Deaths (Obituaries)

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      Robert Pickton, Notorious Canadian Serial Killer, Dies at 74

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      Convicted in the murder of six women (though he boasted of killing many more), he died of unspecified injuries after being assaulted in prison.Robert Pickton, one of Canada’s most notorious serial killers, whose crimes called attention to police and societal disregard for the violent deaths of Indigenous women, died on Friday after a fellow inmate attacked him in prison in Quebec, where he was serving a life sentence. He was 74.His death, in a hospital, was announced by Correctional Service Canada, which said he had been assaulted on May 19 at Port-Cartier Institution and had died of unspecified injuries. The announcement did not give a motive for the attack.In 2007, Mr. Pickton was convicted in the murders of six women, though he boasted to an undercover police officer that he had killed 49 in all.The remains of his victims were found at a ramshackle pig farm he owned outside Vancouver, where authorities conducted what at the time was the largest crime-scene investigation in Canadian history. After 18 months, they found the remains of 33 women.The victims were mainly members of Indigenous groups, and most were sex workers and drug addicts whom Mr. Pickton encountered in the Downtown Eastside, an underbelly of the scenic, affluent Vancouver.Mr. Pickton was able to continue killing for so long, according to an investigation by the provincial government of British Columbia, because of police bias toward the race and marginalized status of his victims.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Yael Dayan, Israeli Writer, Politician and Daughter of War Hero, Dies at 85

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      She was hailed for her books and admired for promoting women’s rights. But her support for a two-state solution to the Palestinian conflict angered many.Yael Dayan, a celebrated Israeli writer who, after the death of her father, the war hero and statesman Moshe Dayan, entered politics and became a proponent of women’s rights, L.G.B.T.Q. issues and a two-state solution to the Palestinian conflict, died on May 18 at her home in Tel Aviv. She was 85.Her daughter, Racheli Sion-Sarid, said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.Ms. Dayan was the last surviving child of Mr. Dayan, who served as Israel’s defense minister during the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973. With his distinctive black eyepatch — he had lost his left eye in combat fighting with the British in World War II — he was the unmistakable patriarch of a family dynasty that many in Israel have compared to the Kennedys.Mr. Dayan’s wife, Ruth, was the founder of the fashion house Maskit. Their son Assi was an actor and filmmaker. Another son, Ehud, was a sculptor.Ms. Dayan shot to literary stardom at age 20 with “New Face in the Mirror” (1959), an autobiographical novel written in English about a young female soldier whose father is a military commander.“One day my father came to the camp,” she wrote. “He said he was passing and had decided to drop in. He would never have admitted that he had come to see me. His arrival was, of course, an event — an occasion for smart and often unnecessary salutes, for alert and curious eyes. Will he kiss her when he leaves?”The novelist Anzia Yezierska, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called “New Face in the Mirror” “an extraordinary record of the inner life of a rebellious adolescent in search of self-realization.” She added, “There is an honesty and a compulsive intensity in the telling of her story that haunts us, long after finishing the book.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sam Butcher, Who Gave the World Precious Moments, Dies at 85

