We wrote about this Playboy curse on Adult Cyber Mart www.adultcybermart.com/Home.html a couple of weeks ago...see that link at the end of this story:
from www.latimes.com - Yvette Vickers, an early Playboy playmate whose credits as a B-movie actress included such cult films as “Attack of the 50-Foot Woman” and “Attack of the Giant Leeches,” was found dead last week at her Benedict Canyon home. Her body appears to have gone undiscovered for months, police said.
Vickers, 82, had not been seen for a long time. A neighbor discovered her body in an upstairs room of her Westwanda Drive home on April 27. Its mummified state suggests she could have been dead for close to a year, police said.
The official cause of death will by determined by the Los Angeles county coroner's office, but police said they saw no sign of foul play.
Vickers had lived in the 1920s-era stone and wood home for decades, and it served as the background for some of her famous modeling pictures. But over time it had become dilapidated, exposed in some places to the elements.
Susan Savage, an actress, went to check on Vickers after noticing old letters and cobwebs in her elderly neighbor's mailbox.
"The letters seemed untouched and were starting to yellow," Savage said. "I just had a bad feeling."
After pushing open a barricaded front gate and scaling a hillside, Savage peered through a broken window with another piece of glass taped over the hole. She decided to enter the house after seeing a shock of blond hair, which turned out to be a wig.
The inside of the home was in disrepair and it was hard to move through the rooms because boxes containing what appeared to be clothes, junk mail and letters formed barriers, Savage said. Eventually, she made her way upstairs and found a room with a small space heater still on.
She was looking at a cordless phone that appeared to have been knocked off its cradle when she first saw the body on the floor, she said. Savage had known Vickers but the remains were unrecognizable, she said.
She remembered her neighbor as an elegant women in a broad straw hat, dressed in white, with flowing blond hair and "a warm smile."
"She kept to herself, had friends and seemed like a very independent spirit," Savage said. "To the end she still got cards and letter from all over the world requesting photos and still wanting to be her friend."
Savage said the neighbors felt terrible.
"We've all been crying about this," she said. "Nobody should be left alone like that."
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From: www.adultcybermart.com/StoryXBiz.html - http://www.adultcybermart.com/StoryXBiz.html -
....Then there's the Playboy hoodoo. Anna Nicole Smith, as we all know, died in Hollywood, Fla., at the age of 39, after she collapsed in her hotel room and was found to be unresponsive.
Movie star and first-ever Playmate Marilyn Monroe and Playmates Willy Rey and Elisa Bridges died of drug overdoses; actress Sharon Tate and Playmates Star Stowe and Dorothy Stratten were murdered.
A drug overdose apparently took the life of Bridges, the magazine's Miss December 1994. Playboy posted an announcement of her Feb. 7, 2002, on its Web site a few days later, saying Bridges had died from "natural causes in Los Angeles" at the age of 28. But the Los Angeles County coroner later found that a massive accidental drug overdose killed her. The drug in question? Heroin.
Willy Rey, a Vancouver woman featured as Playboy's 1971 centerfold, took her own life at age 23 by consuming a large quantity of barbiturates in August 1973.
Sharon Tate - the late wife of now-exiled film director Roman Polanski- once did a Playboy shoot and was murdered in the couple's house in August 1969 along with four friends by members of serial killer Charles Manson's family.
Playboy Playmate Star Stowe, Miss February 1977, dated Kiss band member Gene Simmons. Then Stowe slipped from the spotlight and into prostitution, alcoholism and drug abuse after moving to Ft. Lauderdale. Only days before her 41st birthday, in 1997, Stowe was found murdered in Coral Springs, Fla.
Dorothy Stratten was a former ice cream shop employee from Vancouver before rising to fame as a Playboy centerfold and movie ingenue. She was the Playmate of the Year in 1980. That same year, she was found shot to death in Los Angeles in what police believed was a murder-suicide involving her estranged husband and ex-manager Paul Snider. Stratten was only 20. The pair's bodies were found together with a gun in the bedroom of the home they both owned in West Los Angeles.
Others who appeared in the magazine died young in car crashes. Claudia Jennings, the Playmate of the Year in 1970 and also Miss November 1969, was killed in an accident in 1979 at the age of 29 when she fell asleep at the wheel of her VW convertible in southern California.
Just recently, 1968 Playboy Playmate of the Year Victoria Vetri alias Angela Dorian alias Victoria Rathgeb has been ordered to stand trial on an attempted murder charge for allegedly shooting her husband down the hall from their Hollywood apartment in October, 2010.
Rathgeb's husband of 25 years testified that he left the couple's apartment after his wife accused him of being unfaithful, and that he was waiting for the building's elevator door to open when she allegedly put a bullet in him.
Rathgeb was arrested the same day by the Los Angeles Police Department's Hollywood Division and has remained jailed since on $1.53 million bail. Making this case extremely ironic is the fact that the weapon in question was a gift to Rathgeb from director Roman Polanski.
Then we had an unfortunate situation in Westlake, Ohio involving the former and late Playboy Playmate Jennifer Jackson. Westlake police arrested Jackson and charged her with disorderly intoxication. Officers were dispatched to a trailer park when they arrived, they found Jackson and her new husband, 52-year old James Thompson, under the influence of alcohol. Jackson, a 1989 playmate, said she did nothing wrong and had no idea why police arrested her though Jackson has had several recent run-ins with law enforcement.
In 2005, Jackson was charged with receiving stolen property, but charges were later dropped. She was also arrested and charged with theft and drunk driving though police also say they found marijuana in her possession. Jackson would eventually be found dead of a drug overdose in January of 2010.
