Timothy O'Bryan

popular name: Mary Lily Flagler Bingham

date_of_death: July 27, 1917

age: 50

cause_of_death: Edema with myocarditis along with high levels of morphine, arsenic and mercury

claim_to_fame: Crime and their Victims

best_know_for: Mary Lily Kenan Flagler Bingham was an American philanthropist and heiress who became notorious when she married one of the richest men of the Gilded Age - Henry Flagler - a founder of Standard Oil with John Rockefeller. Growing up in an affluent household, she soon moved with her family to Wilmington in the late 1870s. Her affluence afforded her education, uncommon for a woman on the cusp of the twentieth century. She first met Henry Flagler in 1891 at a party in Newport, Rhode Island. Kenan was only twenty-three years old; Flagler was sixty-one, and still married to Ida Alice. As they became more romantically involved, Mary Lily’s family grew suspicious of Flagler’s intentions, at least until the tycoon gifted her two million dollars’ worth of jewelry and stock in Standard Oil, along with a mansion in Palm Beach that would come to be known as Whitehall. Flagler also set about divorcing Ida Alice, which resulted in him paying Florida state legislators off in order to have insanity declared a viable reason for initiating divorce proceedings. Two months after the law was passed, Flagler divorced her, and he married Mary Lily, a woman nearly half his age, on the Kenans’ family plantation ten days later in 1901. Henry Flagler and Mary Lily Kenan Flagler by most accounts had a comfortable and loving marriage. Their marriage lasted until May of 1913, as after a fall down the stairs at Whitehall, the 83-year-old Flagler passed away, leaving his massive fortune to her. Mary Lily Kenan thus became the world’s richest woman. Three years later she became reaquinted with and married Robert Worth Bingham. A seemly healthy and active socialite, she slowly succumbed to a mysterious illness and died just 8 months later after her marriage to Bingham.

popular name: Jack Ruby

date_of_death: January 3, 1967

age: 55

cause_of_death: Lung cancer and pulmonary embolism

claim_to_fame: Crime and their Victims

best_know_for: American nightclub owner who fatally shot Lee Harvey Oswald, while Oswald was in police custody after being charged with both the assassination of incumbent United States President John F. Kennedy, and murder of Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit. Ruby's extensive mob ties only added to the suspicion that Oswald did not act alone and the assassination of President Kennedy was related to organized crime.

popular name: Sunny Von Bulow

date_of_death: December 6, 2008

age: 76

cause_of_death: Cardiopulmonary Arrest

claim_to_fame: Crime and their Victims

best_know_for: Martha "Sunny" Von Bulow was an American heiress, socialite, and philanthropist. Upon her utilities magnate father's death, she was the heiress to his ~ $100 million fortune. After divorcing her first husband, Prince Alfred von Auersperg, she married Claus von Bulow, a former aide to J.P. Getty. Claus was accused of twice trying to murder his wife for her fortune, by injecting Sunny with Insulin. The second coma left Sunny in a persistent vegetative state for the next 28 years until her death from cardiopulmonary arrest in 2008. Claus was initially found guilty of attempted murder, but his conviction was overturned on appeal. Her children from her first marriage remained convinced that Claus had tried to murder her, and established the Sunny von Bulow National Victim Advocacy Center, now known as the National Center for Victims of Crime. They also established the Sunny von Bulow Coma and Head Trauma Research Foundation in New York in their mother's honor.