Oh yea, Dwyer was a classic shock clip in the golden days/stone age of the internet, I also had a semester long class on Political Corruption where he was a fixture for one of the units. I wrote an essay about how he was the only case of public American Seppuku. He went out like a man with that big old .357, the reasoning behind it was due to his corruption trial. If he were convicted, his retirements/death benefits would be forfeit; so to ensure his wife and children were set up, he did himself in on live TV.
His wife collected a full survivor benefits totaling over $1.28 million (equivalent to about $3.5M in 2023).
Dwyer's sister Mary Kun stated that Dwyer had made the decision to kill himself prior to knowing he would lose his pension and thus his motivation for his suicide was not to provide financial support to his family, but rather to "sacrifice himself to help the system," and although I would respect that in the way I'd respect a corrupt Roman official taking his own life to ensure the life of The Republic in books of old, I'm pretty sure he understood that he was going to prison for a long time and would rather leave his wife and kids with something rather than nothing, since his life was over already. Sorry for the blog post, I just haven't seen someone mention Budd Dwyer in years lol
