Tina Turner Remains Baffled by Son's Suicide

Tina Turner is finally speaking out about the July death by suicide of her oldest son, Craig Turner, and she tells the BBC she's as baffled as everyone else. "I still don't know what took him to the edge," she says of her 59-year-old son, who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, though she concedes that in hindsight, some of her final conversations with her "introverted" and "shy" son suggested "a change" in his demeanor. The 78-year-old notes Craig Turner, her son with musician Raymond Hill, had seemed pretty content with things in the last few months of his life, finding a new girlfriend and a new job at an esteemed real-estate firm in California. "I have no idea what pulled him down, except something that followed him with loneliness," Turner says, adding in her new memoir, My Love Story, that he was "a troubled soul," per USA Today.

Other revelations about her life also emerge in her book, including Ike Turner making her go to a brothel on their wedding night in 1962, and having his "goons" shoot up her house after she left him in 1976. She also writes she tried to kill herself by taking sleeping pills while married to him. She says she's since found love with husband Erwin Bach, whom she married in 2013, and that she's "happier than I've ever been in my life." Despite that, Turner seems at peace with her own eventual departure from Earth, a Buddhist-influenced resignation she says evolved after she reportedly suffered a stroke in 2013 or 2014, followed by kidney failure and a cancer diagnosis in January 2016. The BBC notes she's even signed up with a group that advocates for assisted suicide. "Death is not a problem for me," she says. "I really don't mind leaving." (Turner reveals her husband donated a kidney to her.)