Valerie Rubin wasn’t believing what she was hearing.
Did the woman on her TV screen really say something about “blood and guts” and “suicide?”
Up to that point, it had been a typical Monday morning for Rubin, a reporter with the Herald-Tribune newspaper in Sarasota, Fla. She was sipping a cup of coffee with her husband when she tuned her television to channel 40 to catch a few minutes of Suncoast Digest, a breezy half hour interview show with local personalities.
Rubin, who had become a regular viewer of the show in recent weeks, was surprised to find the show’s host, Christine Chubbuck, reading a news script from the anchor’s chair instead of interviewing guests from the coziness of the show’s interview set. Assuming she was seeing the last few minutes of a newscast instead of the opening of Suncoast Digest, Rubin turned her attention to the morning newspaper.
Chubbuck ran through the news, including noting that the Sarasota area had been hit with several violent crimes the previous week. When film of a shootout at a local bar jammed, Chubbuck started ad-libbing:
“In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts and in living color …”
As Rubin looked up from her paper, wondering “What’s she talking about?” Chubbuck continued.
“ … we bring you another first. Attempted suicide.”
Chubbuck then raised a pistol, pointed it behind her right ear and pulled the trigger. There was a crack and a puff of smoke, Chubbuck’s long dark hair billowed in front of her face as she crashed face-first into the desk before slowly sliding off her chair.
As Rubin tried to make sense of the surrealistic scene, the screen went black.
*****
By all accounts, Chris Chubbuck was an enigmatic soul.
“She was a wet suit and silly wet black flippers on the floor of the Gulf,” her brother, Greg, said at her memorial service. “She was clambakes and sea shells, sandy feet and sunburned skin.”
Growing up, she was a precocious child. At 15, she wrapped up an autobiography by writing: “I hope to be able to become a lady with little spice, a housewife, mother and good friend to all of my acquaintances.”[1]
By just about any metric, Chubbuck fell short of those goals in her brief tumultuous life.
She was a “sandwich” child, born between two brothers on August 24, 1944. Her father, George Chubbuck, did well enough as a salesperson to allow the family to live in an upscale neighborhood in Hudson, Ohio, a small town of 22,000 midway between Cleveland and Akron.
The Chubbuck kids went to private schools where Christine excelled. She was so smart says brother Greg that she “used to make up words for things that didn’t have a word.”[2]
Christine grew quickly and stood 5-11 by the time she was 13, around the time she was earning a national ranking as a kayaker and playing flute in her middle school band. But she was also depressed much of the time and rarely seemed happy. Her parents brought in mental health professionals to moderate her mood swings.
“She had no greys in her life,” Greg Chubbuck said. “Everything was black and white. Things were either wonderful, or terrible. Chrissie just didn’t have a compromise button.”[3]
When Christine was still a very young girl, older brother Tim pulled his younger brother aside to tell him: “We have to hug Chrissie extra hard because we aren’t going to have her very long,” Greg Chubbuck recalls. “He was 12 and I was 8 and in the back of our minds we always knew that our time with her was not going to be infinite.”[4]
Photos of Chubbuck’s high school years at Laurel School for Girls show a typical teenager. There’s a smiling Christine banging on an xylophone. Another of her wearing a toga with a group of friends. There are several snapshots of her slow dancing (and not all with the same boy).
She was a skilled puppeteer and took an interest in acting so intense that she enrolled in a summer acting program at the University of North Carolina, where she landed the lead in a play. She apparently also found a boyfriend through her kayaking.
The family knew him as “Dave the Kayaker” and notes that he was quite a bit older, 23 to Chris’s 16. His death in an auto crash was devastating to young Christine, who dealt with her grief by spending many mornings at a rehab center, helping another young man who was a passenger in Kayaker Dave’s car and was paralyzed in the accident.
You never knew how Chris was going to react, but there was one familiar pattern: Once she mastered something, she would give it up and move on to something else.. Despite her national ranking as a kayaker, she quit the sport. After earning the lead in that play in North Carolina, she never acted again. After tragically losing her boyfriend, it looked like the pattern was repeating.
