She returned home from a dream vacation and into a real-life nightmare 💔

The first person to take their own life on live television delivered chilling final word which were captured on camera before her death.

Christine Chubbuck, 29, was an American television news reporter working for the stations WTOG and WXLT-TV in Sarasota, Florida.

On July 15, 1974, Chubbuck began her shift by telling her co-workers that she had to read a newscast to open her show, Suncoast Digest, something she’d never done before.

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However, after spending the first eight minutes of the show reading out three national news stories as well as covering a shooting which had happened at a local restaurant the day before, she pulled out a gun that she had brought and fatally shot herself live on air.

Christine Chubbuck is believed to be the first person to take their own life live on air.Credit: ABC7

While covering the shooting, which had taken place the previous day at local restaurant Beef & Bottle, at the Sarasota-Bradenton Airport, the film reel which was due to be played jammed and would not run.

Chubbuck shrugged it off, before telling the viewers: “In keeping with the WXLT practice of presenting the most immediate and complete reports of local blood and guts news, TV 40 presents what is believed to be a television first.

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“In living color, an exclusive coverage of an attempted suicide,” before drawing a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson Model 36 revolver and shooting herself behind her right ear.

Chubbuck then violently fell forward before the technical director rapidly faded the broadcast to black before quickly running a standard public service announcement and a movie.

Some viewers who caught the horrific moment live on air had called the police, while others phoned into the station to find out whether it was staged.

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Chubbuck was rushed to Sarasota Memorial Hospital where she was pronounced dead fourteen hours later.

After the tragic incident, news director Mike Simmons found the papers Chubbuck had been reading from, which included a complete script of her show – including the shooting – as well as a third-person account to be read by whichever member of staff took over the broadcast after she took her own life.

In the script she’d written, she’d asked for her condition to be listed as “critical” in the aftermath.

Colleagues had said that Chubbuck appeared to be in good spirits on the morning of her show, before asking to change the running order to start with a newscast instead of interviewing a guest.

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Only a few hundred people are believed to have seen Chubbuck’s final moments on-air and there is believed to only be one surviving copy of the footage, though its whereabouts remain a mystery.

According to some reports, the widow of the station’s owner at the time, Robert Nelson, had the only recording, while others claimed it was in the possession of Chubbuck’s family.

But speaking to PEOPLE in 2016, Chubbuck’s brother, Greg, admitted: “I don’t know to this day where it is.

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“But I know no one knows where it is and no one ever will if I have anything to say about it.”

Greg then revealed that his sister was aware that their grandparents would not be watching her on television that fateful morning.

“[Their grandparents] watched every one of her shows, except my grandfather had an appointment with his doctor and he didn’t feel like driving so my grandmother drove him and they missed the only show they had ever missed my sister on – the show she killed herself,” her brother revealed. “She knew they weren’t going to be watching that show.”

Chubbuck’s family later revealed that she had struggled with depression in the years before her death, and her story was dramatized in the 2016 film Christine which attempted to explain why she took her own life, starring Rebecca Hall as the titular character.