4 People Who Were Ridiculously Hard to Kill | Cracked.com

4 People Who Were Ridiculously Hard to Kill | Cracked.com

They didn't mention the most famous of all - Rasputin, who was like Jason in one of those horror films. While in a basement study with his murderers, who planned to poison him with cyanide-laced food, Raspy drank four bottles of booze, but apparently never consumed any of the food. One of the frustrated murderers then procured a handgun, and fired a bullet in Rasputin's chest at point-blank range. That barely slowed him down. He negotiated a flight of stairs, opened a door to the outside courtyard and started running for the gate. As he fled, the conspirators fired four more shots at his back, one of which penetrated his kidney. They then carried him back inside and started beating him severely. When Rasputin suddenly jerked into a different position, the killers put a revolver to his forehead and fired yet again. Just to make sure the ol' rapscallion couldn't survive that one, they then took him out to a frozen river and threw him from a bridge into a hole in the ice.

Two hours later, he appeared at their quarters, and boy, was he pissed.

No, I'm joking about that last bit. The shot to the forehead had killed him instantly, but Rasputin's legend was so powerful that many people believed he had drowned after surviving the poison, the beatings and the gunshots. (The coroner found no cyanide in his body, by the way.)

After a short period of investigation, the February Revolution deposed the royal family, there was general chaos, and everybody had more important things to worry about, so the murderers got away scot-free. In fact, the youngest of the conspirators, who came from a family which was richer than the Tsar himself, escaped the bloody Russia of revolutionary times and eventually lived to a very ripe old age in France. He was in his seventies and still feisty when he sued CBS for portraying him falsely in a crappy 1962 teleplay called "If I Should Die," a case he eventually lost. He finally died in 1967, having outlived Rasputin by more than 50 years.