Suicide of Bill Sparkman
suicide of an American teacher
William Edwin "Bill" Sparkman Jr. (August 12, 1958 – September 12, 2009) was an American schoolteacher and Field Representative for the United States Census Bureau found dead in September 2009 under suspicious circumstances. After more than two months of investigation, police concluded that his death was a suicide, staged by him to look like a homicide, so that his family could collect life insurance.
Biographical details
Sparkman was raised in Mulberry, Florida, the oldest of three sons of a high school principal and a furniture company executive. Sparkman was an altar boy as a child. In high school, he wrote for the local weekly newspaper, The Mulberry Press, and was the football team manager. An Eagle Scout, he worked for the Boy Scouts of America as an adult, overseeing the programs in Polk and Hillsborough counties. This work later took him to Atlanta, Georgia, then London, Kentucky in 1993.
Once in Kentucky, he raised his adopted son alone, joined a local Methodist Church, and worked for nine years at an elementary school as a volunteer and instructional assistant. In 2005, Sparkman began part-time work with the United States Census Bureau, and studied education with Western Governors University, an online college.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Suicide of Bill Sparkman” as suicide of an American teacher. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as suicide of an American teacher. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5247400. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1958, 2009, 1993 and 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “Suicide of Bill Sparkman” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.