Bobby Driscoll - Death

Death

He left The Factory in late 1967 or early 1968 and, penniless, disappeared into Manhattan's underground. On March 30, 1968, about three weeks after his 31st birthday, two boys playing in a deserted East Village tenement at 371 East 10th St. found his body. The medical examination determined that he had died from heart failure caused by an advanced hardening of the arteries because of his longtime drug abuse. There was no identification on the body, and photos taken of it and shown around the neighborhood yielded no positive identification. When Driscoll's body went unclaimed, he was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave in New York City's Potter's Field on Hart Island.

Late in 1969, about nineteen months after his death, Driscoll's mother sought the help of officials at the Disney studios to contact him for a hoped-for reunion with his father, who was nearing death. This resulted in a fingerprint match at NYPD, which located his burial on Hart Island. Although his name appears on his father's gravestone at Eternal Hills Memorial Park in Oceanside, California, it is a cenotaph since his remains still rest on Hart Island. Driscoll's death was not reported until the re-release of his first Disney film, Song of the South, in 1971-1972, when reporters researched the whereabouts of the film's major cast members, and his mother revealed the tragic outcome.