An obsessed baseball fan’s near-fatal attack on her idol became a movie—but the fan herself quietly died three months ago. Ruth Ann Steinhagen, whose story inspired the Robert Redford movie The Natural, was 83 when she died of natural causes, the AP reports. In 1949, at age 19, she was in a Chicago hotel where the Philadelphia Phillies’ Eddie Waitkus was staying. She managed to slip him a note telling him she had “something of importance to speak to you about,” and he visited her room. When he sat down, she told him she had a surprise for him; she took a rifle from the closet and shot him in the chest, then held his hand. She was ruled insane and spent three years in a psychiatric hospital. Following her release, she worked in an office and lived with her sister. Even workers at the morgue didn’t at first realize who she was, the AP notes. “She chose to live in the shadows and she did a good job of it,” says a baseball historian. Waitkus, on the other hand, kept on playing—and the Phillies won the pennant that year.
