Troilus and Cressida

"Troilus and Cressida, that most vexing and ambiguous of Shakespeare’s plays, strikes the modern reader as a contemporary document—its investigation of numerous infidelities, its criticism of tragic pretensions, above all, its implicit debate between what is essential in human life and what is only existential are themes of the twentieth century. ... This is tragedy of a special sort—the “tragedy” the basis of which is the impossibility of conventional tragedy."

Well, it's clearly autobiographical, and a deeply personal allegorical account of The Secret History of Prince Henry, the uncrowned bastard King Henry XI and the romance of his parents, Elizabeth Tudor and Edward De Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

Enter MENELAUS and PARIS, fighting: then THERSITES

THERSITES

The cuckold and the cuckold-maker are at it. Now,
bull! now, dog! 'Loo, Paris, 'loo! now my double-
henned sparrow! 'loo, Paris, 'loo! The bull has the
game: ware horns, ho!
Exeunt PARIS and MENELAUS
Enter MARGARELON

MARGARELON

Turn, slave, and fight.

THERSITES

What art thou?

MARGARELON

A bastard son of Priam's.

THERSITES

I am a bastard too; I love bastards: I am a bastard
begot, bastard instructed, bastard in mind, bastard
in valour, in every thing illegitimate. One bear will
not bite another, and wherefore should one bastard?
Take heed, the quarrel's most ominous to us: if the
son of a whore fight for a whore, he tempts judgment:
farewell, bastard.

Exit

The Tragedy of Existence: Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida”

By Joyce Carol Oates

Originally published as two separate essays, in Philological Quarterly, Spring 1967, and Shakespeare Quarterly, Spring 1966. Reprinted in The Edge of Impossibility.

---

Troilus and Cressida, that most vexing and ambiguous of Shakespeare’s plays, strikes the modern reader as a contemporary document—its investigation of numerous infidelities, its criticism of tragic pretensions, above all, its implicit debate between what is essential in human life and what is only existential are themes of the twentieth century. Philosophically, the play must be one of the earliest expressions of what is now called the “existential” vision; psychologically, it not only represents the puritanical mind in its anguished obsession with the flesh overwhelming the spirit, but it works to justify that vision. It is not only the expense of spirit in a “waste of shame” that is catastrophic, but the expenditure of all spirit—for the object of spiritual adoration (even if, like Helen, it is not unfaithful) can never be equivalent to the purity of energy wasted. Shakespeare shows in this darkest and least satisfying of his tragedies the modern, ironic, nihilistic spectacle of man diminished, not exalted. There is no question of the play’s being related to tragedy; calling it one of the “dark comedies” is to distort it seriously. This is tragedy of a special sort—the “tragedy” the basis of which is the impossibility of conventional tragedy.

This special tragedy, then, will be seen to work within the usual framework of tragedy, using the materials and the structure demanded of an orthodox work. What is withheld—and deliberately withheld—is “poetic justice.” Elsewhere, Shakespeare destroys both good and evil together, but in Troilus and Cressida the “good” characters are destroyed or destroy themselves. The “evil” characters (Achilles, Cressida) drop out of sight; their fates are irrelevant. Ultimately, everyone involved in the Trojan War will die, except Ulysses and Aeneas, and it may be that Shakespeare holds up this knowledge as a kind of backdrop against which the play works itself out, the audience’s knowledge contributing toward a higher irony; but this is probably unlikely. The play as it stands denies tragic devastation and elevation. It follows other Shakespearean tragedies in showing the annihilation of appearances by reality, but the “reality” achieved is a nihilistic vision. Thus, Pandarus closes the story by assuming that many in his audience are “brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade” and by promising to bequeath them his “diseases.” The customary use of language to restore, with its magical eloquence, the lost humanity of the tragic figure is denied here. Othello is shown to us first as an extraordinary man, then as a man, then as an animal, but finally and most importantly as a man again, just before his death; this is the usual tragic curve, the testing and near-breaking and final restoration of a man. Through language Othello ascends the heights he has earlier relinquished to evil. But in Troilus and Cressida Troilus ends with a declaration of hatred for Achilles and a promise to get his revenge upon him. He ends, as he has begun, in a frenzy. His adolescent frenzy of love for Cressida gives way to a cynical, reckless frenzy of hatred for Achilles. Nowhere does he attain the harmonious equilibrium required of the tragic hero or of the man we are to take as a spokesman for ourselves. Even his devastating scene of “recognition” is presented to the audience by a device that suggests comedy: Thersites watching Ulysses watching Troilus watching Cressida with Diomed. Troilus is almost a tragic figure—and it is not an error on Shakespeare’s part that he fails to attain this designation, for the very terms of Troilus’ experience forbid elevation. He cannot be a tragic figure because his world is not tragic but only pathetic. He cannot transcend the sordid banalities of his world because he is proudly and totally of that world, and where everything is seen in terms of merchandise, diseases, food, cooking, and the “glory” of bloodshed, man’s condition is never tragic. That this attitude is “modern” comes as a greater surprise when one considers the strange, fairy-tale background of the play (a centaur fights on the Trojan side, for instance) and the ritualistic games of love and war played in the foreground.

Shakespeare’s attempt here to pierce the conventions demanded by a typical audience’s will takes its most bitter image in the various expressions of infidelity. Infidelity is the natural law of the play’s world, and, by extension, of the greater world: woman’s infidelity to man, the body’s infidelity to the soul, the infidelity of the ideal to the real, and the larger infidelity of “time,” that “great-sized monster of ingratitudes.” Here, man is trapped within a temporal, physical world, and his rhetoric, his poetry, even his genius cannot free him. What is so modern about the play is its existential insistence upon the complete inability of man to transcend his fate. Other tragic actors may rise above their predicaments, as if by magic, and equally magical is the promise of a rejuvenation of their sick nations (Lear, Hamlet, etc.), but the actors of Troilus and Cressida, varied and human as they are, remain for us italicized against their shabby, illusion-ridden world. Hector, who might have rejected a sordid end, in fact makes up his mind to degrade himself and is then killed like an animal. As soon as he relinquishes the “game” of chivalry, he relinquishes his own right to be treated like a human being, and so his being dragged behind Achilles’ horse is a cruel but appropriate fate, considering the violent climate of his world. One mistake and man reverts to the animal, or becomes only flesh to be disposed of. As for the spirit and its expectations they are demonstrated as hallucinatory. No darker commentary on the predicament of man has ever been written. If tragedy is a critique of humanism from the inside,¹ Troilus and Cressida is a tragedy that calls into question the very pretensions of tragedy itself.

In act 2, scene 2, the Trojans have a council of war, and Troilus and Hector debate. What they say is much more important than why they say it, a distinction that is also true about Ulysses’ speeches:

HECTOR Brother, she is not worth what she cloth cost The holding.

TROILUS What is aught but as ’tis valued?

HECTOR
But value dwells not in particular will;
It holds his estimate and dignity
As well wherein ’tis precious of itself
As in the prizer. (2.2.51-56)

Questions of “worth,” “cost,” and “value” permeate the play. Human relationships are equated with business arrangementsthe consummated love of Troilus and Cressida, for instance, is a “bargain made,” with Pandarus as legal witness. Here, it is Helen who is held in question, but clearly she is incidental to this crisis: Hector insists, along with most Western philosophers, that there is an essential value in things or acts that exists prior to their temporal existence and their temporal relationship to a “particular will.” They are not created by man but exist independently of him. In other words, men do not determine values themselves, by will or desire or whim. Values exist a priori; they are based upon certain natural laws, upon the hierarchy of degree that Ulysses speaks of in the first act. Hector parallels Ulysses in his belief that “degree, priority, and place,/ Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,/ Office, and custom” (1. 3. 86-88) are observed not only by man but by the natural universe. What is strange is that any personal guidance, any evidence of gods or God, is omitted; though the Olympian gods are concerned with the Trojan War, and even though a centaur fights magnificently in the field, the gods ultimately have nothing to do with the fate of the men involved. Like Greek tragedy, this play has certain “vertical” (or universal) moments that coincide with but can sometimes be only weakly explained by their “horizontal” or narrative position. The speeches of Ulysses and Hector are set pieces of this vertical sort, since they explain and insist upon values that must be understood so that the pathos to follow will be more clearly understood; the speeches are always out of proportion and even out of focus, compared to the situations that give rise to them. At these pointssignificantly, they come early in the playthere is a straining upward, an attempt on the part of the characters to truly transcend their predicaments. The predicaments, however, cannot be transcended because man is locked in the historical and the immediate. Ulysses’ brilliance cannot trigger Achilles into action, and, when Achilles wakes to action, all semblance of an ordered universe is destroyed; Hector is destined to kill a man “for his hide” and then to die ignobly, and so his groping after absolute meaning in act z must be undercut by a complete turnabout of opinion, when he suddenly and inexplicably gives in to the arguments of Troilus and Paris.

Troilus, the “essentialist” in matters concerning his own love, the weakly romantic courtier who has been transformed simply by the anticipation of love, is in this scene the more worldly and cynical of the two. Though he speaks of the “glory” of the war and Helen as a “theme of honor and renown” who will instigate them to deeds that will “canonize” them, his conviction that man creates all values out of his sense experiences is much more worldly than Hector’s Platonic idea that values exist prior to and perhaps independent of experience.² Reason itself is called into question: Helenus is accused by Troilus of “furring” his gloves with reason, and reason is equated with fear (2. 2. 32); “Nay, if we talk of reason,/ Let’s shut our gates, and sleep.” This exchange is usually interpreted as pointing up Troilus’ infatuation with honor as an extension of his infatuation with Cressida, but this insistence upon the relativity of all values is much “harder” (to use William James’s distinction between “hard” and “soft” thinkers) than Hector’s. What is most surprising is that this comes after Troilus’ earlier condemnation of Helen (she is “too starved a subject” for his sword). Hector, in his reply, calls upon a supratemporal structure of value that is at all times related to the rather sordid doings of Greeks and Trojans: actions are “precious” in themselves as well as in the “prizer.” His argument, based upon the “moral laws of nature” that demand a wife be returned to her husband, parallels Ulysses’ prophetic warnings concerning the unleashing of chaos that will result in a son’s striking a father dead. Hector says:

There is a law in each well-order’d nation
To curb those raging appetites that are
Most disobedient and refractory. (2.2.180-183)

In doing so, he has shifted his argument from the universal to the particular, speaking now of “law” within a nation and not “law” that exists prior to the establishment of any human community. If this shift, subtle as it is, is appreciated, then Hector’s sudden decision a few lines below is not so surprising. He gives so many excellent reasons for wanting to end the war, then says, “Yet, ne’ertheless,/ My spritely brethren, I propend to you/ In resolution to keep Helen still. . . .”

No doubt there is something wrong with the scene; no audience would ever be prepared for Hector’s sudden change of mind. But it is necessary for the play’s philosophic core that the greatest of the Trojans for some inexplicable reason will turn his back on reason itself, aligning himself with those of “distempered blood” though he seems to know much more than they. The scene makes sense if it is interpreted as a demonstration of the ineffectuality of reason as reason, the relativity of all values, and the existential cynicism that values are hallucinatory in the sense that they are products of man’s will. As Troilus says, “My will enkindled by mine eyes and ears,/ Two traded pilots ‘twixt the dangerous shores/ Of will and judgment” (2. 2. 63-65). Must Troilus be seen as a “lecher,” as one critic calls him,³ because he does not recognize that only marriage is sanctioned by heaven, not courtly love? On the contrary, it seems clear that Shakespeare is pointing toward a criticism of all values in the light of what we know of their originthrough the sensesand that Troilus’ flaw is not his inability to understand a moral code, but his humanity.

The limitations and obsessions of humanity define the real tragedy of this play and perhaps of any play, but only in Troilus and Cressida does Shakespeare refuse to lift man’s spirit above them.⁴ And it is certainly no error on the playwright’s part that the highly moral, highly chivalric Hector changes into quite another kind of gallant soldier when he is alone. In act 5, scene 6, Hector fights with Achilles and, when Achilles tires, allows him to escape; no more than a minute later he sees another Greek in “sumptuous” armor⁵ whom he wants to kill “for his hide.” Why the sudden change? It may well be that through allowing Achilles freedom, Hector gains greater glory for himself, and so his “chivalric” gesture is really an egoistic one. (Achilles has said earlier that he is overconfident and a little proud, despite everyone’s opinion of him4. 5. 74-75.) His sudden metamorphosis into a killer can be explained by the relativity of values in even the most stable of men when he can act without witnesses. Though the mysterious Greek runs away and really should not be chased, Hector does chase him and kill him. He does this out of lust for the man’s armor; he has refrained from killing Achilles because of his egoistic desire to uphold his reputation. The scene is also an allegorical little piece (most of the scenes involving Hector have an obviously symbolic, “vertical” thrust) that suggests that Death himself is present on the battlefield, tempting everyone with an external show of sumptuousness. Shakespeare, therefore, in two carefully executed though puzzling scenes, shows the upholder of “essentialist” views to switch suddenly and inexplicably to the opposite. His psychological insight is extraordinary here, for though the narrative inconsistency of Hector may baffle an audience, he shows that the will does indeed utilize knowledge for its own sake; “knowledge” may be in control but only because the will at that moment allows it. Jaspers speaks of the desire of man to subordinate himself to an “inconceivable supersensible” and to the “natural character of impulses and passions, to the immediacy of what is now present,”⁶ and it is this tragic instability of man that Shakespeare demonstrates.

The debate between what is essential and what is existential is carried on in a kind of running battle by Thersites, who speaks as a debased, maddened Fool licensed to roam about the Greek field. An intolerable character, and not at all an amusing one, he speaks with an intelligence equal to Ulysses’ but without any of Ulysses’ control. He is “lost in the labyrinth of [his] fury,” and we need not ask what he is so furious about: it is the condition of life itself He counters Ulysses’ speech on degree by various parodies of degree, Ulysses’ analytical mmd transformed in Thersites into a savage talent for splitting distinctions:

Agamemnon is a fool to offer to command Achilles;
Achilles is a fool to be commanded of Agamemnon;
Thersites is a fool to serve such a fool; and
Patroclus is a fool positive. (2.3. 67-71)

His curses are a disharmonious music that balances the overly sweet music attending Helen, and the result of his relentless cataloguing is certainly the calling-down of all ideals as they have been expressed in the first two acts of the play:

. . . Here’s Agamemnon, an honest fellow enough, and one that loves quails, but he has not so much brain as ear-wax and the goodly transformation of Jupiter there, his brother the bull, the primitive statue, and oblique memorial of cuckolds . . . to what form but that he is should wit larded with malice and malice forced with wit turn him to? To an ass, were nothing: he is both ass and ox; to an ox, were nothing: he is both ox and ass. To be a dog, a mule, a cat, a fitchew, a toad, a lizard, an owl, a puttock, or a herring without a roe, I would not care; but to be Menelaus! …. (5.1.56 ff.)

