Rudolf Karl Wütherich (August 5,1927 – July 22, 1981) was a German mechanic and race car driver. The former skydiver was a personal friend of James Dean and became famous for being in the car with the actor in his fatal car crash on September 30, 1955. Wütherich, himself badly injured, received hate mail from Dean fans who blamed him for the actor's death. As a result of head injuries, treatments and the experience as a whole, he suffered from mental illnesses for the rest of his life. Wütherich himself died after a car crash in 1981 in Germany.
Rolf Wuetherich was born in Heilbronn, Germany on August 5, 1927. The identity of his parents is unknown. Wütherich had been in Porsche's race car division. He survived numerous dangerous car crashes, including the one with James Dean in 1955. In 1952, he drove his car off a motorway bridge and plunged to the lower federal road where it exploded. He survived this accident because he was ejected from the car. Six months after this accident, he survived a crash with a test car near Heilbronn, Germany. And as a rally driver, he almost died "several times" in the French Alps. "He was "... obsessed with fast cars," says his friend Eugen Böhringer.
In 1950, Wütherich worked for Porsche as a mechanic in the United States. There, he organized airfield car races and befriended the motorsport fan James Dean. Wütherich coached Dean to drive his new Porsche Spyder 550, which Dean had nicknamed "Little Bastard." While the two were on the way to a race on September 30, 1955, Dean (with Wütherich's encouragement) decided to drive the Spyder to the race, rather than towing it behind his Ford station wagon. Wütherich offered to accompany Dean in the passenger seat. Just outside of Bakersfield, a California Highway Patrol (CHP) officer issued Dean a traffic citation for speeding. The pair continued on their way. Two hours after the traffic ticket was issued and roughly a mile east of Cholame, California, Dean's Spyder was hit by an oncoming car (who had turned into Dean's lane without seeing him). While Dean was killed almost instantly from a broken neck caused by blunt force trauma, Wütherich survived after being thrown from the car by the impact. It took four days in hospital for him to regain consciousness, and he remained in treatment in the United States for many months because of his severe injuries which were a skull fracture, pelvic fracture, and upper and lower leg fractures.
He moved back to Germany and became a car mechanic and salesperson in Stuttgart Zuffenhausen. Shortly thereafter, he had a nervous breakdown and flew back to California, where he underwent electro shock therapy in a psychiatric ward. In 1959, he returned to Germany, where he started to work with a psychotherapist, made progress and regained sanity. He felt stable and went back to work for Porsche, where he was again in charge of car racing. In 1965, he joined Böhringer in the Rally Monte Carlo, where they came in second. He also won the Vice European Championship as a rally driver. During one race, he even climbed out of his car to help an injured cyclist and received the Fair Play sports award in that race. He also opened a Go-Kart race track in Stuttgart for a while.
His depression and suicidal tendencies got worse again over time. Wütherich was hospitalized after a failed suicide attempt in 1966. In 1967, he stabbed his wife 14 times with a kitchen knife in an attempt to kill both her and himself in a murder/suicide. After this incident, he moved to the small town of Kupferzell, where he worked as a salesperson in a motorcycle shop. In 1979 he joined a Honda dealer in Hohenlohe near his native Heilbronn. After that he had a job at Neuenstein where he assembled turbo engines for Porsche.[1] He continually received hate mail from Dean fans, who insisted that he was responsible for Dean's death, and never recovered from the feeling of guilt.
In 1981, he died in a car crash in the town center of Kupferzell, Germany, when he was driving while intoxicated and ran his Honda Civic into a building at Künzelsauer Straße.
