Rolf Wütherich
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Rolf Wütherich (1927 – July 22, 1981) was a German race car driver and personal friend of James Dean, who became famous for being in the car with the actor in his fatal car crash on September 30, 1955. Wütherich received hate mail from Dean fans who blamed him for the actor's death. He was suicidal, homicidal and mentally ill for the rest of his life. He died after a car crash in 1981 in Germany.
Rolf Wütherich had been in Porsche's race car division. He survived numerous dangerous car crashes including the one with James Dean in 1955. In 1952 his car drove off from a motorway bridge and plunged to the lower federal road where it exploded. He survived this accident because he had been catapulted out of the car. Six months after this accident he survived a crash with a test car near Heilbronn, Germany. And as a rally driver he almost died "several times" in the French Alps. "He was ... obsessed with fast cars," says his friend Eugen Böhringer.
[edit] "I have persuaded Dean to drive"
In 1950, the former skydiver Wütherich worked for Porsche as a mechanic in the United States. There, he organized airfield car races and befriended the motorsport fan James Dean. He coached him to drive his new Porsche Spyder 550 which Dean had nicknamed "Little Bastard." While the two were on the way to a race on September 30, 1955, Dean couldn't drive his Porsche Spyder 550 properly so Wütherich told him he could take over and drive the car but that he should drive below the speed limit. Minutes before the accident a California Highway Patrol officer gave Dean a ticket for speeding, and a few minutes later the fatal accident happened, a mile east of Cholame, California. It took four days in hospital for Rolf Wütherich to regain his consciousness. He remained in treatment in the USA for many months because of a skull fracture, pelvic fracture, and upper and lower leg fractures.
He moved back to Germany and became a car mechanic and salesperson in Stuttgart Zuffenhausen. Shortly thereafter he had a nervous breakdown and flew back to California, where he underwent electro shock therapy in a psych ward. In 1959, he returned to Germany where he started to work with a psychotherapist and made progress and regained sanity. He felt stable and went back to work for Porsche where he was again in charge of car racing. In 1965 he joined Böhringer in the Rally Monte Carlo where they came in second. He also won the Vice-Europe Championship as a rally driver. During one race he even climbed out of his car to help an injured cyclist and received the fair play sports award in that race. He also opened a Go-Kart race track in Stuttgart for a while.
His depression and suicidal tendencies got worse again over time. He was hospitalized after a failed suicide attempt in 1966. In 1967, he stabbed his wife 14 times with a kitchen knife in an attempt to kill both of them in a double suicide. After this incident he moved to the small town of Kupferzell where he worked as a salesperson in a motorcycle shop. He continually received hate mail from Dean fans who insisted that he was responsible for Dean's death, and never recovered from the feeling of guilt.
In 1981 he died in a car crash in the town center of Kupferzell, Germany when he was driving while intoxicated and ran his Honda into a building.
