Yes, bad things happen to good people. As it turns out, bad things
also happen to famous people. Here are some well-known people with
something unusual in common: they have all accidentally killed someone. 



On the evening of 6 November 1963, two days after her 17th birthday, Laura
Welch failed to stop her Chevy sedan at a stop sign and smashed into a
Corvair being driven by a school chum, Michael Douglas, also 17. Laura and
her passenger, Judy Dykes, were treated for minor injuries at a nearby
hospital, where they learned that Douglas had died from his injuries. No
police charges were filed, apparently, but paperwork from the accident is
missing or unclear and the details of the incident are a bit of a mystery.
Now Laura Welch is married to U. S. president George W. Bush and is known
around the world as LAURA BUSH. The story made national news during the
presidential election of 2000, but little new information came to light. At
the time her spokesman, Andrew Malcolm, said "To this day Mrs. Bush
remains unable to talk about it." 





In 1988, near Enniskillen in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, movie star
MATTHEW BRODERICK was driving a rented BMW and inexplicably crossed the
center lane, crashing head-on into a Volvo carrying local woman Anna
Gallagher and her mother, Margaret Dougherty. Both women were killed.
Broderick's passenger, actress Jennifer Grey, escaped with minor
injuries, and Broderick ended up in an Irish hospital with a concussion,
broken leg and collapsed lung. He was charged with causing death by
dangerous driving, but ended up being convicted of the lesser charge of
careless driving. He paid a fine of $175. At the time the women's
family called the conviction and fine a "travesty of justice,"
but in 2002 Broderick and the family tried to patch things up. 





Democrat ADLAI STEVENSON was governor of Illinois (1949-53) and
presidential candidate against Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, then
ambassador to the United Nations under President John F. Kennedy. In 1913,
just before his 13th birthday, Stevenson was handling a .22 caliber rifle
at a Christmas party and the gun went off, killing 12-year-old Ruth Merwin.
The shooting was ruled accidental and no charges were ever filed against
him. According to biographer Porter McKeever, Stevenson was asked by a
reporter in 1952 about the incident, but the childhood tragedy was never
widely reported by the press. 





Running from trouble with the law over his illegal drug use, WILLIAM S.
BURROUGHS left New York for Texas in 1946. He sent for his common-law wife,
Joan Vollmer Adams, and together they lived in Texas until 1948, when they
moved to New Orleans. Again in trouble with the law over narcotics charges,
they moved to Mexico City in 1949 and continued to fuel themselves with
booze and benzedrine. On 6 September 1951, during a party of sorts, William
decided to show off his pistol skills and called for Joan to help him with
his "William Tell act." She placed a glass on her head and turned
to the side and Bill fired the pistol. The bullet hit Joan in the head and
killed her, and Bill was charged with criminal imprudence, then released on
bail. He sent his infant son to stay with his parents in Florida, and he
lit out for South America and Tangiers. Burroughs later claimed that he
never would have become a writer had he not shot Joan in the head. 





In the early 1930s, future director JOHN HUSTON was considered a rising
young talent in the movie business. A natural raconteur and ardent
carouser, Huston was hired on as a studio screenwriter. On 25 September
1933 Huston was driving on Sunset Boulevard and hit a woman pedestrian,
killing her. A grand jury was convened, but returned no charges against
him. He left the United States for Europe and didn't return to
Hollywood until 1937. He went on to direct some of the most famous films of
the 20th century, including The Maltese Falcon (1941), The African Queen
(1951) and The Man Who Would Be King (1975). 





On the evening of 13 February 2002, former New Jersey Nets power forward
JAYSON WILLIAMS and some friends attended a Harlem Globetrotters basketball
game. After the game, Williams took his associates Kent Culuko and John
Gordnick (and Gordnick's two children) to dinner, along with four
members of the Globetrotters team. From the restaurant they hired Costas
"Gus" Christolfi to drive them to Williams's mansion in
Milford, New Jersey. 



Around 2:40 a.m. on 14 February, Williams was giving the group a tour and
showing off his gun collection. Somehow a shotgun went off and killed
Christolfi. Williams's brother called 911 and told the operator that
Christolfi shot himself. The coroner reported that the shotgun blast came
from "intermediate range," and the police accused Williams of
recklessly handling the shotgun and then trying to make it look like
Christolfi had committed suicide. Both Culuko and Gordnick entered pleas of
guilty on charges of evidence and witness tampering and agreed to testify
against Williams: Culuko says he wiped fingerprints off the gun and agreed
to lie to the police, and Gordnick says he hid Williams's clothes
after the shooting. Williams entered a not guilty plea and went to trial on
several counts, including aggravated manslaughter. In April of 2004 he was
found not guilty on the most serious charges and guilty of four lesser
charges; the jury could not reach a decision on the charge of reckless
manslaughter. 





Famed aviator ORVILLE WRIGHT had a historically deadly crash while testing
a new aircraft for the U. S. Army on 17 September 1908 at Fort Meyer,
Virginia. Signal Corps aviation expert Lt. Thomas E. Selfridge was riding
along as a passenger. Selfridge was an experienced aviator who had worked
with Alexander Graham Bell on his experimental flying machines. Expecting
to go an hour or more, Wright and Selfridge took off a little after five
o'clock in the afternoon. After the plane had made a few turns around
the airfield, its wood propeller snapped, sending a shattered piece across
a bracing wire and forcing the aircraft into a nosedive. 



Orville shut off the engine and tried to stablize the craft, which was
dropping from a height of at least 60 feet and hurtling toward the ground
at a 45-degree angle. Nothing could be done and the plane crashed, pinning
the two men beneath it. Orville suffered leg fractures, broken ribs and an
injured back. Lt. Selfridge received a terrible compound fracture at the
base of his skull; despite emergency surgery, he died about three hours
later without ever regaining consciousness. He was the first person ever
killed in a plane crash. Selfridge was buried at Arlington National
Cemetery, a few hundred feet from where the plane crashed. 





Actor and game show panelist ARLENE FRANCIS took the blame for one of the
stranger accidental deaths on record, when an exercise dumbbell fell from
her eighth-story Manhattan apartment and killed a man who had just emerged
from the popular Le Pavillion restaurant. In her 1978 autobiography,
Francis reported that she had been having the apartment cleaned while she
appeared in a summer stock play in Westport, Connecticut. A maid had placed
the dumbbells on the sill to anchor a towel covering the window where an
air conditioner had been removed. According to Francis, "While the
shutters were being cleaned, the dumbbells became dislodged, one falling
into the room and the other out of the window." Francis paid a
settlement to the man's family, but was not charged with a crime. 



Francis was involved in another deadly accident in 1963: while she was
driving in heavy traffic on a rainy night on Long Island, her car skidded
out of control and into the path of an oncoming car. Francis suffered a
concussion and broken collarbone, but a woman in the other car was killed.
Her survivors sued Francis for $1.5 million, but later settled the case out
of court.