VIDEO.RttP{Death caught on tape}

Most people go gently into that good night, ignominiously withering away in their sleep or stuffed with tubes in a hospital bed. They end their lives with the same thudding mediocrity that they lived them.

Not Budd Dwyer, the king of public relations suicides. You only wish you could die as gloriously as he did. A politician by trade, he couldn't deny his vocation's innate exhibitionist tendencies. On January 22, 1987, a day before he was to be sentenced for o bribery conviction, the cholesterol-stoked Pennsylvania State Treasurer summoned a press conference. He then blasted his dome while the TV cameras rolled, ensuring that his death would be enjoyed by generations to come.

What chrome-plated balls. Hail Bud Dwyer!

His stunning curtain call started when a jury found him guilty of awarding a $4.6-million contract to a California computer firm in exchange for a three-hundred-thousand-dollar kickback. Although the deal never went through, Dwyer faced a possible fifty-five-year sentence. Maintaining his innocence, Dwyer delivered thirty minutes of aimless declamations in front of news reporters, claiming that friends had likened him to a "modern-day Job" and that his imprisonment would be "an American gulag." He was as white as Casper the Friendly Ghost after soliloquizing, his beige skull soaked in sweat under the hot lights.

After handing out some sealed letters to his aides, he reached into a manila envelope and pulled out a blued-steel .357 Magnum revolver. "Please leave the room if this will affect you," he calmly exclaimed amid cries of "Budd! Don't do this!. . . Budd, listen to mel" Before anyone could wrest the gun away from him, he shoved the barrel in his mouth and tripped the hammer, knocking himself back against the Pennsylvania state flag and onto the floor. The blood streamed from his nose like water from a faucet.

The video cameras, of course, zoomed in on his plasma-smeared face. Horrified yelps of "Oh, my God!" and "Holy shit!" spiraled above the sound of clicking shutters. "Don't panic," beseeched an oily middle-aged man, holding out his palms and stepping in front of Budd's bulk. "Don't panic. Someone call the ambulance and a doctor and the police. Don't panic, please. Show a little decorum, please. Dear God in heaven. Alright, you've got your footage. Would you kindly wrap up your footage, get your cameras out-please get out of the room. You've got everything that con be gotten at this point. Please. Paul, please. Paul, please! wrap up your cameras and get out of the room. Oh, my God in heaven. Dear God in heaven. Please, Paul, please! That's enough! enough! Please leave the room!”

Cameramen FINALLY turned off their videocams and virtually flew back to their TV stations the gruesome images. Dwyer's suicide replayed nationally, with most broadcasters having the "decorum" to stop the tape when Budd whipped out his gun. But Philadelphia’s WPVI-TV and WPXI-TV in Pittsburgh were bold enough to let the video wind down to its crimson conclusion. A televison commentator would later call Dwyers final act the "super bowl of suicides."

Tasteless or not, it was undeniably a dazzling gesture, much more sweeping than anything Dwyer could have done as the Keystone State’s chief bean counter. Rather than rot away in the pen with fifty dicks up his ass, he went out blazing, theatrically, on his terms.

We love you Budd Dwyer. We honestly love you.

--from ANSWER ME! Magazine.