Thersites is to the Greeks and Trojans as the Fool is to Lear, except they learn nothing from him. While Ulysses in his famous speech on “degree” strains to leave the earth and to call into authority the very planets themselves, Thersites grovels lower and lower, sinking into the earth and dragging with him all the “glory” of this war: “Lechery, lechery! Still wars and lechery! Nothing else holds fashion.” He is almost ubiquitous, this maddened and tedious malcontent, and if his cynicism is exaggerated in regard to what he has actually seen, so are the romantic and chivalric ideals of the first half of the play exaggerated in regard to their objects. Thersites runs everywhere, from scene to scene, hating what he sees and yet obviously relishing it, for he is the very spirit of the play itself, a necessary balance to its fraudulent idealism. Significantly, he disappears just when the battle begins in earnest. He is last seen just after Patroclus is reported killed by Hector. After this, the action throws off all ceremonial pretensions, and men go out in the field to destroy, not to play a game. Once Achilles announces that he will kill Hector in “fellest manner,” we have no need for Thersites, who is of value only to negate pretensions. Perhaps he does return, in the figure of Pandarusfor the mocking, loathsome Pandarus who ends the play seems a new character altogether. He is really Thersites, but Pandarus is needed to unify the love plot: the play’s final word is “diseases,” a fitting one certainly, but one that makes more sense in Thersites’ mouth than in Pandarus’. Thersites’ is the most base, the most existential vision in the play, and if we hesitate to believe that it is also Shakespeare’s vision, we must admit that he has spent a great deal of time establishing it. His function is to call everything down to earth and to trample it. In his discordant music he celebrates what Troilus and others have been experiencing, and it is certainly Shakespeare’s belief, along with Thersites’, that “all the argument is a cuckold and a whore.”

The play’s great theme is infidelity, and it is this that links together the various separate actions. There are three stories herethat of Troilus and Cressida, that of the Greeks’ quarrel with Achilles, and that of Hector’s downfalland all three pivot around a revelation or demonstration of infidelity. Casting its shadow over the entire play, of course, is the infidelity of Helen. But it is not even a serious matter, this “fair rape”; it is a subject for bawdy jests for all except Menelaus. “Helen must needs be fair,/ When with your blood you daily paint her thus,” (1. 1. 95-96) Troilus observes bitterly, but a reflection of this type is little more than incidental. From time to time Greeks and Trojans register consciousness of what they are doing, but in general the games of love and war are enjoyed for their own sakes. It is characteristic of men to give their lives for such activities, Shakespeare suggests, not characteristic of just these men. It is characteristic of all love to be subject to a will that seems to be not our own, and, as Troilus says, “sometimes we are devils to ourselves” (4. 4. 95). Cressida is not just Cressida but all womenthe other woman in the play, Helen, is no more than a mirror image of Cressida. When Troilus says that Cressida has depraved their mothers, he is not speaking wildly but speaking symbolically. Hector’s sudden about-face is not freakish, but natural; Achilles brutality is not bestial, but human. Above all, the play does not concern isolated human beings but, like all Shakespeare’s tragedies, it contains the whole world by implication. Nowhere in the play is it suggested that there is a contrasting life somewhere else. Pandarus’ impudent address to the audience is intended to link his pandering with that of the audience’s generally, and to suggest that the play is a symbolic piece, the meanings of which accord with the experiences of the audience. This should be understood if the play is to be recognized as a kind of faulty tragedy and not just a farce or satire.

The infidelity theme is illustrated on many levels, some of them ingenious. Shakespeare’s conception of his art as existing in a kind of multidimensional spherehis use, for instance, of structure to comment upon content is nowhere so brilliant as in this play. It has been noted that Othello takes place in a double time,⁷ the foreground being the “timeless” time of the tragic narrative that is universal and the background an attempt to set up a plausible chronological order; in Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare uses structure to point up his irony, the discrepancy between man’s ideals and what he makes of them in reality. It is not “the world” as such that violates man’s ideals; it is man himself. The play begins with symmetrically balanced scenes: Troilus and Pandarus, then Cressida and Pandarus; the great Greek council of war, then the Trojan council; the central position (act 3, scene 2) of Paris and Helen, the magnificent lovers and the cause of the war, who are shown to be, unfortunately, insipid and vulgar. We move back and forth from Greek to Trojan worlds, and then, near the end of the play, the two are brought together when Cressida gives herself to the Greek Diomed. After this, the play seems to fall apart. Chaos threatens. The death of Hector is a butchery, and yet Hector has debased himself before his death. Troilus does not kill Diomed or Achilles but simply vows revenge; this is the last we see of him. Pandarus closes the play, not because what would seem to be a normal narrative has ended but because the play’s points have been made. Characters act in order to illustrate meanings, and then they disappear; there is no reason even to punish them, for justice is clearly not the way of the world, and certainly the infidelity of Cressida is a “given” for the audience, not a surprise. Here, Shakespeare uses technique to illustrate theme. The almost geometric precision of the play’s beginning is matched by the chaos of its ending. Its fairy-tale plots give way to psychological reality, and men live in earnest, thus precipitating the chaos that Othello envisioned as coming when love is destroyed. On a rather abstract level, we have the “infidelity” of the play’s unfolding as contrasted with its promises as a seemingly conventional work dealing with a familiar story.

The more literal demonstrations of infidelity deal with the relationship between man and woman, the relationship of man and time, the relationship of man with his ideals, and the relationship of the soul and the body. The most interesting of these is the last-mentioned, because in a sense it includes all the others.

Much, certainly, has been written on the theme of “time” in this play,⁸ and Ulysses’ marvelous speech calls attention to itself as one of the important set-pieces of the play. But the whole conception of “time” as having supplanted eternity rests upon an existential basisthe mortality of spirit and the corruptibility of the flesh; that is, Ulysses in act 3 rejects philosophically what he has said in the “degree” speech in act 1. It is no matter that all Ulysses is trying to do is to spur Achilles into action no desire in the play is ever equivalent to the homage paid to it; what is important is the assumption behind each of his lines:

Time hash, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,
A great-siz’d monster of ingratitudes:
Those scraps are good deeds past; which are devour’d
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon
As done: . . .
. . . . O! let not virtue seek
Remuneration for the thing it was;
For beauty, wit,
High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service,
Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all
To envious and calumniating time.
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin, . . .
(3.3. 148-175)

“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin”: a famous line rarely recognized as the savage indictment of human destiny it is. Here, Ulysses quite deliberately equates “high birth, vigor of bone, desert in service, love, friendship, and charity” as victims of “time”; it is not suggested that any of these outweigh the others simply because they are more spiritual. “Vigor of bone” may be calmly equated with “love,” for both are leveled by the passage of physical time: “The present eye praises the present object.” Man lives only in the present, a continuously changing present that consumes him and goes on to new flesh. This vision of life is possible only to someone who recognizes nothing beyond man as flesh.

So it is no surprise to Ulysses when Cressida behaves as she does. His language loses its bombastic quality once the Greek council scene in act 1 is over and, as the play continues, becomes direct and objective: “All’s done, my lord,” he tells Troilus when Cressida has exhibited her unfaithfulness. If the “degree” speech is compared with his later lines, it will seem to be pompous and excessively rhetorical.⁹ His vision of chaos is a vision so terrifying that he tries to restrain it through the use of tightly controlled language and imagery; there is the sense in this speech, with its interpretation of the cosmos in terms of man, and, most importantly, in terms of Achilles’ disobedience, of something weak and false, something wished for rather than believed. Ulysses leaps from the sight of the “hollow” Grecian tents upon the plain to the “heavens themselves” and tries to relate the two. His threat is that if degree is masked, everything will “include itself in power,” power will be overcome by will, will by appetite, and appetite will at last eat itself up, a universal wolf confronted with a universal prey. This is certainly ironic in that Ulysses is concerned specifically with power and that his intelligence is of value only as it directs the power of Achilles. While he seems to be speaking against raw power he is really speaking for it; and the greatest chaos of all is to come when Achilles does indeed go into battle, just as everyone wishes. This famous speech, with its evocation of a marvelous, orderly universe threatened by man’s willfulness, is, when examined, hardly more than a sophistic facade of rhetoric intended to bring power, will, and appetite into being. It is directed toward the same ends but is never so honest as the speeches of Troilus and Paris defending Helen. Even if the speech is accepted on its literal level, it is philosophically rejected by Ulysses’ later speech. Indeed, the tradition of considering Ulysses the wisest person in the play is suspect; as George Meyer points out, his wisdom has clear limitations.¹⁰ He seems to be an instrament rather than a fully realized person. Like a refined Thersites, he “sees” and “knows” things but he has little to do with what happens.

The infidelity of time is not the primary theme of the play, but is rather an illustration of the results of the tragic duality of man, his division into spirit and flesh. If we are to take Troilus as the moral center of the play, then the initiation into the discrepancy between the demands of the soul and those of the body is the central tragic dilemma. His experience is a moving one, and the fact that he is surrounded, in his naivete, with various types of sexual and moral degeneracy should not undercut his experience. Surely, the play is filled with “derision of folly,” and its relationship to the comical satires of Jonson and Marston is carefully detailed by Campbell,¹¹ but the experience of Troilus is not a satirized experience; it is quite clear that Shakespeare is sympathetic with his hero and expects his audience to share this sympathy.

Let us examine Troilus’ education in terms of his commitment to a sensualized Platonism, a mystic adoration of a woman he hardly knows. He begins as a conventional lover who fights “cruel battle” within and who leaps from extremes of sorrow to extremes of mirth because he has become unbalanced by the violence of what he does not seem to know is lust. In the strange love scene of act 3, scene 2, with its poetic heights and its bawdy depths, Troilus is giddy with expectation and his words are confused: does he really mean to say that he desires to “wallow” in the lily beds of Cressida’s love, or is this Shakespeare forcing him to reveal himself? The scene immediately follows the “honey sweet” scene in which Pandarus sings an obscene song to Paris and Helen and declares that love is a “generation of vipers”; certainly Troilus’ maddened sincerity is pathetic in this circumstance, since we have heard Cressida reveal herself earlier and give the lie to Troilus’ opinion of her: “she is stubborn-chaste against all suit” (1. 1. 101). After Pandarus brings them together, Cressida says, “Will you walk in, my lord?” ( 3. 2. 61). Troilus continues his rhetorical declaration of passion by lamenting the fact that the “monstruosity in love” lies in the will being infinite and the execution confined, and she says a second time in what is surely a blunt undercutting of his poetry, “Will you walk in, my lord?” Pandarus, meanwhile, bustles around them and comments upon their progress. It seems clear that Troilus of operating on a different level of understanding than are Cressida and Pandaruswhat he takes quite seriously they take casually. It is part of the “game.” Cressida has declared earlier that she lies “Upon my back, to defend my belly; upon my wit, to defend my wiles” (1. 2. 282-283). She is content to think of herself as a “thing” that is prized more before it is won (1. 2. 313), and how else can one explain her behavior with Diomed unless it is assumed that she is “impure” before becoming Troilus’ mistress? It is incredible to think that Troilus has corrupted her, that he has brought her to her degradation,¹² if only for naturalistic reasons; it is just as incredible as Desdemona’s supposed adultery with Cassio. On the contrary, Cressida must be seen as an experienced actress in the game of love, just as everyone else in the play with the exception of Troilus is experienced at “acting” out roles without ever quite believing in them.¹³ Shakespeare uses Calchas’ abandonment of the Trojans to signal Cressida’s coming infidelity. Just as the father betrays his native city, so does Cressida betray Troilus. Not much is made of Calchas in this play, perhaps because there are already so many characters, but Thersites does remark that he is a “traitor.” In earlier treatments, Calchas, who was a Trojan bishop, is a guide and counselor for the Greeks, a respected man; in later sources he is progressively downgraded.¹⁴ In this play he is nothing but a traitor whose flight to the Greeks brings about Cressida’s actual infidelity. Not that his behavior has caused hers: Cressida could have learned infidelity from any number of sources in her world.

Troilus’ tragedy is his failure to distinguish between the impulses of the body and those of the spirit. His “love” for Cressida, based upon a Platonic idea of her fairness and chastity, is a ghostly love without an object; he does not see that it would be really a lustful love based upon his desire for her body. Shakespeare is puritanical elsewhere, but I think in this play he reserves sympathy for the tragedy of the impermanence of love built upon lust; Troilus is a victim not of cunning or selfishness but simply of his own body. He may be comic in his earlier rhetorical excesses, and pathetic in his denial of Cressida’s truly being Cressida (act 5, scene 2), but his predicament as a human being is certainly sympathetic. In acadernic criticism there is often an intolerance for any love that is not clearly spiritual, but this failure to observe the natural genesis and characteristics of love distorts the human perspective of the work of art altogether. Troilus’ behavior and, indeed, his subsequent disillusionment are natural; he is not meant to be depraved, nor is his declaration of love in terms of sensual stimulationparticularly the sense of tastemeant to mark him as a hedonist and nothing more. It is Cressida, the calculating one who thinks of herself as a “thing,” and Diomed, so much more clever than Troilus, who are villainous. The first line of Sonnet 151 might apply to Troilus: “Love is too young to know what conscience is.” Troilus’ youthful lust is a lust of innocence that tries to define itself in terms of the spiritual and the heavenly, just as Ulysses’ speech on degree tries to thrust the disorderly Greeks into a metaphysical relationship to the universe and its “natural” laws. Both failTroilus because he does not understand his own feelings and Ulysses because there is, in fact, no relationship between man and the universe. In both failures there is the pathetic failure of man to recognize the limitations of the self and its penchant for rationalizing its desires. Nothing is ever equivalent to the energy or eloquence or love lavished upon it. Man’s goals are fated to be less than his ideals would have them, and when he realizes this truth he is “enlightened” in the special sense in which tragedy enlightens mena flash of bitter knowledge that immediately precedes death. It is difficult to believe, as Campbell argues, that the finale of Troilus and Cressida should be regarded only as the “intelligent use of an accepted artistic convention,”¹⁵ that is, as the ejection of derided characters in satire, and not as the expression of personal disillusionment of these characters. Troilus is not a satisfactory tragic hero, but he is certainly a human being who has suffered an education. The fact of his going off to die in what is left of the Trojan War would seem to annul the parallel Campbell makes with the banished Malvolio of Twelfth Night.

The play, with its large number of characters, submits various interpretations of itself to the audience.¹⁶ The most strident of the points of view is Thersites, who maintains one note and emerges as a kind of choral instrument to insist upon the betrayal of the spirit by the body. The violent rhythms of the playits jagged transitions and contrasts between sweetness and bawdiness, pomposity and blunt physical actionare most obviously represented by Thersites in his labyrinth of fury. If he reminds us of anyone else in Shakespeare, it is Iago, who cannot love and who must therefore drag everyone down to his bestial level. But Thersites is more mysterious a character than Iago because he figures not at all in the actionthe play would be different without him, but not radically different. He comes onto the stage and mocks the rituals that have characterized the first part of the play; we feel, after Troilus’ inflamed words and the Greeks’ pompous speeches, that this is a man who speaks the truth, who sees at once through all masks. Because it is static, his nihilism soon becomes wearisome. But he is not intended to be an entertaining character; he is little more than a voice that has attached itself to this war simply in order to interpret it.

