Notable Deaths on October 4

Jean-Claude Duvalier, nicknamed "Baby Doc", was a Haitian dictator who held the presidency of Haiti from 1971 until he was overthrown by a popular uprising in February 1986. He succeeded his father François "Papa Doc" Duvalier as the ruler of Haiti after his death in 1971. After assuming power, he introduced cosmetic changes to his father's regime and delegated much authority to his advisors. Thousands of Haitians were tortured and killed, and hundreds of thousands fled the country during his presidency. He maintained a notoriously lavish lifestyle while poverty among his people remained the most widespread of any country in the Western Hemisphere.

Anne Sexton was an American poet known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book Live or Die. Her poetry often drew on her experiences with mental illness, including bipolar disorder and suicidal ideation, as well as aspects of her personal life. She was known for blending fairy tales, mythology, and religious imagery with autobiographical themes. Sexton’s work continues to be widely read and studied for its emotional intensity and lasting influence on contemporary American poetry. After her death, one of her daughters has alleged abuse in accounts discussed in some later biographies and scholarship.

Gunpei Yokoi , sometimes transliterated as Gumpei Yokoi, was a Japanese toy maker and video game designer. As a long-time Nintendo employee, he was best known as the original designer of several notable Nintendo products, including the Ultra Hand toy, the Game & Watch and Game Boy handheld game systems, as well as the producer of a few critically acclaimed franchises such as Donkey Kong, Metroid, and Kid Icarus. The modern Nintendo philosophy called the "Blue Ocean Theory," or focusing on interactive gameplay with black-and-white graphics over cutting-edge technology was espoused by Yokoi and still applied today.

Bernard Buffet was a French painter, printmaker, and illustrator. An extremely prolific artist, he produced a varied and extensive body of work. His style was exclusively figurative and is often classified as Expressionist and Misérabilisme, as well as figurative collectives such as L'Homme-Témoin and La Jeune Peinture. Art historians have also classified his formal style as "abstract realism"—a framework in which recognizable, everyday figurative subjects are flattened, enclosed within rigid geometric grids, and stripped of cast shadows to assert the two-dimensional autonomy of the canvas. Curators have further noted that the emotional detachment, repetition, and formal rigidity of his figures share close affinities with New Objectivity portraiture and the anti-subjective descriptive style of the Nouveau Roman.

Manuel de Godoy y Álvarez de Faria Ríos, 1st Prince of the Peace was First Secretary of State of the Kingdom of Spain from 1792 to 1797 and from 1801 to 1808. He was one of the central Spanish political figures during the rise of Napoleon and his invasion of Spain. Godoy came to power at a young age as the favourite of King Charles IV and Queen Maria Luisa, with whom he had a sexual relationship. He has been partly blamed for the Anglo-Spanish War of 1796–1808 that weakened the Spanish Empire. Godoy's unmatched power ended in 1808 with the Tumult of Aranjuez, which forced him into a long exile. He died in Paris in 1851.

Arthur Stewart Farmer was an American jazz trumpeter and flugelhorn player. He also played flumpet, a trumpet–flugelhorn combination especially designed for him. He and his identical twin brother, double bassist Addison Farmer, started playing professionally while at high school in Los Angeles. Art gained greater attention after the release of a recording of his composition "Farmer's Market" in 1952. He subsequently moved from Los Angeles to New York, where he performed and recorded with musicians such as Horace Silver, Sonny Rollins, and Gigi Gryce and became known principally as a bebop player.

Amaro Rodríguez-Felipe y Tejera Machado, also known as Amaro Pargo, was a Spanish privateer and merchant. He was one of the most well-known Spanish privateers during the Golden Age of Piracy. Pargo was noted for his commercial activities and for his frequent religious donations and aid to the poor. As a privateer, he targeted trade routes between Cádiz and the Caribbean, on several occasions attacking British and Dutch merchant ships, earning recognition in his time as a hero and coming to be regarded as "the Spanish equivalent of Francis Drake". He was declared a Caballero hidalgo in 1725 and obtained certification of nobility and royal arms in 1727.

Michael Smith was a British-Canadian biochemist and businessman. He shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Kary Mullis for his work in developing site-directed mutagenesis. Following a PhD in 1956 from the University of Manchester, he undertook postdoctoral research with Har Gobind Khorana at the British Columbia Research Council in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Subsequently, Smith worked at the Fisheries Research Board of Canada Laboratory in Vancouver before being appointed a professor of biochemistry in the UBC Faculty of Medicine in 1966. Smith's career included roles as the founding director of the UBC Biotechnology Laboratory and the founding scientific leader of the Protein Engineering Network of Centres of Excellence (PENCE). In 1996 he was named Peter Wall Distinguished Professor of Biotechnology. Subsequently, he became the founding director of the Genome Sequencing Centre at the BC Cancer Research Centre.

