David Carradine's Death: Not a Suicide?

June 5, 2009

Digg It De.licio.us RSS print email

Following the discovery of the Kill Bill star's lifeless body, with rope around his neck and genitals, in a hotel room in Thailand, his family and friends are speaking out — saying they suspect foul play — and investigators are further probing the matter.

Carradine's managers, Chuck Binder and Tiffany Smith, say that they don't believe their client took his own life — nor do they believe the death was an accident. They state that the family was told Carradine's hands were bound behind his back — in a way that indicates someone else must have tied them together. "I can tell you 100 percent that he would have never committed suicide," Smith says.

Smith adds that Carradine's family is also skeptical that he took his own life. "They have the same belief we have," said Smith. "There was no way David did this to himself."

A day after calling Carradine's death an apparent suicide, the Bangkok police are now unsure. "It is unclear whether he committed suicide or not or [whether] he died of suffocation or heart failure," said a spokesperson, adding that he could have died from an "accidental suffocation." An autopsy failed to establish the cause of the death — though the chief coroner at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn hospital stated that it was "certainly was not a natural cause of death."

A toxicology report is pending.

The California native was in Thailand filming the movie Stretch. Producers of the film first became worried when the actor failed to appear for a meal with the rest of the film crew on Wednesday, but they thought he was resting. On Thursday they requested that someone at the five-star Nai Lert Park Hotel check on him and his body was discovered.

In a 2004 interview, Carradine admitted he had contemplated suicide, including once while staying in a hotel. "I remember one time sitting in the window of the third or fourth floor of the Plaza Hotel for about an hour, thinking about just tipping off," he said. "And that was at a time when I was having more fun than you could imagine. I just thought, 'Who the ---- cares, man? Why don't I just split?' Of course I didn't, so there you go."

Carradine's body was being shipped to the United States on Friday.

For more gossip, news and pix, follow Star on Twitter.