Thersites makes his noisy entrance immediately after Ulysses explains his plot to get Achilles into action. He undercuts all pretensions of the council scene: if Agamemnon had boils, and the boils ran, then “would come some matter from him. I see none now.” And: “There’s Ulysses and old Nestor, whose wit was mouldy ere your grandsires had nails on their toes” (2. 1. 114-116). Patroclus, who is not a particularly unsympathetic character, is recognized by Thersites as Achilles’ “brach,” his “male varlet,” and his “masculine whore.” Thersites has the magical immunity and privilege of a court jester, and his fearlessness in speaking bluntly even to Achilles suggests that he is not to be explained in naturalistic terms so much as in symbolic terms. He calls for vengeance, the “Neapolitan bone-ache” on the whole camp, for this is a fitting curse for those who “war for a placket” (2. 3. 20-22) . Significantly, the other character who comes closest to Thersites’ cynicism is Diomed, who promises to prize Cressida according to her “worth” (4. 4. 133), and who speaks of Helen as “contaminated carrion.” Because he has no illusions at all, Diomed conquers Cressida at once. Thersites’ rage, however, is impotent, a rage to which no one seems to listen. He calls down curses upon the heroes who surround him in an effort to deflate their fraudulent romanticism and to make them less than human. Man in Thersites’ vision is a catalogue of parts; he is the maddened puritan who cannot endure the discrepancy between the ideals of man and the physical counterparts of these ideals, and who wants nothing so much as to rip to shreds the pretensions of the heroes and to substitute for their grandiose views of themselves a devastating image of man as a physical creature unable to transcend the meanness of his body. Here is Thersites in a typical curse:

. . . Now the rotten diseases of the south, the guts-griping, ruptures, catarrhs, loads o’ gravel i’ the back, lethargies, cold palsies, raw eyes, dirt-rotten livers, wheezing lungs, bladders full of imposthume, sciaticas, lime-kilns i’ the palm, incurable bone-ache, and the rivelled fee-simple of the tetter, take and take again such preposterous discoveries! ( 5. 1. 20-28 )

The effect of all this is exactly the opposite of that of a magical incantation. Thersites is used by Shakespeare to break illusions, to break the spells cast by the eloquent and self-deceived rhetoricians of the early scenes. He echoes Ulysses’ warning that appetite will devour itself when he says “lechery eats itself” (5. 4. 37). In the scenes of battle between Troilus and Diomed, the relationship between the debased war and debased love is made clear. They take on the roles, however diminished, of Menelaus and Paris, suggesting the endlessness of infidelity. Last of all, Thersites is heard noisily excusing himself from battle:

I am a bastard too; I love bastards: I am bastard begot, bastard instructed, bastard in mind, bastard in velour, in everything illegitimate…. (5.7.17-20)

He reveals himself as a coward, just as eagerly debasing himself as he has debased everyone else, and is driven offstage with a curse: “The Devil take thee, coward!” As Tillyard remarks, the world of Troilus and Cressida is a world in which things happen to men, rather than a world in which men commit actions.¹⁷ Only the evil have a positive capacity for action; the rest are powerless, and most powerless of all is Thersites in his fury.

Unlike ideal and orthodox tragedy, this play leads to no implicit affirmation of values. However, it is not necessary to say that the play gives us no ”conclusion,”¹⁸ or that it is only a “rich, varied, and interesting, indeed, heroic and sensational spectacle” devoid of clear moral sinificance.¹⁹ The controversy over the genre to which the play belongs is an important one, because it suggests the complexity of the work. That it can be a comical satire to one person, a dark comedy to another, a tragedy to another, and a heroic farce to yet another makes clear the fundamental ambiguity of the work. Arguments over class)fication may seem superficial, but they are really concerned with the deeper, more important task of understanding the play’s meaning as it is qualified by the striking extremes of tone, mockery in both content and structure, and its placing of a heroic young man in a degenerate society that seems utterly aliens to him. Like Othello, with whom Brian Morris compares him,²⁰ Troilus is a man who is unaccountable in terms of the world that has made him: he is a “given,” an innocence that is introduced only in order to be disillusioned and destroyed.

Above all, the play should be recognized as containing within itself a comment upon the “real” world and not as a satirical offshoot of the larger world, somehow inferior to it. It does not point toward another, better, more perfect way of living. This is important or we will interpret the play as satire against courtly love and chivalric ideals. It is certainly a satire against these codes of living, but it is also much more; like Gulliver’s Travels, it works toward establishing all mankind as its satiric object. There has been much discussion about Shakespeare’s reasons for choosing this familiar story, but I think it important to insist that the play’s worldlike the worlds of the tragediesis complete within itself. It is a mythic or allegorical representation of a complete action that does not demand outside knowledge to fufill it. R. A. Foakes suggests that we see or experience the play in a kind of “double time,” seeing beyond the moment and knowing more than the characters do at any particular point:

. . . if [Shakespeare] reduces the accepted stature of the heroes . . . he does it securely in the knowledge that we will have in mind the legend that has descended from Homer, via Virgil, with medieval accretions . . . and has survived all additions and mod)fications to maintain still the ready image of Hector and Achilles as types of great warriors, Helen as a type of beauty. This vision mod)fies our attitude to the play. . . . ²¹

This idea, while imaginative and stimulating, is based upon an erroneous conception of what drama is. We must remember that the play is meant to be played, shown, demonstrated, and that while a work of art is unfolding, no observer, however learned, can experience it with a “double awareness.” This is certainly to attach too great an agility to the mind. I believe that Shakespeare in this instance seized upon a popular story in order to use it, simply, as a symbolic representation of an idea that at this time of his life must have obsessed him, and that the Troilus-Cressida story and the Trojan War story are not meant to be played out against anyone’s prior knowledge but are intended to transcend or negate this prior knowledge, or simply to create another world altogetherjust as someone like Faulkner is obsessed with a Christ-pattern in his works, not in order to derive meaning from a comparison with the biblical Christ but rather to substitute for that Christ a “real” Christ, a human being. This makes the difference between merely clever art based upon cultural knowledge of earlier art (one certainly thinks of T. S. Eliot in this respect) and art that is deadly serious and wants to absolutely re-create and reinterpret the world. There can be nothing “left over” in Troilus and Cressida, and Shakespeare works hard to establish our attitude to his play through his relentless imagery and ironyhe would not be secure in the knowledge that our attitudes were going to be modified by other versions of the legend.

Laurence Michel, centering his analysis on Othello, sees Shakespearean tragedy as a “critique of humanism from the inside.” ²² He studies the discrepancy between the pretensions of humanism and the stark reality of tragedy, which sees “everything humanistically worthwhile . . . blighted, then irretrievably cracked; men are made mad, and then destroyed….” Following Aristotle’s insistence upon the primacy of the plot, Michel suggests that the plot, as the soul of the action, criticizes the humanistic ideals that the characters live by, and that this is therefore a critique from the “inside.” Troilus and Cressida, so much more complex than Othello, suggests by its subject matter and its mockery of opposites (flawed “reason” vs. flawed “emotion”) a criticism of the pretensions of tragedy itselfwhether it is redefined as “metatheater” or simply as flawed tragedy. The constant ironic undercutting of appearances; the fragments of tragic action that never quite achieve tragedy; above all, the essential philosophic split between the realm of the etemal and that of the existential, the temporarily existing, make it a comment on man’s relationship to himself that is very nearly contemporary. More than any other play of Shakespeare’s, it is Troilus and Cressida about which Auerbach seems to be speaking when he discusses the radical differences between the tragedies of Shakespeare and those of antiquity.²³

---

Notes

1 Laurence Michel, “Shakespearean Tragedy: Critique of Humanism from the Inside,” Massachusetts Review, II (1961), pp. 633-650

2 For a wider application of Platonic ideas to Troilus and Cressida, see I. A. Richards, “Troilus and Cressida and Plato,” Hudson Review, (1948) pp. 362-376

3 F. A. Foakes, “Troilus and Cressida Reconsidered,” University of Toronto Quarterly, XXXII (January, 1963),p. 146.

4 R. J. Kaufmann, in “Ceremonies for Chaos: The Status of Troilus and Cressida,” ELH, XXXII (June 1965) sees the deep theme of the play to be the “self-consuming nature of all negotiable forms of vice and virtue (p. 142); the play itself is a prolegomenon to tragedy, a “taxonomical prelude to Shakespeare’s mature tragedies” (p. 159). David Kaula in “Will and Reason in Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Quarterly, XII (1961) sees the harmony necessary between self, society, and cosmos thwarted in the play, not clearly developed as it is in the more mature tragedies (p. z83).

5 See S. L. Bethell, “Troilus and Cressida,” in Shakespeare: Modem Essays in Criticism, ed. Leonard F. Dean (New York, Peter Smith, 1957), p. 265.

6 Karl Jaspers, Reason and Existenz (New York, 1955), p. 20.

7 See M. R. Ridley’s Introduction to his edition of Othello in the New Arden ShakespeaTe (London, 1958), pp. lxvii-lxx.

8 See Wilson Knight in Wheel of Fire (Oxford University Press, 1935); Harold E. Toliver, “Shakespeare and the Abyss of Time,” JEGP, LXIV (1965), pp. 243-246; and D. A. Traversi’s chapter on the play in An Approach to Shakespeare(New York, 1956).

9 See A. S. Knowland, “Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Quarterly, X (1959), p. 359; and F. QuinIand Daniels, “Order and Confusion in Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Quarterly, XII (1961), p. 285. Professor Knowland also questions the importance of “time” in the play.

10 George Wilbur Meyer, “Order Out of Chaos in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida,” Tulane Studies in English, IV (1954), pp. 55-56.

11 Oscar James Campbell, Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida” (Califomia, 1938).

12 Foakes, op. cit., pp. 146-147.

13 Achilles as the “courtly lover” obeying an oath to Polyxena not to fight is suddenly stirred to savagery when Patroclus, his “masculine whore,” is killed, revealing his true love to be homosexual; Ajax, forced into a role by the cunning of Ulysses, soon swells with pride and becomes more egotistical than Achilles; Hector’s change of mind has been discussed above; Pandarus seems to reveal a newer, more disgusting side of his “honey sweet” character at the end of the play.

14 See R. M. Lumiansky, “Calchas in the Early Versions of the Troilus Story,” Tulane Studies in English, IV (1954), pp. 5-20.

15 Campbell, op. cit., p. z33.

16 See Rudolf Stamm, “The Glass of Pandar’s Praise: The Word Scenery, Mirror Passages, and Reported Scenes in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida,” Essays and Studies (1964), pp. 55-77, for a detailed analysis of the self-consciousness of the play and its visual perspectives.

17 E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s Problem Plays (London, 1950), p.86.

18 T. W. Baldwin, “Troilus and Cressida Again,” Scrutiny, XVIII (1955), p.145.

19 Hardin Craig, ed. The Complete Works of Shakespeare (New York, 1951), p. 863.

20 Brian Morris, “The Tragic Structure of Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Quarterly, X (1959), pp. 488, 491.

21 Foakes, op. cit., p. 153.

22 Michel, op. cit., pp. 633-650.

23 “. . . Shakespeare’s ethical and intellectual world is much more agitated, multilayered, and, apart from any specific dramatic action, in itself more dramatic than that of antiquity. The very ground on which men move and actions take their course is more unsteady and seems shaken by inner disturbances. There is no stable world as background, but a world which is perpetually re-engendering itself out of the most varied forces…. In antique tragedy the philosophizing is generally undramatic; it is sententious, aphoristic, is abstracted from the action and generalized, is detached from the personage and his fate. In Shakespeare’s plays it becomes personal; it grows directly out of the speaker’s immediate situation and remains connected with it…. It is dramatic self-scrutiny seeking the right mode and moment for action or doubting the possibility of finding them.” Erich Auerbach, Mimesis(Princeton, 1953), p. 285.

The Bridge

" It is fairly common for people who disappear to want to make their escape look like a suicide. They could probably just as easily walk out the door into a new identity, but for some reason they want people to think they have died.

Perhaps they believe it will keep people from searching for them, or that it will be easier for their families to cope with death than with disappearance. 

Then again, it may be a scam to collect on life insurance. 

Dr. Richard Seiden of the University of California, an internationally known authority on suicide, has coined a new word for such fake deaths: Pseudocide.

Pseudocide

Di. Seidel investigated 100 cases of apparent suicide from the Golden Gate Bridge in which no body was recovered. 

Of the 100, he easily found 26 that were alive and well and enjoying the finer side of life. 

His investigative techniques were not very sophisticated either, so it is likely that many of the remaining 74 "victims" are out walking the streets somewhere.

The very first suicide from the San Francisco Bay Bridge was actually a pseudocide. The person in question was a San Francisco Supervisor, similar to a councilman or alderman, who was embroiled in a little dispute with the accounting types over the disposal of some official funds.

When the situation got serious he took the easy way out and was written off the books as bridge suicide though his remains were never located. Sometime later he was discovered selling Bibles door-to-door down in Texas. "

Of the 100, he easily found 26 that were alive and well and enjoying the finer side of life. 

His investigative techniques were not very sophisticated either, so it is likely that many of the remaining 74 "victims" are out walking the streets somewhere.

Who Witnessed Each Jump...?

" An official suicide count was kept until the year 1995,sorted according to which of the bridge's 128 lamp posts the jumper was nearest when he or she jumped.

 The official count ended on June 5, 1995 on the 997th jump;[1jumper No. 1000, Eric Atkinson (25), jumped on July 3, 1995.

 Earlier in 1995, a local shock jock had offered a case of Snapple to the family of the 1000th suicide victim.

Consequently, Marin County coroner Ken Holmes asked local media to stop reporting the total number of jumpers.

 By 2012 the unofficial count exceeded 1,600 (in which the body was recovered or someone saw the jump) and new suicides were occurring about once every two weeks, according to a San Francisco Chronicle analysis.

The most suicides in one month were in August 2013, when 10 jumped. 

The total count for the year 2013 was 46, with an additional 118 attempts prevented, making it the year with the highest tally so far. 

The rate of incidence of attempts has risen to nearly one every other day

Shortly after ten-thirty in the morning on Wednesday, March 19th, a real-estate agent named Paul Alarab began hiking across the Golden Gate Bridge. Midway along the walkway, which carries pedestrians and cyclists between San Francisco and Marin County, he stopped and climbed the four-foot safety railing. Then he lowered himself carefully onto the bridge’s outermost reach, a thirty-two-inch-wide beam known as “the chord.” It is on the chord, two hundred and twenty feet above San Francisco Bay, that people intending to kill themselves often pause. On a sunny day, as this day was, the view is glorious: Angel Island to the left, Alcatraz straight ahead, Treasure Island farther off, bisecting the long gray tangent of the Bay Bridge, and, layered across the hills to the south, San Francisco.

