On the Anniversary of an Iconic Young & Restless Villain’s ‘Death’ by Trash Compactor, We Contemplate the Unthinkable

On October 7, 1991, David Kimble’s reign of terror was brought to a fitting end… or was it?

Longtime fans of The Young and the Restless will never forget the CBS soap’s epic 1991 masquerade ball, which the nefarious David Kimble attended dressed as the Big Bad Wolf. His plan was to murder estranged wife Nina Chancellor for her money and nemeses Christine Williams and Danny Romalotti for…

David thought that he’d pulled it off, too. After cornering his would-be victims in an outdoor maze, he opened fire… unaware that a former mistress had taken it upon herself to curb his killer instinct by replacing the bullets in his gun with wax ones. D’oh!

Dare we hope that Nina’s husband kept the sweater?

Credit: Courtesy of Corbett, CBS/Everett Collection

David fled from the police and happened upon what looked like the perfect hiding place: a garbage chute. Only while he was in there… again, d’oh! The trash compactor started doing what trash compactors do and crushed the villain to death.

Or so everyone believed back then. As portrayer Michael Corbett reminded Soaps.com in the summer of 2021, “they never found the body. They never identified it. So we don’t know for sure that it was him.

“There was always a question of whether it was David whose hand was sticking out of the trash compactor,” he added. “There could have been a vagrant or someone that, you know, David being David, he might have thrown in there at the last second so that he could sneak out the back.”

Were that the case, even all these years later, he could return to Genoa City still married to the missus whose fortune he’d gone to extremes to “inherit.” “Oh my God,” Corbett exclaimed after explaining the legalities of such a scenario. “How great would it be to show up again and be like, ‘Hi, honey, I’m home’? It would be crazy, right?”