Christine Chubbuck

 

Christine "Chris" Chubbuck (August 24, 1944 – July 15, 1974) was an American television news reporter who worked for stations WTOG and WXLT-TV in Sarasota, Florida. She was the first person to die by suicide on a live television broadcast.

Early life

Christine Chubbuck was born in Hudson, Ohio, the daughter of Margaretha D. "Peg" (1921–1994) and George Fairbanks Chubbuck (1918–2015). She had two brothers, Greg and Tim. Chubbuck attended the Laurel School for Girls in Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland. During her years at Laurel, she jokingly formed a "Dateless Wonder Club" with other "rejected" girls who did not have dates on Saturday nights. Chubbuck attended Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, for one year, majoring in theater arts, then attended Endicott College in Beverly, Massachusetts, before earning a degree in broadcasting at Boston University in 1965.

Career

Early work

Chubbuck worked for WVIZ in Cleveland between 1966 and 1967, and attended a summer workshop in radio and television at New York University in 1967. That same year, she worked in Canton, Ohio, and, for three months, at WQED-TV in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as an assistant producer for two local shows, Women's World and Keys to the City. In 1968, Chubbuck left WQED to spend four years as a hospital computer operator and two years with a cable television firm in Sarasota, Florida. Immediately before joining ABC affiliate WXLT-TV (now WWSB), she worked in the traffic department of WTOG in St. Petersburg.

Several years before her death, Chubbuck had moved into her family's summer cottage on Siesta Key. Sally Quinn of The Washington Post later reported that she had painted the bedroom and canopied bed to look like that of a young teenager. After Chubbuck's parents were divorced, her mother Peg and younger brother Greg came to live in the Florida home. When Greg left, her elder brother Tim moved in. Chubbuck had a close relationship with her family, describing her mother and Greg as her closest friends.

WXLT-TV

WXLT's owner, Bob Nelson, hired Chubbuck as a reporter, but later gave her a community affairs talk show, Suncoast Digest, which ran at 9:00 am. Production Manager Gordon J. Acker described Chubbuck's new show to a local paper: "It will feature local people and local activities. It will give attention, for instance, to the storefront organizations that are concerned with alcoholics, drug users, and other 'lost' segments of the community." Page five of the article showed a smiling Chubbuck posed with a WXLT camera.

Chubbuck took her position seriously, inviting local officials from Sarasota and Bradenton to discuss matters of interest to the growing beach community. After her death, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported that she had been nominated for a Forestry and Conservation Recognition Award by the Bradenton district office of the Florida Division of Forestry. Chubbuck was considered a "strong contender" by district forester Mike Keel. He had been scheduled to appear as a guest on Chubbuck's show the morning of her suicide, but cancelled because of the birth of his son. On occasion, Chubbuck incorporated homemade puppets she had used to entertain children with intellectual disabilities during her volunteer work at Sarasota Memorial Hospital.

Death

Depression

Chubbuck spoke to her family at length about her struggles with depression and suicidal tendencies, though she did not inform them of her intent to commit suicide on live television. She had attempted to overdose on drugs in 1970 and frequently made reference to that event. Chubbuck had been seeing a psychiatrist up until several weeks before her death. Her mother chose not to tell WXLT management about her daughter's suicidal tendencies because she feared Chubbuck would be fired.

Chubbuck's focus on her lack of intimate relationships is generally considered to be the driving force for her depression. Her mother later summarized that "her suicide was simply because her personal life was not enough." She lamented to co-workers that her 30th birthday was approaching, and she was still a virgin who had never been on more than two dates with a man. Her brother Greg later recalled she had gone out with a man several times before moving to Sarasota, but agreed that she had trouble connecting socially in the beach resort town. He believed her constant self-deprecation for being "dateless" contributed to her ongoing depression.

According to Quinn, Chubbuck had an unrequited crush on co-worker George Peter Ryan. She baked him a cake for his birthday and sought his romantic attention, only to find out he was already involved with sports reporter Andrea Kirby. Kirby had been the co-worker closest to Chubbuck, but she was offered a new job in Baltimore, which had further depressed Chubbuck. Her lack of a romantic partner was considered a tangent of her desperate need to have close friends, though co-workers said she tended to be brusque and defensive whenever they made friendly gestures toward her. She was self-deprecating, criticizing herself constantly and rejecting any compliments others paid her.

Chubbuck had her right ovary removed in an operation the year before her suicide, and had been told that if she did not become pregnant within two to three years, it was unlikely she would ever be able to conceive.