Alarab turned and looped a thick rope over the railing, then wound it around his right wrist five times and grabbed it with his gloved right hand. His weekday attire usually consisted of a business suit with a “Peace” T-shirt underneath, but today he wore black gloves, black shoes, black pants, a black T-shirt, and black sunglasses. Through the palings of the bridge rail and the rush of traffic, he could see the mouth of the Bay to the west and the Pacific beyond. Clasping a typed statement to his chest with his left hand, he leaned backward, away from the railing, and waited for help to arrive.

Alarab, a forty-four-year-old Iraqi-American, was a large, balding, friendly man who kept a “No Hate” sign in his office at Century 21 Heritage Real Estate in Lafayette, across the Bay. The day before, he’d told a co-worker that the prospect of civilian deaths in Iraq made him sick to his stomach. Alarab had chosen this day, the first of America’s war against Saddam Hussein, to make a statement of opposition.

Responding to a “10-31,” bridge code for a jumper, four uniformed California Highway Patrol officers soon arrived at the rail, joined by three ironworkers who had been repairing the bridge. Alarab told them that he wanted to speak to the media. As it happened, a number of TV crews were at the south end of the bridge, filming standups about heightened terrorism precautions. A Telemundo crew came out, and Alarab began to read a declaration about Iraq’s defenseless women, children, and elderly. “Wake up, America!” he said. “This war will be known as ‘the war of cowards and oil’ across the world!”

As a Coast Guard cutter idled in the fifty-five-degree water below, the bridge’s guardians tried to talk Alarab into coming up. “When CNN gets here, I’m back over the other side of the railing,” he promised. One Highway Patrol officer said, “Hey, don’t I know you?” Alarab squinted, and said, “Oh, sure!” They had met during Alarab’s previous adventure on the bridge: in 1988, seeking to publicize the plight of the handicapped and the elderly, Alarab had climbed down a sixty-foot nylon cord into a large plastic garbage can he’d suspended beneath the bridge. His weight proved too much for the apparatus, and the can broke free with him inside. “It seemed like the fall lasted forever,” Alarab said afterward. “I was praying for God to give me another chance.” The fall broke both of Alarab’s ankles and three of his ribs and collapsed his lungs, but he lived—becoming one of only twenty-six people to survive the plunge from the Golden Gate. “I’ll never put my life on the line again,” he said at the time.

Survivors often regret their decision in midair, if not before. Ken Baldwin and Kevin Hines both say they hurdled over the railing, afraid that if they stood on the chord they might lose their courage. Baldwin was twenty-eight and severely depressed on the August day in 1985 when he told his wife not to expect him home till late. “I wanted to disappear,” he said. “So the Golden Gate was the spot. I’d heard that the water just sweeps you under.” On the bridge, Baldwin counted to ten and stayed frozen. He counted to ten again, then vaulted over. “I still see my hands coming off the railing,” he said. As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.”

Kevin Hines was eighteen when he took a municipal bus to the bridge one day in September, 2000. After treating himself to a last meal of Starbursts and Skittles, he paced back and forth and sobbed on the bridge walkway for half an hour. No one asked him what was wrong. A beautiful German tourist approached, handed him her camera, and asked him to take her picture, which he did. “I was like, ‘Fuck this, nobody cares,’ “ he told me. “So I jumped.” But after he crossed the chord, he recalls, “My first thought was What the hell did I just do? I don’t want to die.”

Paul Alarab never told his colleagues about his first experience on the bridge. He didn’t even tell his wife, whom he married in 1990 and divorced in 1995. The only hint of his fascination was his business card, which he resisted changing despite his boss’s complaint that it looked unprofessional. The card featured a photo of Alarab on the shore of the Bay; behind him lurked the Golden Gate.

On that March morning, facing the camera, Alarab read an ambiguous handwritten addendum to his statement: “I would sacrifice myself as a symbol of children that will die. If you are antiwar, e-mail me at alarabpaul@hotmail.com.” After forty minutes, CNN had not arrived and it seemed that Alarab had done all he could. It was 11:33 a.m. He bent to put his statement on the bridge, then placed his cell phone on it. He then unwound his wrist from the securing rope and stepped off the chord. The officers on the walkway craned their necks in a horrified line, watching him fall.

At a 1977 rally on the Golden Gate supporting the building of an anti-suicide barrier above the railing, a minister, speaking to six hundred of his followers, tried to explain the bridge’s power. Matchless in its Art Deco splendor, the Golden Gate is also unrivalled as a symbol: it is a threshold that presides over the end of the continent and a gangway to the void beyond. Just being there, the minister said, his words growing increasingly incoherent, left him in a rather suicidal mood. The Golden Gate, he said, is “a symbol of human ingenuity, technological genius, but social failure.”

Eighteen months later, that minister, the Reverend Jim Jones, who had decamped with his People’s Temple to Jonestown, Guyana, ordered his adherents to kill themselves by drinking grape Kool-Aid mixed with potassium cyanide. Nine hundred and twelve of them did.

Every two weeks, on average, someone jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge. It is the world’s leading suicide location. In the eighties, workers at a local lumberyard formed “the Golden Gate Leapers Association”—a sports pool in which bets were placed on which day of the week someone would jump. At least twelve hundred people have been seen jumping or have been found in the water since the bridge opened, in 1937, including Roy Raymond, the founder of Victoria’s Secret, in 1993, and Duane Garrett, a Democratic fund-raiser and a friend of Al Gore’s, in 1995. The actual toll is probably considerably higher, swelled by legions of the stealthy, who sneak onto the bridge after the walkway closes at sundown and are carried to sea with the neap tide. Many jumpers wrap suicide notes in plastic and tuck them into their pockets. “Survival of the fittest. Adios—unfit,” one seventy-year-old man said in his valedictory; another wrote, “Absolutely no reason except I have a toothache.”

There is a fatal grandeur to the place. Like Paul Alarab, who lived and worked in the East Bay, several people have crossed the Bay Bridge to jump from the Golden Gate; there is no record of anyone traversing the Golden Gate to leap from its unlovely sister bridge. Dr. Richard Seiden, a professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Public Health and the leading researcher on suicide at the bridge, has written that studies reveal “a commonly held attitude that romanticizes suicide from the Golden Gate Bridge in such terms as aesthetically pleasing and beautiful, while regarding a Bay Bridge suicide as tacky.”

Unlike the Bay Bridge—or most bridges, for that matter—the Golden Gate has a footpath adjacent to a low exterior railing. “Jumping from the bridge is seen as sure, quick, clean, and available—which is the most potent factor,” Dr. Jerome Motto, a local psychiatrist and suicide expert, says. “It’s like having a loaded gun on your kitchen table.”

Almost everyone in the Bay Area knows someone who has jumped, and it is perhaps not surprising that the most common fear among San Franciscans is gephyrophobia, the fear of crossing bridges. Yet the locals take a peculiar pride in the bridge’s notoriety. “What makes the bridge so popular,” Gladys Hansen, the city’s unofficial historian, says, citing the ten million tourists who visit the bridge each year, “is that it’s a monument, a monument to death.” In 1993, a man named Steve Page threw his three-year-old daughter, Kellie, over the side of the bridge and followed her down; even after this widely publicized atrocity, an Examiner poll that year found that fifty-four per cent of the respondents opposed building a suicide barrier.

The idea of building a barrier was first proposed in the nineteen-fifties, and it has provoked controversy ever since. “The battle over a barrier is actually a battle of ideas,” Eve Meyer, the executive director of San Francisco Suicide Prevention, told me. “And some of the ideas are very old, ideas about whether suicidal people are people to fear and hate.” In centuries past, suicides were buried at night at a crossroads, under piles of stones, or had stakes driven through their hearts to prevent their unquiet spirits from troubling the rest of us. In the United States today, someone takes his own life every eighteen minutes, and suicide is much more common than homicide. Still, the issue is rarely examined. In the Bay Area, the topic is virtually taboo. One Golden Gate official told me repeatedly, “I hate that you’re writing about this.”

In 1976, an engineer named Roger Grimes began agitating for a barrier on the Golden Gate. He walked up and down the bridge wearing a sandwich board that said “Please Care. Support a Suicide Barrier.” He gave up a few years ago, stunned that in an area as famously liberal as San Francisco, where you can always find a constituency for the view that pets should be citizens or that poison oak has a right to exist, there was so little empathy for the depressed. “People were very hostile,” Grimes told me. “They would throw soda cans at me, or yell, ‘Jump!’ “

When Paul Alarab was pulled from the Bay at 11:34 a.m., he was unconscious and badly bruised. The impact had ripped off his left glove and his right shoe. The Coast Guard crew, wearing their standard jumper-retrieval garb to protect against leaking body fluids—Tyvex biohazard suits, masks, gloves, and safety goggles—began C.P.R. Half an hour later, Alarab was pronounced dead. Gary Tindel, the assistant coroner of Marin County, who examined the body on the dock at Fort Baker, at the north end of the bridge, observed that “massive bleeding had occurred in both ears, along with apparent grayish brain matter in and around the right ear.” Tindel brought Alarab’s antiwar statement and his cell phone back to the coroner’s office in San Rafael. Soon afterward, the cell phone rang. It was Alarab’s ex-wife, Rubina Coton: their nine-year-old son had been waiting more than two hours at school for his father to pick him up.

“May I speak with Paul?” Coton asked.

“I’m sorry,” Tindel said. “You can’t.” Tindel explained that he was with the coroner’s office and suggested that Coton call back on his office phone. When she did, he told her that her ex-husband had jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.

“Please don’t joke,” Coton said.

Tindel described Alarab’s outfit, but Coton didn’t recognize the clothes. Then he told her that the corpse wore a yarn necklace. And she recalled, suddenly, that their daughter had made such a necklace for Paul.

Jumpers tend to idealize what will happen after they step off the bridge. “Suicidal people have transformation fantasies and are prone to magical thinking, like children and psychotics,” Dr. Lanny Berman, the executive director of the American Association of Suicidology, says. “Jumpers are drawn to the Golden Gate because they believe it’s a gateway to another place. They think that life will slow down in those final seconds, and then they’ll hit the water cleanly, like a high diver.”

In the four-second fall from the bridge, survivors say, time does seem to slow. On her way down in 1979, Ann McGuire said to herself, “I must be about to hit,” three times. But the impact is not clean: the coroner’s usual verdict, suicide caused by “multiple blunt-force injuries,” euphemizes the devastation. Many people don’t look down first, and so those who jump from the north end of the bridge hit the land instead of the water they saw farther out. Jumpers who hit the water do so at about seventy-five miles an hour and with a force of fifteen thousand pounds per square inch. Eighty-five per cent of them suffer broken ribs, which rip inward and tear through the spleen, the lungs, and the heart. Vertebrae snap, and the liver often ruptures. “It’s as if someone took an eggbeater to the organs of the body and ground everything up,” Ron Wilton, a Coast Guard officer, once observed.

Those who survive the impact usually die soon afterward. If they go straight in, they plunge so deeply into the water—which reaches a depth of three hundred and fifty feet—that they drown. (The rare survivors always hit feet first, and at a slight angle.) A number of bodies become trapped in the eddies stirred by the bridge’s massive stone piers, and sometimes wash up as far away as the Farallon Islands, about thirty miles off. These corpses suffer from “severe marine depredation”—shark attacks and, particularly, the attentions of crabs, which feed on the eyeballs first, then the loose flesh of the cheeks. Already this year, two bodies have vanished entirely.

On December 17, 2001, fourteen-year-old Marissa Imrie, a petite and attractive straight-A student who had planned to become a psychiatrist, left her second-period class at Santa Rosa High School, took a hundredand-fifty-dollar taxi ride to the Golden Gate, and jumped to her death. Though Marissa was always very hard on herself and had lately complained of severe headaches and insomnia, her mother, Renée Milligan, had no inkling of her plans. “She called us ‘the glue girls,’ we were so close,” Milligan told me. “She’d never spoken about the bridge, and we’d never even visited it.”

When Milligan examined her daughter’s computer afterward, she discovered that Marissa had been visiting a how-to Web site about suicide that featured grisly autopsy photos. The site notes that many suicide methods are ineffective (poison is fatal only fifteen per cent of the time, drug overdose twelve per cent, and wrist cutting a mere five per cent) and therefore recommends bridges, noting that “jumps from higher than . . . 250 feet over water are almost always fatal.” Milligan bought the proprietor of the site’s book, “Suicide and Attempted Suicide,” and read the following sentence: “The Golden Gate Bridge is to suicides what Niagara Falls is to honeymooners.” She returned the book and gave the computer away.

Every year, Marissa had written her mother a Christmas letter reflecting on the year’s events. On Christmas Day that year, Milligan, going through her daughter’s things, found her suicide note. It was tucked into “The Chronicles of Narnia,” which sat beside a copy of “Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teenagers.” The note ended with a plea: “Please forgive me. Don’t shut yourselves off from the world. Everyone is better off without this fat, disgusting, boring girl. Move on.”

Renée Milligan could not. “When I went to my optometrist, I realized he has big pictures of the Golden Gate in his office, and I had to walk out,” she said. “The image of the bridge is everywhere. San Francisco is the Golden Gate Bridge—I can’t escape it.” Milligan recently filed a wrongful-death lawsuit on behalf of her daughter’s estate against the Golden Gate Bridge District and the bridge’s board of directors, seeking to require them to put up a barrier. Her suit charges, “Through their acts and omissions Defendants have authorized, encouraged, and condoned government-assisted suicide.” Three previous lawsuits against the bridge by the parents of suicides have all been dismissed, and the bridge officials’ reply to Milligan’s suit lays out their standard defense: “Plaintiffs’ injuries, if any, were the result of Plaintiffs’ own actions (contributory negligence).” Furthermore, the reply says, “plaintiffs cannot show that Ms. Imrie used the property with due care for the purposes it was designed.”

As Joseph Strauss, the chief engineer of the Golden Gate, watched his beloved suspension bridge rise over San Francisco Bay in the nineteen-thirties, he could not imagine that anyone would use it without due care for its designated purpose. “Who would want to jump from the Golden Gate Bridge?” he told reporters. At the bridge’s opening ceremony, in May of 1937, Strauss read a statement in a low voice, his hands trembling. “What Nature rent asunder long ago man has joined today,” he said. The class poet at Ohio University, class of ’91, Strauss also wrote an ode to mark the occasion:

As harps for the winds of heaven,

My web-like cables are spun;

I offer my span for the traffic of man,

At the gate of the setting sun.

