were the newspapers and televisions supposed to do? It wasn’t until 1994 that the government created an outline for how media should treat suicide:
Providing sensational coverage of suicide:
By its nature, news coverage of a suicidal event tends to heighten the general public’s preoccupation with suicide. This reaction is also believed to be associated with contagion and the development of suicide clusters. Public officials can help minimize sensationalism by limiting, as much as possible, morbid details in their public discussions of suicide. News media professionals should attempt to decrease the prominence of the news report and avoid the use of dramatic photographs related to the suicide (e.g., photographs of the funeral, the deceased person’s bedroom, and the site of the suicide (MMWR 16).
Clearly, the Internet doesn’t play by the same rules. R. Budd Dwyer wanted the media to witness, to document his death, to implicate all of those who didn’t believe in his innocence. The bullet mark where he blew his brains to bits still exists. Despite efforts to remove the scar from the office wall, the damage is permanent. Dwyer was a man facing absolute shame and a lengthy prison term. He’d lost all hope and felt that other conspirators had set him up to be the fall guy. Some say that nine-tenths of Harrisburg’s system was corrupt and that what happened to Dwyer had little to do with his effort in making any deals and more with the promises being made all around him and behind his back. After all of the supposed discussions over money, Dwyer never received a dime.
Beliefs over suicide vary considerably. Various cultures condone and encourage “altruistic” sacrifice. I suppose, though, that it doesn’t really matter what survivors believe. The dead have moved on for their own private reasons that even if spelled out in a letter[1] or witnessed up until the very last second, are a part of humanity that is beyond our comprehension, maybe something so dark and primitive wrought in a cave with marred pictographs, so far back they came before humanity reflected on existing only once, in this miraculous form. Suicide is a devastation for anyone who has experienced its effects, a loss beyond description.
R. Budd Dwyer could not have foreseen his image endlessly repeating on the Internet, accessed by millions in a split second, or that the masses would begin recording themselves in response to watching his suicide. As he’s shown up again and again on various sites, the footage has lost clarity, copied and dubbed so many times that Dwyer resembles a blurred ghost. He probably never would have seen this coming, or maybe he’s online right now watching. After all, the only salvageable organs of Dwyer’s that could be donated were his corneas (Cusick, Philadelphia Enquirer). Imagine: somewhere out there, Dwyer’s eyes are gazing at a computer screen, unknowingly watching his death. It is an unforeseeable recursion and a haunting image that sheds light on the fact that we never know what the future holds around that blind corner.
I know it’s selfish and doesn’t speak to her immeasurable pain, but I’d bring back Marla (and David and sweet Emma Bee). I’d tell each one the truth, plain and simple:
You are worth thousands of stars. You are as precious as wings. You are meant to be here, and if it takes an entire year to convince you, it will be worth every second. I will sit with you on the curb and bring you warm socks and tea, and we can stay right there and cry for the next hundreds of tomorrows if it means I can keep you here on earth with me. We need you more than you know. We need you more than anyone will tell you because it scares us how much we need you in our hearts, in our arms, and if you left us, man, would we hurt. We’d be in the dark. We’d starve like wolves.
Marla: I don’t need to see you online to know how much you’re missed. You were my first girlfriend, the one all others would be set against. I’ll never forget how you showed me to smudge aqua shadow on my eyelids and told me that I’d just know when I was ready to kiss a boy and that I’d make a really good mermaid, and how you didn’t laugh when I told you my greatest fear in life was that I’d never be remembered because no one in school ever listened to me like you did.
We’ll always be spinning around in leg warmers and ballet shoes, chuckling, listening to Madonna and exchanging black gummy bracelets. Visit me, but not online or in the Jewel, in spaces so publicly naked and porous. Sit in my dreams where we’ll have all the time in this world and the next, and all the memories we can remember, and I promise, I won’t be scared. I’ll have always been waiting for you because that’s what BFFs do. We’ll skip back long before this good-bye and keep our promise. We’ll pinkie swear. This time I won’t let you fall. I promise. I swear. Just come back to me, ghost and all, so I can love you all over again.
Works Cited
Bjelić, Dušan I. "Public Suicide as a Deed of Optionless Intimacy." Symbolic Interaction 13.2: 161-183. Print.
Bronner, Simon J. "Digitizing and Virtualizing Folklore." Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World. Ed. Trevor J. Blank. Logan, Utah: Utah State UP, 2009. 41-56. Print.
Cusick, Frederick, Dan Meyers, Walter F. Roche, Jr., and Russell E. Eshelman, Jr. "Treasurer Dwyer Kills Self Suicide At News Session." Philadelphia Inquirer 23 Jan. 1987. Web. Apr. 2010.
Gardiner, Gary. “Color or BW? – The change began in 1987 with “Budd” Dwyer.” http://www.newdigitalphoto.gs/technique/color-or-bw-change-began-1987-budd-dwyer/
Kochersberger Jr., Robert C. "Survey of Suicide Photos." Newspaper Research Journal Summer 9.4 (1988). Print.
Laurin, Marla. "A Request." Message to the author. 2009. E-mail.
Parsons, Patrick R., and William E. SMith. "R. Budd Dwyer: A Case Study in Newsroom Decision Making." Journal of Mass Media Ethics 3.1: 84-94. Print.
Quinn, Sally. "Christine Chubbuck: 29, Good-Looking, Educated. A Television Personality. Dead. Live and in Color." Washington Post 4 Aug. 1974: 124. Web.
Stevens, William K. "Official Calls In Press and Kills Himself." New York Times 23 Jan. 1987. Retrieved from http://www.budd-dwyer.com.remember.to/.
Vathis, Paul. "...And Just Pulled The Trigger." Ocala Star-Banner 23 Jan. 1987. Web. 22 Apr. 2010.
Web. <http://www.budd-dwyer.com.remember.to/>. Dwyer, R. Budd. “R Budd Dwyer’s Final moments.”
Web. <http://eightyfourfilms.com/Dwyer/USAvsDwyer.pdf>. United States of America vs. R. Budd Dwyer / Robert B. Asher. United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania. 13 May 1986.
Web. <http://www.documentingreality.com/forum/f166/budd-dwyer-commits-suicide-during-news-conference-hi-quality-11738>
Web. <http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/PDF/rr/rr4306.pdfSuicide> “Contagion and the Reporting of Suicide: Recommendations from a National Workshop,” MMWR Vol. 43, NO RR-6, 1994.
[1] Marla’s last words to me: So many secrets only shadows would see. So much shame. So much I could never say because of my cannibalized soul. But my ego is not so big that I can't beg for you to forgive me for anything I have ever said or done that was simply wrong and offensive because believe it or not, your friendship was one of the few lights in my life. In my heart, I always felt our souls were kindred in kind.