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Janet Llwellyn, 66, was killed after being hit on the head by a stray golf ball as she played a practice round at Strathendrick Golf Course near Drymen, Stirlingshire, on 1 October 2009. The Scottish widow was airlifted to hospital in Glasgow, but died the next day. Sun, D.Express, 8 Oct 2009.

Last April, Dieudonne Masha and a neighbour were walking home along the shores of Lake Kivu in eastern Congo after an evening of drinking when they encountered two soldiers who asked to see their ID cards. Mr Masha didn’t have his on him, so he ran away and hid in a rocky ditch. His body was found there the foll­owing morning; there were no signs of violence. As if the citizens of Goma and environs don’t have enough to worry about – what with canni­balistic mercenaries, famine, ebola, volcanic erupt­ions, and the world’s most frequent lightning – Lake Kivu has vast reser­voirs of potentially lethal methane and carbon dioxide.
Mr Masha is believed to have died instantly when he hid in a bubble of carbon dioxide, known in Swahili as a mazuku (“evil wind”). Every year, nearly 100 people die from the carbon dioxide vents along the lake’s northern shore. Stories of people feeling breathless and light-headed while swimming in the lake are common, and could account for many of the drownings there. In the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide in 1994, many died from mazukus that sent clouds of gas into jam-packed refugee camps along the lake.
The eruption of Mount Nyiragongo near the lake’s northern shore in 2002 stimulated interest in the gas fields beneath Lake Kivu’s surface: 300 billion cubic metres of carbon dioxide and 60 billion cubic metres of methane slowly building towards saturation point, or potential release. Similar events have been recorded at least twice, both times on lakes in Cameroon in the 1980s. In one case, more than 1,700 people were killed. However, the volume of gas under Lake Kivu is much larger. Int. Herald Tribune, 7 Nov 2009.

A Catholic who went to church to give thanks after being rescued from a jammed lift was killed when a stone altar fell on him. Gunther Link, 45, died instantly as he was crushed under the 390kg altar in the Weinhaus Church in Vienna, Austria. “He seems to have embraced a stone pillar on which the stone altar was perched and it fell on him,” a police spokesman said. D.Telegraph, Ananova, 11 Sept 2009.

The mistress of Henri II, King of France (1519–59) was poisoned by a gold elixir she drank to keep the ageing process at bay, according to French experts writing in the British Medical Journal. Diane de Poitiers (1499–1566) was renowned for her youthful looks and porcelain skin. She was 20 years older than the king, but her appearance made them look the same age. The elixir, which she drank every day, was made up of gold chloride and diethyl ether. It was one of a host of anti-ageing treatments peddled by apothecaries, along with recipes including spider webs, earthworms, frogspawn and scorpions’ oil. Locks of Diane’s hair kept at the Chateau d’Anet were found to contain gold 500 times above normal levels, plus mercury – used as a “purifier” in the elixir. “Her hair was much finer than normal, which is a secondary effect of chronic gold poisoning,” said investigating scientist Philippe Charlier. “It gives you white skin [from anæmia] and very fragile hair, bones and teeth. She was in this fragile state when she died.” However, reaching the age of 66 is fairly good going for the time. D.Telegraph, 23 Dec 2009.

Suzanne Cornwall, 18, died after her scarf got caught in a go-kart engine and strang­led her at Cambridgeshire Raceway at an after-hours session with friends on 10 December. A track marshal who allowed the teenagers to race without the normal security precautions was sacked and could face prosecution. The death echoed that of dancer Isadora Duncan, whose scarf caught in the open-spoked wheel of a car in Nice in 1927. Metro, 15 Dec 2009.