Welcome to the dark divide, a podcast that takes a seat tangles its legs over the edge and stares into the abyss. This is the story of Christine Chubbuck. Christine was born in Hudson Ohio in 1944. It's one of those typical suburban cities lined with tiny store fronts. The main street with a clock tower, perfectly maintained flowerpots along every clean avenue leading to a corner waving an american flag. But Hudson isn't where our story takes place.
I mean, let's face it, if someone's going to take their own life live on air for the first time, it's going to be in florida. Christine earned her degree in broadcasting at the University of boston in 1965. And by 1966 her career in radio and television would take off.
She gathered experience at various public and cable television firms until ending up in Sarasota florida at W. X. L. T. T. V, an affiliate of abc that is now W. W. S. V. Robert nelson, the station's owner had originally hired Christine as a reporter but eventually gave Christine her own morning show called Suncoast digest, a segment which would focus on local stories. And Christine took this very seriously making a space for issues that she believed deserved a strong contender with a voice.
It's important to note Christine's apparent growing sense of dissidents at her job. She had serious problems with the station's lack of quality, the burden of responsibility on its overworked staff and most importantly, robert nelson's thirst for which she viewed as tasteless news, empty, sensationalism as a means of entertainment to gather ratings. The, if it bleeds, it leads mentality quickly revealed to her the unforeseen costs and consequences of following a dream.
What bob demanded from her deeply clashed with her values, which she was expected to leave at the door. There's this photo of her taken at Channel 40, she's resting her arm on a big camera, her long dark hair framing her features. She's striking to say the least, beaming, bright but tough. Even through a photograph you can feel she's not someone you'd want to cross. Christine was passionate and driven and that's putting it lightly. She was a firecracker when it came to her vision.
And like many of us, she wanted to make a difference in a bigger way, while also adding meaning to her own existence through many acts of her life. So much of her time was spent easing the suffering and others and providing a sense of hope. The irony here and in many parts of this story has not been lost on me, which of course leads me to ponder the question, what would have happened to Christine had she never become a journalist at all. Of course, there were other parts that made up Christine.
Besides her work, arguably the more important aspects that design a person in grade school. She created a tongue in cheek group called the Dateless wonders, knitting club, although she was often, its only member, She wrote her own autobiography at 15 where she keenly described an already primed sense of determination when it came to her future. She was sensitive, sometimes too sensitive and extremely empathetic.
She often gave people presents just because she had a chocolate poodle named for Space City. She volunteered at the local hospital by putting on shows for Children with homemade puppets. She was known to occasionally use them in her broadcast to. She was an amazing swimmer who found peace being near and in the water as often as possible. She had a dry sense of humor, a mind for detail in a charisma of equal parts dazzling and defensiveness.
But even we've throughout the innocent summers of her youth filled with kayaking and barbecues. Her brothers both remember Christine, just not being very happy from an early age, there are other important facts to remember here, Christina tried to take her own life before, and this wasn't something she hid from people she had expressed to people around her that she wanted to die and had even gone so far as to joke with editor rob smith about blowing her brains out on television.
These remarks, which often left others uncomfortable and dumbstruck would be met with a light hearted change of topic, a switch under the rug to those who knew her best. They understood that it seemed suicide was always a viable option to Christine if life just got to be too much. However, I think it would be unfair to say Christine hadn't tried to be happy.
She was seeing a psychiatrist, She didn't hide her pain from her family in her strange and complex ways, she was attempting to reach out to a world that try as it might just could not reach back in. Christine wanted the warmth of a light without being vulnerable to the flame, lost between a deep longing to connect and an intense fear of connection itself. She often fueled her own loneliness as much as she was followed by it.
Even if someone had been trying to catch Christine's, I she probably would have been too distant and too busy criticizing herself to notice. After her death, Christine's mother recalled the gap between her daughter and the world. There was a hunting melody in chris it's almost like her life was a little out of gear with other people. She was the only person I ever knew who would walk into a room and every head would turn.
Yet nobody ever came over and asked her for her phone number, but Christine hadn't been without love. Her younger brother, Greg recalls two serious relationships in her life that left a mark before her job in florida.
She even moved to Pittsburgh to be with an older man she was seeing, but the relationship fell apart soon after when Christine's father refused to allow his daughter to marry someone who wasn't just older, but also jewish and as a teenager, she fell madly for an older man in his twenties who tragically died in a car crash, according to Greg,
Christine responded to the unimaginable loss of her first love by spending her mornings in rehab sessions with a passenger who had been left paralyzed by the accident. And here it is so easy to understand the birth of Christine's concern towards the human condition and her need to protect those from unnecessary suffering. She learned firsthand and much sooner than most. Some tragedies are too complex to absolve.