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      His childlike porcelain characters thrilled and inspired generations of collectors. They also made him a millionaire.Sam Butcher, the soft-spoken artist whose doe-eyed, pastel-hued porcelain Precious Moments figurines ignited a global collecting frenzy and made him a wealthy man, and whose Christian faith spurred him to build his own version of the Sistine Chapel in Carthage, Mo., died on May 20 at his home there. He was 85.His death was confirmed by his son Jon.Mr. Butcher was the Michelangelo of Missouri, and his adorable snub-nosed Precious Moments characters were “the Beanie Babies of porcelain,” as The Wall Street Journal once put it. Their zealous collectors, who numbered in the hundreds of thousands, built rooms for their Precious Moments figurines, convened in regional clubs and made pilgrimages to Carthage, where they slept in the Precious Moments motel or the R.V. park, marveled at the Precious Moments Fountain of the Angels, dined in the Precious Moments food courts and wandered the 30-acre grounds. (Carthage also hosted Precious Moments weddings.)For a time, the Precious Moments Care-a-Van — an 18-wheeler kitted out like a museum, filled with figurines and dioramas that told Mr. Butcher’s life story — toured the country. There were hundreds and hundreds of Precious Moments licensees, which made hats, keychains, watches, greeting cards, books and a children’s Bible. At the company’s peak, in 1996 and 1997, Precious Moments’ global retail sales reached over $500 million each year, a stunning amount for a man who was once so poor that he struggled to buy groceries for his seven children.Mr. Butcher, whose fans sought him out at the Precious Moments compound to autograph their figurines and posters (he always carried two pens to do so), was an unlikely-looking millionaire: a rumpled figure typically clad in bluejeans and a T-shirt, with paint in his bushy hair and a shy smile.“Most people just think I’m the gardener,” he said.Mr. Butcher and a colleague began making greeting cards and posters featuring waifish children in the 1970s. A giftware company thought the characters had commercial potential as figurines. By 1995, Precious Moments were said to be the No. 1 collectible in the world.Lissa Forliti-Aska, via Associated PressMr. Butcher had been working with an international nondenominational ministry for children, teaching and illustrating Bible stories, when he and a colleague, Bill Biel, began making inspirational greeting cards and posters featuring his winsome characters in the early 1970s. “I came up with ‘Precious’ and he came up with ‘Moments,’” Mr. Butcher told The Kansas City Star in 1995.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Overlooked No More: Hansa Mehta, Who Fought for Women’s Equality in India and Beyond

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      This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.Human rights has long been considered a Western concept, but recent scholarship has been uncovering the influence of women from the global south. Women like Hansa Mehta.Mehta stood up against the British government during India’s struggle for independence. She campaigned for women’s social and political equality and their right to an education. And she fought for her ideals during the framing of the constitution for a newly independent India.Mehta with Eleanor Roosevelt in 1949, when they were the only two women named as delegate to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights.Marvin Bolotsky/United NationsFor Mehta, women’s rights were human rights. This conviction was best exemplified at a 1947 meeting of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, to which she had been appointed as one of just two women delegates, alongside Eleanor Roosevelt. Mehta boldly objected to the wording of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the commission was tasked with framing.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Bette Nash, Longest-Serving Flight Attendant in the World, Dies at 88

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      A Guinness record-holder, she started flying in 1957, and never stopped. Her regular route from Washington to Boston was nicknamed the Nash Dash.Bette Nash, whose nearly seven decades of serving airline passengers aboard the Washington-to-Boston shuttle earned the route the nickname the Nash Dash and won her a spot in Guinness World Records as the longest-serving flight attendant in history, died on May 17. She was 88.Ms. Nash never officially retired, and her death, from breast cancer, was announced on Saturday by her employer, American Airlines. It did not say where she died. She lived in Manassas, Va.Ms. Nash entered service with Eastern Air Lines in November 1957, at the dawn of the jet age. Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, “I Love Lucy” was on TV and even short domestic flights were still a glamorous adventure.Wearing white gloves, heels and a pillbox hat, Ms. Nash served lobster and champagne, carved roast beef by request and passed out after-dinner cigarettes.Things have changed a lot since then — the smoking is gone, and so is the carved meat — but Ms. Nash remained largely the same.After a brief stint in Miami, she began flying out of Washington in 1961, usually shuttle hops to New York and Boston — an assignment she preferred, even when seniority gave her the choice of routes, because she could return to her home in Northern Virginia every evening to care for her son, who had Down syndrome.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Bill Walton, N.B.A. Hall of Famer and Broadcasting Star, Dies at 71

