Derby Dead Pool

Jakiw Palij was a former guard at the Trawniki concentration camp in Poland. In 1943, as part of Operation Harvest Festival, all 13,000 Jews imprisoned at the camp were massacred in a single day and their bodies incinerated in a sonderkommando. Palij moved to the US after the war and obtained US citizenship in 1957, […]

Does a deadpooling year really begin until “the oldest person in America” dies? This time round it’s Lessie Brown, who left school in 1915. The grandchild of slaves, Brown worked on farms and as a hotel maid in her younger days. She attributed her longevity to a teetotal lifestyle and regular consumption of sweet potatoes. […]

A former television broadcaster, Larry Langford managed to fit a lot into his one term as mayor of Birmingham, Alabama. His tenure started with revelations that he’d just happened to have won $1.5 million in a series of jackpots at a donor’s casino, and ended with him in prison after being found guilty of accepting […]

Originally a surf musician and live keyboardist for the Beach Boys, Daryl Dragon achieved fame as “The Captain”, the peaked cap-wearing half of 1970s cheeseboard easy listening act Captain and Tennille. While Toni Tennille served as the focal point, Dragon handled the overall sound of the band, playing the majority of instruments on daytime radio-friendly […]

Mean WHOO! BY GAWD! Gene Okerlund has finally put that cigarette out, aged 76. A failed rock’n’roll star (his teenage band, Gene Carroll & The Shades, put out a number of singles but failed to get out of their hometown), Okerlund studied broadcast journalism at college and joined the AWA in 1970. Despite previously having […]

In what will undoubtedly be the most glamorous, high profile death of the year, we at the DDP wave goodbye to Kevin J. McIntyre. Appointed by Donald Trump as chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, McIntyre’s reign lasted less than a year before a brain tumour forced him to stand down from the role. […]

Our first hit of the year came to us all the way from West Lafayette, Indiana, on January 1st. Tyler Trent was a student at Purdue University who was diagnosed with osteosarcoma as a 15-year-old. However, he didn’t let that stand in the way of his college football love, and in 2018 became an honorary […]

2018. The year that England celebrated losing three matches out of a possible seven, Elon Musk called a cave diver a paedophile and Bitcoin investors had to sell their gaming chairs on Gumtree. It might not have been a marquee year for celebrity deaths, but in the world of deadpooling we saw a tight race […]