“She often referred to herself as someone who still believed in wine and roses, being sent flowers and called up for a date,” her mother told reporter Sally Quinn of the Washington Post. “But she would go through periods of two or three years where nobody would even ask her out for a hot dog.”[5]
Chubbuck acknowledged her lonely social status with self-deprecating humor, organizing a “Dateless Wonders Knitting Club” with her Laurel high school classmates.
After high school, Chubbuck briefly attended college at Miami of Ohio before moving to Massachusetts to attend Endicott Junior College and Boston University, where she took broadcasting and film courses. She began her broadcast career at Ohio public television stations in Cleveland and Canton. Somewhere along the line she became close to a man who also worked in television.
“She moved to Pittsburgh to be with him, but the relationship fell apart because my dad was vociferously opposed to him,” brother Greg said. “He was older and my dad did not want her to marry a Jewish man.”[6]
Her time in Pittsburgh was short. For three months she was an assistant producer for two local programs on WQED-TV — Women’s World and Key to the City — but when her relationship ended, she left town.
“Chrissie then literally quickly came to Florida and sort of restarted her life,” says Greg. “She never really had another boyfriend after that.”[7]
Chubbuck took refuge in her family’s summer home in Siesta Key, a barrier island known for its sandy beaches just southwest of Sarasota. The home eventually became something of a family commune, her mother joining her after a divorce and her brothers Greg and Tim following in short order. Tim, an interior decorator by trade, spruced up the place.
He helped Chris with her bedroom, a yellow and white checked room with a small single bed in a corner with ruffled curtains around the bed posts. It looked more like the room of a young girl than the one of a 30-year-old woman.[8]
It would be another six years before Chris Chubbuck resumed her broadcasting career. She spent four years working as a a computer operator at a Sarasota hospital before landing a position in the traffic department of the Sarasota cable satellite branch of St. Petersburg TV station WTOG.
She found her first opportunity to do on-camera TV work at WXLT-TV, Channel 40, a seat-of-the-pants ABC affiliate in Sarasota. WXLT was the third leg of Robert Nelson’s broadcast stool. The Philadelphia native and Army Air Corps veteran had arrived in nearby Bradenton in 1953 to launch his first radio station, WBRD (“The Bird”). After starting FM station WDUV 10 years later, Nelson turned his attention to TV.
When WXLT-TV debuted on Oct. 23, 1971, few people saw it as serious competition for the Tampa/St. Petersburg stations to the north. It had a small (13 people at its start) and inexperienced staff. The station’s first news anchor, Bob Keehn, did two newscasts each night, pocketing a mere $5 for each one. Staffers were given Polaroid cameras and told to look for news stories. The photos were then taped on a board, which a camera panned as stories were read. No wonder many in the community called the operation “The Funny Forty.”
Chubbuck, though, had high hopes when she joined the staff in the summer of 1973 as a reporter. Her skills were obvious and soon led to the host’s spot of Suncoast Digest, a local Monday-through-Friday morning interview program. Chubbuck felt the show’s focus should go beyond the fluffy “human interest stories” dictated by its time slot. As she became more comfortable in her role, she emphasized more timely topics such as social and environmental issues, a stance that put her in frequent conflict with her bosses.
The best audience WXLT could hope for was around 10,000 viewers for any one show. For Suncoast Digest, the audience was estimated to be fewer than 500 on most mornings. After more than two years on the air, WXLT wasn’t pulling the viewers it needed to be viable in the growing media market. Station executives decided to follow the tried and true mantra of broadcast television: “If it bleeds, it leads.”
Chubbuck hated the policy, even though she occasionally filled in as a news anchor on weekends. Despite her clashes with station management, she managed cordial, if distant, relations with most of her co-workers. Many of them shared her ambition of fleeing the small Sarasota market. From their perspective, Chubbuck was a hard-working, confident and talented broadcaster with an enigmatic personality and a macabre sense of humor. But, as her family was well aware, the insecurities of her childhood followed her into adulthood.