So we hold them close to us, keeping them safe, as if the pain will help memories stay sharper somehow, allowing them to become more real rather than fade away with time, Christine doesn't deserve to be painted as some 29 year old spinster with a frigid personality, But it is important to note that she would be 30 in a few months and was still a virgin personally, I don't think it was a matter of sex that was of significance to Christine,
but more so what sex could bring into her life for as much as she was devoted to her career, Christine wanted a happy little home with another person. Like many women her age, she longed for Children to care for and a family to call her own.
And if it wasn't devastating enough to feel a sense of hopelessness about finding that special connection, Christine faced a dilemma the year before she'd had an ovary removed, and doctors warned her that if she didn't have Children within the next two or three years, she probably never would. The pressure was on and once again despair would weave its way into her plans and intentions, putting a limit on her favorite daydreams and an expiry on her biggest wish.
It's not like she was totally without prospects, so to speak. Christine had crushes that came and went, but nothing really stuck. That was until George peter Ryan, a broker who read the stock reports on the local news caught Christine's attention. George is described everywhere as a charming ladies man. Some even called him gorgeous George, but apparently he could also kind of be a jerk too.
And Christine's younger brother Greg even says himself that if Christine and George had actually become a thing, he would have intervened for the sake of protecting his sister's heart. Although it's hard to believe that Christine would have allowed anyone, especially her little brother, to get in the way of what she wanted. But alas, Christine like George and apparently many thought she could do better. But Christine wanted what she wanted.
She baked him a cake for his 30th birthday party soon after at a press party, she decided to suck up all the pride and discomfort and make her feelings known. He rejected her when he realized her intentions were romantically based. Not that it mattered much. He was already seeing a sports reporter at the station. Andrea Kirby who was about the closest thing to a good friend outside of her family that Christine had.
Andrea was set out to leave Sarasota in a few days for a new job at a station in Baltimore and this was a cloud hanging over Christine. The thought of losing her small social life to bigger and better things. But it was nothing compared to the sadness she felt when she found out that Andrea had intentionally omitted the fact that she was seeing the very man Christine had confided in her about.
It was a simple albeit humiliating rejection have now become a twofold betrayal and Christine's heart was broken. Some people got mad at Christine, some people tried to reach out, but Christine moved away from that support. It's fair to say that Christine's perpetual juxtaposition of wanting to be taken care of while wanting to keep the most vulnerable parts of herself tucked away from everyone.
Well it hurt more than just Christine but when you live in a black and white world there is no gray, there is no middle to meet in. It was all or nothing with Christine. She was known to skip steps of a budding romance and go straight to intense love. So no doubt the rejection of George stung her deeply to Christine.
It seemed that wherever she looked for love there was none and this wasn't the only thing that weighed heavy on Christine but it would be the final time that she let anyone close enough to hurt her ever again. On the morning of 15 July 1974 Christine Chubbuck went to her job at W. X. L. T. Tv after having coffee with her mother instead of her normal pantsuit attire. She was in a dress. Her spirits were unusually high and there was a lightness to her.
The burden of a question bearing the weight on her shoulders now removed for good. She went to her typewriter with the script she'd handwritten the night before and prepared it for her broadcast For Christine to open with news was unusual. She would normally begin the show with an informal 30 minutes but the technical director went with it. Christine was a professional, she was reliable and she knew what she was doing in hindsight.
We can see Christine's edges becoming blurrier by the day co workers reported how she would get emotional about strange things. She would make rude remarks about guests behind their backs. She threw a temper tantrum about the plastic flowers on her set. She was fed up with upper management decisions including the one to scrap a piece of hers in turn for a local shooting story.
Often it's impossible to take a person's life and pinpoint the moment when the hectic voices in their head all quieted down at once. The moment they decided enough was enough. When the story wouldn't roll because of the tape jam an event which would have normally tested Christine's continually fading patients Instead, it seems there was a shift. Some things in life have an unfortunate way of working out for the worst possible outcome.
And when that tape jammed, Christine saw that as an opportunity to declare her final decision to the world, staring dead on into the camera and with only the slightest detectable shake in her voice, Christine continued on In keeping with Channel 40s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts and in living color you were going to see another first an attempted suicide. Then Christine pulled out a 38 revolver and shot herself in the back of the head.
