Suspicious Death
The following passages were published in 2007 by Robert D. Novak in his memoir, The Prince of Darkness.
"Sullivan came to our house in the Maryland suburbs in June 1972 for lunch and a long conversation about my plans for a biography of Hoover (a project I abandoned as just too ambitious an undertaking). Before he left, Bill told me someday I probably would read about his death in some kind of accident, but not to believe it. It would be murder.
"On November 9, 1977, twenty minutes before sunrise, sixty-five-year-old William C. Sullivan was walking through the woods near his retirement home in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, on the way to meet hunting companions. Another hunter, a twenty-two-year-old man using a telescopic sight on a .30 caliber rifle, said he mistook Sullivan for a deer, shot him in the neck, and killed him instantly... The authorities called it an accident, fining the shooter (the son of a state policeman) five hundred dollars and taking away his hunting license for ten years. Sullivan's collaborator on his memoir, the television news writer Bill Brown, wrote that he and Sullivan's family were "convinced" that the death was "accidental."
"Sullivan's death did not prevent publication of the memoir, telling all about the disgrace of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. After Watergate, with all the principals dead or out of office, it received little attention."
The hunter who shot Sullivan was named Robert Daniels, Jr. Sullivan was one of six current or former FBI officials who died in a six-month period in 1977.
Sullivan is buried in his family's plot at St. Michael Cemetery in Hudson, Massachusetts, with his wife, Marion Hawkes, as well as his parents, sister and other relatives.
Read more about this topic: William C. Sullivan
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