Have you ever wondered why important people, seemingly in good spirits, commit suicide while their close friends often swear the victim has shown no previous indications to be led to such a monstrous act. I wondered a lot when James Amschel Rothschild “killed himself” in his hotel room near the Champs Elysee in Paris in June 1996. He was the apparent heir to head the Rothschild Dynasty until he hung himself one night and left no note. He had not exhibited depression or other signs of distress according to close sources. The Inspector General of Paris examined the site of the crime, pulled out the bathroom towel rack from which Baron RothschIld had supposedly hung himself, and announced “The towel rack could not have supported his body. He was murdered.”.  Rupert Murdock’s news bureau hushed the story about Mr. Rothschild’s murder. If the story did leak out, which of course it did here and there, the media response was “Mr. Rothschild suffered a heart attack”.

I also wonder why the youngest son of the former Shah of Iran, Alireza Pahlevi (44), “killed himself” in his Boston apartment in January 2011. It is said that he had hopes of returning to Iran to help establish democracy according to his close friends and associates. His death received only mild mention in the U.S. media and, if it did mention the tragedy, the stories explained that he had “great anger and sorrow about his father’s demise in 1979.  Occasional hearsay says that the betrayers of his father were the CIA and Henry Kissinger.

I was stunned to hear that Ilya Zhitomirskiy (22), founder of Diaspora, a Facebook alternative private social site, had committed suicide. Why did Ilya kill himself last month (November 2011) when he was becoming such a success in establishing his social site?  The investment money was flowing in (though PayPal was not passing the donations on to him for some reason) and he was apparently healthy in mind, body and spirit. I am awaiting the autopsy results to learn of the actual cause of death. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, announced after Ilya’s death that he had been one of the 6,500 donors to Ilya’s project,  Facebook quickly cleansed itself.

Yours Truly, George W Hunt