GAWKER: In July 2007, the artists Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan ended their own lives. Both had grown erratic and paranoid in the preceding months, and on the 10th, Blake found his longtime romantic partner dead in their East Village apartment, overdosed on a lethal cocktail of whiskey and Tylenol PM. One week later, he drowned himself in the Atlantic Ocean at Rockaway Beach. The official story, forwarded in a flurry of media coverage of the so-called “golden suicides,” tells of folie à deux—a shared delusion, brought on perhaps by career-related stress and a lot of bourbon and champagne, and manifested in abruptly burned bridges with formerly close friends, bizarre “loyalty oaths,” and an increasingly monomaniacal preoccupation with conspiracies, especially
those related to the Church of Scientology. But alongside this, there exists a second vague narrative: that the shadowy forces that so captured the imaginations of Duncan and Blake in their final years were not merely a troubling obsession, but an active player in their deaths. This conspiracy theory, put forth mostly by an army of amateur bloggers, points to an array of organizations, but mostly to Scientology, and specifically Blake’s very real working relationship with one of its most visible members: Beck, whose 2002 album Sea Change was adorned with cover art by Blake. MORE
VANITY FAIR: On a rainy October night in Washington, D.C., the friends and family of Jeremy Blake gathered for a private memorial service at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Blake, an art-world star acclaimed for his lush and moody “moving paintings,” shape-shifting innovations mixing abstract painting and digital film, had ended his life on the night of July 17, walking into the Atlantic Ocean off Rockaway Beach, Queens, never to return.
“I am going to join the lovely Theresa,” Blake, 35, had written on the back of a business card, which he left on the beach, along with his clothes. Police helicopters searched for him for days on the 
chance he might still be alive. Friends prayed that he was, talking of how his passport was missing, he had bought a ticket to Germany. Then on July 22, a fisherman found his body floating 4.5 miles off Sea Girt, New Jersey. “The lovely Theresa” was Theresa Duncan, a writer, filmmaker, computer-game creator, and Blake’s girlfriend of 12 years. He had found her lifeless body on July 10, in the rectory of St. Mark’s Church in Manhattan’s East Village, where the couple had been renting an apartment. There was a bowl full of Benadryl pills, a bottle of Tylenol PM, and a champagne glass on the nightstand. There was a note saying, “I love all of you.” Duncan was 40. The last post on her blog, “The Wit of the Staircase,” was a quote from author Reynolds Price about the human need for storytelling and the impossibility of surviving in silence.
No one who spoke at Blake’s memorial service that evening at the Corcoran said anything about Theresa Duncan. Almost no one mentioned her name.
(It happened to be her birthday, October 26.) No one talked about the dark stories and wild speculation that had emerged after news of the couple’s “double suicide” hit the media. There had been reports they had become “paranoid,” obsessed with conspiracy theories, believing they were being harassed by Scientologists. The Internet filled up with conjecture about government plots and murder. Something about their story seemed to capture the modern imagination, if only because no one knew exactly why two such accomplished and attractive people had chosen to make their exit. MORE
NEW YORK MAGAZINE: Until seven months ago, the couple had been living in Los Angeles—in a cozy, book-lined Venice Beach cottage where they often threw salonlike dinner parties for friends, friends of friends, anyone who seemed interesting. Sometimes their move back to New York was explained by Blake’s new consulting job at Rockstar Games, creators of the Grand Theft Auto franchise, where he was a founding member. Other times it was because Duncan had grown exhausted by Hollywood—by the narrow-minded executives who refused to embrace her vision, by the unhinging sensation that she would forever be an inch away from the life she was so hungrily seeking. Often it was simply because they missed New York, where they fell in love and lived for many years and had always considered home. More complicated was the matter of what friends had taken to referring to as “the paranoia”—the couple’s consuming belief that complex forces involving the government and Scientology were conspiring against them. To know them even casually was to know the stories: of increasingly erratic behavior, of close friends being mysteriously deemed enemies. There was a pervading sense that something was not right, and a hope that New York would somehow act as a remedy.
“They’re upstairs?”
“They won’t come down?”
“Is everything okay?”
Duncan and Blake had been found in the rectory, seated by the window, looking down at the party—their party—below. Without apology they explained that they could not come down, no, they were experiencing a “collective vision” that the grill was going to explode, somehow harming Duncan. It would have been a more troubling exchange were it not, by this point, almost expected. During their moments of clarity there were few people as thrilling to be around as these two—the banter was invigorating, the exchange of ideas fervent—but an incident like this was a reminder that moments of clarity were increasingly rare. For many friends this image of the couple—abrasive, frightened, isolated from what they loved and fostered—would prove to be their final memory. Seven days later, on the evening of July 10, Duncan swallowed a number of Tylenol PM tablets with bourbon. It was Blake who first discovered her body on the floor of their bedroom, and it was Blake who, a week later, ended his own life by taking the A train to Rockaway Beach and walking into the Atlantic Ocean. MORE
Theresa Duncan’s The History of Glamour from M.Duncan on Vimeo.