Deaths Associated With the Bullet Catch |
| Coulen (1500s) |
beaten to death with his trick pistol |
| Kia Khan Khruse (1818) |
Indian magician- report of his death onstage may
have been false |
| Madame deLinsky (1820) |
magician's assistant killed when real bullet
loaded into chamber by mistake |
| Giovanni deGrisy |
son of Torrini, supposedly Robert-Houdin's
mentor; could be a fictitious story; reportedly Torrini fired the gun that killed his son |
| Arnold Buck (1840) |
died when a volunteer secretly added nails to
the gun barrel before firing at him |
| Adam Epstein (1869) |
his wand, used to ram home the balls in the
rifle barrel, broke inside the gun; he was killed by wand shards |
| Raoul Curran (1880) |
killed by a member of the audience who jumped up
out of his seat and shot him without warning |
| deLine Jr (1890) |
his magician father shot him onstage |
| Michael Hatal (1899) |
he failed to switch blank cartridges for the
real bullets that killed him |
| Otto Blumenfeld (1906) |
he also failed to switch bullets |
| Chung Ling Soo (1918) |
killed by a faulty trick gun |
| H. T. Sartell |
he also failed to switch bullets |
| "The Black Wizard of the West"
(1922) |
his wife purposely fired live bullets at him |
| Ralf Bialla (1972) |
fell off a cliff because of constant dizzyness
caused by injuries from bullet catching act |
| Doc Conrad (1977) |
killed during practice of the Russian Roulette
trick, a version of the Bullet Catch |
| Fernando Tejada
(1988) |
killed onstage during a
performance in Columbia |
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