00:00The DMV Record
00:01Rebecca Lucille Schaefer was a 21-year-old American actress starring on the CBS sitcom
00:08My Sister Sam, and on the 18th of July, 1989, she was at her West Hollywood apartment expecting
00:15a courier to deliver a script.
00:18The man who knocked was Robert John Bardo, a 19-year-old fan who'd fixated on her since
00:23seeing her in a 1986 commercial.
00:26Bardo had hired a private investigator and paid roughly $250 to $300 to pull her home
00:33address from California DMV Records, which was perfectly legal at the time.
00:37He came to her door with a gun hidden in a shopping bag, spoke to her briefly, then shot
00:42her point-blank in the chest with a .357 loaded with a hollow-point round.
00:48She died of that gunshot wound.
00:50Bardo was found in Arizona, running into traffic and confessing.
00:54A judge found him guilty of first-degree murder, with the special circumstance of lying in
00:59wait, and in December 1991, sentenced him to life without parole.
01:05Her killing pushed California to pass the country's first anti-stalking law in 1990.
01:10The seatbelt.
01:12Diana, Princess of Wales, 36 years old, was leaving the Ritz Hotel in Paris just after midnight
01:18on the 31st of August, 1997, with Dodi Fayyad trying to slip out the back in a Mercedes-Benz
01:25S 280 to lose the paparazzi chasing them.
01:29Behind the wheel was Henri Paul, the hotel's acting head of security, driving at roughly
01:3585 miles per hour in a 30 miles per hour zone, legally drunk at about three times the French
01:42limit.
01:42The car clipped a white Fiat Uno at the mouth of the Pont de L'Alma tunnel, swerved, and
01:48hit the 13th concrete pillar head-on.
01:50Diana, unrestrained, was thrown forward violently.
01:54The impact displaced her heart and tore her upper left pulmonary vein.
01:58The only survivor was bodyguard Trevor Reese Jones, the one occupant who'd buckled his
02:04seatbelt.
02:05Diana died at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital around 4 a.m.
02:09A British inquest jury later returned a verdict of unlawful killing through Henri Paul's grossly
02:15negligent driving and the pursuing paparazzi, and the case reshaped French rules on press
02:20conduct and the duty to render aid.
02:22The catcher in the rye.
02:24John Winston Lennon, 40 years old, former Beatle and writer of Imagine, was returning to
02:31his home at the Dakota on West 72nd Street in Manhattan around 10.50 p.m. on the 8th of
02:37December 1980, after a recording session with Yoko Ono.
02:42Earlier that same evening, around 5 p.m., a 25-year-old fan named Mark David Chapman had
02:49asked Lennon to sign a copy of Double Fantasy, and Lennon stopped and signed it.
02:55Chapman waited near the building for hours.
02:57When Lennon walked past toward the archway, Chapman called out,
03:01Mr. Lennon pulled a .38-caliber revolver and fired five shots, four of them striking Lennon
03:08in the back and shoulder.
03:10Lennon lost roughly 80% of his blood volume and was pronounced dead at Roosevelt Hospital.
03:15Chapman never fled.
03:17He stayed at the scene, calmly reading The Catcher in the Rye, and was arrested without
03:22a struggle.
03:22He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 20 years to life, and his case became a constant
03:27reference point in debates over handgun licensing and interstate purchase loopholes.
03:32The Missing Records
03:34Selena Quintanilla Perez, the 23-year-old American Queen of Tejano music, went to a room at the
03:41Days Inn in Corpus Christi, Texas, on the morning of 31 March 1995, to recover financial documents
03:48from Yolanda Saldivar, the woman who ran her fan club and her Selena Etcetera boutiques.
03:55Selena's team had discovered missing money and accused Saldivar of embezzling thousands.
04:00Inside that motel room, after a confrontation over the records, Saldivar fired a single hollow
04:06point, 38 round.
04:08It entered Selena's upper right back, severed her right subclavian artery, and exited her
04:14chest.
04:15Bleeding heavily, Selena ran toward the lobby, leaving a trail of blood before she collapsed.
04:20She was pronounced dead at 1.05 p.m. from exsanguinating hemorrhage.
04:25Saldivar fled to her truck and held off police for about nine hours before surrendering.
04:30A jury convicted her of first-degree murder on the 23rd of October 1995, and she got life
04:36with parole eligibility after 30 years, which came in 2025, when parole was denied.
04:42Two weeks after the killing, Texas Governor George W. Bush declared April 16 Selena Day,
04:48The Ten Most Wanted.
04:50Gianni Versace, the 50-year-old Italian fashion designer, walked from his Miami Beach mansion
04:56Casa Casuarina to the nearby News Café on the morning of the 15th of July, 1997, to pick
05:02up his magazines, then headed back along Ocean Drive.
05:06As Versace reached the front steps of his villa around 8.45 a.m., a man approached him from
05:13nearby Andrew Cunanan, a spree killer who had already murdered four men across multiple
05:19states and was sitting on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list.
05:23Using a .40-caliber Taurus pistol stolen from an earlier victim, Cunanan fired two shots at
05:29point-blank range, hitting Versace in the back of the head and the left cheek.
05:34Versace was pronounced dead at Jackson Memorial Hospital at 9.21 a.m.
05:40Cunanan fled, and the manhunt only escalated.
05:44Eight days later, on July 23, a caretaker reported a gunshot on a Miami Beach houseboat,
05:51and police found Cunanan dead from a self-inflicted shot with that same pistol.
05:56There was no note, no confession.
05:58The case became a lasting study in the FBI's failures tracking a known fugitive, the milk.
