"Yo Adrienne!!"

"Men start stalking her and murders take place all around her," reads the synopsis of ADRIENNE SHELLY's directorial debut, Sudden Manhattan (photo). "Full of deliciously funny moments." If only it were a joke...

"There's actually a line in Sudden Manhattan that was my father's," Adrienne said of dad Shelly Levine {from whom she took her stage surname}. "He said, 'I will not have my daughter jumping out a window when she's 30.' That was his idea of what would happen to you." Instead, at 40, his daughter was suddenly found hanging from a shower rod in Manhattan (photo) on November 1, 2006...and no, it wasn't with the tightly knotted sweater (photo).

Instantly dubbed "the Suicide Beauty" by the tabloids, five days later The Unbelievable Truth emerged {her 1989 indie debut, (photo)} that she'd actually been murdered (photo)! It seems the actress-writer-director "became frustrated by the racket coming from the vacant apartment below hers and stormed downstairs to confront the handyman working there." Diego Pilco, a 19-year-old illegal immigrant who'd arrived less than four months before from Ecuador, responded to pint-size Adrienne's "coarse words"...by throwing a hammer at her as Shelly ran back upstairs. Pilco followed and grabbed her, whereupon the 5-foot-2 "lighter than air" actress (photo) reportedly "slapped him in the face and called the handyman a 'son of a bitch.'"

Pilco later told police he "retaliated by hitting her in the face and knocking her to the ground. Then, suspecting that the blow was fatal but unsure whether she was actually dead {she wasn't, unlike in Teresa's Tattoo, (photo)}, he hanged her, unconscious, from the shower rod in an attempt to make her death look like a suicide." But when investigators found a Reebok Allen Iverson sneaker print on her toilet (speaking of tattoos, that guy is always trouble!} and matched it to Pilco's downstairs, the handyman confessed: "I was having a bad day," he infamously remarked. "I didn't mean to kill her. But I did kill her." As one cop commented: "He tried to cover his tracks, but ended up leaving his tracks."

Adrienne left a 2-year-old daughter, Sophie, with her husband Andrew Ostoy, who has created the Adrienne Shelly Foundation, a scholarship program for independent female filmmakers like she was: "Through the foundation," Ostoy hopes, "Adrienne's legacy will continue to grow." Please forgive Sleuth for noticing that the actress's assets had grown from her skinny starlet days {busty in her final photo, (photo)}...and it seems from this legacy she left behind that she'd gone under the knife...and over the top (photo)!

"I hope there's a God," Shelly summed up in an interview. "I sure hope there is. I hope we don't just die and that's it."