Her mother tried to boost Chubbuck’s confidence by buying her expensive designer dresses so she’d look good on the air.
“In 1974 there weren’t too many local TV personalities wearing $2,000 designer dresses, and she did,” her brother Greg told People magazine in 2016. Despite her classy attire, Chubbuck was earning just $100 a week at the peak of her career.
As professional as Chubbuck appeared on-air, her personal life was much different. Despite being a local celebrity, she had been unable to forge a lasting relationship with any of the men she met. Indeed, as her 30th birthday approached, Chubbuck was still a virgin, a personal detail she was quite open about.
“One afternoon we were doing a mock newscast and because she had no qualms about being virginal at 29 she named herself ‘Pristine Buttocks.’ ‘I am Pristine Buttocks and here is the news’,” news director Gordon Galbraith recalled.[9]
In the summer of 1973, around the time she started at WXLT, Chubbuck had her right ovary removed surgically. At that time, doctors told her that if she wanted children, she’d have to conceive in the next two to three years. Finding a suitable mate seemed to be an obsession with Chubbuck, according to friends.
Chubbuck found a confidante in camerawoman Jean Reed, who was her mother’s age. The pair frequently dined together and Chubbuck shared details of her personal struggles, like the time in 1970 when she tried to end her life by swallowing a bunch of pills. Or the fact that she was seeing a psychiatrist, unbeknownst to station brass.
Like many fellow staffers, Reed tried to bolster Chubbuck’s confidence, like steering her to Sarasota Memorial Hospital where she put on puppet shows for patients with intellectual disabilities.
Chubbuck's prospects for a romantic partner seemed slim as she rarely dated. Then came George.
George Peter Ryan was a business reporter at WXLT. His good looks led some staffers to refer to him as “Gorgeous George.” Ryan, a Sarasota native, was active in community theater and, more importantly, available following a recent divorce.
The two didn’t hit it off at first. Chubbuck was leery of Ryan’s reputation as a ladies man and he found her professional ambitions to be unladylike, even militant.
But Ryan started piecing his personal life back together after discovering transactional analysis and shared his newfound zest for life with Chubbuck. Chubbuck remained distant, but found Ryan’s change in attitude refreshing.
She confided to friends that the “new George” was someone she wanted to get close to. At a dinner with co-worker Andrea Kirby, she revealed a plan to bake a cake for Ryan on his 30th birthday on June 26, 1974. That plan went awry, though, as Ryan — who was discreetly dating Kirby at the time — snubbed her advances.
“When Chris found out that George and I were going out, that depressed her,” Kirby said.[10]
Chubbuck’s behavior became erratic. When someone tried to brighten her set with a spray of artificial flowers, she flung them across the room, screaming, “I won’t have these damned things in my studio.”[11]
She became furious when other staffers did interviews on her show and thought Miss Florida was after her job when someone suggested the pageant winner do a weather segment on the news. Often when young males appeared on the show, she used foul language in front of them and hinted they may want to date Shay Taylor, a 24-year-old camera person.
Just days before her suicide, Chubbuck seemed to warm up to Ryan again as a romantic prospect, As her friend Kirby was soon to leave for a new job in Baltimore, Chubbuck turned flirtatious toward Ryan, once perching herself on his lap while joking about how horny he must be. Ryan planned to ask her out at a party the next night, but Chubbuck brushed him off.
That party was hosted by Chubbuck at her family’s home. About 30 people attended, including many surprised WXLT staffers.
“She didn’t seem the type to hang out and then all of a sudden we get this invitation she is going to have a huge party at her place,” said Craig Sager, then a sports reporter at WXLT. “We thought this is fantastic. She is coming out of her shell. This will be a treat.”[12]
That weekend, Chubbuck baked a cake and worked on her tan. She put on a puppet show for her niece.