Three months later, a forty-seven-year-old First World War veteran named Harold Wobber turned to a stranger on the walkway, announced, “This is as far as I go,” and hopped over the rail. His body was never found. The original design called for the rail to be five and a half feet high, but this was lowered to four feet in the final blueprint, for reasons that are lost to history. The bridge’s chief engineer, Mervin Giacomini, who recently retired, told me half seriously that Strauss’s stature—he was only five feet tall—may have been a factor in the decision. Known as “the little man who built the big bridge,” Strauss may simply have wanted to be able to see over its side.

In May, 1938, Strauss died of a heart attack, likely brought on by the stress of seeing the bridge to completion. A plaque dedicated to him at the southern end of the bridge a few months later declared the span “a promise indeed that the race of man shall endure unto the ages”; at that point, six people had already jumped off. And at the dedication ceremony A. R. O’Brien, the bridge’s director, delivered a notably dark eulogy. Strauss “put everything he had” into the bridge’s construction, O’Brien said, “and out of its completion he got so little. . . . The Golden Gate Bridge, for my dead friend, turned out to be a mute monument of misery.”

In the years since the bridge’s dedication, Harold Wobber’s flight path has become well worn. I spent a day reading through clippings about Golden Gate Bridge suicides in the San Francisco Public Library, hundreds of two- or three-inch tales of woe from the Chronicle, the Examiner, the Call-Bulletin: “police said he was despondent over domestic affairs”; “medical discharge from the army”; “jobless butcher”; “the upholstery still retaining the warmth of the driver’s body”; “saying ‘goodbye’ four times and looking ‘very sad’ “; “ ‘sick at heart’ over the treatment of Jewish relatives in Germany”; “the baby’s cries apparently irritated him past endurance”; “footprints on the fog-wet girders were found early today”; “using his last nickel to scratch a farewell on the guard railing.”

The coverage intensified in 1973, when the Chronicle and the Examiner initiated countdowns to the five-hundredth recorded jumper. Bridge officials turned back fourteen aspirants to the title, including one man who had “500” chalked on a cardboard sign pinned to his T-shirt. The eventual “winner,” who eluded both bridge personnel and local-television crews, was a commune-dweller tripping on LSD.

In 1995, as No. 1,000 approached, the frenzy was even greater. A local disk jockey went so far as to promise a case of Snapple to the family of the victim. That June, trying to stop the countdown fever, the California Highway Patrol halted its official count at 997. In early July, Eric Atkinson, age twenty-five, became the unofficial thousandth; he was seen jumping, but his body was never found.

Ken Holmes, the Marin County coroner, told me, “When the number got to around eight hundred and fifty, we went to the local papers and said, ‘You’ve got to stop reporting numbers.’ “ Within the last decade, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Association of Suicidology have also issued guidelines urging the media to downplay the suicides. The Bay Area media now usually report bridge jumps only if they involve a celebrity or tie up traffic. “We weaned them,” Holmes said. But, he added, “the lack of publicity hasn’t reduced the number of suicides at all.”

The Empire State Building, the Duomo, St. Peter’s Basilica, and Sydney Harbor Bridge were all suicide magnets before barriers were erected on them. So were Mt. Mihara, a volcano in Japan (more than six hundred people jumped into it in 1936 alone); the Arroyo Seco Bridge, in Pasadena; and the Eiffel Tower. At Prince Edward Viaduct, in Toronto, the site of nearly five hundred fatal jumps, engineers just finished constructing a four-million-dollar “luminous veil” of stainless-steel rods above the railing. At all of these places, after the barriers were in place the number of jumpers declined to a handful, or to zero.

“In the seventies, we were really mobilized for a barrier at the Golden Gate,” Dr. Richard Seiden, the Berkeley suicide expert, told me. In 1970, the board of the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District began studying eighteen suicide-barrier proposals, including a nine-foot wire fence, a nylon safety net, and even high-voltage laser beams. The board’s criteria were cost, aesthetics, and effectiveness. In 1973, the nineteen-member board, most of them political appointees, declared that none of the options were “acceptable to the public.” (The laser-beam proposal was vetoed because of the likelihood of “severe burns, possibly fatal, to pedestrians and personnel.”)

In 1998, a company called Z-Clip suggested that one of its livestock fences serve as a barrier. The seven-foot-tall mesh of wires had originally been used in Chile to keep cattle out of pine-seedling plantations, and would cost a mere $2.3 million to $3.5 million. The bridge board would not approve it, however. Barbara Kaufman, a board member, said that the fence resembled the “barbed wire at concentration camps.”

Tom Ammiano, a leading candidate for the mayoralty of San Francisco this fall, is among the bridge’s most liberal supervisors. He says that a barrier is no longer being actively considered, and that only he and three or four other board members favor one. “There’s a lot of white Republicans on the board who resist change,” Ammiano told me. He laughed darkly, and added, “The Golden Gate is an icon, my dear.”

The most plausible reason for the board’s resistance is aesthetics. For the past twenty-five years, however, three hundred and fifty feet of the southern end of the bridge have been festooned with an eight-foot-tall cyclone fence, directly above the Fort Point National Park site on the shore of the Bay. This “debris fence” was erected to keep tourists from dropping things—including, at one point, bowling balls—on other tourists below. “It’s a public-safety issue,” the bridge’s former chief engineer, Mervin Giacomini, told me.

Another factor is cost, which would seem particularly important now that the Bridge District has a projected five-year shortfall of more than two hundred million dollars. Yet, in October, construction will be completed on a fifty-four-inch-high steel barrier between the walkway and the adjacent traffic lanes which is meant to prevent bicyclists from veering into traffic. No cyclist has ever been killed; nonetheless, the bridge’s chief engineer, Denis Mulligan, says that the five-million-dollar barrier was necessary: “It’s a public-safety issue.” Engineers are also considering erecting a movable median to prevent head-on collisions, at a cost of at least twenty million dollars. “It’s a public-safety issue,” Al Boro, a member of the Bridge District’s board of directors, said to me.

A familiar argument against a barrier is that thwarted jumpers will simply go elsewhere. In 1953, a bridge supervisor named Mervin Lewis rejected an early proposal for a barrier by saying it was preferable that suicides jump into the Bay than dive off a building “and maybe kill somebody else.” (It’s a public-safety issue.) Although this belief makes intuitive sense, it is demonstrably untrue. Dr. Seiden’s study, “Where Are They Now?,” published in 1978, followed up on five hundred and fifteen people who were prevented from attempting suicide at the bridge between 1937 and 1971. After, on average, more than twenty-six years, ninety-four per cent of the would-be suicides were either still alive or had died of natural causes. “The findings confirm previous observations that suicidal behavior is crisis-oriented and acute in nature,” Seiden concluded; if you can get a suicidal person through his crisis—Seiden put the high-risk period at ninety days—chances are extremely good that he won’t kill himself later.

The current system for preventing suicide on the bridge is what officials call “the non-physical barrier.” Its components include numerous security cameras and thirteen telephones, which potential suicides or alarmed passersby can use to reach the bridge’s control tower. The most important element is randomly scheduled patrols by California Highway patrolmen and Golden Gate Bridge personnel in squad cars and on foot, bicycle, and motorcycle.

In two visits to the bridge, I spent an hour and a half on the walkway and never saw a patrolman. Perhaps, on camera, I didn’t exhibit troubling behavior. The monitors look for people standing alone near the railing, and pay particular attention if they’ve left a backpack, a briefcase, or a wallet on the ground beside them. Kevin Briggs, a friendly, sandy-haired motorcycle patrolman, has a knack for spotting jumpers and talking them back from the edge; he has coaxed in more than two hundred potential jumpers without losing one over the side. He won the Highway Patrol’s Marin County Uniformed Employee of the Year Award last year. Briggs told me that he starts talking to a potential jumper by asking, “How are you feeling today?” Then, “What’s your plan for tomorrow?” If the person doesn’t have a plan, Briggs says, “Well, let’s make one. If it doesn’t work out, you can always come back here later.”

The non-physical barrier catches between fifty and eighty people each year, and misses about thirty. Responding to these figures, Al Boro said, “I think that’s positive, I think that’s effective. Of course, you’d like to do everything you can to make it zero, within reason.”

Despite the coroner’s verdict, Paul Alarab’s loved ones insist that he didn’t jump off the Golden Gate. Having viewed the Telemundo tape, they believe that when Alarab was putting down his antiwar statement he slipped and fell. An accident is easier for friends and family to accept, whereas suicide leaves behind nothing but guilt. It’s impossible to know whether any one suicide might have been prevented, but many suicidal people do indeed wish to be saved. As the eminent suicidologist E. S. Shneidman has said, “The paradigm is the man who cuts his throat and cries for help in the same breath.”

Those who work on the bridge learn to cope with the suicides they can’t prevent by keeping an emotional distance. Glen Sievert, an ironworker who has often helped rescue potential jumpers, told the Wall Street Journal, “I don’t like these people. I have my own problems.” Even Kevin Briggs, the empathic patrolman, was surprised to learn, when he and some colleagues had a week’s training with a psychiatrist earlier this year, that suicidal people “are real people—not crazy people but real people suffering from depression.” Nonetheless, Briggs remains opposed to a barrier. “The bridge is about beauty,” he told me. “They’re going to jump anyway, and you can’t stop them.”

Mary Currie, the bridge’s spokeswoman, is an intense woman with short dark-blond hair. Last February, she went on a foot patrol with five Golden Gate patrolmen so that she would understand that detail better. Currie told me that her group stopped to assess a handsome middle-aged man who’d been at the south tower for two hours. “He said he was just taking a walk. But we all had a feeling,” Currie said. “Still, you can’t gang-tackle a guy for taking a walk. Five minutes after our last contact with him, he walked to the mid-span and looked back. We all took off after him; I was only twenty feet away when he went over. We saw him go in, feet first.

“The other guys felt they’d followed procedure, done what they had to do, didn’t get him, and they’ve moved on. But I had nightmares for a week. Should I have grabbed his ankles? Should there be a barrier? I finally decided it was this guy’s choice. I have depression in my family—I’ve had some myself—and you just have to fight it.” After a second, she reversed herself. “You know, if my mother had succeeded in killing herself—and she tried—I would be much more devastated, and my thinking would be . . .” She shook her head, banishing doubt. “That bridge is more than a bridge: it’s alive, it speaks to people. Some people come here, find themselves, and leave; some come here, find themselves, and jump.”

The bridge comes into the lives of all Bay Area residents sooner or later, and it often stays. Dr. Jerome Motto, who has been part of two failed suicidebarrier coalitions, is now retired and living in San Mateo. When I visited him there, we spent three hours talking about the bridge. Motto had a patient who committed suicide from the Golden Gate in 1963, but the jump that affected him most occurred in the seventies. “I went to this guy’s apartment afterward with the assistant medical examiner,” he told me. “The guy was in his thirties, lived alone, pretty bare apartment. He’d written a note and left it on his bureau. It said, ‘I’m going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump.’ “

Motto sat back in his chair. “That was it,” he said. “It’s so needless, the number of people who are lost.”

As people who work on the bridge know, smiles and gentle words don’t always prevent suicides. A barrier would. But to build one would be to acknowledge that we do not understand each other; to acknowledge that much of life is lived on the chord, on the far side of the railing. Joseph Strauss believed that the Golden Gate would demonstrate man’s control over nature, and so it did. No engineer, however, has discovered a way to control the wildness within. ♦

" Of the 100, he easily found 26 that were alive and well and enjoying the finer side of life. 

His investigative techniques were not very sophisticated either, so it is likely that many of the remaining 74 "victims" are out walking the streets somewhere. "

When reading these names, please remember the distress and confusion the person was in during their time of crisis.