James Whitcomb was a United States senator and the eighth governor of Indiana. As governor during the Mexican–American War, he oversaw the formation and deployment of the state's levies. He led the movement to replace the state constitution and played an important role at the convention to institute a law that prevented the government from taking loans in response the current fiscal crisis in Indiana. By skillfully guiding the state through its bankruptcy, Whitcomb is usually credited as being one of the most successful of Indiana's governors. He was elected to the United States Senate after his term as governor but died of kidney disease only three years later.

Pyotr Mironovich Masherov was a Soviet partisan, statesman, and one of the leaders of the Belarusian resistance during World War II who governed the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Byelorussia from 1965 until his death in 1980. Under Masherov's rule, Belarus was transformed from an agrarian, undeveloped nation which had not yet recovered from the Second World War into an industrial powerhouse; Minsk, the capital and largest city of Belarus, became one of the fastest-growing cities on the planet. Masherov ruled until his sudden death in 1980, after his vehicle was hit by a potato truck.

Neal Eugene Walk was an American college and professional basketball player who was a center in the National Basketball Association (NBA) for eight seasons during the late 1960s and 1970s, playing overseas afterward. Walk played college basketball for the University of Florida, and remains the Florida Gators' all-time rebounds leader. The Phoenix Suns picked Walk second overall in the 1969 NBA draft, having lost the coin toss with the Milwaukee Bucks for Lew Alcindor. Walk played professionally for the Suns, the New Orleans Jazz and the New York Knicks of the NBA.

William Lewis Shaw was an American professional football player who was a guard for the Buffalo Bills in the American Football League (AFL). After playing college football for the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets, he was selected by the Bills in the second round of the 1961 AFL draft. Shaw was the prototypical "pulling guard" who despite his size held his own against much bigger defensive linemen like Ernie Ladd, Earl Faison and Buck Buchanan. He won three straight Eastern Division titles and two AFL championships in 1964 and 1965 with Buffalo.

Philip Louis Ulric Cross was a Trinidadian jurist, diplomat and Royal Air Force (RAF) navigator, recognised as possibly the most decorated West Indian of World War II. He is credited with helping to prevent some two hundred bombers from being shot down in a raid over Germany in 1943. He subsequently studied law at London's Middle Temple, and went on to fulfil a distinguished international career as a jurist across Africa and within Trinidad and Tobago. He also served as a diplomat for Trinidad and Tobago to the United Kingdom.

Võ Nguyên Giáp was a Vietnamese general, communist revolutionary and politician. Highly regarded as a military strategist, Giáp led Vietnamese communist military forces to victory in the decades-long Indochina wars. Giáp was the military commander of the Việt Minh and the People's Army from 1941 to 1972, minister of defense of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1946–1947 and from 1948 to 1980, and deputy prime minister from 1955 to 1991. He was a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of Vietnam.

Field Marshal John Campbell, 2nd Duke of Argyll, 1st Duke of Greenwich,, styled Lord Lorne from 1680 to 1703, was a British army officer and politician. He served on the continent in the Nine Years' War and fought at the Siege of Kaiserswerth during the War of the Spanish Succession. He then went on to serve as a brigade commander during the later battles of the War of the Spanish Succession, and was subsequently given command of all British forces in Spain at the instigation of the Harley ministry.

José Ber Gelbard was a Polish-born Argentine activist and politician, and a member of the Argentine Communist Party. He also helped organize the Confederación General Económica (CGE), made up of small and medium-sized business. Beginning about 1954, he was appointed as an economic advisor to Juan Perón and repeatedly was called back to serve as Minister of Finance to successive governments until the military coup of March 1976. He fled with his family shortly before the coup, gaining political asylum in the United States and settling in Washington, D.C.

Leroy Gordon Cooper Jr. was an American aerospace engineer, test pilot, United States Air Force pilot, and the youngest of the seven original astronauts in Project Mercury, the first human space program of the United States. Cooper learned to fly as a child, and after service in the United States Marine Corps during World War II, he was commissioned into the United States Air Force in 1949. After serving as a fighter pilot, he qualified as a test pilot in 1956 and was selected as an astronaut in 1959.

Charl (Sarel) Arnoldus Cilliers was a Voortrekker leader and a preacher. With Andries Pretorius, he led the Boers to a huge victory over the Zulus at the Battle of Blood River in 1838. In particular, Cilliers led the Voortrekkers in a vow which promised that if God would protect them and deliver the enemy into their hands, they would build a church and commemorate the day of their victory as if it were an annual Sabbath day, which their descendants would also be instructed to honour.

Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi was a French sculptor and painter. He is best known for designing Liberty Enlightening the World, commonly known as the Statue of Liberty, in New York City, United States. Its construction was begun by Viollet-le-Duc, famous for his restoration of the most prominent medieval landmarks in France, until his death and then completed by Gustave Eiffel. The statue was a gift from France to the United States and was erected in 1886 on Liberty Island, at the entrance to New York harbor.