“In retrospect there was an uncomfortable calm about her,” recalls brother Greg. “She was more resolved than she usually was about everything. At the time, I didn’t see that.”[13]
*****
Monday, July 15, 1974
It was a beautiful start to a work week in Sarasota. Seventy degrees. Blue skies. Just a slight hint of mugginess.
Chris Chubbuck had breakfast with her mother, Peg, in their cottage overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. She reminded her mother to keep an eye on her poodle while she was gone to do her Suncoast Digest TV show, but said that she’d be back before 11 a.m. She put on a fashionable black and white print dress, got into her yellow Volkswagen Beetle convertible and drove the four miles from her home to the WXLT studio.
Her apparent good mood wasn’t the only thing different as she entered the WXLT building, She approached technical director Linford Rickard and asked for a rare favor: Could he tape today’s show? Then she told the show’s director, Gordon Galbraith, that she was going to open the show with a brief newscast, something she’d never done before.
While the crew was adjusting the set to include the news desk, Chubbuck’s interview guests — a local meteorologist and his wife — arrived. Chubbuck settled them into the interview area and went to work on her news script. A few minutes later she emerged and headed to the news set, carrying her tote bag of puppets, which she sometimes included on the show.
She stopped briefly to check with the two-person camera crew to make sure they understood that she’d be opening from the news desk before moving over to the interview area. Camera operator Shay Taylor locked her camera onto the guests in the interview area while Jean Reed set up for a head-and-shoulders close-up shot of Chubbuck at the news desk.
For eight minutes, Chubbuck read through national news stories before moving to a local story, a shooting the previous day at the Beef and Bottle Restaurant at the Sarasota-Bradenton Airport. When the film for the story wouldn’t come up, Chubbuck started her ad-lib.
“In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts and in living color, we bring you another first, an attempted suicide.”
Before anyone on set realized what was happening, Chubbuck reached into her puppet bag, pulled out a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver and completed her grisly task.
As Chubbuck slid to the floor, Rickard faded the screen to black, then rushed into the studio, furious that Chubbuck would pull such a prank. Jean Reed reacted much the same as she abandoned her camera to rush behind the news desk. They soon realized it was no prank.
Viewers were similarly confused. Was this some sort of stunt? Dozens of calls overwhelmed the station’s switchboard. Others called the police, as did station officials. Rickard filled the remaining minutes of Suncoast Digest with public service programming as sheriff’s deputies and Sarasota police raced to the scene and the South Trail Ambulance Unit rushed Chubbuck to Sarasota Memorial Hospital in critical condition.
Station employees moved studio furniture back into their regular positions after the ambulance left to assist authorities in their investigation. Employees were interviewed at length. Photos were taken. Evidence was gathered. Chubbuck’s car was searched. Tape of the incident was viewed.
Reporters filled their notebooks with whatever information they could dig up, filling local newspapers with vivid dispatches and feeding newspapers across the land through national press associations. TV networks, true to the “if it bleeds, it leads” mantra, wanted the tape. ABC and WXLT said no.
Peg Chubbuck and her sons, Tim and Greg, rushed to the hospital. They were at Chris’s side when she died at 11:15 p.m.
The next morning, instead of Suncoast Digest, WXLT viewers saw reruns of Gentle Ben, a show about a young boy and a bear living in Florida’s Everglades.
*****
Chris Chubbuck was the talk of the nation for a day or two. Sarasota officials, however, seemed determined to escape the glare of the national spotlight as soon as possible.
An autopsy was performed within hours of Chubbuck’s death. To no one’s surprise, the cause of death was a bullet to the head. Authorities reported that no suicide note was found and Sarasota County Detective Capt. Ellis Denham said “deep depression and loneliness” were the only reasons for the suicide that investigators had been able to discover. Case closed.
But the sad story of Christine Chubbuck was far from over. Advocates for better mental health treatment latched onto her story, noting, among other things, that earlier intervention and taking the cries for help from a mentally anguished person more seriously may have avoided the tragedy.
But, as Greg Chubbuck pointed out in numerous interviews, the family spent a small fortune trying to help Chris, but it wasn’t enough.
