For you obit fans out there, the New York Times’ Margalit Fox has a great one today of Linda Riss Pugach. A snippet to whet your appetite:
She was 22, a sheltered, dark-haired Bronx beauty said to look like Elizabeth Taylor. He was a decade older, a suave lawyer who courted her with flowers, rides in his powder-blue Cadillac and trips to glittering Manhattan nightclubs. He was married, though not to her.
Before long, tiring of his unfulfilled promises to divorce his wife, she ended their affair. He hired three men, who threw lye in her face, blinding her, and went to prison for more than a decade. Afterward, she married him.
The incident dominated headlines after it happened in 1959, and more than a decade later the Times would describe it as “one of the most celebrated crimes of passion in New York history.” Pugach, along with her husband Burton, stayed in the public eye thanks to a pair of retellings of the incident and their subsequent marriage: Berry Stainback’s 1976 book A Very Different Love Story, and the widely seen 2007 documentary Crazy Love. Full obit here.
