Mark Ruffalo’s Bro Died In Russian Roulette Game

In a sad twist that no one expected, it was revealed that Mark Ruffalo’s brother Scott was not murdered, but died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound that apparently occurred during a game of Russian Roulette. Shaha Mishaal Adham, 26, has been released from the Beverly Hills jail where she was being held, and her lawyer insists that she will not be charged with anything. Apparently Adham walked into the scene after arriving at Ruffalo’s home to obtain her keys. “This was an accidental shooting by someone that plays with guns,” her attorney said. “A series of wrong decisions starting with her not staying at the scene of the shooting caused an incredible chain reaction of stupidity and bad luck.”

Our thoughts continue to go out to the family of Scott Ruffalo, who will be buried at a private service this week.

William Balfour, the only suspect in the triple murder of Jennifer Hudson’s mom, brother and nephew, will not be walking out of jail today. Balfour is currently being held on a parole violation, but was thisclose to being released if there were no other violations found to keep him behind bars. His pregnant girlfriend is responsible for extending his lockdown, after she told cops he was in possession of a gun that matched the one used in the murder.

His girlfriend has also told authorities that Balfour confessed to being involved in the murders, and he has admitted to being at the Hudson home the morning the family members were gunned down. Looks like confession-watch has officially started.  [ChicagoTribune. Photo: FilmMagic]

A great fury gripped America in 1910 after boxer Jack Johnson became the first undisputed black heavyweight champion of the world. In those unenlightened times, a desegregated fight was unheard of. But after years of dodging Johnson’s challenges, white champ James J. Jeffries came out of retirement “for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a Negro.”

When the pair squared off in Reno, the crowd chanted “Kill the nigger” and the ringside band played “All Coons Look Alike to Me.” And then Jeffries threw in the towel in the 15th round. When the news broke, riots and lynchings around the U.S. claimed the lives of at least 20 blacks and two whites.

Johnson was hounded out of the country for marrying a white woman in 1911, lost his title in Cuba in 1915, and spent the remainder of his life as the kind of fallen spectacle we now call “Mike Tyson.” Racism, as ever, remains the hardest palooka to keep down. — Charles Bottomley

After the jump, watch a clip of Jack Johnson’s 1909 fight.
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Ah, the joys of minor league stardom. For Bob Crane, his six-season sentence making the world laugh at Nazis in Hogan’s Heroes brought him just that. The dedicated sex addict lived a life full of barflies with rug-burned knees and sheets crusted with dried jizz.

When his friend John Carpenter (no relation to the Halloween director) got him a prehistoric video camera, he started filming his sexcapades — many of them co-starring his techie pal. The orgy came to a premature end in 1978, when Bob was found bludgeoned to death in an Arizona hotel. Carpenter was the prime suspect, but DNA tests on the blood found in his car were inconclusive.

The 2002 film Auto Focus revived Crane’s notoriety, portraying him as a churchgoing family man who ends up screwing his brains out. The Cranes were disgusted. “My father had been having extramarital affairs and photographing hundreds of nude women engaged in sexual activity since the 1940s … He was an overly sexual person from an early age,” protested son Scotty — who, to prove it, posted prehistoric porn loops featuring Pop on the Web. Even his father might agree that some things are better left behind closed doors. — Charles Bottomley

After the jump, watch Bob perform “These Boots Were Made for Walkin’” — on the drums!

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In 1921, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was the biggest comic actor in America, the Jazz Age’s answer to Will Farrell. Paramount was paying him $1 million to make six laff riots a year (that’s more than 12 million in 2008 dollars). One fan described dancing with him as “like floating in the arms of a huge doughnut.” Then, 30-year-old aspiring actress Virginia Rappe died of a ruptured bladder after an epic party in Arbuckle’s San Francisco hotel room. Oops.

The cops concluded that the damage had been done by Arbuckle’s 300-pound girth during sexual intercourse. He was booked after a friend of the actress claimed Arbuckle had raped Rappe in the hotel room. Rumors quickly swirled around the case. It was whispered that Rappe had been abused by everything from an icicle to a champagne bottle.

After two mistrials, Arbuckle was acquitted, but the legal fees left him penniless. In 1922, he was banned from making movies and left with but a solitary friend — alcohol. Arbuckle died on June 30, 1933, aged 46, ironically the day after he had been signed by Warner Bros. to make his first feature film in 12 years. — Chuck Bottomley

On April 20, 1999, two Columbine High School students walked into their school in Littleton, Colorado, shot and killed thirteen people, and injured twenty-three others before turning the guns on themselves. The massacre shocked the country into a wave of introspection and accusation. Just who or what could have led these young men to commit such a gruesome act?