Count	Date	First Name	Last Name	Sex	Age	Residence	Comment
1	8/7/1937	Harold	Wobber	M	47	San Francisco
2	10/2/1937	Louis	Levin	M		San Francisco
3	10/5/1937	Rafaello	di Regolo	M
4	11/26/1937	Frank	Clevenger	M	62	San Francisco	carpenter
5	1/20/1938	John	Prohoroff	M	35	NSJ listed as 6th
6	3/9/1938	Agnes	Harrington	F
7	8/24/1938	Harold M	Juda	M		San Francisco	cash register salesman
8	10/1/1938	Edwin D	Pierson	M		Colorado
9	November	unidentified		M	30	Swiss immigrant	lost job and gambled all his money away
10	December	unidentified
	12/30/1938	unidentified		F	25		"young Jewess" bride guilty
11	February	unidentified		M
11	2/14/1939	J.M.	Silvey	M		San Jose
12(14)	3/27/1939			M
13	4/4/1939	Paul J.	Umland	M	25
14	5/15/1939	Mathew	Wuerstle	M	52	San Francisco	unemployed
15	6/9/1939	Arthur John	Fisher	M	26	San Francisco	nurse
16	6/9/1939	Ruth	Tumelty	F	26(36)	Stockton	art school supervisor
17	6/24/1939	George	Verhagen	M		San Francisco
	June	unidentified
18	10/26/1939	Andrew O.	Glover	M	80	San Francisco	rancher
19	11/1/1939	Lloyd	James	M	27	Oakland	hardware salesman
20	11/3/1939	Mildred Louis	Gibbs	F		San Bruno
21	11/20/1939	Kathleen L.	Johnson	F	45	San Francisco	widow
	2/29/1940			F	21		Model
	4/2/1940	Joseph	Pricaso	M		San Francisco
15	4/3/1940	Joe	Tricaso	M	33	San Francisco	jobless singer/dancer
	4/4/1940			M	25
	10/21/1941	Julia B.	Hunter	F	65
	April	unidentified		M
	May	unidentified		M
	5/29/1942	Julian B.	Haswell	M	60	San Francisco	retired exec in New York
	3/22/1943	Charles Lee	Brewer	M	45	San Francisco	drafted
	10/9/1943	John	Mariana	M	68	San Francisco
	12/29/1943+B258	Eugene	Fagothey	M		Corte Madera	telephone co. employee
42	4/3/1944	Charles J.	Baltzer	M	69	San Francisco	elevator operator
	7/27/1945	Marilyn	Demont	F	5	San Francisco
	7/27/1945	August C	Demont	M	37	San Francisco
	8/29/1945			F			had husband pull over on bridge
	9/25/1945			M			elderly whitehaired main - left note to Effie from Ed
55	11/1/1945	Justin Dimick	French	M		Vallejo	2:15 PM
56	11/1/1945	unidentified		M
57	11/2/1945	Leola	Myers	F	42	San Francisco
58	11/20/1945	James	McCowan	M	65
63	7/25/1946	Charlotte	Winton	F	48
64	8/14/1946	Marie C.	Percy	F		San Anselmo
73	3/22/1947	Ernest	Kloeres	M	68	San Francisco
76(81)	May			F	24
	6/26/1947	Mrs Frederick	Murphy, Jr.	F		San Francisco
84	11/19/1947	Lugo	Winfield	M	52	Oakland	nurseryman
85	11/19/1947	Meyer	Brazer	M	56		meat salesman
86	11/19/1947	William K	Powell	M	60	Alameda	Attorney
89	2/11/1948	Alfred "Dusty"	Rhodes	M	38	Port Chicago	Hollywood stunt man
93	3/6/1948	Eulis K.	Williams	M	30		hotel clerk
94	3/12/1948	Philip H	Sheridan III	M	31		suffered "war neurosis", grandson civil war Gen Philip H Sheridan
	3/31/1948	Leona	Strauss	F	55	Richmond	possible suicide
	5/3/1948			M			young domestic
101	8/8/1948	Miner Waddington	Smith	M	36	San Jose	creamery owner
	8/9/1948	unidentified		M			body washed up at Land's End in water 24 hours
102	9/26/1948	Caspar T	Pelietier	M	39
104	10/6/1948	unidentified		M			left hat and coat with addresses and recipe for corn beef
107	12/2/1948	G. H.	Derr	M	51
	12/19/1948	unidentified		M		about 5:30 pm
108	12/21/1948	Albert C	Hartford	M	44	San Francisco
109	12/21/1948	unidentified
110	1/4/1949	unconfirmed		M			retired construction worker
115	8/3/1949	unconfirmed J.B.	Nathan	M	49	San Francisco	machine shop operator
116	8/4/1949	Glenn R	Burbank	M	~45	unknown
	3/29/1950			M		Willits	logger
	4/4/1950			M	23		sailor
123	4/14/1950	Henry	Feldman	M	42	Tiburon
	8/10/1950	unidentified		M			use of dye to find body
	11/15/1950			M		Los Angeles	truck driver
116	12/20/1950
	3/16/1951			F	49	Berkeley
	2/17/1952			F	52
	4/20/1952
	4/20/1952
	4/20/1952
	4/27/1952	Martin F.	McDonough				limousine service driver
	5/2/1952	Eugene	Cronin	M	32		plasterer
	5/12/1952			F	61	San Francisco	society photographer
	8/1/1952			M			WW II veteran ill
	8/1/1952			M	22		UC Davis student
140	9/9/1952	Gabrielie J	Leibbers	F	43		9/7/1952 BBD
	2/13/1953	Bruce	McCollum	M	49	San Francisco	real estate
144	4/2/1953	Unidentified		M
	4/17/1953	unidentified		M			photo of man jumping from bridge
145	5/4/1953	unidentified		M
147	6/12/1953	Murial	Whelan	F		Los Angeles	divorcee
	8/1/1953	Morris	Hirsch	M	49	San Francisco	businessman
	8/14/1953	Gene Lee	White	M	21	Maryland
	11/20/1953	Arthur J.	Cohen, Jr.	M	39	San Francisco	prominent attorney
	12/1/1953	Marie L.	McCormick	F	24	San Francisco	department store filing clerk
"55"	12/7/1953	Everett Lawrence	Hubbard	M	48	Willits
132	12/11/1953	Arthur R.	Burt	M	60	Redwood City	realtor/faces "morals charge"
	12/18/1953	unidentified		M
134	12/19/1953	Gustav P.	Aguilar	M	65	Richmond	auto dealer
	4/19/1954	William M.	Coulter, Jr.	M	28
	7/7/1954	unidentified		M	elderly
140	9/27/1954	Charles S	Gallagher	M	64		credit manager - BBD
141	10/2/1954	Charles S	Gallagher, Jr.	M	24		pre-med student, "I wanted to keep dad company"
142	10/22/1954	William	Roach	M	58	San Francisco	retired government electrical engineer
144	11/22/1954	John Thomas	Doyle	M	49	member Redwood City AFL Plumber/Steamfitter union
	7/26/1955	Joseph R.	Eppler	M	59	San Francisco	suicide note in abandoned car
		unidentified					abandoned car
	8/3/1955	Earl	Burlingame	M	64	Oakland	Custodian
	12/14/1955	Albert	Bender	M	51	San Francisco	contractor
159	4/3/1956	Doris Marie	Dickinson	F	60	Berkeley	retired school teacher
"62"	6/4/1956	George Clark	McConnell	M	23	San Francisco	salesman
	9/4/1956	Charles Lee	Waters	M	24	Daly City	potato chip salesman/truck driver
	9/19/1956	Michael	Wyatt	M	27	England	Stanford U professor
	7/16/1957	unidentified		F	13	San Francisco	left note
	12/3/1957	Joyce M.	Scheuer	F	33	Concord	unemployed
174	1/8/1958	Dave D.	Lala	M	33	Oakland	truck driver
175	1/13/1958	John H.	Pearson	M	25	North Highland	insurance trainee
178	8/12/1958	Howard S	Cook, Jr.	M	36		Admin Aide to UC Pres. Kerr
179	8/14/1958	Eilert	Johnson	M	70	Oakland	retired shipyard worker
	4/1/1959	Fritz A.	Meyer	M	64	San Leandro	unemployed cook
	10/6/1959	unidentified		F
	10/9/1959	Sheldon K.	Goldfus	M	24	Berkeley	UC teaching assistant
	10/13/1959	Madeline	Pera	F
191	11/26/1959	Clarence	TRUE	M	52	San Francisco	cabinet maker
	1/30/1960	Jack H.	Cleaveland	M	33	San  Francisco	grocery clerk
	5/7/1960	Albert Lloyd	Keehn	M	21	Oakland	SFSC senior and student teacher
	6/17/1960	Pyung	Chung	M	31	Berkeley	CPA
	6/29/1960	Adolph	Uribe	M	29	San Francisco
	1/4/1961	Betty Anne	Brown	F	38	Irvington	1st of the year
	1/30/1961	Arthur G.	Irwin	M	51	Berkeley	heart patient
	4/11/1961	Clifford A.	Cullis	M	50	San Francisco	shipyard worker
216	12/13/1961	Francis Patrick	Kennedy	M	20	Oakland	jumped 12/3/1961 and died of injuries
224	5/21/1962	unidentified		F	"older"
229	7/12/1962	Cecil P.	Herrman	M	34	San Francisco	unemployed bakery route salesman
231	9/9/1962	Vladimir	Valauykin	M	62	Carmichael	real estate broker
	9/19/1962	Steven P.	Mason	M	73	San Francisco	ill health
	2/18/1963	unidentified
		Unidentified
242	5/1/1963	Clara K.	Levine	F	36	Hayward	wife of physician/owner Levine  Hospital Hayward
	7/4/1963	baby girl	Buckleman	F	2	San Mateo	mother says she dropped child off bridge
244	7/15/1963	Donald B.	Laquet	M	31	Sunnyvale
245	7/16/1963	Patricia	Williams	F	34	Hayward	on pass from Agnew State Hospital
246	July	unidentified		F		Novato	housewife
247	13 days later	unidentified		F		Novato	housewife
	9/11/1963	Hickman	Price III	M	20		Stanford U student missing since 9/3 car in lot; body floating 9/10
	12/27/1963	Marshall N.	Israel	M	33	San Rafael	real estate tycoon left 7 million to estranged wife
254	1/6/1964	Richard R.	Gray	M	42	San Francisco	coroner's clerk in SF
	3/5/1964	Gary G.	Girton	M	20	Castle AFB, Merced	Air Force
261	5/26/1964	Mary E.	McKeegan	F	45	Santa Rosa
265	7/22/1964	Drake E.	Rogers	M	20	Petaluma	soldier
266 *	7/23/1964	Leonard M.	Jenkins	M	45	Sacramento	aircraft mechanic at McClellan AFB jumped with  4 yo son, Harold
266	7/27/1964	Richard H.	Gillespie, Jr.	M	24		left note - police looking for him
267	7/28/1964	Emma	Barsi	F	58	Sebastopol	took bus
268	7/29/1964	unidentified		M	55-60
269	8/3/1964	Carl B	Anderson	M	51	San Francisco	Lutheran Pastor : 5th suicide in 11 days
270	8/7/1964	Merrell Augustus	Sisson	M	55	Sausalito	Pres SF radiological society
271	8/8/1964	unidentified		M			6th  in 2 weeks
272	8/21/1964	Betty Lou Storm	Hunsucker	F	30	Mill Valley
273	8/23/1964	Morris	McClellan	M	56	San Francisco
279	1/13/1965	Murry R.	Baird	M		Redwood City	2nd in 2 days
281	2/25/1965	Stanley	Klopstock	M	54	Oakland	Army terminal employee
	2/25/1965	Blossom Marie	Grim	F	38	San Francisco	unemployed bakery clerk
281	6/25/1965	Jill	Thompson	F	29	Sausalito
283	8/11/1965	Clyde F.	Casey	M	42	El Cerrito	unemployed carpenter
284	8/21/1965	Juanita R.	Daneri	F	42	San Francisco	cab - recent patient at Napa state hospital
285	9/9-10/1965	F.P.	Johnson	M			CHP witnessed
286	11/11/1965	Karen	Silverstain	F	30	San Francisco	patient from Napa State Hospital on leave
288	11/23/1965	Perry	Charlton	M	39	Oakland	merchant marine officer
292	2/20/1966	Otto Hermann	Weidanz	M	91
296	3/25/1966	unidentified		F			Thursday night
300	4/13/1966	Michael	Detata	M	20	San Francisco	bank clerk
302	5/6/1966	Ferdinand	Pechin, Jr.	M	26
	7/13/1966	Russell F	King	M	58	Richmond	attorney/ quoted Shakespeare in note
	7/20/1966	David Lee	Prescott, Jr.	M	28	San Francisco
308	1/14/1967	unidentified		M	~35
308	1/16/1967	Edward	Walsh	M	38	San Anselmo	unemployed musician
	3/20/1967	Shirley Ann	Overmiller	F	34	Alameda
	4/11/1967	Walter G.	Weeks	M	33	San Francisco	Radiolgist Oakland Peralta Hospital car belonged to Charle R Gouker
	4/19/1967	Paul	Mezei	M	44	San Francisco	CPA
319	5/13/1967	Lucinda	Cheney	F	25	San Francisco
	5/17/1967	Maria	Caldera	F	76	Oakland
332	3/27/1968	unidentified					332 recorded
341	4/22/1968	unidentified		F	late 20s	J Doetts
342	5/1/1968	unidentified		F	30ish
361	4/17/1969	Michael J.	Dalton	M	22	San Bruno
365	6/15/1969	Daniel J.	Lenihan	M	34	San Francisco
370	10/24/1969	Karl E	Bybee	M	48	jumped while CBS News filming documentary on bridge
368	"	unidentified		M
369	"	unidentified		M
370	11/6/1969	Charles H.	Stebbins, Jr.	M	22	Campbell
375	2/17/1970	Raymond Joseph	Tanguay	M	59	Hoopa Valley Indian reservation
374	2/19/1970	Dennis John	Marinos	M	26	newspaper employee for examiner
383		unidentified					jumped while movie: "PS I love you" was being filmed
403	10/26/1970	James Norman	Lest	M	26	Oakland
407	12/24/1970	unidentified		M	23		postal worker
408	12/31/1970	unidentified		M			his friend - thai waiter at Enrico's
	2/12/1971	unidentified		F	24	San Francisco
	6/17/1971	Michael P.	Lamm	M		Napa	suspected bomber(6/21/1971 OAK)
	"	David	El Rae	M	31	San Francisco
415	7/7/1971	James L.	Decleur	M	20	Los Angeles
	8/9/1971	Christiana A.	Luma	F	23	Santa Clara
	"	William A.	McClanahan	M	44	San Francisco
421	8/30/1971	Darcy Jill	Van de Riet	F	18	Mountain View
	8/31/1971	unidentified		M	~18	long haired
	10/6/1971	Rhey Lee	Bartlett	M	32	San Francisco
427	October	unidentified		M	22		University of Oregon student
430	Dec	unidentified
431	12/5/1971	unidentified		M
432	12/5/1971	unidentified		F
433	12/16/1971	unidentified		M			4th this month
437	1/1/1972	unidentified		M			jumped within 35 mnutes of 438
438	1/8/1972	unidentified		M	~35
438	1/26/1972	Bruce McBain	Austin	M	25	Berkeley	computer analyst for Safeway
	"	Frank A.	Basile	M	34	Santa Clara
445	2/26/1972	unidentified		M			hit a girder then crashed through  roof in Old Fort Point
441	2/27/1972	Richard J.	Grimm	M	21	Berkeley	found roof of Fort Point Museum
448	5/30/1972	Kathleen	Clancy	F	32	Oakland
454	6/8/1972	Douglas R.	Martin	M	21	Belmont
450	6/12/1972	unidentified		M		witnessed
459	10/11/1972	Peter	Weldon	M	23	Allston, Mass	tied dog, Jessi, to rail before jumping
460	10/15/1972	unidentified		M	36		kissed fiance and jumped
492	8/18/1973	Pierre Beal	Lee	M	27	Son of Lt. Gov Blair Lee III -same day SF churches rang bells in unisun for those lost by GGB jumps
	9/9/1973	Candy	Polycove	F	24		legal secretary ?women who jumped last week
496	9/9/1973	Ephram C.	Oliva	M	20	Hamilton AFB
498	9/12/1973	Nancy	Chisholm	F	56	Atherton	Socialite
499	9/12/1973	unidentified		M
500	10/11/1973	Stephen	Hoag	M	26	San Francisco	Blood technician
501	10/10/1973	unidentified		F	48	Corte Madre	housewife
	1/1/1974	Heather	Forsythe	F		Sausalito	art gallery and waitress
511	4/16/1972	withheld		F		San Anselmo
	5/6/1975	Ingebord	Raeth	F	50		North Tower Jane Doe #2
	May	unidentified		M			cyclist
	5/19/1975	Billy Bob	Strickland	M	29
	6/11/1975	Alan Jay	Meinhofer	M	31		Lime Point
	6/21/1975	Robert Russell	Kennedy	M	29		North Tower
552	9/8/1975	withheld		F	30	San Bruno
	11/16/1975	Dennis Reid	Kneeland	M	32		Slide Ranch Beach - undetermined cause
	12/10/1975	David Lyle	Robbie	M	31		Lime Point
		Susan	Hermeyer	F	26		North Tower  Jane Doe #1
	1/21/1976	unidentified		M			picture
	1/24/1976	Rayman Earl	Hagerman	M	56		Racoon Straits  MTI
	2/16/1976	Sally Jane	Hanson	F	31		Big Beach/Muir Beach  Jane Doe #2
	4/16/1976	Douglas R.	Ranieri	M	29		East Side GGB
	5/14/1976	Maracella E.	Buller	F	52		Beach So end Cronkite - Jane Doe #4
	6/6/1976	Barbara	Greene	F	32		Lime Point
	6/22/1976	Carol	Simon	F	32		Slide Ranch MTI
	8/26/1976	Daniel	Alexander	M			beneath GGB
	10/4/1976	unidentified		F	33	Sausilito
	11/20/1976	Rev James	Halligan	M	44	Fairfax	Catholic priest
	12/21/1976	John	Doe #15	M			North Beach Point Reyes
591?	2/10/1977	Marc	Salinger	M	28		father Pierre press sec to Kennedy and Johnson
	5/26/1977	unidentified		M			found with hunting knife in chest
600	5/30/1977	Sharon	Ungewitter	F	24		unemployed medical lab tech
	6/10/1977	Richard B.	Hubbell	M	32		GGB MTI
	7/16/1977	Friedhelm Will	Bially	M	25		Lime Point
	7/21/1977	Stephen S.	Luskkow	M	26		FD Stinson Beach
	8/31/1977	Margaret	Mocko	F	24		GGB
621	9/1/1977	Margaret	Mocko	F	28	Foster City	31st 1977
	10/1/1977	Elizabeth M	Cocjin	F	23		beneath north end GGB
	10/1/1977	Bayani	Mariano	M	28		"
612	10/3/1977	Unidentified	Couple	M	20's	asian	Kissed and jumped' found at Lime Point
613	10/3/1977	"	"	F	"	"	"
	10/2/1977	Robert Allen	Fast	M	35		Pacific Ocean MTI John Doe #6
	1/10/1978	Linda Louise	Ryner	F	33		FD deep water 50ft GG ferry dock MTI
639	5/9/1978	Unidentified		F	44		unemployed
	5/18/1978	Thomas S.	Davlin	M	19		SF Bay Water
	8/2/1978	Robert	Escobar	M	34		SF Bay .5 mi N angel island John Doe #2
	1/9/1979	Ron Michael	Martello	M	27		East side GGB property
	3/10/1979	Nicholas	Samaras	M	38		Pacific Ocean shore MTI
	3/27/1979	Michael Joe	Canepa	M	26		Pacific Ocean John Doe #3
	4/2/1979	James William	McAleer	M	72		open are neath north end GGB
	5/7/1979	Elliot Scott	Helfer	M			Lime Point
	5/26/1979	Josephine	Solorzano	F			2 mi west of GGB decomp Jane Doe #2
	9/24/1979	Scott William	Stalker	M	21		North Tower
	10/31/1979	Neal Anthony	Zappa	M	24		Paradise Cay Tiburon (S-erased)
	12/30/1979	John	Doe #15	M			Bolinas Beach undetermined
	7/9/1980	Donna Lee	Howe	F	33		North Tower
	7/9/1980	Unidentified		F	32		had recent skiing accident
	7/20/1980	Menasse	Lorber	M	52		SF Bay waters
	11/1/1980	Brian David	Boykin	M	20		Beach at Point Reyes
	1981	John	Doe #2				mandible fd at Fort Baker
	7/26/1981	Janet Suzanne	Hoch	F	18		Pacific Ocean GGNRA
	8/21/1981	Patrick	McCullough	M	42		Lime Point - John Doe #7
	8/31/1981	Michael J.	Murray	M	unk		Kirby Cove Beach John Doe #8
	9/17/1981	Unidentified		F	38		German actress
700	10/8/1981	Unidentified		M		Marin	youth
	10/8/1981	Daniel Robert	Hogg	M	19		North Tower
719	11/10/1981	Unidentified		M
720	11/10/1981	Unidentified		F		Rohnert Park	teenager
	12/24/1981	Thomas L.	Boeninghausen	M	45		fd breakwater Presidio Yacht Club Ft Baker
	2/4/1982	Michael S.	Cox	M	31		fd Loch Lomond Marina decomp
	4/3/1982	Clara Hiroko	Shitanishi	F	37		fd So beach Pt Reyes
	4/12/1982	Ron A	Gubi	M	29		GGB
	4/20/1982	Janice	White	F	31		fd Wildcat Beach decomp Jane Doe #4
	6/26/1982	Thomas Vincent	LaCoste	M	62		Drakes Beach Inverness
	7/23/1982	John Alfred	Beyer	M	53		fd Pacific Ocean So Muir Beach
	9/6/1982	Enrique	Martinez	M	16		fd Muir beach decomp John Doe #4
	12/4/1982	Serge	Boutourline, Jr.	M	50		beach pt Reyes John Doe #6
	2/21/1983	Joseph Francis	Coogan	M	28		N of McClure's beach, Pt Reyes partial remains John Doe #3
	10/6/1983	Catherine M.	Hafeez	F	33		Lime Point
	10/18/1983	Richard Loweth	Plumb	M	39		fd Muir Beach
	11/14/1983	William John	Murphy	M	35		Ocean at Slide Ranch MTI
	3/27/1984	Timothy Craig	Stephens	M	38		Lime Point
	5/2/1984	Michael Arnold	Fuchs	M	31		Pacific Ocean Bolinas John Doe #3
	6/29/1984	Daniel Joseph	Curly	M	46		North Tower
	8/14/1984	Unidentified	Doe				partial remains on Muir Beach
	9/14/1984	Lawrence Robert	Heaton	M	36		SF bay Ft Baker Yacht Harbor
	9/23/1984	Mildred	Minor	F	46		SF bay water Sausalito
	2/19/1985	Norman Thomas	Luffman	M	34		east side North Tower
	3/27/1985	Michael John	Casentini	M	71		Ayala Cove Angel Island
	6/29/1985	Jean M.	Erickson	F	48		Ocean Beach Bolinas MTI
	1985	John	Doe #3				foot ravine s Stinson beach
	12/20/1985	Richard John	Fisch	M	34		pacific ocean Bolinas
	8/17/1986	Wolfram Lothar	Fischer	M	23		Lime Point
	5/12/1987	Irene	Rodriguez	F	39		Muir Beach
	7/14/1987	Catherine	Chan	F			Lime Point Jane Doe #4
	7/30/1987	Patricia Etta	Beeson	F	38		Lime Point Jane Doe #5
	8/10/1987	Donald J.	Schinkel	M	56		North Tower
	9/14/1987	Karen Virignia	Miller aka Arreola	F	44		Lime Point Jane Doe #6
	11/27/1987	Karen Sue	Hoggatt	F	27		Pacific Ocean Bonita Lighthouse Jane Doe #7
	5/30/1988	Cathleen Ann	Hughes	F	30		North Tower
	10/1/1988	Rik	Helmke	M	34		Ocean beach No Stinson beach John Doe # 6
	10/4/1988	William	Johntz	M	65		under North Tower
	10/13/1988	Christopher J.	Stowe	M	23		Lime Point John Doe # 5 6/13/1988
	10/18/1989	Richard S.	Woodside	M	34		North Tower
	11/28/1989	Michael J.	Distaso	M	40		seashore Pt Reyes
	11/29/1989	Keith Scott	Orner	M	42		seashore Pt Reyes

