On July 15, 1974, Florida journalist Christine Chubbuck shot herself on live TV and collapsed onto her news desk, leaving behind a bloodstained script and chilling final words that would reveal a disturbing detail about her death.
In 1974, 29-year-old Christine Chubbuck was working as a television journalist in Sarasota, Florida, where she hosted Suncoast Digest, a half-hour program covering local community affairs. The show reached fewer than 1,000 viewers, and although Chubbuck earned just $5,000 a year, she devoted much of her time to its production.
“It was her show,” her brother Greg recalled in an interview with People. “It was one person doing all of it with very low pay.”
But behind her dedication to journalism, Chubbuck was struggling with depression and deep feelings of self-doubt.
“She was very gifted and she never felt like she was good enough and she was constantly doubting herself, and I mean morosely doubting herself,” Greg said, revealing that his parents had spent more than $1 million on psychiatric and psychological care over two decades in an effort to “help Chrissie find peace.”
A horrifying broadcast
On the morning of July 15, Chubbuck delivered three news stories before introducing footage of a shooting at a local restaurant.
When the video failed to roll due to a technical glitch, she flicked her dark hair, looked directly into the camera and, with composure, said something that would shock viewers and make media history: “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts…and in living color, We are going to bring you another first – an attempted suicide.”
She then reached beneath the desk, pulled out a revolver and shot herself behind the right ear.
The station cut the broadcast as Chubbuck collapsed onto the desk, and she was rushed to Sarasota Memorial Hospital, where she died later that day.
Tape ‘will never ever be watched’
Her family later secured an injunction preventing the footage from being released, and the tape, initially held as evidence, was eventually given to her mother, Peg.
“I don’t know to this day where it is,” Greg told People. “But I know no one knows where it is and no one ever will if I have anything to say about it.”
“It doesn’t upset me to know the tape exists, because the reason it will never ever be watched is because of me,” her brother said in a separate interview with The Sun.
Final words
While the Ohio native didn’t leave a suicide note, she left behind her script – stained by her blood on the news desk – to be read after the shooting.
Written in third person, it described a TV personality who, after shooting herself in a live broadcast, was in “critical condition” at the Sarasota Memorial Hospital.
Her last words, “an attempted suicide,” at first confused people but as her co-workers explained, Chubbuck “was too good to write ‘a suicide’ when it might have failed.”
Her mother offered a simpler explanation.
“Chris was hedging her bets,” Peg told the Washington Post.
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