A week before her suicide, she told night news editor Rob Smith that she had bought a gun and joked about killing herself on air. Smith later stated that he did not respond to what he thought was Chubbuck's "sick" attempt at humor, and changed the subject.

in the lead-up to her suicide, Chubbuck (who was known to detest what she referred to as "blood and guts" reporting, i.e., sensationalised violence over legitimate journalism) had volunteered to produce a feature on suicide for the station, during research for which she had asked a police officer how someone would go about taking their own life (the sheriff proceeding to reveal what kind of gun and bullets that he would use if ever put in that situation).

One co-worker has since recalled that around the same time, Chubbuck had said to him (in what he assumed was a joking manner) something to the effect of:

"Wouldn't it be wild if I blew myself away on the air?"

Suicide

On the morning of July 15, 1974, Chubbuck confused co-workers by claiming she had to read a newscast to open Suncoast Digest, something she had never done before. That morning's guest waited across the studio while Chubbuck sat at the news anchor's desk. During the first eight minutes of her program, Chubbuck covered three national news stories and then a shooting from the previous day at a local restaurant, Beef & Bottle, at the Sarasota-Bradenton Airport.

The film reel of the restaurant shooting had jammed and would not run, so Chubbuck shrugged it off and said on-camera, "In keeping with the WXLT practice of presenting the most immediate and complete reports of local blood and guts news, TV 40 presents what is believed to be a television first. In living color, an exclusive coverage of an attempted suicide." She drew a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson Model 36 revolver that she had hidden in her bag, placed it behind her right ear and fired, immediately slumping forward violently onto her desk, as the technical director scrambled to fade rapidly to black.

The station quickly ran a standard public service announcement and then a movie. Some television viewers called the police, while others called the station to inquire if the shooting was staged.

After the shooting, news director Mike Simmons found the papers from which Chubbuck had been reading her newscast contained a complete script of her program, including not only the shooting, but also a third-person account to be read by whichever staff member took over the broadcast after the incident. He said her script called for her condition to be listed as "critical".

"She had written something like 'TV 40 news personality Christine Chubbuck shot herself in a live broadcast this morning on a Channel 40 talk program. She was rushed to Sarasota Memorial Hospital, where she remains in critical condition.'"

–Mike Simmons, TV-40 news director, quoted in The Dallas Morning News

Chubbuck was taken to Sarasota Memorial Hospital, where she was pronounced dead fourteen hours later. Upon receiving the news, a WXLT staffer released the information to other stations using Chubbuck's script. For a time, WXLT aired reruns of the TV series Gentle Ben in place of Suncoast Digest.

Aftermath

Chubbuck's body was cremated. The funeral ceremony was held on the beach, where her ashes were scattered into the Gulf of Mexico. Approximately 120 people attended, including local officials who had appeared on her show. Three songs by her favorite singer, Roberta Flack, were played. Presbyterian minister Thomas Beason delivered the eulogy, stating, "We suffer at our sense of loss, we are frightened by her rage, we are guilty in the face of her rejection, we are hurt by her choice of isolation and we are confused by her message."

Suncoast Digest stayed on the air for several years with new hosts. Simmons, the station director, said Chubbuck's suicide was unrelated to the station. "The crux of the situation was that she was a 29-year-old girl who wanted to be married and who wasn't", he said in 1977.

Availability

As the broadcast took place in 1974, it's possible - though highly unlikely - that the suicide could've been recorded by a home viewer, as several primitive VCRs had been made commercially available by that time, such as the U-matic, one of the first home video recorders. However, due to the high cost of the unit, it was incredibly rare for a 1974 household to possess one.

Until some form of hard evidence surfaces indicating that an additional copy still exists somewhere (or proof that the originals were not actually destroyed), the video is generally accepted as being impossible to obtain.

Notably, a significant number of people claim to have seen the footage via a number of sources other than the original live broadcast, including early websites, FBI training videos, and mondo films a la Faces of Death, though, given the circumstances, this seems unlikely.

Steve Newman, WXLT’s weatherman at the time, picks up the story from there in Kate Plays Christine’s interview: “There is only one copy of that videotape for that last day that exists. Nobody copied it.” It seems to have had at least one viewer while still in the station’s headquarters: Quinn, who wrote the Post story, says she recalls watching a recording at WXLT “many times” while writing her story, but doesn’t have any information about what happened to the tape after that. The station — now called WWSB — confirmed that it doesn’t have a copy. Newman explained that the station’s then-owner, the late Robert Nelson, kept the tape for himself, and that his widow, Mollie, currently has it.* “She wants to throw it in the Bay,” Newman said of Mollie. “And I said, ‘Don’t do that. Give it to the Newseum or Columbia School of Journalism or something, for safekeeping.’ Because it is history, as unfortunate as that history is.”