Editors at the Washington Post saw a story beyond the obvious drama of the country’s first televised suicide. As Post editor Ben Bradlee pondered his options, he found the solution under his own roof.
Bradlee and Post reporter Sally Quinn had recently moved in together in D.C.’s fabled Watergate apartments following Quinn’s ill-fated six-month attempt at television journalism on CBS News’ morning program. Quinn, a skilled interviewer and talented writer, was dispatched to Sarasota where she spent two days interviewing Chubbuck’s family, friends and co-workers for an in-depth article that ran in the Post on August 4.
As reporters found, people were very open to talking about Chubbuck after her death. Everyone, it seemed, had a sad story to tell.
After Chubbuck was whisked from the set by paramedics the day of the shooting, news director Mike Simmons found a blood-splattered script on the news desk, two pages hand-written from a stenographer’s notebook.
One page contained the fateful words she uttered before the shooting. The other, apparently intended to be read by someone else, said: “Today Chris Chubbuck shot herself during a live broadcast. She was rushed to Sarasota Memorial Hospital, where she remains in critical condition.”
That she wrote of her action as an “attempted suicide” reflects on her journalistic skills, recognizing that she may not succeed in her morbid quest. That she so accurately described her condition also left open the possibility that the shot may not be immediately fatal.
Chubbuck did her homework before putting her suicide plan in action. Despite her aversion to hard news, she lobbied Simmons a few weeks earlier to let her do a story on suicide. He said yes.
She contacted Sarasota police who told her the most efficient suicide method was to use a .38 caliber pistol with “wadcutter” bullets that disintegrate on contact. Despite popular belief that a shot to the temple is best, police told her it’s better to aim at the lower back of the head, where vital bodily functions are controlled.
A week before killing herself, Chubbuck bought a .38 caliber snub-nosed silver Smith & Wesson revolver and some wadcutter bullets.
One of her closest friends at WXLT, Rob Smith, a 22-year-old former film student at New York University who had transferred to New College in Sarasota, was working as night news editor when Chubbuck casually mentioned that she had bought a gun.
“What for?” Smith asked.
“Well, I thought it would be a nifty idea if I went on the air live and just blew myself away,” she answered.
“I just changed the subject,” said Rob.[14]
Chubbuck’s threats of suicide were not unusual within her family. Just two days before her suicide, she had mentioned the possibility to her brother, Greg. When he offered to talk to her about it, she said, “Nah. We can talk tomorrow.” They never did.
There were other signs that something was amiss in Chubbuck’s final hours. On Sunday she unexpectedly gave a piece of heirloom jewelry to her brother’s fiancee. In the studio on Monday there was the unusual request to tape the show and her insistence that she lead with a newscast for the first time. She also picked a day when two of her most loyal viewers, her grandparents, wouldn’t be able to watch Suncoast Digest because of a doctor’s appointment.
If Chris Chubbuck was chasing the “15 minutes of fame” that Andy Warhol claimed every human was allotted, she succeeded. But, if she thought that having her demise recorded on videotape would extend her time in the spotlight, she was only partially correct.
*****
It is absolutely certain that WXLT recorded Chubbuck’s on-air suicide on videotape. But where that tape is today (or if it still exists) is one of the lingering mysteries surrounding the entire incident.
And people are still looking.
On the day of the shooting, Rob Smith said the WXLT program director was dubbing copy after copy, claiming that every national network was going to want a copy. No copies ever surfaced and even as Chubbuck was clinging to life at Sarasota Memorial, her brother Greg was working with lawyers to get an injunction to ensure the tape was never broadcast.
At that point, the tape was in the hands of Sarasota authorities who had seized it as evidence. Within two days the tape was returned, but to whom?
The Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported that the tape was returned to WXLT, but People magazine reported that it was returned to Peg Chubbuck. In interviews, Greg Chubbuck has stated that he doesn’t know where the tape is. Molly Nelson, the widow of WXLT owner Robert Nelson, claims that her husband kept the tape for years, despite her pleas that he toss it in Tampa Bay.
