Linkin Park’s Lead Singer Bennington died of Suicide by Hanging

But some of Bennington’s friends now feel they overlooked signs that the singer’s dark side – which he called his “dark passenger,” a reference to the force that motivated the serial-killer protagonist on TV’s Dexter – had been creeping back into his life. Bennington had gone to rehab around 2006 and appeared to be sober in the years after. But friends say he suffered a three-day relapse last August, during which he blacked out from alcohol, and had been drinking as recently as October.

A month before his death, Bennington told longtime friend Ryan Shuck, who played guitar in Bennington’s side project Dead by Sunrise, that he was six months sober. But Bennington also sent Shuck, who had his own struggles with alcoholism, some text messages that seemed portentous in hindsight: “He was describing an hour-by-hour battle with addiction. When I look at it now, it’s horrifying. He was telling me, down to the detail, what he would do in the first hour he wanted to drink: ‘I basically just take it hour-by-hour every day.’ ”

Shuck believes Bennington “had a couple of drinks” just before his death. “We don’t know how much, but it doesn’t take much when you’re that advanced an alcoholic and an addict and you’re battling to the extent he described to me. You don’t need much to lose your mind for a minute.”

Shuck and Dowdell downplay speculation that Cornell’s death inspired Bennington’s. While there are similarities – both artists hanged themselves, and Bennington did so on what would have been Cornell’s 53rd birthday – they believe it was mostly a coincidence. “It could be a part of it, but it’s a small part of it,” Shuck says. “I think that it’s just another horrible event that gets put in your subconscious. It’s kindling, but the fire was already burning.”

Bennington’s troubles go back to a nightmarish childhood. He was born on March 20th, 1976, in Phoenix, the youngest of four children. His mother, Susan, was a nurse; his father, Lee, was a police detective who investigated child-sex crimes. They divorced when Chester was 11, and, feeling abandoned by his mother, he lived with his dad, whom he later said was not “emotionally stable” at the time.

From the time Chester was seven or eight until he was 13, he was sexually abused by an older male friend. “I was getting beaten up and being forced to do things I didn’t want to do,” he once said. “It destroyed my self-confidence.”

The experience led Bennington to explore drugs and alcohol. By his teens, he had used opium, amphetamines, marijuana and cocaine. “I’d drink so much that I’d shit my pants,” he once said. Bennington claimed to have kicked substance abuse the first time in 1992, when a local gang burst into a place where he was getting high with his friends and beat and robbed them.

Bennington poured his experiences into Linkin Park’s songs, which mixed his soul-baring screams with Mike Shinoda’s rapping and the band’s lumbering riffs for a sound that dominated the pop charts for much of the 2000s. “He had a distinct voice, at once delicate and ferocious,” says actor and 30 Seconds to Mars frontman Jared Leto, who met Bennington on the festival circuit in the 2000s (30 Seconds to Mars also toured with Linkin Park in 2014). “It’s the angel and the demon, sitting on both shoulders. You could feel the tension between the two when he sang, and I think the reason so many people connected to his music was because of that balance he achieved between the two.”

Bennington’s songs, many co-written with Shinoda, became anthems for young people struggling with some of the same emotional issues. “ ’Crawling,’ for example, is probably the most literal song lyrically I’d ever written for Linkin Park,” Bennington said of the single, off the band’s megaselling 2000 debut, Hybrid Theory. “That’s about feeling like I had no control over myself in terms of drugs and alcohol.”

Those who knew him say Bennington didn’t let his struggles define his personality. He could be funny in a juvenile way one minute (he was a fan of scatological humor) and deeply sensitive the next: Shuck recalls Bennington kicking himself endlessly after making a joke about lung cancer onstage.

Bennington would sometimes tell bands that opened for Linkin Park, “Next time we might be opening for you guys.” Sorum remembers how he’d asked the Kings of Chaos band members to do a gig shortly before Christmas. Bennington and DeLeo were laid over for 12 hours in Chicago, and the drummer felt horrible for keeping them from home during the holiday season. “I e-mailed those guys and said, ‘I apologize. I’m so sorry. Thank you so much for going the distance,’ ” Sorum says. “And typical Chester style, he e-mailed back: ‘Anytime, bro.’ There was no drama. Nothing.”

At home, Bennington found solace in his six kids. He’d become a father for the first time at age 20, and first got married in 1996. That relationship ended in a tumultuous divorce, marked by a relapse where “I drank myself to the point where I couldn’t leave the house and I couldn’t function,” he recalled. “I wanted to kill myself.” He married Talinda in 2005, and the couple had a son and twin daughters. Leto remembers going to Bennington’s house for dinner one night. “I walk in and it’s just jam-packed with the biggest family you’ve ever seen,” he says. “I just couldn’t believe that he had such a beautiful and thriving family life, especially for someone so young. I hadn’t seen so much of that [in him], spending time on the road.”

“He always had enjoyable tales of his six kids, which he always referred to with a beaming smile, no matter what kind of parental woe might have had him do a double take,” says ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, who toured with Bennington in Kings of Chaos within the past year. “His tattoo-parlor business was another highlight; he had me designing silver jewelry for the Las Vegas shop where we whiled away the hours talking shop. He was really an engaging soul.”

In late July, Shuck paid tribute to Bennington at a private service in Los Angeles, where he read a eulogy alongside Linkin Park’s Joe Hahn and Shinoda. (The members of Linkin Park, as well as Talinda Bennington, declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Bennington’s death is still resonating among his fans, who experienced a shock wave when the news reached the public. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline says it received a 14 percent spike in calls on the day after the news broke.

Ten days after Bennington’s death, the singer’s home was encircled with a temporary six-foot fence. A police cruiser sat outside as fans left flowers, drawings, signs, guitar picks and crosses on its perimeter. “When I found out, I was at a museum, and I just bawled my eyes out,” said 19-year-old Briana Yah-Diaz. “It was like a piece of my childhood went away. The little-girl part of me needs to come up and pay my respects. . . . I could always count on them.”