Dead Celebrity List

Urbandale police are investigating the death of the bass guitarist for Grammy award-winning Slipknot at a local hotel.

Paul Dedrick Gray, 38, of Johnston was found dead at approximately 10:50 a.m. today by an employee at TownePlace Suites, 8800 Northpark Drive, police said.

There was no evidence of foul play, police said, but the investigation is ongoing.

An autopsy is scheduled for Tuesday. Toxicology tests will be done.

Gray was a founding member of Slipknot and one of only two members not born in Iowa. The band broke into the mainstream with a platinum-selling self-titled debut in 1999. Two follow-ups, 2002’s “Iowa” and 2005’s “Vol. 3 (The Subliminal Verses)” also went platinum. The band has been nominated for seven Grammy awards, winning in 2006 for best metal performance.

In 2008, Slipknot released its most recent album, “All Hope Is Gone,” and toured arenas, including its first-ever show at Wells Fargo Arena in January. The band ended its tour cycle in October, and members of the band have been working on individual projects since then.

Gray was arrested on drug charges in June 2003, after he crashed his Porsche into a Des Moines motorist at Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway and Carpenter Avenue.

Police charged Gray with marijuana possession, cocaine possession, possession of drug paraphernalia and a red-light violation. He later pleaded guilty to operating while under the influence of drugs, and was sentenced to one year of informal probation.

His court file included a handwritten note from Dr. Joe Takamine, who described a conversation with Gray about his “sporadic use of various drugs and of the long periods of abstinence in between.”

Takamine concluded that Gray was not addicted to any drug and understood the consequences of drug use.

“In light of his past and present history and because of his great love of music, I feel that Mr. Gray will refrain from future use of mind-altering chemicals,” Takamine wrote.

Ronnie James Dio, Rock Singer, Dies at 67

Ronnie James Dio, a singer with the bands Rainbow, Black Sabbath and Dio, whose powerful, semioperatic vocal style and attachment to demonic imagery made him one of the best-loved figures in classic heavy metal, died on Sunday morning, according to an announcement on his Web site by his wife, Wendy. He was 67.

No cause was given in the announcement, but Mr. Dio had been suffering from stomach cancer, and recently his band Heaven and Hell canceled its summer tour because of his health. The Houston Chronicle reported that Mr. Dio was being treated at a hospital in Houston.

Mr. Dio was born Ronald James Padavona in Portsmouth, N.H., and grew up in Cortland, N.Y. He began his career in rockabilly bands in the late 1950s, but by the mid-1970s, when Ritchie Blackmore, the guitarist of the British band Deep Purple, hired him to sing for his new band, Rainbow, Mr. Dio had become a heavy-metal purist, and he became known as much for his vocal prowess as for his Mephistophelean stage persona. He is widely credited with popularizing the “devil horn” hand gesture — index and pinky fingers up, everything else clenched in a fist — as a symbol of metal’s occult-like worship of everything scary and heavy.

Mr. Dio sang about devils, defiance and the glory of rock ‘n’ roll with a strong, mean voice, punctuating his points with gale-force vibrato, a style derived in part from singers like Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan. When Ozzy Osborne was fired from Black Sabbath in 1979, Mr. Dio replaced him, and by 1983 he released the album “Holy Diver” with his own band, Dio. In various lineup configurations, the band Dio continued to release material in the mid-2000s.

In 2006 he began playing with some of his former band mates in Black Sabbath, naming the group Heaven and Hell after the title of the first Black Sabbath album on which Mr. Dio appeared. Heaven and Hell released one album, “The Devil You Know,” in 2009.

Other than his wife, no information about his survivors was immediately available on Sunday afternoon.

Lynn Redgrave, an introspective and independent player in her family’s acting dynasty who became a 1960s sensation as the freethinking title character of “Georgy Girl” and later dramatized her troubled past in such one-woman stage performances “Shakespeare for My Father” and “Nightingale,” has died. She was 67.

Her publicist Rick Miramontez, speaking on behalf of her children, said Redgrave died peacefully Sunday night at her home in Connecticut. Children Ben, Pema and Annabel were with her.

“Our beloved mother Lynn Rachel passed away peacefully after a seven year journey with breast cancer,” they said in a statement Monday. “She lived, loved and worked harder than ever before. The endless memories she created as a mother, grandmother, writer, actor and friend will sustain us for the rest of our lives. Our entire family asks for privacy through this difficult time.”

Her death comes a year after her niece Natasha Richardson died from head injuries sustained in a skiing accident and just a month after the death of her older brother, Corin Redgrave.