When Robert Nelson died, Molly Nelson says she turned it over to a “very large law firm” for safekeeping, which, presumably, is where it is today.
Interest in the Chubbuck tape increased in the late 1990s when the darker side of human nature found a home on the internet where a subculture of gruesome death enthusiasts took root. It’s not unusual to find lengthy threads devoted to Chris Chubbuck’s death on these sites, mostly lamenting the absence of actual footage of the fatal moment. The words “Holy Grail” are often used to describe the missing Chubbuck tape.
A few years back a purported grainy taped version of the incident popped up on a few sites, but was quickly taken down after being generally determined to be a fake. Its authenticity is still debated today, but most knowledgeable Chubbuck enthusiasts have debunked it, largely on technical grounds.
The original tape was in the 2-inch quadruplex format, the television industry standard for a quarter-century after its introduction in 1956. The shooting occurred before there were VHS or Beta home recorders so it is extremely unlikely that any of the limited viewing audience that day recorded the show from their home.
There is a question about whether videotape from the 1970s would still be playable after all these years. Some tapes from that era can only be played back on the machine that made the recording. The oxide coating on cheaper tapes sometimes flakes off, affecting playback. Plus, tape was expensive. Many stations re-used videotape over and over. It’s doubtful anyone would knowingly tape over the Chubbuck suicide, but how many times had the tape been used up to that time? WXLT was a bare-bones operation and it’s pretty safe to say their tapes were used more than once.
And what would happen if the Chubbuck tape were to magically appear?
“It’d get a million hits on YouTube, but ultimately, there are no mysteries to it,” said Scott Michaels, founder of FindADeath and of a death-site tourism company called Dearly Departed. “You’d be like, There’s a woman, she blows her brains out. There it is.”[15]
*****
Many people think Chris Cubbuck’s on-air suicide inspired Paddy Chayefsky to write his Oscar-winning Network screenplay. The movie, which also depicts a violent on-air death, premiered two years after the Chubbuck incident, but Chayefsky claimed he was actually working on the screenplay before July 1974.
However, two other movies were clearly inspired by Chubbuck and premiered at the same film festival in 2016, when Kate Plays Christine and Christine both debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.
Christine was a conventional biopic, purporting to tell Chubbuck’s story while taking a few creative liberties. It starred Michael C. Hall (Dexter) as George Ryan and Rebecca Hall as Christine. It premiered nationally on Oct. 14 and eventually grossed $313,465 in its international run.
In a curious twist of fate, when producer Craig Shilowich went in search of a company to put together a preview trailer for Christine, he ran across Chubbuck’s former co-worker Rob Smith, the 65-year-old owner of InSync Plus, a California company that produces trailers. Smith gave Shilowich a discount for his services.
Kate Plays Christine was an ambitious docudrama, mixing real-life interviews while following actress Kate Lyn Sheil as she portrays Chubbuck in a retelling of her story. Director Robert Greene’s creative screenplay won Sundance’s U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Writing. Greene’s film premiered the same day as Christine, but only managed to pull in $27,364 from the seven screens it appeared on worldwide.
Even less successful was the 2010 attempt to create a musical about Chubbuck. Playwright Michael Finke created the musical called Reporting Live, but quickly abandoned the project when he feared that viewers may erroneously think he was condoning Chubbuck’s action.
*****
It was an unusual request.
Lew Funeral Home asked the Sarasota County Commission for permission to hold a memorial service for Chris Chubbuck on the Siesta Key public beach. Commissioners wrestled with their decision. They had approved weddings on the beach before, but no one had asked to hold a memorial service there. Ultimately, they took no action on the request, fearing it may create a precedent they might later regret. The funeral home went ahead with the service.
It was another cloudless Chamber of Commerce morning on July 18, 1974, when Rev. R. Tom Beason of the Presbyterian Youth Culture Ministry strode to the lectern to eulogize Chris Chubbuck. Vacationers were frolicking in the Gulf of Mexico, just a few feet from Benson’s post. A few people in swimsuits and bikinis strolled closer to check out the hubbub. Peg Chubbuck was there, in a white dress with green polka dots. So were about 120 other people, including Florida State Representative Bob Johnson.