That’s one version of the story. Another version, told in dubious accounts on Wikipedia and the Lost Media Wiki, says a tape was given to the Sarasota police at one point. But the Sarasota Sheriff’s Department said unequivocally that they have never had such a tape in their possession. “I doubt you will ever get your hands on it,” the public-affairs rep went out of her way to add.

Then there’s the version that places the tape in the possession of the Chubbuck family. They’re understandably secretive, but Chubbuck’s brother Greg recently spoke to People and briefly touched on the rumors of the tape. He says that the family got an injunction to prevent the station from releasing the footage, that “authorities” seized it, that those authorities turned it over to Chubbuck’s mother; the rest, he says, is hazy. “I don’t know to this day where it is,” Greg said. “But I know no one knows where it is, and no one ever will if I have anything to say about it.”

And then, of course, there’s the story that Chubbuck-footage obsessives subscribe to: that somehow, somewhere, at least one viewable copy exists. Some people even claim to have watched it.

“A long time ago, when the internet was fairly new, I remember seeing the video,” says Tracy Kelly, a San Diego author who is fascinated by Chubbuck’s life and death. She says she viewed it in the late 1990s or early 2000s, possibly on Ogrish. “I’ve always been interested in true crime and murders, and I was curious to see what she actually did. So I clicked on it, and I can remember her sitting behind the desk, with her black hair and her black-and-white dress. I remember her saying that line and shooting herself. I know I saw it.” She’s never been able to locate it again.

Footage

Shortly thereafter, an injunction was brought against Channel 40 (by Chubbuck's family) preventing them from ever releasing the footage of her death; the 2-inch quad master tape, plus a copy (both of which had previously been confiscated by the Sarasota Sheriff's Department as evidence following the incident) were then handed over to the family, who are said to have destroyed them.

A rumored third copy has been speculated to exist in the FCC Archives. However, this claim has never been proven (and was, in fact, denied by the FCC when queried by a Findadeath Forum user). Interestingly, it was by Chubbuck's own will that the event was recorded in the first place: she requested that the episode be taped, something that was not normally done, due to the cost of tapes back then.

Recreation of the Footage

On January 31st, 2017, a video titled "Freaky 5 - Lost Footage" was uploaded by a YouTuber called NationSquid, featuring five pieces of lost media that are considered creepy or disturbing. The Christine Chubbuck story is at number 1 on the list.

At the end of the video, at 8 minutes and 46 seconds, there appears to be footage of the suicide as it happened. It is in black and white, with distorted audio and video. Since then, many users on YouTube have since re-uploaded the so-called “footage".

There was a wide debate on websites like 4Chan, the NationSquid Forums and even the Lost Media Wiki forums about the authenticity of the so-called "footage" from NationSquid. NationSquid himself never replied to any questions about whether the footage was real or fake, and therefor users on the aforementioned websites came up with theories and analyses in attempts to deliver a verdict on whether the footage was genuine or fabricated.

On February 13th, 2017, the footage seen in NationSquid's video was confirmed fake by Gordon Galbraith, who was the news director of Newswatch program at WXLT-TV (now WWSB-TV) that Christine hosted at the time of her suicide.

Audio from the Newscast

In early 2021, YouTuber Ataliste acquired what is generally accepted as being a legitimate cassette recording of the audio from the incident (via an undisclosed private collector), releasing the portion of the newscast prior to the suicide on their YouTube channel in February of that year (though, choosing not to publish the actual suicide audio out of respect). The audio matches the voice of Christine heard in Kate Plays Christine and also aligns with the news reported on in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune from the day of the incident, leaving little doubt as to its authenticity.

In April of the same year, Ataliste released the audio in its entirety via his YouTube channel. It has since been privated (as has the other video, without her final words and the gunshot).

So does a copy of her death actually exist?

Well according to an article by Vulture on June 8th, 2016, the video does still exist in the hands of Mollie Nelson, the widow of the former owner of WXLT-TV. Her husband, for reasons he never shared, kept a copy of the tape, and when he died, it passed to her.

However, when this was publicised, she started getting requests to see it, which made her uncomfortable. She says that the tape is now in the hands of a very large law firm for safe keeping, that she has no intention to ever let anyone see it, and that she only held onto the tape to honor her husband.

In 2007, Greg Chubbuck spoke publicly about his sister for the first time since 1974 in an E! television special.

It is sad to say that Christine Chubbuck never got what she truly wanted out of life that being a loving partner, marriage and children.

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Chubbuck

https://www.vulture.com/2016/01/death-hags-christine-chubbuck-suicide-video.html

https://lostmediawiki.com/Christine_Chubbuck_(partially_found_on-air_suicide_footage_of_television_news_reporter;_1974)