The youngest child of Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson, Lynn Redgrave never quite managed the acclaim – or notoriety – of elder sibling Vanessa Redgrave, but received Oscar nominations for “Georgy Girl” and “Gods and Monsters,” and Tony nominations for “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” “Shakespeare for My Father” and “The Constant Wife.” In recent years, she also made appearances in the television shows “Ugly Betty,” “Law & Order” and “Desperate Housewives.”

“Vanessa was the one expected to be the great actress,” Lynn Redgrave told The Associated Press in 1999. “It was always, ‘Corin’s the brain, Vanessa the shining star, oh, and then there’s Lynn.’”

In the theater, Redgrave, with her striking dark red hair, often displayed a sunny, sweet and open personality, much like her ebullient offstage personality. It worked well in such shows as “Black Comedy,” her Broadway debut in 1972 and again two years later in “My Fat Friend,” a comedy about an overweight young woman who sheds pounds to find romance.

Tall and blue-eyed like her sister, she was as open about her personal life as Vanessa has been about politics. In plays and in interviews, Lynn Redgrave confided about her family, her marriage and her health. She acknowledged that she suffered from bulimia and served as a spokeswoman for Weight Watchers. With daughter Annabel Clark, she released a 2004 book about her fight with cancer, “Journal: A Mother and Daughter’s Recovery From Breast Cancer.”

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/movies/2010/05/03/2010-05-03_lynn_redgrave_dies_at_age_67_after_sevenyear_breast_cancer_struggle.html#ixzz0msuPbnj3

aryl F. Gates, the unyielding chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, whose aggressive approach to policing in a period of intense urban turmoil was both admired for its innovation and criticized for the racial unrest it provoked, died on Friday at his home in Newport Beach, Calif. He was 83.

Phil McCarten/Associated Press

Daryl F. Gates, former Los Angeles police chief.

In a statement, the police department said he died after “a short battle with cancer.”

Mr. Gates began his police career in 1949 as a Los Angeles patrolman, and it ended when he was forced to resign in June 1992, after 14 years as chief. The years in between were a raucous era in which Los Angeles almost doubled its population while becoming overwhelmed by drugs, gangs, guns and a tide of violent crime.

Mr. Gates, who embraced the tough, principled and inflexible strategy of his mentor, William H. Parker, the former Los Angeles police chief, responded to that climate by stressing discipline in the ranks of his 8,000-strong department, enlarging the police presence in the streets and developing new policing tools.

Mr. Gates pioneered the use of police helicopters to fight crime across the nearly 470 square miles of his city, and he helped develop the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) unit, made up of elite mobile teams of highly trained officers.

SWAT teams deployed sophisticated surveillance equipment, assault weapons and paramilitary skills to neutralize threats. Hundreds of police departments in the United States and around the world have since developed SWAT units. In Los Angeles, they had a prominent role in maintaining order during the 1984 Summer Olympic Games, a period widely regarded as the high point of Mr. Gates’s career.

Another initiative was DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), a program, begun in the early 1980s, in which officers go into schools to teach students how to resist peer pressure to use drugs, join gangs and engage in violence. Millions of American students now receive the DARE curriculum each year.

But as Los Angeles grew more dense and diverse, as crime increased and as cultural mores and racial attitudes shifted in the ’80s, Mr. Gates’s oversight of the department came under mounting criticism. Black and Hispanic residents accused the police of treating them harshly and Mr. Gates of doing little to rein in his officers. They said the department’s emphasis on making arrests invited confrontation and discouraged good will in minority neighborhoods.

The city’s mayor, Tom Bradley, who was black and a Democrat, was a fierce critic of Mr. Gates, a conservative Republican. So were members of the Los Angeles City Council, several members of the city’s Congressional delegation and the editorial pages of the city’s two major daily newspapers, The Los Angeles Times and The Daily News.

The criticism intensified in March 1991, when Rodney King, a black convicted robber and parolee, was viciously beaten by white officers after a high-speed car chase. The beating was videotaped by a bystander and repeatedly broadcast around the world, provoking widespread revulsion and an intense national debate about police brutality, race relations, poverty and Mr. Gates’s leadership.

Mr. Gates said he was appalled by what he saw on the videotape but defended the department, contending that the officers’ conduct had been an “aberration.”