At first everyone thought it was a sick joke. She finally gone too far to stick it to nelson jane read the camera, woman whose eyes had been fixed on Christine for her entire suicide, not even realizing what she was filming, eventually ran over to the anchor desk. Christine had slowly slid behind have prepared to lecture, laughing, Christine. The sight of her laying in blood on the floor instantly changed everything.
Unfortunately, like any other story in the past, Christina done her homework, she had asked the deputy during her research about concealing guns, where to shoot what bullets to use. It wasn't abnormal for Christine to dive so deeply into her research, but now it would hold a haunting sense of planning and preparation for something so much darker. Who knows what made her decide that this day was the day to die. She used a revolver, a gun known for its accuracy and a wad cutter.
A bullet made to disintegrate into tiny particles upon impact. Hauntingly enough, Christine had also typed up a third person account of what had happened. Instead of leaving behind a suicide note, It said she would be taken to Sarasota Memorial Hospital and listed her in critical condition. Christine's final story was herself.
This all took place well before emails and tweets and text messages before the overload of information and minute by minute reports from every corner of the world news was broadcast when it was broadcast and if you missed it, you might get lucky and catch it once more later or possibly in the paper. Communication was done the old fashioned way person to person. It took a while for news of a reporter in florida who had done something so unimaginable to spread but spread. It did.
And it's no surprise that the trauma of something so horrendously sad quickly morphed into a sort of outrage from the public, even those closest to Christine still remains shaken and bewildered by what she did that day. But did she give it all up for some short 15 minutes of fame? Was it all just to bring attention to a life unknown. Then again, how much good is attention when you're dead.
Some coworkers went as far as to think it was her way of helping the station's ratings of giving them a sensational story, Putting them on the map with the 1st. We can't be sure exactly why Christine did what she did, but it does appear that no matter where her career would have taken her in life, it couldn't take away the deep oblivion she felt within. Maybe her search for an escape route was inevitable. Maybe no job or person would have ever been enough when it comes to suicide.
Almost every question includes a why of some sort, but why is the most difficult of them all to answer? There is no simple direction here. Every road leads to suffering with no real reason, no satisfying conclusion. Nothing. The tape is out there as far as we know, one copy and one copy alone exists, robert's wife molly had it after his passing, but for practical reasons gave it to a law firm, it's most likely somewhere in a vault slowly disintegrating as it ages.
Her husband never did say why he kept it, but it exists. And we need to ask ourselves why its existence matters unreleased footage forever begs the question, Why is anything out there for us to see in the first place? Where do we draw the line between personal freedom and a collective protection. In a world of reaction videos and shock value media who holds the blame.
A few mindless clicks led by curiosity or maybe just boredom and all of a sudden you've accidentally seen a beheading video or an act of cruelty on an animal. That sick feeling in your brain, it's trying to understand what's real and what's not, this is the world in which we live and a reality that Christine couldn't bear the sour taste of. Even if we were ever to figure out why there was still nothing justified about what Christine Chubbuck did.
In the end, she gave into the very exploitation that had taken on the role of her antagonist. As far as she was concerned, there was nothing to ride out, nothing to fight on behalf of nothing left to hope for depression is the monster that hides in plain sight. It is the heavy thing, sucking all the air out of the room, dimming the lights and leaving us quiet. That burning pain of not belonging. The deep ache of love unrequited, the apathy and dread of the future.
I've been there a lot of us have and for as unique as this story is, it's also painfully ordinary. Had Christine decided to live, she would be 73 years old today, A woman with stories and scars, I know bullshit voice we might have turned to for comfort during the turmoil and division of our past and current states.
I cannot help but lend my imagination to another version, a happier ending because even though she felt invisible, she was more than just a body of despair moving through time and yet crinkled with irony of a mundane life begging to be seen has become a ghost, maybe in spite of her story, or because of it entirely. The world turned off their television sets and tuned her out like fading signals into the airwaves.
But should Christine Chubbuck remain forgotten, the vanity of such acts often leaves the details overlooked. And here I couldn't help but search deeper and gaze more closely at a woman whose story calls us to question the sanity and sacredness of a world who rips intimacy wide open a world which capitalizes on salt in our wounds and forces us to face the fears.
We spend every moment of our lives avoiding Christine was ill and Christine was very sad and she felt no way out, but through with reckless force driven by her own madness, and maybe a little of ours too.