from news.com/reuters June 5 2009
* David Carradine found hanged in hotel room
* May have been sex act (masturbation) gone wrong
THAI coroners have completed an autopsy on the body of actor David Carradine, a day after the star of the TV show Kung Fu was found naked and hanging dead in his luxury Bangkok hotel room.
Coroners at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn hospital said they had not yet determined the cause of the 72-year-old's death and were waiting for the results of a toxicology screen but police have said he may have died from a sex act gone wrong.
"This certainly was not a natural cause of death," the hospital's chief coroner, Nantana Sirisap, said.
A maid found Carradine hanging naked by a rope in the closet of his hotel suite at the plush Swissotel Nai Lert Park hotel yesterday, police said.
"There was a rope tied around his neck and another rope tied at his sex organ, and the two ropes were tied together and hung in the closet," Lieutenant General Worapong Siewpreecha said.
"Under these circumstances we cannot be sure that he committed suicide but he may have died from masturbation," he said.
Police said there was no indication other people had been in the room, where Carradine had stayed during the shooting of a film called Stretch.
They would neither confirm nor deny suggestions that Carradine was attempting auto-erotic asphyxiation, a practice designed to boost sexual pleasure.
Carradine, from a family of performers and the eldest son of character actor John Carradine, enjoyed a long career on Broadway, television and in movies such as director Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill and Kill Bill 2.
While some media reports speculated his death may have been a suicide, a spokeswoman said neither they nor his family believed Carradine was capable of killing himself.
"His family is in shock," Tiffany Smith of Carradine's management firm, said.
"They have the same belief we have. There was no way David did this to himself."
Carradine wrote in his 1995 autobiography Endless Highway that he had tried to kill himself when he was five years old.
The book also documented his alcoholism and extensive use of drugs, from LSD to cocaine.
He was made most famous by his role in the US series Kung Fu where he played Kwai Chang Caine, a half-Asian martial arts specialist, which earned him an Emmy nomination.
The role of Caine led to parts in more than 200 productions and his turn as the villainous Bill in Tarantino's Kill Bill movies led to his fourth Golden Globe nomination.
Carradine was married five times and had two daughters from previous marriages.
Carradine's death has similarities to the death of INXS frontman Michael Hutchence.
Hutchence died at Sydney's Ritz-Carlton hotel in November 1997, with the NSW coroner ruling he had committed suicide.
But some of those closest to him, including his brother, believe he accidentally strangled himself during a sex act .
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