That assessment was disputed by a commission appointed by the city to investigate allegations of police brutality. The panel, led by Warren Christopher, a prominent lawyer who later became secretary of state in the Clinton administration, issued a damning report, finding that a “significant number” of officers had often used excessive force, especially against members of minority groups, and that these officers had rarely been disciplined; that police reports were frequently falsified to protect abusive officers; and that messages between patrol cars — many quoted in the report — documented racial animosity, contempt for official restraints and violent attitudes among officers.

The commission also said that the department’s record in hiring and promoting minority group members was insufficient.

Over the next 13 months, Mr. Gates vigorously fended off calls for his resignation while struggling to manage the department. Among those who defended him was Gov. Pete Wilson, a fellow Republican, who said the department under Mr. Gates was “one of the best.”

In April 1992, four white officers accused of assault in the beating of Mr. King were acquitted by an all-white jury. The decision set off three days of rioting, which left 53 people dead, about 2,500 injured and more than $400 million in property damage, mostly in the South-Central neighborhood. A second commission, led by William H. Webster, the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, faulted the police, the mayor and the City Council for poor planning, poor coordination and poor reaction to the jury decision.

Actor Peter Graves was found dead Sunday at his home in Pacific Palisades, according to law enforcement sources. Graves, who stared in “Mission: Impossible,” “Airplane!” and Billy Wilder’s “Stalag 17″–apparently died of natural causes, the sources said.

Graves was 83, according to a biography on the website IMDB.com.

In a Times story late last year, Graves said he initially turned down the role for “Airplane!” because he thought it was in poor taste–until actors Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges and Leslie Nielsen signed on to the cast. “They say you are supposed to stretch as an actor, so let’s go stretch it,” he told The Times’ Susan King.

A full obituary is coming shortly from The Times.

–Andrew Blankstein and Cara Mia DiMassa

Photo: Peter Graves, pictured Dec. 8, 2009. Credit: Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

The Los Angeles coroner’s office says “The Lost Boys” actor Corey Haim is dead at 38.

Coroner’s Lt. Cheryl MacWillie said Wednesday that Haim died at 2:15 a.m. at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank.

She said an autopsy will determine the cause of death and there are no other details.

Canadian-born Haim became a 1980s teen heartthrob with the 1986 film “Lucas” and 1987’s “The Lost Boys.”

His first role was in the 1984 hit “Firstborn,” in which he played a young child caught up in a family war.

He then appeared in the 1985 television movie “A Time to Live.”

In recent years, he appeared in the A&E reality TV show “The Two Coreys” with his friend Corey Feldman.

It was canceled in 2008 after two seasons.

PHILADELPHIA (AP) – A relative says soul singer Teddy Pendergrass has died in suburban Philadelphia at age 59.

The singer’s son, Teddy Pendergrass II, says his father died Wednesday at Bryn Mawr Hospital.

Pendergrass’ son says his father underwent colon cancer surgery eight months ago and had “a difficult recovery.”

The elder Pendergrass was injured in a car accident in 1982. He suffered a spinal cord injury and was paralyzed from the waist down. He spent six months in a hospital but returned to recording the next year with the album “Love Language.”

His son thanks all the fans of his father’s music and says he will live on through his songs. He says the singer was loved by friends and family worldwide.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

PHILADELPHIA (AP) – A relative says soul singer Teddy Pendergrass has died in suburban Philadelphia at age 59.

The singer’s son, Teddy Pendergrass II, says his father died Wednesday at Bryn Mawr Hospital.

Pendergrass’ son says his father underwent colon cancer surgery eight months ago and had “a difficult recovery.”

The elder Pendergrass was injured in a car accident in 1982. He suffered a spinal cord injury and was paralyzed from the waist down. He spent six months in a hospital but returned to recording the next year with the album “Love Language.”

Erik Gates is dead at 47 following a freak accident.  For those that don’t know, Gates was regularly seen on the Discovery Channel’s “Myth Busters”, and is the survivor of cancer and several mishaps.  Erik Gates’s freakish death is enough to shock and stun many.

Erik and one of his friends were walking on the roof of the Xirrus Inc building when he fell 30 feet.  He sustained chest injuries which later claimed his life. Why was he walking on the roof of the building? Reports indicate that he owns Gateco Electric and was on a job sight.  He fell through a skylight and suffered blunt force trauma.

Gates’s appearances on “Myth Busters” were largely due to his expertise in rocketry. This experience allowed him to not only appear on the Discovery Channel series approximately four times, but also start a Web site devoted to rocketry. The site, Gates Brother Rocketry, was co-owned by Erik and his brother Dirk.  Dirk also owns the building where Erik fell to his death.