Don’t let Wy come to my funeral. She’s mentally ill’: Naomi Judd’s devastating suicide note

Country music star Naomi Judd left a brutal suicide note at her bedside, insisting that her daughter and her singing partner Wynonna not be allowed to attend her funeral and claiming she was mentally ill.

Judd, 76, took his own life in April at his Tennessee mansion after years of struggles with his own mental health.

On Wednesday it emerged that police found a note next to his bed saying: ‘Don’t let Wy come to my funeral. He has a mental illness.

The Judd family, their daughters Wynonna, 58, and actress and activist Ashley, 54, as well as her husband, gospel singer Larry Strickland, tried in court to prevent the police report from being made public, but abandoned the case. case in December.

The Williamson County Sheriff’s Department has now released the files, which include the photo of the bloodstained bed where Judd committed suicide.

The images also show the gun next to his bed and the suicide note.

Strickland, her husband of 33 years, was in Europe at the time of her death and the police report noted that she did not like being alone.

“I didn’t like being alone/Larry in Europe,” wrote a deputy sheriff, in a handwritten note from the scene.

“She threatened to kill herself half a dozen times, guns were involved. She locked herself in her bedroom. She would threaten to shoot people who took her away (illegible.)’

The police report also details how Ashley Judd found her dying mother and comforted her as they waited 30 minutes for an ambulance to arrive at the Leipers Fork home, 25 miles south of downtown Nashville.

Ashley found her mother in a manic state and called the family doctor, Dr. Ted Klontz.

The actress told police her mother yelled, ‘Kill me, kill me now.’ I do not want to live!

She said she responded, “Now, Mom, you know I’m not going to do that.”

Ashley texted Klontz, writing: ‘He’s having an episode. Screaming, crying and pacing… Emergency… Please come to Mom’s… Now.’

When Klontz arrived, she told him, ‘I was yelling and speaking in tongues.’

Ashley said her mother calmed down when the doctor arrived and then left them alone to talk about her condition.

When he returned to the room, he found his mother with a gunshot wound to the head.

She told the doctor: ‘She did it. She finally did it.

Wynnona attended the funeral, a source said. online radarand he believes the note was written when his mother was out of her mind.

In a harrowing essay in The New York Times, Ashley in August described how finding out about her mother was “the most devastating day of my life.”

“The trauma of discovering and then holding her body in labor haunts me at night,” she wrote.

But instead of being able to comfort her mother in her final moments, Ashley said police officers harshly questioned her and took her away from her mother.

“I felt cornered and powerless as law enforcement officers began questioning me as the last of my mother’s life slipped away,” she wrote.

“I wanted to comfort her, telling her that she was about to see her dad and her little brother when she ‘went home,’ as we say in Appalachia.”

Ashley said she was so shocked after finding her dying mother that she responded to police questions, “I would never have answered on any other day” and never thought to consider whether the public would have access to them later.

“In the immediate aftermath of a life-changing tragedy, when we are in acute shock, trauma, panic, and anguish, the authorities show up to talk to us,” he wrote.

‘Because so many of us are socially conditioned to cooperate with law enforcement, we are completely off guard in what we say.

‘I never thought to ask my own questions, including: Is your body camera on? Are they recording me on audio again? Where and how will what I am sharing be stored, used and made available to the public?”

Both Ashley and Wynonna were cut out of their mother’s will.

The Judd family said in a statement confirming her death: “Our beloved mother and wife succumbed to mental illness.

“Everyone who has been through this tragedy understands that in the depths of a mental health crisis, thinking is profoundly distorted. Furthermore, the worst days are never representative of the comforts and pleasures of disease-free days.

“After this tragedy, our family has tried to grieve, together, with our community, and most importantly, with the privacy that all who lose a family member deserve.

“We have always been a frank and open family about our difficulties and the depth of our love for each other. In this particular matter, however, we ask for privacy, because a death with privacy is a death with more dignity.”

The Judds were the most successful country singers of the ’80s, winning five Grammy Awards, nine CMA Awards, and selling 20 million records.

In the immediate aftermath of her mother’s death, Ashley and Wynonna supported each other in her loss, attending her induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame on May 1, the day after her mother’s suicide.

Naomi had a tumultuous upbringing, partly attributing her depression to the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of an uncle when she was just three years old.

When she was 22, Naomi was raped and beaten by an ex-boyfriend, a trauma that led her to flee Los Angeles for rural Kentucky, where she lived with her children on welfare while preparing to become a nurse.

They lived in a house with no electricity, telephone, television, or indoor plumbing.

Naomi moved to Nashville when she graduated, eventually becoming head nurse in an intensive care unit.

It was there that he learned that a patient’s father was in the music industry. She made a tape of herself singing with Wynonna, gave it to him, and the music career of ‘The Judds’ was launched.

On May 29, a month after her mother’s death, Wynonna wrote an emotional post on Instagram in which she discussed her excruciating pain and her fear that she could never ‘give in to the truth’ the way her mother did. left this life

She wrote about ‘self-healing’, her feeling of being ‘helpless’ and how little she knew in the face of so much despair and drama.

She said she would continue to fight for her faith, herself and her family, to continue to ‘show up and sing’.

And he vowed to “break the cycle” of addiction and dysfunction that has plagued Judd women.