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Saturday, August 4, 2007

Angelenos of the Week: Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake



It's been several weeks since the suicide of game designer/writer/blogger Theresa Duncan -- followed days later by the suicide of her boyfriend, up-and-coming artist Jeremy Blake. The two former Angelenos had moved back to New York whe they both took their lives.

Yet there's a growing interest in the mystery surrounding their nearly simultaneous demise -- so much so that the L.A. Times has done several stories, while the L.A. Weekly weighed in this week with a massive piece by Fishbowl L.A.'s Kate Coe.

Check out Coe's story here. Coe, an acquaintance of Duncan's, debunks some of the mystique surrounding Duncan's death, and gets to the paranoia and bizarre behavior that came at the end of her life:

In 2001, Theresa Duncan was on top of the world. She had a two-picture deal with Fox Searchlight, and came to Los Angeles confident in her ability to conquer Hollywood. In July 2007, she was dead by her own hand, having washed down an overdose of Tylenol PM with bourbon in her Greenwich Village apartment. New York police say her handwritten note indicated she was at peace with her decision.

News of her suicide spread on the Internet, where she had gained a small but devoted audience as a blogger. A week after her suicide, her longtime romantic partner Jeremy Blake, 35, went missing, his clothes and wallet found on the Atlantic shore at Far Rockaway with a note implying he had walked into the sea...

I knew her, and I knew that much of what she wrote about her world was an elaborate tale, taken as fact by the uninitiated. Duncan blogged daily on her elegant Web site, The Wit of the Staircase, about her bohemian-chic cottage on a Venice canal, meetings of the slightly sinister and probably nonexistent Lunar Society of Los Angeles, and the turbulent love life of Kate Moss.

In his piece, L.A. Times writer Chris Lee reports that Duncan and Blake had prepared a 27-page document that was to be used in a lawsuit against the Chuch of Scientology, which the duo alleged had been stalking them.

By making so much noise after their deaths, Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake are Franklin Avenue's Angelenos of the Week.

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