Almanac for July 18th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for July 18th: https://ko-fi.com/post/July-18-My-Brothers-Wedding-I3I11HQEQX

Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: William Makepeace Thackaray

Beatles Trivia
July 18, 1995, South Bend: I dropped Mom off at work. When I came home, I turned on the tv to see Yoko Ono and beautiful, 19-year-old Sean Lennon [Ono] on the Today show.

Bummer July 18th

July 18, 1817: Jane Austen dies, aged 41. Her death is speculated to have been from Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

July 18, 1954: 18-year-old Dorothy Poore’s decomposing body is found stuffed inside a dresser drawer inside a room at the Claypool Hotel in downtown Indianapolis. Her killer is apprehended in Missouri and brought back to Indiana, where he is convicted and serves more than 25 years before being released on parole. He claimed to have killed the teenager after failing to recruit her as a sex worker.

July 18, 1966: Rock musician Bobby Fuller, whose band The Bobby Fuller Four has recently scored a hit with “I Fought the Law,” is found dead in his car outside his apartment in Hollywood. Fuller is 23 years old. His body has no signs of injury other than some small spots (indicated broken capillaries under the skin) thought to have been caused by the summer heat. No cause of death is ever determined. Strangely, the boxes for both “accident” and “suicide” are checked on the Los Angeles deputy medical examiner’s report.

July 18, 1969: U.S. Senator Edward (“Ted”) Kennedy leaves a cocktail party in his car with a passenger, Mary Joe Kopechne. The impaired senator drives the vehicle into a lake. He manages to escape, but Kopechne drowns. Kennedy fails to report the deadly accident until the following morning. He later pleads guilty to leaving the scene of an accident.

July 18, 1975: Influential graffiti-style artist Vaughn Bodē, age 33, is found dead of apparent autoerotic asphyxiation.

July 18, 1984: A lone gunman kills 21 people and wounds an additional 19 people at a McDonald’s restaurant in San Ysidro*, California. The gunman is subsequently killed by a police sniper.

In her book Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, Caroline Fraser offers the theory that the perpetrator suffered from severe heavy metal poisoning as a result of exposure to high levels of cadmium at his workplace, where he was a welder. Outbursts of violent behavior are a documented side effect of cadmium poisoning.

July 18, 1988: Christa Päffgen, the model and singer who performed under the mononym Nico, dies in Ibiza at age 49 from a cerebral hemorrhage suffered from a fall off her bicycle.

July 18, 1989: Actress Rebecca Schaeffer, then the star of the popular sitcom My Sister Sam, is shot in the chest at her home by a 19-year-old obsessed fan who has stalked her over the course of three years. He became enraged when she appeared in a film in which her character is seen in bed with a male character. Schaeffer dies at the hospital.

*San Ysidro, in English, is called Saint Isadore, and he's the patron saint of farmers.