Richard Everitt, television director and producer, was born on July 28, 1933. He died of heart failure on September 1, 2004, aged 71.

As floor manager, Richard Everitt did the first cue on the first episode of Coronation Street when he joined Granada television in 1960. He worked on the soap opera for 18 months, and by the end he was producing it. The objectives and parameters of the television industry were still being defined, and the use of a permanent brick-built set — which he had insisted would be preferable to a studio set — was one example of his innovative influence.

After studying mining engineering at London University, at the age of 23 he emigrated to Australia and began working at the GCV9 in Melbourne. He returned to England with his wife, Vivien, and worked with Granada for nearly 30 years, during which time he produced, directed or wrote many popular programmes such as The Man in Room 17 (1965), Shabby Tiger (1973), Strangers (1978) and Bulmer (1985). One of his most obvious successes was the drama Whose Life is it Anyway? (1972) starring Ian McShane as a paraplegic who wanted the right to take his own life, which was made into a stage play and a Hollywood film. He was later reunited with McShane at the BBC when from 1986 he directed Lovejoy.

John McNamara, Bronx historian, was born December 22, 1912. He died on October 15, 2004, aged 91.

John McNamara travelled all over the world for the sake of his native borough of the Bronx in New York City. The move to erect street signs in the burgeoning New York of McNamara’s childhood sparked in him a desire to find out how and why the surrounding area came to be the way it was. He embarked on a lifelong quest to discover the undocumented details of his environs. His passion for local history and the etymology of place names led him to produce History in Asphalt (1978), a 600-page guide to the Bronx.

McNamara was born into what he called “a real pioneer community”, in a house with no electricity. He dropped out of high school and travelled about the country along the railways, stowing away in empty boxcars during years of the Depression along with the dispossessed and disillusioned. Eventually he covered 49 of America’s states (later he could not work out why he had managed to miss Oklahoma), having stopped in Yuma, Arizona, to be, in his own words, a “hobo journalist” for a publication called Sand Dunes.

McNamara was already satisfying his cravings for historical curios, meticulously noting down place names and finding their meanings; connecting history with geography. His search for his birthplace’s historical antecedents led him to increasingly exotic places: the Australian outback, Pago Pago, Europe. He learnt Dutch in order to read early New Amsterdam documents, which he put to good use when he had to get by in Afrikaans during his visit to South Africa.

When he settled back down in the Bronx, becoming a clerk for the New York City Housing Authority, he, in 1956, began to write regularly for The Bronx Press Review and later for The Bronx Times Reporter under the title McNamara’s Old Bronx. He was a co-founder of Bronx County Historical Society. He was also a volunteer firemen and a Cub Scout leader. He was married and had a son and a daughter.

Christer Pettersson, suspected murderer, was born on April 23, 1947. He died on September 29, 2004, aged 57.

Tried, convicted and finally acquitted on appeal for the murder of the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, Christer Christer Pettersson was the most notorious criminal in Sweden. Although he was innocent in the eyes of the law, many Swedes, including Palme’s family and senior police detectives, regarded Pettersson as guilty.

In 1988, two years after Palme was shot by a single assailant in central Stockholm, Christer Pettersson was picked out from a police line-up by the principal witness, the Prime Minister’s wife Lisbet Palme. He had then a long and severe criminal record, including theft, narcotics crimes, and manslaughter. At that time many described him by stressing his dual personality: he could be a violent, aggressive drug addict but also a talkative, sociable and politically engaged person.

In a heavily media-covered trial, Pettersson was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. But uncertainties and doubts remained. One year after, in 1989, Pettersson was acquitted by an appeals court, referring to lack of a murder weapon, lack of an appropriate motive and also questioning Lisbet Palme’s accuracy as a witness.

Although he was cleared of the charge, Pettersson continued to draw public attention. In a series of sensational appearances on commercial television and in the tabloid press throughout the 1990s, Pettersson made — and withdrew — statements and ambiguous remarks. “Sure as hell it was me who shot him,” he was reported to have said. “But they’ll never nail me for it. The weapon is gone.” In 1998, however, the Supreme Court rejected the prosecutor ’s appeal to retry him. After his death from head injuries, few Swedes believe that Palme’s murderer will be caught and sentenced.