5 /21/1990
identified
M
35

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

8 /13/1990
identified
M
40

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge

8 /27/1990
identified
M
29

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

2 /5 /1991
identified
M
29

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge. (AKA John Doe #3-2/05/91)

4 /1 /1991
identified
F
35

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.
900
6 /23/1991
identified
M
38

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

7 /25/1991
identified
F
33

Apparent unwitnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge, found floating in waters. (AKA Jane Doe #2 - 072591)

9 /26/1991
identified
F
32

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

10/1 /1991
identified
M
20

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge

10/5 /1991
identified
M
21

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

1 /21/1992
identified
F
50

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

2 /9 /1992
identified
F
34

Sat on railing of Golden Gate Bridge, fell backwards.

2 /10/1992
identified
F
25

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

4 /1 /1992
identified
M
30

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

5 /7 /1992
identified
M
36

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

6 /24/1992
identified
M
36

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

7 /14/1992
identified
F
31

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge (AKA Jane Doe #1).

7 /20/1992
identified
M
46

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

8 /9 /1992
identified
F
62

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

8 /12/1992
identified
M
56

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

9 /3 /1992
identified
M
46

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

9 /16/1992
identified
F
19

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

10/29/1992
identified
M
33

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge

11/4 /1992
identified
M
31

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge (AKA John Doe #5 - 11/04/92)

11/7 /1992
identified
M
36

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge, found floating in bay waters (AKA John Doe #6 - 11/07/92).

1 /28/1993
identified
M
32
with 3 yo daughter
Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge. (Companion case #93028)

2 /12/1993
identified
M
36

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

4 /9 /1993
identified
M
40

Witnessed jump, Golden Gate Bridge.

4 /21/1993
identified
M
41

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge (AKA John Doe #042193).

4 /30/1993
identified
M
32

Apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

5 /14/1993
identified
F
44

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

6 /9 /1993
identified
F
29

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

6 /12/1993
identified
M
42

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

6 /16/1993
identified
M
30

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge. (AKA John Doe #061693)

6 /16/1993
identified
M
46

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

7 /6 /1993
identified
F
40

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge

7 /15/1993
identified
M
44

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge

8 /26/1993
identified
M
46

Unwitnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge; dec. left suicide note of intention to jump.

9 /7 /1993
identified
M
58

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

9 /27/1993
identified
M
33
with 2 yo son
Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

10/5 /1993
identified
M
65

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

10/19/1993
identified
F
20

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge (AKA Jane Doe #101993).

11/26/1993
identified
M
36

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

12/3 /1993
identified
F
29

(AKA Jane Doe #120393) Unwitnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

2 /4 /1994
identified
F
66

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

2 /6 /1994
identified
F
34

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

2 /21/1994
identified
M
47

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge (AKA John Doe #022194).

2 /26/1994
identified
M
43

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge

3 /15/1994
identified
M
43

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge

3 /27/1994
identified
M
28

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge (AKA John Doe #032794).

4 /6 /1994
identified
F
44

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge, found floating in moat at base of south tower.

4 /14/1994
identified
M
22

Unwitnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge (AKA John Doe #041494).

6 /2 /1994
identified
M
31

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

6 /24/1994
identified
M
44

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge (AKA John Doe #062494).

7 /5 /1994
identified
M
28

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

7 /8 /1994
identified
F
20

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

8 /5 /1994
identified
M
41

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

8 /9 /1994
identified
F
63

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

9 /7 /1994
identified
M
20

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge (AKA John Doe #090794).

9 /12/1994
identified
M
47

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

9 /13/1994
identified
M
39

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge (AKA John Doe #091394-A).

9 /13/1994
identified
M
30

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge (AKA John Doe #091394-B)

9 /17/1994
identified
M
51

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge

9 /29/1994
identified
F
50

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge. (AKA Jane Doe #092994)

10/2 /1994
identified
M
52

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge. (AKA John Doe #100294)

10/3 /1994
identified
M
46

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

10/16/1994
identified
M
83

Found in moat at South Tower of Golden Gate Bridge.

10/19/1994
identified
M
44

Found in moat under Golden Gate Bridge.

11/5 /1994
identified
F
45

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge

11/19/1994
identified
M
47

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge (AKA John Doe #111994).

12/25/1994
identified
M
46

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge (AKA John Doe #122594).

12/31/1994
identified
M
41

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

1 /12/1995
identified
M
30

Found lying supine on ground. Witnessed jump from sidewalk of approach to Golden Gate Bridge.

1 /28/1995
identified
M
24

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

2 /6 /1995
identified
M
68

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

3 /19/1995
identified
M
19

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

4 /1 /1995
identified
M
38

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

4 /19/1995
identified
M
30

Witnessed bridge jump, found in moat at South Tower of Golden Gate Bridge.

5 /1 /1995
identified
M
31

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge (AKA John Doe #050195).

5 /13/1995
identified
M
34

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

5 /23/1995
identified
M
31

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge (AKA John Doe #052395).

5 /26/1995
identified
M
22

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge, rescued, became comatose, transported to hospital (AKA John Doe #052695)

6 /5 /1995
identified
F
35

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge, recovered and transported to hospital.

6 /28/1995
identified
M
48

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge. (AKA John Doe #062895)

7 /8 /1995
identified
M
63

Found floating near Golden Gate Bridge, mid-span.

7 /26/1995
identified
M
48

Unwitnessed jump from North Tower of Golden Gate Bridge; found in water east of North Tower (AKA John Doe #072695)

7 /27/1995
identified
F
36

Unwitnessed bridge jump - found in water 50 yards west of South Tower of Golden Gate Bridge. (AKA Jane Doe #072795)

7 /30/1995
identified
M
42

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

8 /9 /1995
identified
F
43

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge (AKA Jane Doe #080995).

8 /21/1995
identified
M
41

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge (AKA John Doe #082195).

8 /22/1995
identified
M
38

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

8 /31/1995
identified
M
68

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

9 /10/1995
identified
M
31

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

9 /10/1995
identified
F
40

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge. (AKA Jane Doe #091095)

9 /21/1995
identified
M
21

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

9 /22/1995
identified
M
24

Found floating under Golden Gate Bridge from unwitnessed apparent bridge jump (AKA John Doe #092295).

9 /29/1995
identified
F
48

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

9 /30/1995
identified
M
44

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

10/1 /1995
identified
F
41

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge, shot herself during descent.

10/7 /1995
identified
M
47

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

10/11/1995
identified
M
23

Unwitnessed presumed jump from Golden Gate Bridge, found in bay waters offshore Angel Island (AKA John Doe #10119).

10/11/1995
identified
M
71

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

10/17/1995
identified
F
69

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge (AKA Jane Doe #101795).

10/27/1995
identified
M
69

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge (AKA John Doe #102795).

10/31/1995
identified
M
45

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge.
1000
12/19/1995
identified
M
23

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge, found in water.

1 /25/1996
identified
M
45

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge, found in water. (AKA John Doe #012596)

2 /19/1996
identified
M
55

Found in water next to "rip rap," presumed to have jumped from Golden Gate Bridge. (AKA John Doe #021996)

3 /6 /1996
identified
M
63

Found on hillside below approach to Golden Gate Bridge, east side, midway between north tower and anchorage. (AKA John Doe #030696)

3 /17/1996
identified
M
46

Seen by private sailboat in waters near Angel Island; apparent Golden Gate Bridge jumper. (AKA John Doe #031796)

4 /6 /1996
identified
F
59

Unwitnessed apparent Golden Gate Bridge jumper. (AKA Jane Doe #040696)

5 /13/1996
identified
M
37

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

7 /15/1996
identified
M
42

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

7 /27/1996
identified
M
24

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

8 /14/1996
identified
F
32

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge. (AKA Jane Doe #081496)

8 /29/1996
identified
M
62

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

8 /31/1996
identified
F
58

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

9 /19/1996
identified
F
34

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge (AKA Jane Doe #091996).

9 /20/1996
identified
F
48

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge (AKA Jane Doe #092096).

10/18/1996
identified
M
37

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge, found in moat of south tower (AKA John Doe #101896).

12/1 /1996
identified
M
21

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge (AKA John Doe #120196).

