The Washington Post Obituaries Desk

William J. Goodman, 79, a former Maryland legislator who championed a controversial 1979 tax freeze in Prince George's County, died Nov. 16 at his home in Lanham. He had Alzheimer's disease.

Lewis L. Millett, 88, a career Army officer who was briefly and somewhat misleadingly court-martialed for desertion during World War II and went on to receive the Medal of Honor for leading a bayonet charge during the Korean War, died Nov. 14 at a veterans hospital in Loma Linda, Calif. He had...

Sy Syms, 83, the discount retailer who for 35 years told millions of television viewers that "an educated consumer is our best customer," died of heart disease Nov. 17 at his home in New York City.

Carol Ann Orr, 49, a Navy chef who cooked for the White House and the pope, and then in retirement for middle school children in Woodbridge, died of breast cancer Nov. 9 at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. She lived in Woodbridge.

Edward Woodward, 79, an urbane and versatile British stage actor who specialized in playing introspective men of conscience and who gained his widest following on the TV drama "The Equalizer" as a disillusioned spy who offers his services to ordinary people, died of pneumonia Nov. ...

Bobby Frankel, 68, a Hall of Fame racehorse trainer whose eye for thoroughbred talent turned losers into winners and winners into bigger winners, culminating in more than 3,500 career victories and $225 million in purse money, died Nov. ...

Donald Harington, an Arkansas novelist whose quirky, experimental books set in the Ozarks gave him a reputation as one of America's finest, if least known, writers, died Nov. 7 of pneumonia at a hospice in Springdale, Ark. He was 73 and had throat cancer and other ailments in recent years.

Thomas J. Graff, 65, who helped transform the nation's water policy as the longtime regional office director in California for the Environmental Defense Fund, died Nov. 12 at a hospital in Oakland after battling thyroid cancer for more than two years.

Most of Gilbert Kombe's brothers in Kitwe, Zambia, are engineers. But as he grew up, he noticed that what his family talked about most often was sickness and health, as relatives became ill, recovered or plotted how to avoid disease.

Ruth Abbott, 89, an activist who helped lead protests, voter registration drives and preservation efforts in Takoma Park, where her husband served three terms as the city's feisty mayor, died Oct. 14 of congestive heart failure at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring. ...

James R. Lilley, 81, a longtime CIA operative in Asia who served as ambassador to China during the Tiananmen Square crackdown and was regarded as one of the most pragmatic voices on the modern Sino-American relationship, died Nov. 12 at Sibley Memorial Hospital. He had complications related to pr...

Retired Navy Capt. William B. Ecker, 85, who led low-level sorties over Cuba in October 1962 and provided photographic evidence of Russian missile installations that almost led to a nuclear confrontation between the Soviets and the United States, died Nov. 5 at a hospital near his home in Punta...

Earl Cooley, 98, who was one of the first two U.S. Forest Service smoke jumpers to parachute into a forest fire and later was a spotter on the Mann Gulch fire that killed 13 firefighters, died Nov. 9 at his home in Missoula, Mont., of pneumonia.

John J. O'Connor III, 79, the husband of retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, died Wednesday in Phoenix, Ariz. He had Alzheimer's disease. John O'Connor, himself a lawyer, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's nearly two decades ago. ...