Claudine Longet, the French-born singer and actress whose glamorous entertainment career was eclipsed by the 1976 shooting death of Olympic skier Vladimir "Spider" Sabich in his Colorado chalet, has died at 84. Her nephew Bryan Longet reported her death Thursday. No cause or location of death was disclosed.
Longet's story reads like a case study in how celebrity, wealth, and the right connections can bend the justice system until it barely resembles justice at all. A man was killed by a bullet from a gun she held. She walked away with a misdemeanor, a $250 fine, and 30 days in jail.
For millions of Americans who followed the case in the late 1970s, the outcome was an early and bitter lesson: accountability in America often depends on who you are, not what you did.
Born Claudine Georgette Longet on January 29, 1942, in Paris, she was performing by age 10, appearing in a production of The Turn of the Screw. By 1960, she had crossed the Atlantic and was dancing in a Folies Bergère revue at the Tropicana in Las Vegas.
That is where she met Andy Williams, the beloved crooner 15 years her senior. Williams later told the story with characteristic charm in a 2009 CBS Sunday Morning interview:
"My manager and I were driving down there and we saw this lovely girl and her girlfriend, who was also quite pretty, pushing this car. And so, being gallant, and also because they looked pretty good, we stopped to see if we could help them."
They married on December 15, 1961, at a church in Bel-Air. She was 19. He was 34. Williams had proposed in Paris.
Longet quickly became a fixture on The Andy Williams Show on NBC, appearing alongside the couple's three children, Bobby, Christian, and Noelle, on the variety program and its popular Christmas specials. In May 1966, she sang an English-French version of "Meditation" on an episode, and the performance earned her a recording contract with A&M Records, the label founded by Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss.
Her first album, 1967's Claudine, produced by Tommy LiPuma, sold more than a million copies. Her breathy, lightly accented pop style found a comfortable niche. She sang "Nothing to Lose," written by Henry Mancini and Don Black, in Blake Edwards' 1968 comedy The Party alongside Peter Sellers. She appeared on Run for Your Life with Ben Gazzara. Nightclub impresario Lou Walters, father of Barbara Walters, hired her.
The Williamses moved in powerful circles. They were close friends of Robert and Ethel Kennedy. On June 4, 1968, Longet and Williams were at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles watching RFK deliver a televised primary victory speech. Shortly after midnight, Sirhan Sirhan shot Kennedy. The senator was pronounced dead at Good Samaritan Hospital on June 6, nearly 26 hours later. Longet and Williams were present at the hospital. On June 8, they attended the funeral at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York and rode the funeral train to Arlington National Cemetery. Williams performed at the service.
By the early 1970s, the marriage had frayed. Williams acknowledged the fault plainly: "We just sort of grew apart, I was never home... it was all my fault, I just didn't take care of my marriage." They divorced in 1975, though Longet continued appearing on his TV shows through 1974. Her last album, Let's Spend the Night Together, came out in 1972.
That same year, Longet met Spider Sabich at a celebrity skiing exhibition in Bear Valley, California. Sabich was a California-born Olympic skier whose talent and good looks had reportedly served as the model for Robert Redford's character in Downhill Racer. He was 27. She was 30. They moved in together.
By 1976, they had been living together for a couple of years at Sabich's chalet in Starwood, a community near Aspen, Colorado. The relationship, by various accounts, had grown turbulent.
On March 21, 1976, Longet shot Sabich in his bathroom with a.22-caliber German-made gun that had been purchased by his father. A single bullet struck Sabich in the abdomen. He was 31 years old. He died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
Longet claimed the gun had accidentally discharged. Celebrity cases involving fatal shootings and questions of accountability have continued to grip the public in the decades since, much as the recent arrest of singer D4vd on a murder charge has drawn intense scrutiny over how fame intersects with criminal justice.
A month after Sabich's death, prosecutors charged Longet with reckless manslaughter, a felony that carried as many as 10 years in prison. But the case quickly developed problems, problems that favored the defendant.
Officers had failed to obtain a proper search warrant, and diary evidence that might have shed light on the relationship's dynamics was ruled inadmissible in court. Andy Williams, her ex-husband, escorted Longet to and from the Aspen courtroom, testified on her behalf, and provided legal assistance. He told interviewers years later: "I thought it was unfair, I thought she was innocent, I thought it was an accident."
After four days of testimony and just three and a half hours of deliberations in January 1977, a jury convicted Longet, then 36, not of reckless manslaughter but of criminally negligent homicide, a misdemeanor.
Her sentence: two years' probation, a $250 fine, and 30 days in jail.
The Sabich family filed a civil suit against Longet for $1.3 million. The outcome of that suit was not detailed, but the criminal result alone tells the story. A young, accomplished athlete was dead. The woman who held the gun served 30 days. The questions surrounding what happened in that bathroom have never been fully answered to the public's satisfaction, and the evidentiary failures by law enforcement ensured they never would be.
The case became instant fodder for popular culture. In April 1976, barely a month after the shooting, Saturday Night Live aired a sketch called "The Claudine Longet Invitational," set in Vail, Colorado. Chevy Chase and Jane Curtin played sportscasters providing play-by-play as skiers were "accidentally shot" by Longet. The bit drew enough backlash that announcer Don Pardo read an apology on the air the following week. The Rolling Stones recorded a song called "Claudine" for their 1978 album Some Girls, though the track did not make the final cut.
The public fascination never fully subsided. As recently as the TikTok era, users have posted videos recounting the case, including one by the account @jack.hutton featuring a play-by-play of the SNL sketch premise. High-profile cases in which public figures face criminal allegations, such as questions about who looked the other way in other celebrity scandals, continue to raise the same uncomfortable questions about accountability that the Longet case first posed nearly half a century ago.
Shortly after her sentencing, one of Longet's own defense attorneys, Ronald Austin, moved in with her. They married in June 1985. The couple remained in the Aspen area for years, living on a 5.4-acre estate, before eventually relocating to Hawaii.
Longet largely vanished from public life. She gave few interviews. One rare public comment came after the trial, when she said: "Because of the many cards and letters I've received, the prayers, I feel very good about everybody."
She outlived much of her immediate family. Her son Christian, one of her three children with Andy Williams, died in 2019. Her daughter Noelle reportedly died in 2023. Andy Williams himself died in 2012. Her surviving son Bobby had been named for Robert F. Kennedy.
The broader pattern of how high-profile criminal allegations are handled, whether involving entertainers, politicians, or other public figures, remains a live issue in American life. Investigations in Los Angeles County and elsewhere continue to test whether the justice system treats the powerful the same way it treats everyone else.
Claudine Longet's death closes a chapter, but it does not resolve the central question her case raised. A man was shot and killed. The shooter served 30 days. The evidence that might have told the full story was thrown out because officers cut corners. The defendant's celebrity ex-husband sat beside her in court and called it an accident.
For Spider Sabich's family, $250 was the price the state of Colorado put on his life.
That is the kind of justice you get when the system decides some people matter more than others. It was wrong in 1977. It is wrong now.