06:04Michael Joseph Jackson, the 50-year-old king of pop, was at his rented Holmby Hills mansion
06:10in Los Angeles in the early hours of the 25th of June 2009, rehearsing for a 5-0 show comeback
06:18run at London's O2 Arena, and struggling, as he had for weeks, to sleep.
06:23His personal physician, cardiologist Dr. Conrad Murray, said Jackson asked for what he called
06:30his milk propofol, a milky-white anesthetic meant for operating rooms with full monitoring.
06:35Murray gave him lorazepam and midazolam first, then administered propofol intravenously in
06:40the bedroom.
06:41Trial evidence pointed to a continuous infusion, a saline bag with a slit cut into it on the IV
06:47stand, and an empty propofol bottle.
06:50Jackson's breathing was suppressed until he went into cardiac arrest, and he was pronounced
06:54dead at 2.26 p.m. at UCLA.
06:58The coroner ruled it homicide, caused by acute propofol intoxication.
07:03Murray was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in November 2011.
07:07The case tightened how medical boards police propofol and how the law treats doctors who
07:12medicate powerful patients.
07:13The cocktail.
07:15River Jude Phoenix.
07:16Phoenix, the 23-year-old American actor nominated for an Oscar for Running on Empty, went to
07:21the Viper Room on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood late on the 30th of October 1993, with his
07:28girlfriend and his younger siblings, Joaquin and Rain, expecting he might play music on stage
07:33that night.
07:34When it became clear he wouldn't be performing, Phoenix used a combination of cocaine and heroin
07:40inside the club.
07:41He began sweating and vomiting, made his way to a bathroom, then was moved toward the exit
07:47as his condition collapsed.
07:49Out on the sidewalk in front of the club, he went into convulsive seizures.
07:54Joaquin, then 19, ran to a payphone and called 911, begging for help.
07:59Paramedics found him in cardiac arrest.
08:01He was pronounced dead at Cedars-Sinai at 1.51 a.m. on October 31, 1993.
08:10The coroner ruled it an accidental overdose, with lethal levels of both cocaine and morphine
08:15either alone enough to kill him.
08:17No one was ever charged, a gap later cited in debates over drug-induced homicide laws.
08:23Pharmaceutical Suicide
08:25Vicki Lynn Hogan, known to the world as Anna Nicole Smith, the 39-year-old American model
08:31and Playboy Playmate of the year, was in her suite at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and
08:35Casino in Hollywood, Florida, on the 8th of February, 2007, sick with the flu and a bacterial
08:42infection and self-medicating with a stack of prescriptions.
08:45Just five months earlier, her 20-year-old son Daniel had died of a methadone-related overdose,
08:51and she'd spiraled.
08:53That day, she became unresponsive in her room.
08:56She was rushed to Memorial Regional Hospital and pronounced dead at 2.49 p.m.
09:01The Broward County Medical Examiner ruled it an accidental combined drug intoxication,
09:06with the sedative chloral hydrate, the major factor, layered on top of four different benzodiazepines
09:12and methadone.
09:13No illegal drugs were found.
09:15A pharmacist who'd refused to fill her prescriptions had called them pharmaceutical suicide.
09:21California later prosecuted her psychiatrist, physician, and lawyer over the prescribing
09:27a test case for charging the people who keep supplying pills to an addicted star.
09:31The shared photos.
09:33Kobe Bean Bryant, 41 years old and one of the greatest players in NBA history, boarded a Sikorsky
09:40S-76B helicopter on the morning of the 26th of January, 2020, with his 13-year-old daughter
09:48Gianna and seven others flying toward a youth basketball tournament at his sports academy
09:53in Thousand Oaks.
09:54The Los Angeles area was socked in with dense fog that morning.
09:58The LAPD had grounded its own helicopters.
10:02Pilot Ara Zobayan, flying under visual rules, climbed to about 2,300 feet to clear the cloud
10:09layer, then flew into the clouds, lost his references, and became spatially disoriented.
10:15The helicopter made an abrupt left turn and slammed into a Calabasas hillside at roughly
10:21184 miles per hour.
10:23The coroner ruled all nine deaths, blunt trauma, instant, and accidental.
10:30In the aftermath, sheriff's deputies and firefighters were found to have taken and shared graphic
10:35photos of the victim's remains.
10:37Vanessa Bryant sued and a federal jury awarded her $16 million.
10:42In September 2020, California made it illegal for first responders to share images of the
10:48dead.
10:48Seven prescriptions.
10:50Heath Andrew Ledger, the 28-year-old Australian actor who had just finished playing the Joker
10:55in The Dark Knight, was at his rented apartment at 421 Broom Street in Soho, Manhattan, on the
11:0222nd of January, 2008.
11:06Battling the chronic insomnia, he'd long medicated with prescription drugs.
11:11That afternoon, his housekeeper and a massage therapist found him lying unresponsive on his bed.
11:16They called for help, attempted CPR following the dispatcher's instructions, and paramedics
11:22arrived, but Ledger was pronounced dead at 3.36 p.m.
11:27The New York City medical examiner found he had died from acute intoxication by the combined
11:32effects of six medications, the opioids, oxycodone and hydrocodone, the benzodiazepines, diazepam,
11:40temazepam, and alprazolam, and the antihistamine doxalamine.
11:44Together, they depressed his breathing to a stop.
11:47The manner of death was ruled accidental.
11:50The DEA investigated the doctors involved and cleared them, and no one was ever charged.
11:55Medical journals seized on his case as the overdose that shifted public alarm from street
12:01drugs to legal prescriptions, helping drive tighter rules on combining opioids and sedatives.
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