Fingers flailed and landed on a skinny man caked in face paint and dressed in gothic garb similar to that favored by the murderers. He also had a few hit albums under his black leather belt, but that didn’t stop critics from blaming Marilyn Manson for influencing the teens to kill. Pundits and politicians, including Senator Joe Lieberman, attacked Manson, labeling the artist a “shock rocker” whose band was the “sickest group ever promoted by a mainstream record company.” Manson fought back with a piece in Rolling Stone: “When it comes down to who’s to blame for the high school murders in Littleton, Colorado, throw a rock and you’ll hit someone who’s guilty. … when these tragedies happen, most people don’t really care any more than they would about the season finale of Friends or The Real World.”

In 2001, the band’s “Fight Song” video, featuring goth kids battling jocks, was alleged to be a commentary on the tragedy. Manson replied to the rumor: “People will put into it what they want if it helps them sell newspapers … Flak isn’t my job.” True. Now that he’s divorced from burlesque babe Dita Von Teese, his job consists mostly of feeding tabloids news of his romance with 19-year old actress Evan Rachel Wood. Even when it’s just about sex, Manson’s still scandalous.

As a record producer, pint-sized Phil Spector created the sound of the 1960s, using a multitude of instruments to re-create the feeling of a first kiss and the fracture of a broken heart. Through the 1970s and ’80s, the reclusive Spector earned a reputation as a borderline psycho and gun-nut. He has waved pistols at John Lennon and Leonard Cohen.

Bad craziness undid Spector when, in 2003, a dead B-movie starlet was found in his home. Lana Clarkson had died of a gunshot wound that Spector blamed on “accidental suicide.” In an interview given a week earlier, he had described himself as “relatively insane.” Phil didn’t help his sanity’s cause when he appeared at his second-degree murder trial in a variety of wigs that made him look like everything from a blond pageboy to a collision between TV’s Screech and a bottle of Rogaine.

In 2007, a deadlocked jury resulted in a mistrial. In public, the jury is still out on Phil Spector. Phil is just out to lunch. — Charles Bottomley

Watch Tina and Ike Turner perform Spector’s “River Deep, Mountain High” below.

Sex Pistols member Sid Vicious was only 20 when he met Nancy Spungen in 1977. British punk god and veteran American groupie bonded instantly over their mutual passion for extreme drug use. Less than two years later, both were dead.

The story goes that the couple holed up in Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel after the Pistols broke up to binge on smack while planning Sid’s solo career. On October 12, 1978, Nancy was found in the couple’s bathroom, dead from a knife wound in her abdomen. Ten days later Sid slit his own wrist. He survived, but only to be charged with Nancy’s murder (the knife was traced back to him) before overdosing on February 2, 1979, at the home of his new girlfriend.

Speculation still swirls about both deaths. Some say that Sid’s overprotective mom injected him with a lethal dose of heroin to spare him from prison. Others maintain that it was drug dealers that stabbed Nancy. In his book Vicious: Too Fast to Live, Alan Parker argues that both were murdered by Rockets Redglare, an East Village actor and alleged drug dealer. Tragic? Yes. Totally sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll? Yeah, baby.

Although he was best known for his soulful odes to racial harmony and sexual bliss, singer Marvin Gaye’s personal life was anything but laid back. At age 44, Gaye publicly admitted he was long-time “drug addict and sex freak”, a Safe-for-Work version of one ex-wife’s accusations that Gaye was a porn fiend and chronic masturbator prone to violence and coke binges.

Gaye’s double life mirrored that of his father, Marvin Pence Gay Sr., a fundamentalist preacher in Washington, DC. Despite vowing to wipe out vice in all its guises, Gay Sr. was also a cross-dresser who whipped his children. Unsurprisingly, tension and arguments were common under his roof. Marvin and his father had fierce brawls, the singer later changing his last name to “Gaye” to distance himself.

In 1984, in a house filled with guns, booze, and blow, the Grammy-winning singer and his father had their final skirmish, this time over misplaced business papers. After Gaye knocked his father to the floor, 70-year-old Marvin Sr. got up, retrieved the pistol his son had given him for Christmas, and shot him twice at point blank range, killing him instantly. In a jailhouse interview, Gay Sr. was asked if he loved his son. He responded, “Let’s say that I didn’t dislike him.”

America reeled when, in 1996, six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey was discovered strangled and sexually assaulted in the wine cellar of her family’s home in Boulder, Colorado.

The former Little Miss Merry Christmas’s painted Kewpie-doll face became a nightly news fixture, and America was gripped by a necromantic furor. Armchair detectives pondered clues such as the undigested pineapple found in her stomach and the unidentified male DNA found in her underwear. As the case ground on, everyone from the police to supermarket tabloids to Colorado’s governor began to suspect the parents’ involvement. Allegations of a cover-up raged; grand juries were convened. But no one was ever charged.

In 2006, just as public interest had waned, ex-schoolteacher John Karr confessed to Ramsey’s murder. Karr fit the profile–if the profile is looking like someone you’d never leave your six-year-old alone with. But no positive DNA match was made, and Karr was found to be living in Alabama at the time of the murder.

In July 2008, the Colorado D.A. officially cleared the girl’s parents of any wrongdoing in her death. “JonBenét” can now be filed away in the bulging Cold Case album of American scandals. — Charles Bottomley