Milestones

By Melissa August; Peter Bailey; Elizabeth L. Bland; Unmesh Kher; Nadia Mustafa Sunday, Mar. 14, 2004
    • CHARGED. SUSAN LINDAUER, 41, former Washington journalist and congressional aide; with conspiring to act as an unregistered agent of the Iraqi intelligence service and engaging in prohibited financial transactions with the Iraqi government; in New York City. Lindauer, a cousin of White House chief of staff Andrew Card, denied the charges, telling reporters "I'm an antiwar activist, and I'm innocent."

    SENTENCED. JOHN ALLEN MUHAMMAD, 43, to death; for terrorizing the D.C. area with a three-week sniper spree in October 2002 that left 10 people dead; in Manassas, Va. His accomplice, LEE BOYD MALVO, 19, was sentenced to life in prison without parole.


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    DIED. JOHN WILLIAMS, 35, son of Boston Red Sox Hall of Famer Ted Williams; of leukemia; in Los Angeles. A former minor-league ballplayer and owner of sports-related businesses, he helped turn his father into a posthumous punch line when he had the elder Williams' body frozen at an Arizona cryonics laboratory.

    DIED. ROBERT PASTORELLI, 49, beefy film and stage actor best known for his role as the ever-present screwball house painter Eldin on the CBS sitcom Murphy Brown; of an apparent drug overdose; in Los Angeles.

    DIED. ABU ABBAS, 56, mastermind of the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro; of natural causes; in U.S. custody in Baghdad. In 1976 he founded the Palestine Liberation Front, whose members seized the boat, fatally shot American Leon Klinghoffer and pushed him, in his wheelchair, into the Mediterranean. Abbas was captured by U.S. special forces in Baghdad last April, nearly two decades after being convicted in absentia by an Italian court.

    DIED. SPALDING GRAY, 62, confessional storyteller and movie actor; in New York City, where his body was found floating in the East River two months after his disappearance. Gray acted in New York experimental theater and created a series of stage monologues on such topics as the Vietnam War (Swimming to Cambodia, in 1984) and his own writing (Monster in a Box, 1992). He had a history of depression, made worse by a 2001 car accident that fractured his skull and crushed his hip.

    DIED. PAUL WINFIELD, 62, actor who brought an imposing demeanor and human-size emotions to roles ranging from Diahann Carroll's boyfriend in the 1960s TV sitcom Julia to Martin Luther King Jr. in the '78 mini-series King; of a heart attack; in Los Angeles. Raised in L.A.'s Watts section, he turned down a scholarship to Yale to pursue stage acting on the West Coast, where Sidney Poitier gave him his first film break in 1969's The Lost Man. He won an Oscar nomination for his role as a sharecropper father in the '72 film Sounder.

    DIED. MARSHALL FRADY, 64, reporter who documented the South's social and political upheaval during the civil-rights era; of cancer; in Greenville, S.C., where he had recently joined the faculty of his alma mater, Furman University. The son of a Southern Baptist minister in Georgia, he wrote seven books, including a 1968 biography of Alabama Governor George Wallace, and later became an Emmy-winning correspondent for ABC's documentary unit.

    DIED. FRANCES DEE, 96, smart, lustrous star of Hollywood's golden age; in Norwalk, Conn. As a lark, after the University of Chicago, she took a bit part in movies and graduated to co-starring roles in such films as An American Tragedy, Little Women and I Walked with a Zombie. Equally impressive by Hollywood standards, she sustained a 57-year marriage to actor Joel McCrea.