14 DAY TRIAL // As always, the internet manages to bring out the worst in people. Actor Robin Williams has been dead for only a couple of days and already the first fake photos of his dead body have emerged online. This photo comes to fulfill people's morbid curiosity to see the body after it has emerged yesterday that Williams had indeed committed suicide by hanging himself to his belt.
TMZ has busted the myth already, deeming the photo a fake and warning people that the body in the phot is not of dead actor Robin Williams. According to their investigation, the photo floating around on some websites looking for a spike in traffic is actually from a Spanish website that deals with strangulation and provides several images as illustration.
The image reportedly showing the actor's dead body first appeared on Tuesday night online and it quickly became famous, spurring people's curiosity. The person in the photo resembles the comedic actor, but it's not him.
Actually, the image has been reported as being online for several years. That doesn't mean that it didn't cause a lot of grief to Robin's family, in particular Zelda Williams, Robin's daughter. Understandably, she was very shaken by the photo and expressed her anxiety on Twitter.
“I'm shaking. I can't. Please. Twitter requires a link and I won't open it. Don't either. Please,” she pleaded publicly with her followers. Later, after the sham was revealed, she deleted her previous post and prophetically added “I should have risen above.”
The police have also confirmed that the photo in question is not of Robin's body. They were the first ones to report that the actor was found hanged on his belt on his bedroom door, in a seated position.
The official report mentioned the actor had cuts on his left wrist, indicating that before he tried to hang himself, the actor had tried to cut open his wrist with a pocketknife. His dead body was found on August 11 by his assistant who became worried that the actor wasn't answering knocks on his bedroom door.
She told police and emergency services, which arrived 15 minutes after the 911 call was placed, that Robin's body had been cold to the touch when she first found it and that rigor mortis had already set in. This means that the actor had been dead for some time when he was found.
A full report into Robin Williams' death is now under way and the results are going to be made public in a few weeks’ time. At the moment, the official cause of death is listed as asphyxia.