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Featured Image Credit: ABC 7
Topics: Mental Health, Florida, History
Joe Yates
The first person to kill herself on live television delivered heartbreaking final words to the camera before taking her own life.
The tragic story takes us back to Florida, 1974, where Christine Chubbuck was a newsreader for a local broadcasting station in Sarasota.
It was the same year the then president Richard Nixon resigned and was replaced by Gerald Ford following the Watergate scandal, although these events took place just 24 days earlier, on July 15.
Talk show Suncoast Digest on WXLT-TV was broadcasting to its relatively small audience when Chubbuck took her own life using a revolver that she had stored in a bag of puppets she kept neatly under her desk.
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On the morning of the incident, the 29-year-old was said to be in good spirits and told her colleagues she was trying a new format for the show, opening with a newscast rather than interviewing a guest.
The plan was for her to open the show with a report on a local shooting, but a technical problem meant that the prerecorded footage failed to air.
The show then cut back to Chubbuck, who read out her chilling final words from a script she had written direct to the camera.
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She said: "In keeping with Channel 40's policy of bringing you the latest in 'blood and guts', and in living colour, you are going to see another first – attempted suicide."
Those were her last words.
She placed her gun in her right ear and pulled the trigger, after which her body slumped forwards.
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Only a few hundred people are thought to have seen Chubbuck die live on air, according to Vulture.
She was rushed to hospital where doctors pronounced her death 14 hours late.
In the meantime, the station quickly ran to a public service announcement - but it was too late.
Some of those watching the channel called the police to report the death, while others phoned the station to see whether it was staged.
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There is thought to be only one copy of the footage, but it's unclear what happened to it.
Some say the widow of the station's owner at the time, Robert Nelson, has the only recording; others say it's in the possession of Chubbuck's family.
The tragic story was dramatized in the 2016 film Christine, which stars Rebecca Hall as Chubbuck and tries to explain why she took her own life
If you or someone you know is struggling or in a mental health crisis, help is available through Mental Health America. Call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org. You can also reach Crisis Text Line by texting MHA to 741741