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      He won championships in high school, college (U.C.L.A.) and the pros (Trail Blazers and Celtics) before turning to TV as a talkative game analyst in the college ranks.Bill Walton, a center whose extraordinary passing and rebounding skills helped him win two national college championships with U.C.L.A. and one each with the Portland Trail Blazers and Boston Celtics of the N.B.A., and who overcame a stutter to become a loquacious commentator, died on Monday at his home in San Diego. He was 71.The N.B.A. said he died of colon cancer.A redheaded hippie and devoted Grateful Dead fan, Walton was an acolyte of the U.C.L.A. coach John Wooden and the hub of the Bruins team that won N.C.A.A. championships in 1972 and 1973 and extended an 88-game winning streak that had begun in 1971. He was named the national player of the year three times.Walton’s greatest game was the 1973 national championship against Memphis State, played in St. Louis. He got into foul trouble in the first half, but went on to score a record 44 points on 21-for-22 shooting and had 11 rebounds in U.C.L.A.’s 87-66 victory. It was the school’s ninth title in 10 years.Walton — not yet known for his often hyperbolic, stream of consciousness speaking skills — refused to say much after the game. As he left the locker room, he told reporters, “Excuse me, I want to go meet my friends. I’m splitting.”He played one more year at U.C.L.A. before being selected by Portland first overall in the 1974 N.B.A. draft. He weathered injuries, two losing seasons under Coach Lenny Wilkens and criticism over his vegetarian diet and his red ponytail and beard before winning the 1977 championship under Coach Jack Ramsay.“I think Jack Ramsay reached Walton,” Eddie Donovan, the Knicks general manager, told the columnist Dave Anderson of The New York Times. “Of all the coaches in our league, Jack Ramsay is the closest to being the John Wooden type — scholarly, available. I think Walton responded to that.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Stanley Goldstein, Who Helped Make CVS a Pharmacy Giant, Dies at 89

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      The small chain that he, a brother and a third partner opened in 1963 had become the nation’s largest by the time he retired as its chief executive three decades later.Stanley P. Goldstein, who in the early 1960s helped start a retail chain named Consumer Value Stores, which, after shortening its name to CVS — because, he said, fewer letters meant cheaper signs — grew into the largest drugstore chain in the United States, died on Tuesday at his home in Providence, R.I. He was 89.The company, which is headquartered in Rhode Island, announced his death. Family members told The Providence Journal that the cause was cancer, diagnosed about a month ago.Mr. Goldstein was frequently described as informal and no-nonsense — much like the airy, brightly lit outlets that he, a brother and a third founder opened in 1963 to sell cut-price toothpaste, aftershave, Band-Aids and other personal care products.When he retired as chief executive in 1998, the company had more than 4,000 stores. Today, it has more than 9,000 outlets in the United States and its territories, and its revenues are larger than those of Exxon Mobil, Microsoft and Ford.Mr. Goldstein, who graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1955, at first had little enthusiasm for retail sales, a business that he knew, from the experience of his father, Israel Goldstein, was cutthroat. Instead, he became a stockbroker.But when Mr. Goldstein’s father died, his brother Sidney persuaded him to help take over the father’s struggling enterprise, which had begun by selling bags and other paper products to grocery stores and had branched out to offer sundry health and beauty aids, displayed near the cash registers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Don Perlin, Comic Book Artist Who Found Success Late, Dies at 94

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      His Moon Knight was a hit in the 1970s, 30 years after he began his career. Bloodshot, another popular superhero, followed two decades later.Don Perlin, a veteran comic book artist who, after decades in the industry, helped create the popular but nontraditional superheroes Moon Knight and Bloodshot, died on May 14 in Jacksonville, Fla. He was 94. His death, in a nursing home, was confirmed by his stepson Leslie Blumenfeld.Mr. Perlin began working in the comic book industry in the late 1940s, but some of his greatest successes came later — first in the ’70s and later in the ’90s.In 1974, he was recruited by Roy Thomas, an editor at Marvel, to draw the series Werewolf by Night. The next year as part of that series, he and the writer Doug Moench created Moon Knight, a mercenary armed with silver weaponry to slay supernatural creatures. In 1976, the creative team introduced the idea that Moon Knight had multiple identities, which would eventually be revealed to be a sign of a dissociative identity disorder. In 2022, Oscar Isaac starred as the character in a six-part series on Disney+.“He appreciated the idea that these characters that he, his colleagues and his friends had created so long ago endured,” said another stepson, the jazz journalist Larry Blumenfeld.Another enduring character Mr. Perlin worked on was Bloodshot, a hero powered by nanotechnology. The character, created with the writers Bob Layton and Kevin VanHook, first appeared in 1992 in a comic book published by Valiant. Vin Diesel played the character in a 2020 feature film.The character Bloodshot, right, created by Mr. Perlin with Bob Layton and Kevin VanHook, first appeared in 1992.Valiant ComicsWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More