1996 deaths

Jacques Couëlle (1902–1996) was a French architect, whose work was marked by the movement known as architecture-sculpture.

Christophe Caze (22 October 1969–29 March 1996) was a French terrorist and criminal, a former medical student in Lille, France. Caze was one of France's foremost terrorists.
Caze was raised Catholic. A medical student, he travelled to Bosnia in 1992 to practice medicine, working at the Zenica hospital. He converted into Islam and joined the Bosnian mujahideen in the Bosnian War, a unit that fought Jihad against Serbs. He became an extremist, and is reported to have played football with heads of decapitated Serbs. Abu Hamza al-Masri, who was a Bosnian mujahideen, was the religious guide of Christophe Caze. Another French convert was Lionel Dumont, who also joined the mujahideen.
He returned to France a radical Islamist, and became the leader of a GIA group based in Roubaix, the "Gang de Roubaix". The group robbed banks, armoured cars and supermarkets with machine guns and grenade launchers.In March 1996 the group planned to assassinate international leaders at the G7 meeting in Lille, using a car bomb. French police found the bomb, and then killed four in the group in an apartment shootout. Caze escaped but was shot dead the next day after trying to ram a police checkpoint, on motorway E17 near Kortrijk, Belgium. His address book was found to contain the contact information for Algerian resident in Canada, Fateh Kamel, another Bosnian mujahideen and suspect of militant ties.

Gabriel Loire (April 21, 1904 – December 27, 1996) was a French stained glass artist of the twentieth century whose extensive works, portraying various persons or historical scenes, appear in many venues around the world. He founded the Loire Studio in Chartres, France which continues to produce stained glass windows. Loire was a leader in the modern use of "slab glass" (French: dalle de verre), which is much thicker and stronger than the stained glass technique of the Middle Ages. The figures in his windows are mostly Impressionistic in style.

Marcel Dadi (French pronunciation: [maʁsɛl dadi]; 20 August 1951 – 17 July 1996) was a Tunisian-born Jewish French virtuoso guitarist known for his finger-picking style which faithfully recreated the instrumental styles of American guitarists such as Chet Atkins, Merle Travis and Jerry Reed. He became a friend of country star Chet Atkins.

John Joseph Joubert IV (July 2, 1963 – July 17, 1996) was an American serial killer executed in Nebraska. He was convicted of murdering three boys: one in Maine, and two in Nebraska.

John C. Salvi III (March 2, 1972 – November 29, 1996) was an anti-abortion extremist who carried out fatal shootings at two abortion facilities in Brookline, Massachusetts on December 30, 1994. The shootings killed two and wounded five. An insanity defense at his trial was not successful and he was convicted of two counts of murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He died in 1996 in what was officially ruled a suicide in his jail cell.

Collin Wilcox (September 21, 1924 – July 12, 1996) was an American mystery writer who published 30 books in 30 years.Born in Detroit, Michigan, September 21, 1924, his first book was The Black Door (1967), featuring a sleuth possessing extrasensory perception. His major series of novels was about Lieutenant Frank Hastings of the San Francisco Police Department. Titles in the Hastings series included Hire a Hangman, Dead Aim, Hiding Place, Long Way Down and Stalking Horse. Two of his last books, Full Circle and Find Her a Grave, featured a new hero-sleuth, Alan Bernhardt, an eccentric theater director. Wilcox also published under the pseudonym "Carter Wick".
Wilcox's most famous series-detective was the television character Sam McCloud, a New Mexico deputy solving New York crime. The "urban cowboy" was played by Dennis Weaver in the 1970–1977 TV series McCloud. Wilcox wrote two novelizations based on scripts from the series: McCloud (1972) and The New Mexican Connection (1974).Wilcox died in San Francisco, July 12, 1996, from cancer at the age of 71. Wilcox was survived by two sons, Christopher of Berkeley, California, Jeff of Lafayette, California, and five grandchildren. His five grandchildren are Scotty, Conor, Hayley, Jessica, and Emma.

Nicholas Louis "Nick" Bissell Jr. (January 14, 1947 – November 27, 1996) was the county prosecutor of Somerset County, New Jersey. After being charged with embezzlement, tax fraud and abuse of power, he fled to Laughlin, Nevada, and killed himself after a standoff with US Marshals.

Henri Nannen (25 December 1913 in Emden – 13 October 1996 in Hanover) was a German journalist and art collector. He became one of the most prominent journalists and magazine publishers in Germany.
His father was a police officer in Emden who was removed from his post by the NSDAP. After a one-year book dealer apprenticeship he studied the history of art at the University of Munich. In the 1930s he started working as a journalist. During the war he served in SS-Standarte Kurt Eggers, a propaganda unit in Italy. Being large, well-built and fair haired, he corresponded to the racial ideals of the time in Germany. This made him the speaker of the Olympic Oath during the 1936 event in Berlin – for Riefenstahl's film, but not in reality. Many years after the war, he confessed that "I knew what was happening ... but I was too cowardly to do something against it." He got back to journalism while working for the Hannoverschen Neusten Nachrichten, the daily newspaper Abendpost and the youth newspaper Zickzack.
He was the founder of Gruner + Jahr publishing house and the news magazine Der Stern. He led the magazine from 1948 to 1980 to become one of the strongest in Europe. Gruner + Jahr is the largest publisher in Europe as of 2014.
Nannen gained popularity as an art collector and benefactor of the Kunsthalle in Emden, an art museum, that he built in 1983. The annual Henri Nannen Prizes are awarded in his honor by Gruner + Jahr. The Henri-Nannen-Schule (formerly Hamburger Journalistenschule), is the journalist school of Gruner + Jahr and is considered one of the best schools of journalism in Germany, along with the German School of Journalism (Deutsche Journalistenschule) in Munich.He was married to Eske Nannen (born 1942), a former actress. Henri Nannen has a son Christian Nannen (born 1946), co-owner of Hamburg suitcase-producer Travelite.

Jessica Whitney Dubroff (May 5, 1988 – April 11, 1996) was a seven-year-old American trainee pilot who died while attempting to become the youngest person to fly a light aircraft across the United States. On day two of her quest, the Cessna 177B Cardinal single-engine aircraft, piloted by her flight instructor, Joe Reid, crashed during a rainstorm immediately after takeoff from Cheyenne Regional Airport in Cheyenne, Wyoming, killing Dubroff, her 57-year-old father Lloyd Dubroff, and Reid.: 6 Although billed by the media as a pilot, Dubroff was not legally able to be a pilot because of her age. She did not possess a medical certificate or a student pilot certificate, since they require a minimum age of 16 or a pilot certificate that requires a minimum age of 17, according to U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations. At the time of her trip, there was no record-keeping body that recognized any feats by underage pilots. Nevertheless, local, national, and international news media picked up and publicized Dubroff's story, and closely followed her attempt until its tragic ending.The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigated the crash and concluded that the fatality was caused by Reid's improper decision to take off in poor weather conditions, his overloading the aircraft, and his failure to maintain airspeed. The three factors resulted in a stall and subsequent fatal crash in a residential neighborhood. The NTSB also determined that "contributing to the [instructor's] decision to take off was a desire to adhere to an overly ambitious itinerary, in part, because of media commitments.": 53