12/29/1996
identified
F
23

Unwitnessed presumed jump from Golden Gate Bridge (AKA Jane Doe #123196; AKA ...)

2 /14/1997
identified
M
22

Unwitnessed apparent Golden Gate Bridge jumper, hit land.  Found by passerby.

2 /16/1997
identified
F
59

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

3 /12/1997
identified
M
52

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

3 /31/1997
identified
M
32

Found in bay waters, presumed having jumped from Golden Gate Bridge. (AKA John Doe #033197)

4 /12/1997
identified
M
40

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

4 /16/1997
identified
M
44

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

5 /10/1997
identified
M
40

Witnessed jump from the Golden Gate Bridge.

6 /4 /1997
identified
M
47

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

6 /5 /1997
identified
F
34

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

6 /9 /1997
identified
M
35

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

6 /9 /1997
identified
M
21

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge. (AKA John Doe #060997)

6 /28/1997
identified
M
25

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge. (AKA John Doe #062897)

7 /4 /1997
identified
M
43

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

7 /13/1997
identified
M
20

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge. (AKA John Doe #071397)

8 /5 /1997
identified
M
30

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

8 /17/1997
identified
M
47

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge (AKA John Doe #081797).

8 /21/1997
identified
M
54

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

8 /25/1997
identified
M
32

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

8 /26/1997
identified
M
26

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.  (AKA John Doe #082697)

9 /4 /1997
identified
M
21

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

9 /9 /1997
identified
M
20

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge. (AKA John Doe #090997)

9 /17/1997
identified
M
23

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

9 /22/1997
identified
F
39

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge. (AKA Jane Doe #092297)

9 /30/1997
identified
M
40

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

10/30/1997
identified
F
54

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

11/4 /1997
identified
M
60

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

12/11/1997
identified
M
39

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge (AKA John Doe #121197).

12/22/1997
identified
F
33

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

2 /10/1998
identified
M
35

Presumed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

2 /20/1998
identified
M
19

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge. (AKA John Doe #022098)

4 /4 /1998
identified
F
41

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge. (AKA Jane Doe #040498)

4 /14/1998
identified
F
57

Found floating 400 yds west of Alcatraz. (AKA Jane Doe #041498) (Unwitnessed probable jump from Golden Gate Bridge)

4 /23/1998
identified
M
23

Found dead on beach behind Spindrift Drive, Stinson Beach. (AKA John Doe #042398) (Unwitnessed probably jump from Golden Gate Bridge.)

4 /24/1998
identified
F
22

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge. (AKA Jane Doe #042498)

4 /24/1998
identified
F
51

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

4 /26/1998
identified
F
29

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

6 /14/1998
identified
M
24

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge

6 /20/1998
identified
M
51

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

7 /7 /1998
identified
F
30

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge. (AKA Jane Doe #070798)

7 /10/1998
identified
M
37

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

8 /12/1998
identified
F
33

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge. (AKA Jane Doe #081298)

8 /14/1998
identified
M
51

Found in water; unwitnessed presumed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

8 /31/1998
identified
F
52

Apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

9 /25/1998
identified
M
37

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

10/1 /1998
identified
M
26

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

10/11/1998
identified
M
48

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

10/12/1998
identified
M
29

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

10/18/1998
identified
M
31

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

12/14/1998
identified
M
56

Witnessed jump from the Golden Gate Bridge.

1 /6 /1999
identified
M
28

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge

2 /6 /1999
identified
M
37

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

3 /13/1999
identified
M
45

Witnessed jump from the Golden Gate Bridge.

3 /16/1999
identified
M
53

Witnessed jump from east side of Golden Gate Bridge near North Tower.

3 /25/1999
identified
M
30

Apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge from north tower to construction area beneath.

3 /29/1999
identified
M
49

Witnessed jump from the Golden Gate Bridge.

4 /4 /1999
identified
M
46

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

5 /8 /1999
identified
M
37

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

5 /28/1999
identified
M
33

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

6 /24/1999
identified
M
45

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

8 /7 /1999
identified
F
56

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

8 /14/1999
identified
M
34

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

8 /24/1999
identified
M
19

Witnessed to have jumped from Golden Gate Bridge.

10/17/1999
identified
M
32

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

11/15/1999
identified
M
27

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

12/7 /1999
identified
F
35

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

12/8 /1999
identified
M
31

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge. (AKA John Doe #120899)

1 /8 /2000
identified
M
29

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

1 /22/2000
identified
F
54

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge. (AKA Jane Doe #012200)

4 /29/2000
identified
M
20

Witnessed jump from the Golden Gate Bridge.

5 /17/2000
identified
M
39

Witnessed jump from the Golden Gate Bridge, found at Pt. Cavallo by Coast Guard.

5 /24/2000
identified
M
56

Witnessed to have jumped from Golden Gate Bridge.

7 /8 /2000
identified
M
21

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

7 /19/2000
identified
M
46

Witnessed jump from the Golden Gate Bridge

7 /30/2000
identified
M
52

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge

9 /13/2000
identified
M
28

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

10/22/2000
identified
M
24

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge. (AKA John Doe #102200)

11/7 /2000
identified
M
46

Witnessed jump from the Golden Gate Bridge.

3 /16/2001
identified
M
53

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

3 /19/2001
identified
F
43

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.  (AKA Jane Doe #031901)

4 /16/2001
identified
F
63

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

6 /14/2001
identified
F
58

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

6 /17/2001
identified
M
52

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge. (John Doe #061701)

7 /19/2001
identified
M
38

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge (AKA John Doe #071901)
1100
8 /7 /2001
identified
M
55

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge

8 /28/2001
identified
M
49

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge

9 /6 /2001
identified
M
52

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge onto roadway and rocks below.

10/8 /2001
identified
M
49

Unwitnessed apparent jump from the Golden Gate Bridge. (AKA John Doe #100801)

11/20/2001
identified
M
21

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge. (AKA John Doe #112001)

12/9 /2001
identified
M
58

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

12/17/2001
identified
F
14

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

1 /5 /2002
identified
M
27

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

1 /16/2002
identified
M
32

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.  (AKA John Doe #011602)

2 /26/2002
identified
M
28

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

3 /7 /2002
identified
M
20

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge; subsequently died at hospital.

3 /11/2002
identified
F
37

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge

3 /17/2002
identified
F
59

Unwitnessed apparent jump from the Golden Gate Bridge.

3 /26/2002
identified
M
43

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

4 /24/2002
identified
F
43

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

4 /29/2002
identified
M
44

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

5 /25/2002
identified
M
59

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.  (AKA John Doe #052502)

5 /27/2002
identified
M
69

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge

6 /8 /2002
identified
M
23

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge

7 /8 /2002
identified
M
77

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.  (AKA John Doe #070802.)

9 /6 /2002
identified
F
50

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

9 /14/2002
identified
M
52

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge onto roadway below.

9 /20/2002
identified
M
38

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

11/13/2002
identified
F
33

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

12/4 /2002
identified
M
49

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge (AKA John Doe #120402).

12/12/2002
identified
M
45

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

1 /24/2003
identified
F
35

(AKA Jane Doe #012403) Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge, found on beach.

2 /6 /2003
identified
F
55

(AKA Jane Doe #020603) Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

2 /6 /2003
identified
M
76

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

3 /2 /2003
identified
F
27

Unwitnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

3 /12/2003
identified
M
58

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

3 /19/2003
identified
M
44

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

5 /18/2003
identified
M
40

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.  (AKA John Doe #051803)

6 /5 /2003
identified
M
34

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

6 /6 /2003
identified
M
35

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

6 /19/2003
identified
M
53

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

6 /21/2003
identified
F
33

Unwitnessed probable jump from Golden Gate Bridge (AKA Jane Doe #062103).

6 /26/2003
identified
M
32

(AKA John Doe #062603) Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge

7 /7 /2003
identified
M
72

(AKA John Doe #070703) Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

7 /11/2003
identified
F
54

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

8 /30/2003
identified
M
84

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge

9 /8 /2003
identified
M
53

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

10/26/2003
identified
F
26

Unwitnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

11/13/2003
identified
M
38

(AKA John Doe #111303) Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

12/21/2003
identified
M
52

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge

1 /16/2004
identified
M
21

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

2 /6 /2004
identified
M
38

Unwitnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

2 /20/2004
identified
M
63

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

3 /7 /2004
identified
F
20

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

3 /9 /2004
identified
M
55

(AKA John Doe #030904) Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

4 /11/2004
identified
F
44

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

4 /28/2004
identified
M
49

(AKA John Doe #050204)Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge, found in ocean waters at Stinson Beach on 05/02/04.

5 /6 /2004
identified
M
49

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

5 /10/2004
identified
F
35

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

5 /11/2004
identified
M
34

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

7 /16/2004
identified
M
41

Unwitnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

8 /2 /2004
identified
M
52

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

8 /20/2004
identified
F
39

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge (AKA Jane Doe #082004)

9 /16/2004
identified
M
55

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

9 /28/2004
identified
F
40

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

10/26/2004
identified
M
33

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

11/11/2004
identified
M
40

(AKA John Doe #111104) Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

12/16/2004
identified
F
58

Unwitnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

12/29/2004
identified
M
28

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

1 /27/2005
identified
M
59

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

2 /1 /2005
identified
M
18

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

2 /6 /2005
identified
M
37

(AKA John Doe #020605) Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

2 /18/2005
identified
F
26

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

2 /22/2005
identified
F
33

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

2 /28/2005
identified
M
46

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

3 /31/2005
identified
M
27

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

4 /14/2005
identified
M
53

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

4 /24/2005
identified
F
75

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

5 /6 /2005
identified
F
19

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

5 /19/2005
identified
M
42

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

5 /24/2005
identified
M
18

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

8 /10/2005
identified
F
25

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

9 /15/2005
identified
M
85

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

9 /29/2005
identified
M
21

 (AKA John Doe #092905) Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

10/11/2005
identified
M
34

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

10/14/2005
identified
F
39

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

10/24/2005
identified
M
36

Unwitnessed apparent jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

10/25/2005
identified
F
49

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

11/29/2005
identified
M
17

(AKA John Doe #112905) Unwitnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

12/6 /2005
identified
F
54

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

2 /13/2006
identified
M
48

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

2 /15/2006
identified
M
48

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge. (AKA John Doe #021406)

3 /2 /2006
identified
F
44

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

3 /11/2006
identified
M
34

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

3 /14/2006
identified
M
47

Found washed ashore near Golden Gate Bridge

3 /22/2006
identified
M
49

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

3 /24/2006
identified
M
65

Found on beach near Golden Gate Bridge; note of intent found at his residence.

4 /13/2006
identified
M
54

Unwitnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

5 /15/2006
identified
M
62

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

5 /27/2006
identified
M
48

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

6 /1 /2006
identified
M
35

(AKA John Doe #060106) Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

6 /14/2006
identified
F
29

(AKA Jane Doe #061406) Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

6 /30/2006
identified
M
35

(AKA John Doe #063006) Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

7 /7 /2006
identified
F
31

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

7 /17/2006
identified
M
55

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.
1200
7 /24/2006
identified
M
28

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

7 /25/2006
identified
M
42

Unwitnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

8 /22/2006
identified
F
49

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

8 /28/2006
identified
M
51

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

9 /1 /2006
identified
M
40

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

10/16/2006
identified
F
32

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

10/21/2006
identified
M
60

Unwitnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

12/9 /2006
identified
F
37

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

12/10/2006
identified
M
49

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

12/12/2006
identified
M
0

Unwitnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

12/20/2006
identified
M
50

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

12/22/2006
identified
F
65

Unwitnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

12/23/2006
identified
F
58

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

1 /1 /2007
identified
M
52

Apparent unwitnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge, found washed up on rocks at Angel Island (AKA John Doe #010107)

1 /7 /2007
identified
M
44

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge, falling onto rocks below.

2 /3 /2007
identified
M
44

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

2 /14/2007
identified
M
52

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

2 /16/2007
identified
M
46

(AKA John Doe #021607) Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

2 /25/2007
identified
M
47

(AKA John Doe #022507) Unwitnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

2 /27/2007
identified
M
38

(AKA John Doe #022707) Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

3 /4 /2007
identified
M
36

(AKA John Doe #030407-B) Unwitnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

3 /4 /2007
identified
M
57

(AKA John Doe #030407-A) Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

3 /6 /2007
identified
M
23

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

3 /9 /2007
identified
F
64

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

3 /13/2007
identified
M
50

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

3 /28/2007
identified
M
53

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

4 /4 /2007
identified
F
39

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

4 /9 /2007
identified
F
33

Unwitnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge

5/8/2007
Henry Lew
M
18

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge. Rescued by boat and taken to San Francisco General Hospital. Died in surgery. Death Certificate does not mention bridge.

5 /12/2007
identified
M
55

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

5 /19/2007
identified
M
37

(AKA John Doe #051907) Unwitnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

6 /8 /2007
identified
M
29

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

6 /16/2007
identified
M
39

Unwitnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

6 /25/2007
identified
M
40

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

7 /9 /2007
identified
M
22

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

7 /22/2007
identified
F
57

Unwitnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

7 /26/2007
identified
M
40

(AKA John Doe #072607) Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

8 /7 /2007
identified
M
45

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

8 /7 /2007
identified
M
27

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

8 /21/2007
Unidentified
M
0

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

9 /9 /2007
identified
F
59

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

9 /25/2007
identified
M
31

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

9 /26/2007
identified
M
47

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

10/1 /2007
identified
M
26

Unwitnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

10/2 /2007
identified
M
23

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

11/2 /2007
identified
M
37

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

11/11/2007
identified
M
35

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

11/18/2007
identified
F
39

Unwitnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

11/19/2007
identified
M
35

(AKA John Doe #111907) Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

12/15/2007
identified
M
46

(AKA John Doe #121507) Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

2 /13/2008
identified
M
36

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

3 /18/2008
identified
M
39

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

4 /16/2008
identified
F
23

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.
5 /25/2008
identified
M
38

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

6 /8 /2008
identified
M
49

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

6 /18/2008
identified
M
38

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

8 /1 /2008
identified
F
47

Unwitnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

8 /13/2008
identified
M
37

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

9 /8 /2008
identified
F
37

Unwitnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge, found on coastline 7 miles north of the bridge.

9 /16/2008
identified
M
23

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

9 /26/2008
identified
M
21

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

10/3 /2008
identified
F
19

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

10/21/2008
identified
F
29

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

11/23/2008
identified
M
30

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

11/25/2008
identified
M
46

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge(11/23/08), found on Angel Island (11/25/08).

12/1 /2008
identified
M
59

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

12/15/2008
identified
F
72

Witnessed jump from Golden Gate Bridge.

" Of the 100, he easily found 26 that were alive and well and enjoying the finer side of life. 

His investigative techniques were not very sophisticated either, so it is likely that many of the remaining 74 "victims" are out walking the streets somewhere. "