Chris Chubbuck loved the beach, where she swam, scuba dived, sailed and fished. She also loved singer Roberta Flack. Three of Flack’s songs were played during the 30-minute service that morning.
“We are shocked by the suddenness … confused by her message,” the Rev. Mr. Beason said in his eulogy.
Beason wasn’t alone in his confusion. Outwardly, Chris Chubbuck appeared to have it made.
She was young, attractive, well-educated, had a decent job and supportive family and was living in what some people might call paradise.
Her family home was perched on limestone cliffs with a spectacular view of the Gulf of Mexico. Stairs led down to the sandy white beaches that drew thousands of tourists to the area each year where they could enjoy some of the best snorkeling on the planet, slip into the turquoise waters and swim among snappers, groupers and amberjacks.
The small home, which was built in 1918, is actually a cottage, but its location is special. So special, in fact, that it sold for $1.8 million in 2014 and was named a historic site by the Sarasota County Commission in 2015.
This was where Chubbuck, her mother and brothers called home, where Chubbuck had a room decorated like a child’s and a closet stocked with designer dresses so she’d look nice on the air.
Her job at WXLT, while not paying well, offered opportunity. Her good friend Andrea Kirby went on to be a successful sports broadcaster for ABC, including duties on the network’s popular Wide World of Sports. Another sports reporter, Craig Sager, lad a lengthy career at ESPN. Known for his colorful suits, Sager was a revered NBA announcer before his death in 2016.
It’s hard to know what pushed Chubbuck over the edge. There were plenty of stressors in her life. There was the disappointment of her failed relationship with George Ryan and the fact that her window of opportunity to be a mother was slipping away. Her parents had divorced and her father remarried less than a month before she killed herself.
In the end, Chris Chubbuck’s cremated ashes were scattered over the Gulf of Mexico and her friends and family were left wondering why she killed herself. Sager, for one, wished he had known what was going through Chubbuck’s mind while everyone was yukking it up at her party the Friday night before she took her life.
“That was her going away party and it was her chance to say goodbye to everyone, but of course we didn’t realize it at the time,” said Sager. “It was just so shocking.”[16]

[1] Washington Post, Aug. 4, 1974, “Christine Chubbuck: 29, Good-Looking, Educated, A Television Personality. Dead. Line and in Color.”
[2] People magazine, Feb. 11, 2016, “Brother of TV Journalist Christine Chubbuck Who Shot Herself on Air: ‘She Never Felt Like She Was Good Enough’”
[3] The Telegraph, January 24, 2017, “The Newsreader who shot herself live on air: the tragic true story of Christine Chubbuck.”
[4] People magazine, Feb. 11, 2016, “Brother of Christine Chubbuck, the 70s Journalist Who Committed Suicide on Live TV, Says No One Will Ever Find the Tape of that Horrific Day.”
[5] Washington Post, Aug. 4, 1974.
[6] The Sun, News Group Newspapers Limited, London, Oct. 8, 2016, “I THINK ABOUT IT EVERY DAY”
[7] People magazine, Feb. 11, 2016.
[8] Washington Post, Aug. 4, 1974.
[9] People magazine, Feb. 11, 2016.
[10] Washington Post, Aug. 4, 1974.
[11] Ibid
[12] People magazine, Feb. 11, 2016.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Washington Post, Aug. 4, 1974.
[15] Vulture, Jan. 29, 1916
[16] People magazine, Feb. 11, 2016
Christine Chubbuck, TV news reporter
Born: August 24, 1944
Died: July 15, 1974 (age 29)
Author Larry Lehmer's book about Dick Clark and American Bandstand -- Bandstandland: How Dancing Teenagers Took Over America and Dick Clark Took Over Rock & Roll --is available from Sunbury Press. His book about the last tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens -- The Day the Music Died -- is available at Amazon.
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